23 Park Avenue: Review and Ratings

Review of 23 Park Avenue by Carter Horsley

This quite distinctive, six-story building is a former mansion designed by Stanford White that for many years was the home of the Advertising Club until its conversion to cooperative apartments in 1978.

Its dark red, finely detailed masonry and terracotta ornament in Italian-Renaissance style and handsome stooped entrance make it one of the most attractive buildings on Park Avenue. Indeed, its deep, rich color stands out from its limestone peers.

It was erected in 1889 for James H. Robb, a banker and cotton trader who was also a state senator and president of the Union Club.

"Although Park Avenue has little to match the most glorious Fifth Avenue relics (none of them any longer private residences), it once had many splendid private dwellings and still has some quite respectable survivors. The oldest of the best is 23 Park...This is the only true Stanford White house on Park Avenue and one of the few anywhere," observed James Trager in his excellent book, "Park Avenue, Street of Dreams," (Atheneum, 1990).

"When the Advertising Club, which occupied the premises from 1923 to 1977, took over the place," Trager continued, "a local minister made a speech to the members, saying, 'Save as much of White as possible. He had a wonderful sense of proportion. There is something about a house where he had a free hand that gives you a special feeling of comfort. That s why I say...that I would rather have a Stanford White house than a painting by Rembrandt.' Alas, the house was divided into fifteen-unit cooperative in the late 1970's, and although the apartments have fifteen- and even eighteen-foot ceilings (a two-bedroom duplex was advertised in 1988 at more than $600,000), a certain amount of White was no doubt lost."

In fact, the building was already showing signs of wear and tear in the reign of the Advertising Club, which used it for many meetings and gatherings especially when much of the city's advertising community was located nearby on Madison Avenue.

Certainly the grandest residential building on Park Avenue south of Grand Central Terminal, it is also one of the few impressive mansions, or mansion-like buildings, that have been converted to apartments, such as the Pulitzer Mansion on 73rd Street just east of Fifth Avenue, or the former Police Headquarters Building in Little Italy.

This building is on a quiet stretch of Park Avenue in the heart of Murray Hill and is close to the wonderful Morgan Library and public transportation.