This pleasant, mid-block row of six-story buildings contains 245 apartments and face the mammoth slab of Manhattan House, the full-block apartment complex between Second and Third Avenues and 65th and 66th Streets.

These former tenements were acquired by New York Life Insurance Company to serve as "light-protectors" and "view-protectors" for its Manhattan House project that was erected in 1960. The insurance company painted them gray with white trim to complement the light-gray-brick Manhattan House. The buildings have four-step-up entrances, protruding air-conditioners, fire escapes, sidewalk landscaping, and no doormen, no garages, and no health clubs.

One of the most influential post-war buildings in New York City, Manhattan House marked the beginning of the age of "white-brick monstrosities" in the eyes of some observers and the first big splash of International Style modernity in the city to others.

The mammoth development, which occupies the full block between Third and Second Avenues and 65th and 66th Streets, actually is clad in a light gray-brick, but niceties aside it presented a "clean," "neat," almost Spartan appearance in distinct contrast to the historical styles of earlier periods and the Art Deco stylizations of the 1920s and 1930s.

Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Mayers & Whittlesley, it was built in 1950 and was, according to Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman in their superb book, "New York 1960 Architecture and Urbanism...