The Trafalgar House, 188 East 70th Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 188 East 70th Street by Carter Horsley

This finely detailed, distinguished, 31-story, condominium apartment building has 100 apartments and is one of the most attractive post-war residential towers erected on the Upper East Side.

The red-brick building has a two-story limestone base with an oculus window above its canopied entrance. The building has a nine-story base on the sidestreet with handsome staggered limestone quoins.

The tower, which was completed in 1986, has four setbacks graced by finials on its south façade and a handsome roof.

The building has a doorman, sidewalk landscaping, consistent fenestration, an attractive lobby, a garden, and a health club. It has some terraces but no balconies.

It has an excellent location on a pleasant sidestreet in the center of the Upper East Side. It is about four blocks from the Lexington Avenue subway and there is good cross-town bus service on 67th and 72nd Streets. The neighborhood boasts many good restaurants and stores and movie theaters.

East 70th Street, especially west of Lexington Avenue, is widely considered one of the city's handsomest and most prestigious sidestreets as it boasts not only The Frick Collection at its west end, but many prestigious art galleries and elegant townhouses.

An article by Joseph Giovannini in the October 13, 1986 edition of The New York Times said that its "associations are so genteel and the building so urbanistically polite that the building hardly seems "as tall as it is."

Although it does not have a garage, or a health club, it does offer an atrium lounge with catering service, a nursery and valet services.

Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, one of the nation s premier architectural firms of office buildings since the late 1970s, designed the tower for Allan Boardman.