167 East 67th Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 167 East 67th Street by Carter Horsley

This beige-brick, 20-story apartment building was erected in 1960 and converted to a cooperative in 1969. It has 98 apartments.

The building has a 1-story limestone base and a polished red granite entrance surround with a doorman, and a garage.

It is on one of the city's most secure as well as architecturally interesting blocks.

It is adjacent to the Park East Synagogue/Congregation Zichron Ephraim at 163 East 67th Street that was completed in 1890 to designs by Schneider & Herter. In their fourth edition of "The A.I..A. Guide to New York," (Three Rivers Press, 2000), Norval White and Elliot Wilensky note that the structure "is a confection that might have been conceived in a Moorish trip on LSD: a wild, vigorous extravaganza."

The authors also note that the building at 157 East 67th Street that was originally the headquarters of the New York City Fire Department and is now merely a fire station, was designed in 1886 by Napolean Le Brun & Sons and altered in 1988 by The Stein Partnership and is "a lusty exercise in Romanesque Revival in brownstone and brick."

The Stein Partnership the same year also altered the 19th Precinct of the city's Police Department at 153 East 67th Street, which White and Willensky described as "a Victorian palazzo."

Further to the west on the same side of the street is the Kennedy Child Center, originally the Mt. Sinai Dispensary, at 149-51 East 67th Street, that was completed in 1890 by Buchman & Deisler and Brunner & Tryon, and is, according to White and Willensky, "dignified neo-Italian Renaissance styling in brick and terra-cotta that required the collaboration of two distinguished partnerships of architects."

In the middle of the south side of this block is a white-brick apartment building that houses the Permanent Missions of the Russian Federation and several Eastern Bloc countries to the United Nations.

The building has a prime Upper East Side location that is convenient to the area's many fashionable boutiques and restaurants, art galleries and museums, and social clubs. It is close to Hunter College and there is cross-town bus service on this street and 65th Street and a subway station is nearby at 67th Street and Lexington Avenue.