The Aristocrat, 45 West 54th Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 45 West 54th Street by Carter Horsley

This 13-story cooperative apartment building was built in 1949 and has 45 apartments.

It was designed by DeYoung, Moskowitz & Rosenberg, the architectural firm best known for several buildings at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Chelsea.

The building has a full-time doorman and a garage and a laundry on each floor. It is known as the Aristocrat.

The cream-colored building has a canopied entrance with a white marble entrance surround, a step-down lobby and protruding air-conditioners and no sidewalk landscaping. It is has an exposed rooftop watertank.

The building is similar in size and massing to the Regent House at 25 West 54th Street and to the color of the Rockefeller Apartments at 17 West 54th Street further down the block and all three are across from the Museum of Modern Art.

This building has some terraces and some angled corner windows on its higher floors.

It is distinguished by its many stringcourses that extend across most of the street frontage.

The building is quite modest and conservative in comparison with the architects' work at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

In his June 26, 2005 "Streetscapes" column in The New York Times, Christopher Gray wrote that " The Fashion Institute of Technology - established in 1944 to offer training relevant to the apparel industry - limped along in modest quarters until the late 1950's. In 1956, plans for a new $7.7 million building on West 27th were announced. Charles H. Silver, the president of the New York City Board of Education, said that 'the eyes of the world are on us to set trends in style and standards of taste,' according to an account in The New York Times. The school is now part of the State University system."

"The architects de Young, Moscowitz & Rosenberg," Mr. Gray continued, "designed what is now known as Building C in an utterly nonhistoric vocabulary - huge quilted panels of aluminum with regularly spaced square window openings framed in bronze-colored metal. The panels were originally meant to be in two tones of blue but wound up a brown, coppery color, above a recessed arcade supported by freestanding columns and a great freestanding metal arch, shaped like a section of a Quonset hut. To the east, the building's auditorium has a jet-age character, with a wildly angled roof and faceted walls framed by a bronze-colored metal grid. In 1956, Benjamin Moscowitz told the magazine Architectural Record that the firm had spent weeks watching students and faculty at work, because it wanted to create a building "consistent with the good taste and atmosphere of the school itself." The building opened in 1959. In 1960, the same architects designed the school's Nagler Hall, a dormitory across the street, at 220 West 27th, which has a gridlike masonry façade in faceted, chalky white concrete, with deep-set windows and a wafflelike roof-tank enclosure. To try to reconcile the frank modernism of the architects' work at F.I.T. with their classical training is a bracing experience. All three studied in New York in the 1910's: Philip de Young and Moscowitz at Columbia University and the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, and Karl Rosenberg at Cooper Union."

This building has a very central midtown location, just a few blocks north of Rockefeller Center and a few blocks south of Tiffany's, F.A.O. Schwartz and Bergdorf Goodman.

There is good bus service in the area and a subway station is one block south. station is one block south.