Construction is up to the 19th floor at 1600 Broadway, the new 27-story, 137-unit condominium apartment building on the north side of 48th Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue.

The 290-foot-high building will have a 9-story-high advertising sign in the middle of its southern facade. The building has a tower setback over a two-story-high base and the top five floors of the tower are angled outwards and the middle part of the east and west facades are also flare outwards.

Sherwood Equities, of which Jeffrey Katz is the principal, acquired the site in 1986, and it built the black-glass Renaissance Hotel that occupies much of the small block just to the south, at the north end of Times Square. Sherwood also owns a minority interest in 1 Times Square.

Jorge Szendiuch of Einhorn Yafee Prescot is the design architect and Cetra Ruddy and SLCE Architects are also involved and M. Paul Friedberg and Partners is the landscape architect for the building's large terrace on the fourth floor, a club floor for the residents with virtual golf, and the "observatory" on the roof.

For those "wild-and-crazy" people bored with typical urban vistas of rivers and parks, this building offers the pulsating, razzle-dazzle of the Times Square district.

Prices start at $555,000 for studios, $675,000 for one-bedrooms, $820,000 for one-bedrooms with a home office, $1,150,000 for two-bedrooms, $1,755,000 for three-bedrooms and $2.5 million for penthouses.

It replaced the former 10-story, Studebaker Brothers building that was erected in 1902 and designed by James Brown Lord, the architect of the Appellate Division of the State of New York building on Madison Square Park.

In a November 8, 2004 article in The New York Times, David Dunlap wrote that the handsome building was "one of New York's most familiar unknown buildings" as it was adorned with large advertising signs for Maxwell House, Chevrolet, Braniff and Sony.

"Columbia Pictures may be said to have been born there," Mr. Dunlap continued, "since it was in an office at 1600 Broadway that Harry Cohn, Joseph Brandt and Jack Cohn formed the C.B.C. Film Sales Company in 1920. Four years later, tired of the nickname 'Corned Beef and Cabbage,' they renamed the company Columbia. In the 1930s Joseph Hilton & Sons, a clothier, operated in the building and in 1939 the building, which had a large cornice, chamfered corners and large, arched windows on its 9th floor, was home to the Ripley Believe It or Not! Odditorium in 1939 and soon thereafter to Howard Clothes."

According to "Capt. Spaulding," who posted a message at wirednewyork.com, "Bix Beiderbecke played there with two different bands. (The Wolverines, in 1924 at the Cinderella Ballroom, and with Adrian Rollini's band at the Club New Yorker in 1927)....The Paul Whiteman club was there too!" Capt. Spaulding added that he was "sure cartoon fans are also mourning the loss of the building, given the whole Fleisher Studios connection."

A recent article in The New York Times indicated that about 40 percent of the apartments in the new building have been sold. Most of the apartments have balconies.