Next door at 781 Fifth Avenue, the Sherry Netherland Hotel, the vestibule serve the dual jobs of exhibiting the wall reliefs of singing putti from an old Vanderbilt mansion while hotel patrons and disco dancers at Doubles negotiate the hotel's very impressive revolving door under the gaze of the doormen.
Some vestibules, such as that in the southernmost, marble townhouse of the Marymount School on Fifth Avenue in the middle of the block between 83rd and 84th Streets serve as a convenient place to store one's skateboard before going to class.
Many vestibules are important transition rooms between a building's exterior and its lobby, particularly when the levels are different. In the ages before disabilities were acknowledged, many such vestibules had stairs up or down. Vestibules are generally neat and uncluttered as opposed to lobbies that have seating and concierge stations and mail-room alcoves and elevator banks.
Not all vestibules are antiseptic, especially in comparison with some of the more grandiose lobbies with chandeliers, mirrors and artworks.
Some of the better vestibules are adorned with marble walls. Just sashay into the extremely handsome and very formal vestibules at 265 Lafayette Street between Prince and Spring streets, a six-story, beige-brick, rather non-descript, rental apartment building with 93 apartments, or the sumptuous but small palace-like one, shown at the right, at 780 Madison Avenue between 66th and 67th Streets, a 10-story, mid-block, pre-war, rental apartment building with a very elegant two-story rusticated base and a very classical, marble vestibule with pediment-covered walls and vaulted ceiling.
Vestibules also served as an ideal place for doorbells dating back to pre-electronic days when physical bells were actually used, and sheltered good-night kisses, away from the ravages of inclement weather. Costas Kondylis, the architect of many of Donald Trump's slick residential towers, has designed probably the sleekest modern vestibule in the city at The Link, the 40-story condo tower at 310 West 52nd Street. He said he designed the glass entrance cube for El-Ad Properties before Apple erected its free-standing glass box in front of the General Motors Building on the east side of Fifth Avenue between 58th and 59th Streets in 2006. Coming out of the building, there can be no doubt about the weather whereas less "open" vestibules make weather analysis more of a guessing game, especially is the building has a canopy.
But for real inspiration, one must turn to the greatest: Michelangelo's vestibule of the Laurentian Library in Florence, a spectacular architectural space of tremendous tension and alluring ambiguity. Its very grand, three-part staircase takes up about half the space of the very tall room and is surrounded by double-columns set into the middle of the walls.
The library was begun in 1525 and the staircase was completed in 1558 by Bartolommeo Ammannati using the designs and a clay model by Michelangelo who had left Florence in 1534.
The staircase has three flights of steps and the outer ones are quadrangular and the central one is basically convex.
One art historian described the "intimidating" staircase as crowding the vestibule like "a flow of lava" and "bursting" in three directions as if on steroids!
What is going on there? It is, in fact, an immensely impressive room of explosive space, the type of space that has a bathtub in the kitchen with a flat cover for drying the dishes, a "there" place for hope and ambition, and pomp and circumstance, a decompression chamber.
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