21 East 79th Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 21 East 79th Street by Carter Horsley

This elegant, Art Deco-style, 14-story, mid-block apartment building at 21 East 79^th Street is a cooperative with only one apartment a floor. 

It was built in 1930 and designed by Van Wart & Wein. 

It has 12 cooperative apartments. 

Bottom Line

Just a lovely, plain, limestone-clad, pre-war, mid-block building close to Central Park with only one apartment a floor.

Description

The building has a limestone façade and a canopied entrance with a one-story polished granite base. The building has relatively little ornamentation but it is handsome. There is a scalloped curve design above the entrance and the railings on the top terraces are pleasantly criss-crossed.

Amenities

The building has a doorman, wall lanterns flanking the entrance, discrete air-conditioners and sidewalk landscaping, but no balconies, no health club, no garage and inconsistent fenestration. It has two bandcourses, one of which is "broken" by an air-conditioner.

Apartments

The 9^th floor is a 5-bedroom unit with a 14-foot-wide entrance foyer that leads to a 25 –foot-wide living room with a wood-burning fireplace and a 19-foot-wide dining room with sliding door next to a 15-foot-long, windowed kitchen with sliding door.  The apartment also has a 17-foot-long library, a long hall, a laundry and a 10-foot-long maid’s room.

Location

It is across the street from a mansion row that extends from The Ukranian Institute of America that was designed in 1899 by C. P. H. Gilbert with many fine gargoyles for Isaac D. and Mary Fletcher and later occupied by Harry F. Sinclair and then Ann van Horn Stuyvesant at the southeast corner at Fifth Avenue and by impressive limestone mansions closer to Madison Avenue. 

It is to the west of the stucco-clad, former Hanae Mori building that was strikingly altered for Richard Feigen, the art dealer, in 1969, by Hans Hollein and Baker & Blake with a two-story-high chrominum cylinder highlighting its entrance. The column, however, was subsequently removed for a new retail tenant. 

There is good cross-town bus service on 79th Street and a subway station is at Lexington Avenue and 77th Street. 

Central Park is nearby as is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, many art galleries and fashionable boutiques on Madison Avenue and Lenox Hill Hospital is two blocks to the south on Park Avenue.