Central Park Place, 301 West 57th Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 301 West 57th Street by Carter Horsley

This pale green, 55-story tower, which is known as Central Park Place, is one of the city's most prominent mixed-use skyscrapers.  It is located on the northwest corner of Eighth Avenue at 301 West 57^th Street.

Its lower 7 floors are built full to the building line and are commercial and the setback tower contains 274 condominium apartments.

The condominium tower, built in 1988, has fantastic views of Central Park even though it might appear to be hemmed in by more recent construction of three huge projects: the Time Warner Center just across 58^th Street on the west side of Columbus Circle; the big, notched addition to the former Hearst Building by Sir Norman Foster just across 57^th Street; and the recladding of the office building at 1775 Broadway just across Eighth Avenue.

Bottom Line

With great views in three directions from the large bay windows in most apartments at Central Park Place, the rugged, modern tower has a wonderful location one block south of Columbus Circle. Within walking distance of Central Park, Lincoln Center, the theater district and the Plaza office district, this location is hard to beat.  It also has excellent public transportation.

Description

A deeper shade of green on the exteriors would probably have been more effective, and, given its name, more appropriate.

Indeed, imagine this building in stainless steel, or polished black granite!  What a knockout that would be, enough to sock it to "high-tech" master architects.

It is one of the few aluminum-clad towers in the city.  Whereas some of the others are office buildings with patterned panels, this tower's "skin" is plain and its color does not belie its metallic nature. The color, in fact, is the most questionable element of this project.

Clearly, the architects, Davis, Brody & Associates, one of the city's most innovative and sculptural designers of residential towers, were in a courageous, experimental mode.  The pale green probably looked great in pastel renderings, but in reality, it is a bit weak-looking, especially for such a very vigorous and robust structure topped by its very handsome octagonal watertank enclosure.

For connoisseurs of water-tank enclosures, this tower boasts one of the city’s prettiest, the perfect cap to this very modern "pneumatic" tower.

Regardless of color, however, this tall tower affords fantastic views of Central Park and its site is such that such views are not blocked significantly from the Time Warner Center just across 58th Street on the former  site of the New York Coliseum on the west side of Columbus Circle.

The views are incredible because most of the units have very large and deep bay windows that afford comfortable views in three directions.

Just to the south of Columbus Circle, this project might appear to be at the hub of a major traffic bottleneck.  Surprisingly, the circle's traffic is nowhere near as terrible as the approaches to the Queensborough Bridge across town.

Amenities

The building has a concierge and doorman, a fitness center with pool, a laundry, a live-in superintendant, a swimming pool, a bicycle room, residents’ entertainment space with catering kitchen, and storage and it is pet friendly. 

Apartments

Although apartments are not gigantic, the spectacular, five-sided bay windows more than make up for the somewhat meager square footage.

The building has some studios with 22-foot-long living rooms with a bay window more than 12-feet wide and an open kitchen.

It also has some conventional one-bedrooms that are a bit bigger than average.  One has a 26-foot-long living room with an enclosed kitchen and a 17-foot-long bedroom.

Many of the two-bedroom units are laid out nicely.  One has an 18-foot-long master bedroom with a 13-foot-long second bedroom off the 21-foot living room.  Another has an 11-foot-long foyer leading into a very large living room with corner windows flanking the large bay window and large bedrooms at separate ends of the apartment.

History

The Zeckendorfs originally planned Central Park Place as a mixed-use tower to fill the entire west blockfront on Eighth Avenue from 57th to 58th Streets but the northern half of the blockfront was occupied by the Alpine Hotel, a single-room-occupancy property, and city regulations then in effect barred demolition of such properties.

So William Zeckendorf Jr. and his partners built Central Park Place only on the northwest corner of the avenue. When it was completed in 1988, this area was still something of a no-man's land.

Fifty-Seventh Street, of course, was making a strong comeback to the east, but Eighth Avenue to the south was then an unattractive avenue that may have shed much of its famed X-rated imagery, but not all its rundown-shabbiness. (Zeckendorf, incidentally, was been a fantastic pioneer on the avenue, having built, with his partners, the immense and very handsome World Wide Plaza project on the former Madison Square Garden site at 50th Street.)

in 1989, the Zeckendorfs were able to demolish the Alpine Hotelby agreeing to pay for the replacement of its 51 housing units. In its place, the Zeckendorfs built a new seven-story office building known as Four Columbus Circle that was designed by Swanke Hayden Connell, an architectural firm that occupied its top four floors.  (The architectural firm, however, relocated a few years later and its space was taken over by Steelcase. That building is directly across 58^th Street from the Time Warner Center.)

A decade after it was erected, Central Park Place’s project's location was bustling with large computer stores, household goods stores, theme restaurants and the continued boom of the nearby Lincoln Center district.

In 2003. the Time Warner Center, of course, would then up the ante with its expensive restaurants, its fabulous Whole Foods store, curved retail atrium and expensive condominiums.

And the beat went on as the Zeckendorfs completed another project nearby in 2007 at 15 Central Park West that set new residential records for price per square foot and nearby Extell Development was building its 1,004-foot tall mixed-use tower, One57, at 157 West 57^th Street.