Top 10 Post-World War II Apartment Buildings
#1 - Residences at the Mandarin Oriental, 80 Columbus Circle
It's rare that a very controversial project exceeds its expectations but this twin-towered project dominating Columbus Circle has apartments with very great vistas, a stunning, curved retail atrium, a Mandarin Oriential hotel, luxury restaurants, offices and a fabulous Whole Foods store in its huge basement.
#2 - Trump Tower, 721 Fifth Avenue
Donald Trump's flagship next door to Tiffany's has a stunning design by Der Scutt with a pink marble waterfall, excellent retail, offices and condominium apartments in a stepped tower with staggered plans.
#3 - 1 Central Park West
Donald Trump took a drab office tower on the north side of Columbus Circle and had Philip Johnson give it a new, faceted reflective-glass facade and a stainless-steel globe in a plaza and, presto, you have a dazzling new entrance to the Upper West Side.
#4 - Olympic Tower, 641 Fifth Avenue
This and the Galleria on West 57th Street ushered in the era of mixed-use skyscrapers in New York about the same time and this slick, dark, reflective-glass tower provided a stunning north neighbor for St. Patrick's Cathedral that was most compelling for many foreign buyers.
#5 - 40 Bond Street
A modest mid-block residential project by Herzog & de Meuron that was mind-blowing for its thick, green-class variation on the theme of cast-iron, 19th Century factory buildings and its startling and undulating cast-aluminum fence whose intricate, lace-like design was inspired by grafitti.
#6 - Metropolitan Tower, 146 West 57th Street
Harry Macklowe's angled tower of apartments above a normal base of offices and retail is a black-glass, razor-sharp sword of modernity that trifles with the city's midtown grid.
#7 - 15 Central Park West
Robert A. M. Stern here created the quintessential pre-war apartment building in 2007 and one of the city's most successful residential buildings in history.
#8 - One Beacon Court, 151 East 58th Street
For the ladies who lunch, what is better than a tall and handsome, mixed-use project just south of Bloomingdale's with a huge, ellipitical driveway and its own Le Cirque restaurant.
#9 - Trump World Tower, 845 United Nations Plaza
Some neighbors were outraged that Donald Trump would dare to erect a tower considerably higher than the nearby Secretariat Building of the United Nations, but the city needed a beautiful, dark, "2001" monolith, didn't it?
#10 - 165 Charles Street
The clean, modern lines of this southernmost of the trio of Richard Meier-designed, mid-rise apartment towers facing the Hudson River in the West Village were an instant hit.
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