210 Fifth Avenue: Review and Ratings

Review of 210 Fifth Avenue by Carter Horsley

210 Fifth Avenue, the very handsome, mid-block building facing Madison Square Park between 25^th and 26^th Streets, was erected in 1903 and designed by John B. Snook.

In 2015, the top of the 11-story building was converted to 9 residential condominiums designed by Joseph Pell Lombardi, one of the city’s leading residential conversion architects.

The Lenard Company, of which Jeffrey Manocherian is a principal, is the converters.

Bottom Line

An ornate former office building designed by John B. Snook facing Madison Square Park that was converted in 2015 of 9 residential condominiums and retail by Joseph Pell Lombardi, the dean of residential conversion architects.

Description

The building has a marble, cast-iron, brick and terracotta façade.

Landmarkbranding.com described this building as “a wonderfully opulent Beaux Arts fantasy, by John B. Snook & Sons, who also completed the far more prosaic 118 Fifth Avenue,” adding that the building “is a double-height wedge of Second Empire Paris, replete with scrolls, balconies and cartouches and topped with one of the avenue’ best mansard roofs” and that the building “originally held a combination of commercial lofts and bachelor apartments” and that “sometime between the building’s construction 1902 and 1938 a penthouse apartment was added.”

The third and fourth floors have center curved bay windows flanked by single windows with simple surrounds.

There is a very handsome cast-iron balcony above the third-floor bandcourse which is dentalated as the narrowed 5^th floor bandcourse.  The 5^th through the 9^th floors have indented bay windows flanked by facing protruded quoins and the 9^th floor bay window is slightly arched beneath an elaborate cartouche and a very large bracketed bandcourse.

The 10^th and 11^th floors have windows with copper surrounds capped by a curved pediment that projects out from the mansard roof.

It is located in an historic district.

Amenities

Views of the MetLife Clocktower Building, good bus transportation and two blocks north of Eataly.  No doorman and no swimming pool, just architectural grandeur.

History

Snook was the architect of 287 Broadway on the southwest corner of Reade Street that “The A. I. Guide to the Architecture of New York City, Fifth Edition” termed “the most succulent cast-icon street-show in all of New York: a glassy, mansarded, wrought-iron-crested, Ionic and Corinthian-columned delight.  Lovely, 51 Corinthians, 17 Doric. Count them.”

Snook was also the architect of the A. T. Stewart Dry Goods Store No. 1 at 280 Broadway on the northeast corner at Chamber Street facing City Hall Park that later became the Sun Building and then has been used by the NYC Department of Buildings.