400 East 59th Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 400 East 59th Street by Carter Horsley

For a generation or so, some civic activists in the Sutton Place neighborhood fought fiercely to block a project known as Bridgemarket that would have restored the enclosed Gustavino tile vaults of the Queensborough Bridge on the east side of First Avenue at 59th Street, directly across from this handsome pre-war apartment building.

The city had enclosed the vaults and used them for storage for some of its agencies and Harley Baldwin, a developer, proposed to redevelop the Piranesian spaces with a food emporium and attended probably a couple of hundred public meetings arguing the merits of his proposal.

The civic activists opposing the project arguing that it would bring too much traffic to the area and incredibly their argument won over the common-sense reality that the bridge was already one of the largest generators of traffic in the city and this project was considerably more elegant in style than many of the other retail uses in the immediately vicinity.

He was unsuccessful in persuading the community's planning board to approve the project and the site languished with its dirty windows and unsightly official mess until Terence Conran, the British retailer, took it over and managed to win approval in 1999 and opened up a food market and restaurant in 2000. The good news, then, is that this building is now across from one of the city's most spectacular spaces at street level. It, of course, has always been directly across from one of the city's most spectacular structures, the bridge.

The 17-story building, which has a canopied entrance and doorman, was built in 1928 and converted in 1981 and has 126 apartments. Some have tall ceilings and raised living rooms. There is excellent crosstown bus service and many restaurants in the area, although subways are several long blocks away. There are several small parks to the east at York Avenue as well as two small parks on Sutton Place.

Carter B. Horsley