The Stanford, 45 East 25th Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 45 East 25th Street by Carter Horsley

This 42-story, mixed-use tower has one of the best locations in the city, next to one of the city's great architectural masterpieces and across 25th Street from another.

Its immediate neighbor to the west is the magnificent New York State Appellate Division Courthouse, one of the most ornate and lovely public structures in the city.

The city acquired and demolished two three-story buildings on this site for an expansion of the courthouse, but funding was not provided and after seven years the city auctioned off the property in 1982 to Lawrence Wong for a little more than $2 million. Two years later, Arun Bhatia bought it for $4.5 million and started construction of this tower in 1985.

Mr. Bhatia, whose father was a builder of apartment houses and office buildings in Bombay, is the developer also of the Whitney at 311 East 38th Street, the Dunhill on the northeast corner of 84th Street and First Avenue and the Park East at 233 East 86th Street among other Manhattan properties.

The Stanford's neighbor directly across 25th Street is 11 Madison Avenue, formerly the north annex building of the Metropolitan Insurance Company headquarters, one block south. 11 Madison Avenue is one of the city's most massive, full-block office towers and is noted for its huge, arched corner entrances and its scalloped, setback façades. The building was originally planned to be an approximately 100 story tower but construction was halted during the Depression and no doubt may eventually restart if the city's economy and the Flatiron District's popularity continue to improve.

Completed in 1986, this condominium tower, which is setback from the courthouse and from the streetline with its own plaza, contains 120 apartments, most of which have curved balconies.

The building, which has two duplex penthouses, has studios with about 375 square feet of space, one-bedrooms with about 700 square feet and two-bedroom units of 1,050 square feet each. The lower seven floors in this building are commercial.

Liebman Liebman Associates was the architectural firm for the project.

Although it has rounded corners, the tower is rather square in plan, which is rather unusual for such a slender tower and its impact on the area is rather minimal, given the presence of larger structures, such as the office building at 41 Madison Avenue. The base of this building is limestone to complement the courthouse.

In their book, "New York 2000, Architecture and Urbanism Between The Bicentennial and The Millennium," Robert A. M. Stern described the building as "drab," noting that "A thirty-foot setback from the neighboring Appellate Court provided the developers with a significant height bonus."

While the tower is out of context with the wonderful architectural heritage of Madison Square Park, it at least does not front directly on the park as does the very inappropriate commercial building at 41 Madison Avenue.