The Park Lane, 185 East 85th Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 185 East 85th Street by Carter Horsley

This very imposing, 35-story, beige-brick apartment tower, which is known as The Park Lane, was erected in 1967 and has 442 rental apartments.

It was designed by H. I. Feldman.

The free-standing, L-shaped tower has rounded balconies at its corners and angled balconies on its sides. It caps its geometries with a nice cylindrical rooftop watertank enclosure.

The building occupies the blockfront on Third Avenue between 85th and 86th Streets and was a prominent landmark in the Yorkville neighborhood until 2008 when it began to be somewhat hemmed in by the construction of two mid-rise luxury apartment buildings, the Brompton, designed by Robert A. M. Stern, directly across the avenue, and the Lucida, designed by Cook & Fox, to the east. It still towers above each.

It has a large, lushly landscaped driveway designed by Klonsky Associates with a large circular marquee entrance on 85th Street and the tower rests on a one-story retail base. The building has a concierge, consistent fenestration, a garage, and discrete air-conditioners, but no health club.

The building has many spectacular views from its upper floors. It has lush sidewalk landscaping at its driveway entrance and a mid-block sunken retail plaza on 86th Street.

It is very convenient to public transportation and not far from the many cultural institutions along Museum Mile on Fifth Avenue and many private schools in nearby Carnegie Hill.

There is excellent local shopping and numerous movie theaters nearby and a noisy fire station is on the same block.

There is considerable traffic in this area and there are often many sidewalk vendors on the sidewalks by this building on the avenue and 86th Street. The building has a large lobby and concierge but only three passenger elevators.

The circular balconies soften this buildings great, bland mass, but the angled balconies are awkward looking. This is not a pretty building but it was an early harbinger of the tall-building renaissance of Third Avenue that began when the "El" was demolished in the mid-1950s and the era of German-style dance halls on Yorkville's main drag, 86th Street, began to disappear and give way to the gentrification of so-called "luxury" apartment high-rises.

The building was the fictional home on television of "The Jeffersons," an upwardly mobile black family who "made it big in dry cleaning."