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Apartments at the very handsome former New York Lying-In Hospital building at 305 Second Avenue on the northwest corner at 17th Street across from Stuyvesant Park are now available to be bought as condominiums.

The building was actually converted in 1986 but has been operating as a rental building until now.

The building, which is known now as Rutherford Place, was completed in 1902 and designed by Robert Henderson Robertson, who had designed the 391-foot-high Park Row Buiding in 1886 that for nine years was the world's tallest building, the American Tract Society Building at 150 Nassau Street in 1894, and the New York Savings Bank building in 1897 at Eighth Avenue and 14th Street.

The building is distinguished by a very ornate and lovely entrance with a large fan window and a marble, 30-foot-high lobby that still has a tablet inscribed with the Hippocratic Oath that was originally unveiled by J. P. Morgan, the financier who was a parishioner at St. George's Church nearby on Rutherford Place.

The building was converted to apartments in 1986 and Win Chamberlin, a principal of Orb Development, which is managing the property and a sponsor of the offering, has stated that "fortunately, most of the intricate detail work" in the lobby "was intact," noting that "the rosette window over the entrance was warped, but functional still."

The building will have 122 apartments and prices as of a month ago ranged from $775,000 for a 619-square-foot unit to $2,300,000 for a 1,610-square-foot apartment.

The pet-friendly building has a full-time doorman, a roof deck, a bicycle room, and an ATM in the lobby.

Each apartment has a different layout and some units have ceilings as high as 17 feet and some are duplexes and some are triplexes.

Kitchens have under-counter halogen task lighting, SubZero refrigerators, Bosch dishwasthers, Dacor convection/microwave ovens, Viking ranges and Poggenpohl European cherry cabinets.

The Second Avenue frontage has a pediment roof element with an circular window at the 9th story over a large arched window. The building lies within the Stuyvesant Park Historic District.

The red-brick and limestone building 10-foot-tall wood-framed windows and random-length select oak floors and many apartments have curved rooms. Beyer Blinder Belle was the architectural firm involved in the residential conversion.

The building has medical offices on the first floor.
Architecture Critic Carter Horsley Since 1997, Carter B. Horsley has been the editorial director of CityRealty. He began his journalistic career at The New York Times in 1961 where he spent 26 years as a reporter specializing in real estate & architectural news. In 1987, he became the architecture critic and real estate editor of The New York Post.