41 West 58th Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 41 West 58th Street by Carter Horsley

This 22-story, light-gray brick building has a very striking terraced top that culminates in a large, glass-enclosed elevator "house."

It was designed in 1941 by Mayer & Whittlesley, an architectural firm that also the same year designed 240 Central Park South, which features a similar rooftop shape although not glass-enclosed, the same year and was a co-architect with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill on Manhattan House at 200 East 66th Street in 1950.

This building occupies the former site of the Dalhousie, an early apartment house that dated to 1884. The building is actually in two parts and on the other side of its garden is an 11-story structure at 41 West 58th Street of the same style that has a similar marquee and façade address marker.

(Mayer & Whittesley also were co-architects with M. Milton Glass of another through-block apartment building at 220 Central Park South in 1954.)

This building has a stainless steel, upturned marquee supported by poles attached to frog sculptures on the façade. It has a large, windowed lobby with a glass wall waterfall. The building has two large restaurants along its Central Park South façade, a garage, bright wall lanterns and many balconies with glass walls.

The building, which is just to the west of the Helmsley Park Lane Hotel and not too far from the Plaza Hotel, also has a concierge, and a one-story polished black granite base. The building has 139 rental apartments and no sidewalk landscaping and no health club.

Landscape architect Ken Smith designed a sculpture garden in the courtyard between the two buildings that includes a cast steel Isamu Noguchi torso titled "Man Aviator" from the late 1940's, a mid-century cast copper by Chaim Gross and a large bronze by Michele Oka Doner.

The garden is designed for viewing from a window-lined central corridor.