William Lie Zeckendorf and his brother Arthur Zeckendorf and Eyal Ofer, co-chairman of Miller Global, which controls Eastgate Realty, signed a contract in May 2007 to acquire the 17-story Parkside Evangeline women's residence building at 18 Gramercy Park South from the Salvation Army, according to an article by Lois Weiss today in The New York Post.

The article said that they "have brought back 'stararchitect' Robert A. M. Stern to design residential condominium apartments in the building.

Plans call for 15-full-floor apartments and two duplexes, the article said, adding that the full-floor "family-size apartments will spread just over 4,500 square feet - and buyers get a key to the very private and tranquil Gramercy Park."

"To close the deal this past July," the article continued, adding that "The Salvation Army took pack a $40 million mortgage and is getting income from the mortgage payments."

An article August 5, 2010 by Joey at curbed.com said that the building had been sold for $60 million to W2005Z/18 GPS Realty.

The building, which has a long frontage on Irving Place, was erected in 1927 and became a dormitory-like residence for young women in 1963 before closing in 2008, the curbed.com article said, adding that "back in 2006 it was reported that the Salvation Army wanted more than $100 million for the building."

A November 1, 2006 article by Lauren Elkies at therealdeal.com said that the building, which provided about 300 residents with their rooms and two meals a day for under $300 a week, was up for sale "for more than $100 million."

Maid service was also included and the building had a key to the park that residents could use for an hour.

Mr. Stern designed 15 Central Park West for the Zeckendorfs.

"Many of the current residents have already moved out and Parkside has stopped accepting new applications in preparation for the imminent sale," the curbed.com article said.

The building is within the Gramercy Park Historic District and residents of buildings directly fronting on the private park have keys to gain access to it.

"The Parkside was designed to enshroud new arrivals in a safe, vaguely Christian environment until they married or moved on," Steven Kurutz wrote in a September 25, 2005 article in The New York Times.

"Amenities included a rooftop garden, a sewing room and an in-house social group called the Parkside Club. A brassy Southerner named Opal Pierce ran the front desk. Even as the early 60's gave way to the 'Sixties,' an Eisenhower-era atmosphere pervaded. Though the residents were grown women, alcohol was forbidden, and the policy on male visitors was only slightly more lenient: they were allowed on the ground floor but not beyond.

"The rooms at the Parkside are very, very small, about the size of the space in which a woman living in a Park Avenue penthouse might keep her shoes. Some doubles exist, but most units are 100-square-foot singles with modest wood furnishings: a bed, a dresser, a desk. There is a rumor that when the Salvation Army bought the place, which was formerly a hotel, it halved the old rooms and turned the closet of each new room into a bathroom," the article said.

In their great book, "New York 1930, Architecture and Urbanism Between The Two World Wars," (Rizzoli International Publications, 1987), Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins provided the following commentary about the former Barbizon Hotel on the southeast corner of 63rd Street and Lexington Avenue:

"Murgatroyd & Ogden, whose women's club residence at 18 Gramercy Park South of 1927 had been a chaste of overblown Adam-style Georgian building, returned to the Italianesque in their romantically massed and detailed, tawny-colored 1927 Barbizon club residence for women."