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About The Corinthian, 330 East 38th Street
One of the city's most spectacular residential developments, this full-block project between 37th and 38th Streets has a distinctive shape of bundled cylinders that affords all the apartments very large, curved bay windows.
Built on the site of the former East Side Airlines Terminal that had been designed by John B. Peterkin in 1951, this development has extensive gardens and great views. The tower is sited close to Second Avenue, but its entrance faces First Avenue.
The building's lobby is palatial as befits a 54-story tower that contains 863,800 apartments. The high-ceilinged lobby is grander than most major hotels and movie sets.
The asymmetrical design of the tower by architect Michael Schimenti and Der Scutt Architects, the design consultant, is original and interesting and far more complex than its closest design "cousin," the "corn-cob" twin towers of Marina City in Chicago. This tower is the closest New York comes to the great Lake Point Tower in Chicago, a glass tower of sinuous form that is one of the architectural masterpieces of the 20th Century.
What is particularly interesting here is the combination of the fluid, almost rippling curved forms with the very tactile rough-cut facade.
Bernard Spitzer, the lead developer, had previously built the curved apartment tower overlooking Central Park on the southwest corner of Central Park South and Seventh Avenue. Kriti Properties and Development and Peter L. Malkin were also the developers on the Corinthian.
The project, which was completed in 1987, is the most dominant of the high-rise group that is clustered around the Manhattan entrance to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.
Normally, such a location would not be conducive to luxury housing, but Spitzer and Jeffrey Glick, the developer of the nearby Horizon and Manhattan Place high-rise apartment towers were confident that good-looking high-rises with plenty of modern amenities would overcome qualms about such a high-traffic location.
The building has about 100,000 square feet of office space on its second and third floors. It has a garage, a roof deck and a health club.
Much of the former low-rise airlines terminal building on the site was incorporated into the project, "but the portion along First Avenue was demolished to make way for what was, at 27,000 square feet, the largest residential plaza in the city," noted Robert A. M. Stern, David Fishman and Jacob Tilove in their monumental book, "New York 2000, Architecture and Urbanism between the Bicentennial and the Millenium" (The Monacelli Press, 2006).
Thomas Balsley Associates wrapped the plaza's central sloping grass lawn with a border of trees and provided areas with benches at the street corners. Opposite the entrance, a cascading, semicircular waterfall fountain arced around Aristides Demetrio's abstract bronze sculpture Peirene (1988) and faced a curving, skylit porte cochere that brought tenants into a ninety-foot-long, twenty-eight-foot-high lobby," the authors continued.
The authors noted that the design of the project was generally "seen as something special," but Robert Campell of the Boston Globe said that "What's wrong with the Corinthian is that it is a leech on the body of New York," adding that "Grabbing amenity from everything around it, it offers the city nothing in return...only empty greenery, blank walls, tight security and a tower that is hideously, overwhelmingly, out of scale with those 'townhouse lined streets' bragged about in the sales brochure."
Mr. Campbell's description was not fair when he wrote it and irrelevant by 2007 when city planners were deciding whether to approve a gigantic, high-rise, redevelopment project by Sheldon H. Solow nearby along First Avenue on two former Con Edison sites along the East River.
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