The New York State Attorney General's Office has approved the condominium conversion of the landmark Apthorp apartment house that occupies the full block between Broadway and West End Avenue and 79th and 78th Streets, according to an article today at Craig Karmin at The Wall Street Journal.

That approval, however, requires the sponsor, Apthorp Associates, to address several health and safety concerns raised by the building's tenants, the article said, adding that "once approved, the Apthorp will be allowed to close sales on nearly 40 apartments with signed contracts."

"When the Apthorp had trouble attracting condo buyers during the recession, lenders threatened foreclosure. Anglo Irish Bank and Apollo Real Estate Finance agreed last year to restructure the debt. The 102-year old building with 163 apartments is famous for its grand courtyard and arched limestone entryway. The Apthorp was sold near the peak of the market for $426 million in 2007, one of the highest prices ever paid for a rental building. It has been home to numerous celebrities, including Al Pacino and Nora Ephron," the article said.

The most impressive of the handful of surviving full-block apartment buildings in the city with major garden courtyards, the Apthorp was designed by Clinton & Russell and completed in 1908, the same year as the larger Belnord, seven blocks to the north. Both are Renaissance Revival in style with rustication and large cornices, but the Apthorp, has a more lively facade because it is entirely limestone and, more importantly, because it has beautiful sculptural elements not only at its base but also near the top. The Apthorp has two arched entrances like the Belnord but they are on different boulevards while the Belnord's are close to one another on one street. The Apthorp's arched entrances, moreover, are grander with three-story pilasters topped with sculptural figures and very elaborate and lovely iron gates and bas reliefs of draped females holding up garlands.

The Apthorp was built by the Astor family who also erected Astor Court, ten blocks to the north, which also has a large garden courtyard, but is not a full block building. The Astor Court, however, has a much larger cornice than either the Apthorp or the Belnord.

In her excellent book, "New York, New York, How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City 1869-1930," (An Owl Book, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1993), Elizabeth Hawes provides the following commentary about the Apthorp:

"William Waldorf Astor, who was called the landlord of New York despite the fact that he had lived in England since the 1890s, had been sitting on his properties for almost a generation, and his decision to build apartment houses on them now served to signal the world that the movement for development was nigh....Where a pretty two-story stone-and-frame house had stood for a century ad a half, the Apthorp Apartments rose now. Until conversion to a roadhouse and hotel in the late 1850s, the house had been the country seat of Baron John Cornelius Van Den Heuvel, the son-in-law of the prominent lawyer Charles Ward Apthorpe, and sat at the southern end of Apthorpe's rolling two-hundred-acre estate. Near the site on Bloomingdale Road where Apthorpe's own mansion had commanded a view to both the North and East rivers, the twelve-story Astor Court would eventually prevail. Astor's endorsement of the Beaux-Arts courtyard building was early and expansive....Astor focused his own personal attention on the Apthorp, offering ideas on its design gathered in his travels abroad, and then giving his architects and contractors carte blanche to building on a cost-plus basis. Inside and out, the Apthorp was an exceptional building, and it showed off the new aesthetics to advantage...."