Sales have started at the St. Regis Hotel at 2 East 55th Street of 24 condominium apartments and 22 condo-hotel units.

The hotel is one of the most luxurious in the city and was erected in 1904 by Col. John Jacob Astor and was designed by Trowbridge & Livingston. In 1927, Sloan & Robertson designed a large mid-block expansion that was compatible with but much less detailed than the original facade at the southeast corner at Fifth Avenue.

The expansion, by Duke Management, permitted the hotel to create a large and superb club-like bar room highlighted by Maxfield Parish's large, amusing mural of a flatulent "Old King Cole" that originally was in the former Knickerbocker Hotel on the southwest corner of Broadway and 42nd Street that Astor had built after he had erected the larger and more famous Astor Hotel on Broadway between 44th and 45th Streets that has since been demolished. The Parrish mural has been moved within the hotel to a smaller bar when much of the larger room was converted to a dining room.

Originally, the hotel reportedly had 47 Steinway pianos and was the first hotel in the city to be air-conditioned. In his book, Fifth Avenue, the Best address (Rizzoli International Publications Inc., 1998), Jerry E. Patterson noted that there was an outdoor terrace where one could have refreshments, lost when Fifth Avenue was widened." According to Mr. Patterson the hotel was named after St. Regis Lake in the Adirondacks and "During the nightclub years of the 1930's, the St. Regis had many clubs, attracting for the most part a rather conservative and very well-heeled crowd. Joseph Urban[n, the flamboyant architect, designed the Seaglades nightclub, where Vincent Lopez's orchestrated played. During the summer it played for dancing in the Japanese-style roof garden of the hotel.

In the 1960's, Peter Duchin and his orchestra attracted the dancing set at the large Maisonette nightclub in the hotel's basement.

The building's Fifth Avenue corner was reclad in travertine marble that was not sensitive to the great Art Nouveau spirit of the hotel's architecture, although it originally housed Buccellati, whose fine silver objects were memorably upscale. Buccellati eventually moved elsewhere and its space is now occupied by a diamond concern.

The condominium conversions only affect 59 of the hotel's 315 rooms.

On the 10th and 11th floors of the building 24 "full-ownership" condominium apartments have been created that range in price from $1,600,000 for a 435-square-foot studio to $7,200,000 for a 1,546-square foot apartment. Although sales only became about two weeks ago, 10 of these units are now understood to be in contract.

On the 8th and 9th floors, there are 22 studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments that are being sold as "fractionalized" condo-hotel units that can be occupied for only about half the year. These units are known as the St. Regis Residence Club and offer "butler service" and interiors "presented by" by Sills Huniford.