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About The Alexandria, 201 West 72nd Street
The most attractive new building on the Upper West Side in decades when it was built in 1991, this 25-story, 202-unit condominium building abounds in nice architectural touches.
Its location on the northwest corner of Broadway at 72nd Street (in the lee of the taller Ansonia one block north) makes it highly visible from the south and its distinctive watertank enclosure is a wonderful Post-Modern concoction of Egyptian motifs.
The façade of the building is richly colored in reds, whites and greens and sports very handsome white grill balcony railings.
The apartment layouts are quite spacious and many of the units have very tall ceilings.
While most other new buildings of the period have tried to be contextual (with strong urging from the city's zoning), this building, which was developed by Peter L. Malkin, Arthur G. Cohen and William Zeckendorf Jr. and partners and designed by Frank Williams & Associates and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill has gone the extra distance and been original.
The building replaced a two-story building that housed the Embassy movie theater, that was designed by Peter Copland and Schwartz & Gross in 1938, and was formerly a site occupied by the Hotel St. Andrew that was designed by Andrew Craig in 1893.
In their great book, "New York 2000, Architecture and Urbanism Between The Bicentennial and the Millennium," Robert A. M. Stern, David Fishman and Jacob Tilove described the Alexandria as "the most flamboyant of Broadway's new generation of apartment houses."
They noted that developed William Zeckendorf Jr. had planned to expand the theater on the site "to become a 1,250-seat, five-screen complex, but the plan proved uneconomical when his attempt to assemble the full Broadway blockfront failed."
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