Built in 1925 and designed by J. E. R. Carpenter, the leading luxury apartment architect of his generation, this handsome building was originally the Mayfair House, a pleasant, 450-room hotel, but it gained considerably more cachet when Le Cirque restaurant opened on its first floor sidestreet frontage in 1974 and quickly became one of the city’s most socially prestigious dining rooms.

A generation later, however, Le Cirque decided to relocate to the Villard Houses that are part of the New York Palace Hotel at 451 Madison Avenue in 1997 and the next year the building was bought at a bankruptcy auction for $15 million and Park 65th Associates L.P., an affiliate of Colony Capital Inc., a real estate investment group based in Los Angeles that had recently also taken over the Stanhope Hotel on Fifth Avenue and has been active in luxury resort properties, and the Trump Organization, headed by Donald Trump.

The new owners renovated the property for another $55 million to convert it into 70 condominium apartments. At the time of the conversion the hotel had had 210 hotel rooms.

A large entrance marquee on the sidestreet had been created in 1934 for a restaurant, but over the years it had become the hotel’s entrance and Le Cirque had an adjacent, discrete entrance. The 1998 renovation, however, used the marquee sidestreet entrance for the building’s new restaurant Daniel, which was considerably larger and much grander than Le Cirque, and it quickly became one of the city’s top...