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About The Majestic, 115 Central Park West
One of Central Park West's famous twin-towered apartment houses, the 29-story Majestic occupies the former site of the 12-story, 600-room Hotel Majestic that had been built in 1894 by Albert Zucker with a roof garden and bowling alleys.
Irwin Chanin of the Chanin Construction Company that in 1929 completed the now famous 56-story Chanin Building on the southwest corner of Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street had grander plans for the site. A few months before the 1929 stock market crash he had announced plans for a 45-story apartment hotel with central dining room and a ballroom for the site. The handsome old hotel was demolished and steelwork for the new tower commenced, only to be interrupted by the crash, which forced Chanin to scale back his plans. At the same time, the city had based a new multiple-dwelling law and Chanin's single tower became two to take advantage of the law.
Chanin and his brothers, Henry, Sam and Aaron, had started in the construction business with one-and-two-family houses in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, but moved into Manhattan with a flourish building the Lincoln (now the Manhattan) Hotel and numerous theaters including the famed Roxy and the Majestic, the Royale, and the Biltmore, among others.
"Irwin Chanin, through his in-house architectural designer, Jacques Delamarre, and his decorative expert, sculpture René Chambellan, decided to be aggressively different. He chose a stripped-down Art Deco version that he called Modern American, but which was often referred to as Zigzag Moderne?.Unlike the historical styles, which had a horizontal emphasis and a cornice to "end" the building at the roofline, Moderne was vertically oriented. In subtle counterpoint to the new buildings verticality were the horizontal cantilevered terraces and strips of windows at the corners. A technically advanced construction method obviated the need for corner columns in the solaria, thereby increasing their sunny openness," notes Andrew Alpern in his excellent book, "Luxury Apartment Houses of Manhattan: An Illustrated History," Dover Publications Inc., 1992.
Many of the 238 apartments had fireplaces, black walnut floors in the living rooms and large foyers.
The Depression took its toll on the building and Chanin defaulted on its mortgage in 1933. The building subsequently became a cooperative and has long been one of the premier addresses on Central Park West given its prime location and stupendous views. According to Alpern, columnist Walter Winchell and Frank Costello, the gangster, lived in the Majestic, and Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the convicted kidnapper of Charles Lindbergh's baby, worked on the building as a carpenter.
The original Chanin plans for the site, on which the architectural firm of Sloan & Robertson also worked, would have produced quite a monumental tower, noted for a complex series of mid-tower setbacks and culminating in a much more pronounced piered top. A rendering of the tower is reproduced on page 410 of "New York 1930 Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars," by Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins, Rizzoli, 1987. "The flattened pilasters of the design rose up through the base as lines of structural force interlaced by the stacked apartment floors, the horizontality of which was emphasized by continuous bands of glass stretching across the corners (and enclosing narrow solariums within)," the authors wrote.
Lewis Mumford, the famed architecture critic, was not enthusiastic about the design of the Majestic nor its sister Chanin building, the Century, a few blocks to the south on Central Park West, according to the authors. They quote him as saying of the two buildings that their "modernism is merely a thin veneer: banked corner windows that light long, narrow rooms; occasional terraces fitfully disposed about the upper parts of the structure; massive brick enclosures of water tanks. Even the relatively plain facades do not authenticate these structures. But these apartments are far from being solid and useful examples of modern architecture. Lewis Mumford, the famed architecture critic, was not enthusiastic about the design of the Majestic nor its sister Chanin building, the Century, a few blocks to the south on Central Park West, according to the authors. They quote him as saying of the two buildings that their "modernism is merely a thin veneer: banked corner windows that light long, narrow rooms; occasional terraces fitfully disposed about the upper parts of the structure; massive brick enclosures of water tanks. Even the relatively plain facades do not authenticate these structures. But these apartments are far from being solid and useful examples of modern architecture.
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