One of the sentinels of the new Bowery, this 15-story residential condominium building at 52 East 4th Street in NoHo is a sleek and good-looking building designed by Robert M. Scarano Jr., one of the city s more controversial architects whose many projects in Brooklyn have aroused the ire of some architectural observers.

The project has 14 apartments and three floors of retail space.

The 210-foot-tall building also has an address of 351 Bowery, which is mid-block between East 3rd and East 4th Streets. The building's plot has 8 sides, three of which are angled.

The building, which has a high fenestration pattern with multipane, clear windows and crisp lines, has a part-time doorman, concierge, a roof deck with pool and a garage with an electric gate entrance. Many apartments have high ceilings.

351 Bowery Associates LLC, which is part of the HK Organization of Elmont, NY, of which Harry Kotowitz is president, is the developer.

Mr. Scarano has designed scores of developments in Brooklyn with rather boldly juggled designs from many influences.

Here, however, he has taken subtle and restrained hints from the Switch Building at 109 Norfolk Street where nARCHITECTS had the fa??ade's bay windows alternately protrude and recede and from Skidmore Owings & Merrill's Gordon Bunshaft's design for Sheldon Solow's sloping tower at 9 West 57th Street where he exposed diagonal bracing in the center of the side facades. Diagonal braces are also applied to the garage gates.

Andres Escobar & Associates is designing the interiors.

The building has one studio unit with terrace, three one-bedroom apartments, one two-bedroom unit with wrap-around terrace, eight two-bedroom apartments with two-and-a-half baths and one two-bedroom unit with two-and-a-half baths and private rooftop outdoor space.

According to an article by Lauren Elkies of therealdeal.net, prices will range initially in late 2009 from abut $795,000 to $4,700,000 and the three garage spaces were priced at $175,000 each.

In the early years of this millennium, the skyline of the Bowery, long the city's skid row, became to change very dramatically with such stunning projects as the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Cooper Square Hotel, the Thompson Hotel, the apartment building at 445 Lafayette Street and the spectacular new Cooper Union Building between East 6th and East 7th Street designed by Thomas Mayne.