Lincoln Guild, 303 West 66th Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 303 West 66th Street by Carter Horsley

This red-brick apartment building at 303 West 66th Street was erected around 1961 and is notable for its lushly landscaped curved entrance driveway and its many balconies.

It is also known as 139-159 West End Avenue and 2-10 Freedom Place.

It is close to the large Lincoln Towers project that was erected around the same time. The Lincoln Towers buildings are large slabs and this building has a tall, setback central section and two lower wings that frame the driveway.

This building has 420 cooperative apartments and was known as Lincoln Guild.

The building has a doorman, a bicycle room, a playroom and permits each apartment to have a cat but no dogs.

It is one of many older buildings in the city where many residents have enclosed their balconies.

An article by Andree Brooks in the New York Times February 14, 1993 reported that the building was involved in a case, Lincoln Guild Housing Corporation v. Stuckelman, in which Judge Peter Wendt of New York Housing Court ruled in November 1992 that Anna Stuckelman, a shareholder at 303 West 66th Street, had the right to let her grandniece occupy her apartment without board approval.

"Judge Wendt based his decision on an interpretation of the state's 1983 Roommate Law, which gave a primary tenant the right to bring one other person to live in the unit without the landlord's approval. Shareholders are frequently classified as primary tenants by the courts because they are, in essence, tenants of the co-op corporation. Thus, argued Judge Wendt, the customary language in a co-op proprietary lease restricting occupancy to the shareholder's immediate family is contrary to the intention of the roommate law and cannot be upheld. The Lincoln Guild co-op had argued that the grandniece was an illegal subtenant since Mrs. Stuckelman had been in a nursing home at the time."

Subleasing regulations have since been tightened.

The building was erected as a publicly subsidized, middle-income housing cooperative and in 1992 it was converted from a public to a private cooperative.

The building has no mortgages.