This large, lavish, Italian-Renassiance-palazzo-style apartment house occupies a prime location on the avenue at a major entrance to Central Park just south of the model sailboat pond and the great Alice-in-Wonderland statue, which is to say about as close to heaven as possible in New York.

After a façade cleaning in 1998, sparrows quickly rebuilt nests in the narrow spaces of the small balustrades beneath several third-floor windows on the building’s avenue façade, clearly a good omen.

The 12-story building, which has a handsome, canopied entrance on 72nd Street and a center court, was built in 1915 and converted to a cooperative in 1955. It has 48 units now but when built it had only two per floor. It was designed by J. E. R. Carpenter.

The building received a Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects in 1916 and is very elegant. The lower four floors are rusticated. The corners have deep quoins. The cornice is quite immense. Escutcheons separate the windows on the next-to- the-top floor. The building’s only major design "twist" is the broken stringcourse above the third floor, which is a bit awkward but does not distract from the pleasing, overall composition.

When the building opened, its large 28-room apartments rented for about $30,000 a year. Close to several prominent schools, The Frick Collection and world-famous boutiques on Madison Avenue, this building has a very desirable location although it is a bit removed from the subways.

This building...