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About The Pythian, 135 West 70th Street
One of the city's most fabulous buildings, the Pythian is richly decorated in brightly colored, glazed terracotta embellishments depicting figures of antiquity.
It was designed by Thomas W. Lamb, one of the country's foremost designers of movie palaces, most of which, sadly, have been destroyed. One of his other works in New York is the Audubon Theater and Ballroom building on Broadway and 165th Street.
"Hollywood may have had its Grauman's Chinese, but New York has its Pythian Temple! Hidden on an anonymous side street, this opium-smoker's dream is best seen from across the street- or better still from someone's upper floor-apartment to the south," wrote Elliot Wilensky and Norval White in the excellent book, "The A.I.A. Guide to New York City, Third Edition," (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988).
Indeed, its fantastic ornamentation clearly inspired the developers of the Coronado, a new apartment house on the same block at the Broadway corner that was finished after the Wilensky and White book was published. It features large fanciful monsters atop its large canopy.
While the facade of the Pythian is not as fully decorated as the Alwyn Court on Seventh Avenue and 58th Street, it ranks with the gargoyle-strewn Westside YMCA on 63rd Street west of Central Park West and the former Shelton Hotel, now the Marriott Marquis New York, on Lexington Avenue at 48th Street, at the top of the city's list of surprising and delightful buildings. It also serves as a good reminder that sculpture in antiquity was often brightly painted.
Built in 1926, it was converted to a condominium in 1983 and contains 84 apartments. The conversion and restoration, designed by David Gura, altered the building's largely windowless facade by inserting many new windows, but it managed to retain most of its exuberant decorative features.
According to architect David Gura, "the building was intended to be the regional meeting facility for the lodges of the Knights of Pythias and as such it housed several stacks of windowless lodge halls, each one complete with ancillary rooms and an organ loft."
"This pile of meeting rooms was suspended above the column-less auditorium, which occupied the entire third floor by two enormous steel plate trussses, two stories tall," according to Mr. Gura. "New duplex apartments were threaded throughout the old trusses and inserted between the existing floor slabs. New floor slabs trisect the old auditorium space. New windows were added in a manner thar reveals both the original construction and new renovation. Gold reflective curtain wall with deep red-colored framing members are split at the fifth floor, providng terraces for bedrooms on that level and showing both how the mass above is suspended on trusses and how the original five-bay architectural facade was overlaid on a six-bay structural frame," Mr. Gura has noted.
Some decorative elements that were removed from their original positions were salvaged for use elsewhere within the building, whose renovation won a residential design award from the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
Each apartment is different and there are four professional offices on the ground floor.
The building, which has several terraces and many unusual layouts with high ceilings, is close to an express subway station and not far from Central Park and the Lincoln Center district.
The building, which has several terraces and many unusual layouts with high ceilings, is close to an express subway station and not far from Central Park and the Lincoln Center district.
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