1133 Fifth Avenue: Review and Ratings

between East 94th Street & East 95th Street View Full Building Profile

Review of 1133 Fifth Avenue by Carter Horsley

This attractive apartment house at 1133 Fifth Avenue was built in 1927 and converted to a cooperative in 1948.

It was designed in a neo-Federal style by Emery Roth, the architect also of 870, 880, 993, 1125 and 1200 Fifth Avenue, the Ritz Tower on Park Avenue at 57th Street and the San Remo and Beresford buildings on Central Park West among many others.

It was built by Bing & Bing.

The 16-story, mid-block building, which has stunning views of Central Park, has only 17 apartments and is just to the north of the very handsome International Center of Photography’s Georgian-style mansion designed by Delano & Aldrich in 1913 for Willard Straight.

Bottom Line

Description

The two-story limestone base is separated from the beige masonry façade by a wave-carved bandcourse and the entrance has a broken segmental pediment over fluted pilasters.

Lintels above the windows on the 3^rd through the 5^th floors, which are contained within a terracotta frame, and the 13^th and 14^th floors, which have two-story high window surrounds, have Greek key motifs and urns are placed above the dentiled cornice.

The building, which has inconsistent fenestration and some discrete air-conditioners, has a handsome watertank enclosure with arched openings and a protruded glass window. It also has quoins.

Amenities

The building has a full-time doorman, and a health club, but not roof deck, and no balconies. It is pet-friendly.

Apartments

Apartment 3and4B is a duplex with a 16-foot-wide entry foyer that leads into a 27-foot-corner living room with a fireplace that is adjacent to a 12-foot-square library and a 20-foot-wide dining room that is next to a 18-foot-kitchen that leads to a 23-foot-family room. The lower level has four bedrooms and the up[per level has two more bedrooms and a 20-foot-wide family room.

The 12^th floor apartment is a two-bedroom unit with a 14-foot-wide entry foyer that leads to a 32-foot-long living room with a fireplace next to a 19-foot-wide dining from and an open 16-foot-wode kitchen with an island that leads through a 7-foot-service hall to a 9-foot-long laundry and a 21-foot-wide exercise room. The living room is also adjacent to an 18-foot-library and a 20-foot-wide master bedroom, both facing Fifth Avenue, and there are two other bedrooms.

History

The year after it was built, the building was sold to Benjamin Winter who subsequently sold it.

One of its residents was Hattie Carnegie, a fashion designer who was borne Henrietta Kanengeiser in Vienna. From 1919 to 1939, she made seven trips a year to Europe and according to her obituary in The New York Times her frequent trips :”made her one of the fabulous characters of Paris.” Her apartment was bought by Ann Woodward who died in 1975 at the age of 57 and who had been accused of the 1955 shotgun shooting of her husband, William Woodward Jr., the sportsman and son of the chairman of the Central-Hanover Bank, at their Oyster Bay, L.I., home after attending a dinner in honor of the Duchess of Windsor. The article said that she was “particularly known for her beauty” and that as a John Robert Powers model she was “blue-eyed and blond,…described the most beautiful girl in radio.”

A May 8, 1999 article by Jim Yardley in The New York Times about the suicide of her son, William Woodward 3d, said that Life Magazine had described the death of his father as “The Shooting of the Century” and whispers about the incident “eventually reached Truman Capote, whose unfinished, but published novel, ‘Answered Prayers,’ included a thinly veiled fictional account of the Woodward shooting” and “depicted her as “Ann Cutler, a harlot and a gold digger who killed her husband because he had discovered he was a bigamist.” After an excerpt from the novel was published in Esquire magazine, she was soon found dead in her apartment from suicide.

In her 1992 book about the shooting, “This Crazy Thing Called Love,” Susan Braudy accepted Capote’s account as fact but eight years later she concluded that the shooting had been an accident and that Capote’s story about her background was “pure fabrication,” the article said.