Construction is up to the 5th floor for a new 11-story condominium apartment building at 543 West 110th Street on the northeast corner at Broadway.

The developer is the Surtsey Realty Company, a concern of Howard Katz, and the development is on the former site of the two-story, terra-cotta-clad West Side Markets. Surtsey is the owner of the Beacon Theater and Hotel on Broadway and converted the Alden and Oliver Cromwell Hotels to residential use several years ago.

Platt Byard Dovell White, the architectural firm that recently designed such luxury apartment projects as 50 Madison Avenue and 47 East 91st Street, is the architect.

The new building will contain about 57 apartments and have a garage and is expected to completed by the middle of next year. The lower floors will have a pre-cast concrete facade and the upper floors will be clad in glass.

At one point, the developer hoped to get a variance to build a 16-story tower on the site, but decided to erect the lower building "as-of-right," that is, within the existing zoning and building regulations.

The building is just to the west of 535 West 110th Street, a beige-brick, 14-story apartment building that has about 289 apartments and is being converted to condominiums and has a construction shed in front of it. That building has a one-story limestone base with limestone window surrounds and the 2nd through the 4th floors and on the 13th floor and three decorative balconies. It has a canopied entrance, a one-step-up entrance and a four-step-up vestibule, a handsome marble lobby with stained-glass windows, a nice cornice and protruding air-conditioners and is adjacent to the spectacular, 9-story, mid-block apartment building at 527 West 110th Street that is distinguished by very large gargoyles of men eating on its second floor.

Across the street, the 12-story, Cathedral Tower apartment building at 514 West 110th Street was recently converted to about 100 condominiums. It has a three-story limestone base with a canopied entrance and protruding air-conditioners. It has a three-step-up vestibule and is missing the original masonry top of the slightly protruding window surrounds that are not missing on its twin building at 520 West 110th Street. Both of these beige-brick buildings were designed by Schwartz & Gross in 1911 and both have recessed entrances. exposed rooftop watertanks and masonry piers decorated in a diamond pattern.

To the east on this impressive block between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue is the very impressive and ornate facade of The Amherst-Cortlandt apartment building at 504-510 West 110th Street. There is a subway station at 110th Street and Broadway and these buildings are close to Riverside Park, Morningside Park and Central Park and Columbia University and the Cathedral of St. John The Divine are a few blocks to the north.