309 West 57th Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 309 West 57th Street by Carter Horsley

This 16-story rental apartment building at 309 West 57th Street was erected in 1927 by Vincent J. Slattery and Morris H. Rothschild and designed by Rosario Candela, the famous architect of pre-war "luxury" apartment buildings on the Upper East Side.

The brown brick building has a two-story stone base and bandcourses at the 3rd and 15th floor. There are also decorative protrusions on either side of the 15th floor.

The building, which has an exposed rooftop watertank, is just to the west of the tall apartment building with very large bay windows and a light-green metallic façade at 1 Central Park Place on the northwest corner at Eighth Avenue. It is also across 57th Street from the Hearst Building, whose angled tower addition was designed by Sir Norman Foster.

The building, which is pet friendly and permits protruding air-conditioners, has a sculpture of the head of Bela Bartok (1881-1945), the composer of "The Miraculous Mandarin" on its ground floor façade because he lived his last year the building.

The building, which has beamed ceilings, windowed separate kitchens and a live-in superintendent was designed as a "Skyscraper Church," and "The Church of Strangers," according to David W. Dunlap in his fine book, "Abyssinia to Zion: A Guide to Manhattan's Houses of Worship."

"Of all the names to call a church in New York," Mr. Dunlap wrote, "none may be as poignantly perfect, since this is a city of the transient. One such was The Rev. Charles Force Deems, from North Carolina, who founded the non-denominational Church of the Strangers in 1868, especially to minister to sojourners."

"Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt," he continued, "bought the Mercer Street Presbyterian Church - built in 1834 at Mercer Street and later the birthplace of the YMCA of the City of New York - and presented it to Deems in 1870. It was the setting in 1877 of Vanderbilt's funeral over which Deems presided. In 1898, the Church of Strangers moved to a Victorian Gothic sanctuary at 309 West 57th Street that had been the Sixth Universalist Church, also known as The Church of Our Saviour, and the Central Congregational Church. This site was redeveloped in 1927-1928 with a Skyscraper Church: a 16-story apartment tower by Rosario Candela with a new home in its base for the church, known as Deems Memorial, expressed as a large Gothic portal. The developers, Vincent J. Slattery and Morris H. Rothschild, went on to build similar projects with the Second Presbyterian and Calvary Baptist Churches."

"The West 57th Street sanctuary," Mr. Dunlap wrote, "was used by Christian Scientists and Baptists until 1969, when it became the Media Sound Recording Studio, whose acoustics drew performers like Aretha Franklin, John Lennon, Frank Sinatra, and Stevie Wonder. Then it was transformed into Le Bar Bat, which the Zagat Survey called 'a great place to dance and be merry late at night with young BATS (bridge and tunnelers).' In other words, strangers."

The very large former Le Bar Bat space subsequently was known as Club 57 and the Triumph Room and was a quite large discotheque.

The building has no garage, no fitness center, and no roof deck.