733 Park Avenue: Review and Ratings

Review of 733 Park Avenue by Carter Horsley

This dark-brown, 30-story tower at 733 Park Avenue on the southeast corner at 71^st Street is the tallest on Park Avenue north of 62^nd Street.

It was erected by Stephen Muss in 1971 and designed by Harry F. Green and Kahn & Jacobs.

It has 30 co-operative apartments.

Bottom Line

"Of the avenue's postwar buildings, only 733 Park Avenue...presumed to vie with the great luxury houses of earlier decades in the size of its apartments," noted James Trager in his excellent 1990 book, "Park Avenue, Street of Dreams" (Atheneum). It also has fabulous views of Central Park from its upper floors.

It has 30 co-operative apartments.

Description

The brown-brick building is set back in a small but quite nice landscaped plaza that extends beneath the building to a one-story travertine marble fall behind its polished dark red granite one-story base and colonnade.

The lobby is appropriately and elegantly awash with travertine.

The building's plaza ruptured the avenue's solid wall of buildings, but no more so than the setback building of Hunter College, or the Seventh Regiment Armory, both a few blocks away.

It caused more harm, however, to the avenue's line of cornices from which it bursts forth quite prominently, affording its residents, of course, spectacular vistas. A couple of older buildings had exceeded the average building height of about 15 stories by a few floors, but 733 and another tower at 79th Street, 900 Park Avenue, soared above the rest. Both of these buildings, of course, have their sheer towers set back a bit from the avenue so that their impact on the avenue's famous vistas was not too severe. Nonetheless, many architecture critics and planners correctly decried these breaches in the cornice line as disruptive of the avenue's celebrated continuity.

It should be noted, however, that its immediate neighbor to the south on the same block is the polished red granite Asia Society, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, which only has 7 floors, and the two complement one another to a certain extent and therefore mitigate a bit their break with traditional building size on the avenue. On the other hand, it also has the merit of obscuring much of the view of the Viscaya at 110 East 71st Street, a "sliver" apartment tower that went up a few years later just to the east of it on 71st Street.

The building has discrete air-conditioners.

Amenities

The building has one passenger elevator, a doorman and a concierge, and a gym and a wine cellar.

Apartments

The apartment layouts are impressive and grand, although the 8-foot-11-inch-ceiling heights were a bit above average, but not extraordinary. Most apartments have nine-and-a-half rooms.

A February 22, 2013 article by Robin Finn in The New York Times said that “an opulent and meticulously renovated Manhattan duplex penthouse owned by the same family Impressionist Art connoisseurs for decades at 733 Park Avenue sold for its $21 million asking price” that week.

“The 4,250-square-foot penthouse, on the 30^th and 31^st floors, is further enlivened by 1,250 square feet of lushly planted terraces, one of them an east-facing Zen-style terrace accessible from the wood-paneled library, which like the corner living room has parquet de Versailles floors and a carved marble fireplace.  A private elevator landing opens onto a two-story foyer with double-height windows that face Central Park; a curving staircase connects the two levels of the nine-room residences…..The apartment was sold by the estate of Ethel Strong Allen, a philanthropist who died in June.  Mrs. Allen was the window of Herbert A. Allen Sr., a Wall Street investor and a partner in Allen & Company, which was founded in 1922 by his older brother, Charles….Mrs. Allen bequeathed three important works – a Sisley, a Pissarro and a Monet masterpiece, ‘Nympheas’ – to the Hackley School in Tarrytown, N.Y., which was attended by three generations of the family.  When the paintings were sold in November at a Christie’s auction, a buyer paid $43.76 million for the Monet, at the time believed to be the second-highest price ever paid for a work by that artist,” that article continued.

The 11^th floor is a three-bedroom unit that has a 14-foot-long entry foyer that leads to a 27-foot-long living room next to a 17-foot-long library and a 19-foot-long dining room adjacent to a 16-foot-long kitchen and a 14-foot-long breakfast room.

A maisonette quadraplex at 106 East 71^st Street has a semi-circular foyer with a staircase and an 19-foot-long living room with a fireplace and a 23-foot-long terrace and a bedroom on the first floor, a 28-foot-long formal living room and a 19-foot-long dining room with a fireplace and an 17-foot-enclosed kitchen on the second floor, three bedrooms on the third floor and a 19-foot-long family room, two bedrooms and a 30-foot-long patio/garden on the lowest floor.

Also at 106 East 71^st Street is a seven-story townhouse with six bedrooms, a 19-foot-wide gym, a 23-foot-wide terrace, a 22-foot-long playroom, a 29-foot-long living room with a fireplace, a 32-foot-wide dining room with a fireplace, a 21-foot-wide kitchen with terrace, a 20-foot-wide entry foyer and a large basement with upper and lower patios.

History

The building rises on the site of a former English-Regency-style mansion of Elihu Root that had been built in 1905 and designed by Carrere & Hastings. The 30-room mansion had been put up for sale by Mrs. Carll Tucker who had lived in it since 1915 and the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission had tried, without success, to save it.

While the minimalist façades leave much to be desired, this building's great location and the exclusivity of large, full-floor apartments make it a choice residence.

In a September 30, 1979 article in The New York Times entitled "Top Postwar Apartment Buildings," Paul Goldberger wrote it had "an ordinary outside but a very distinguished inside," adding that it was "not River House, but it probably comes closer to recreating the grand apartment houses of an earlier era than anything else Park Avenue has seen in decades."

Location

The building is across the avenue from 740 Park Avenue, one of the city’s grandest apartment buildings and it is just to the north of the 8-story Asia Society that was erected in 1979 and designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes and clad with polished dark red and light red granite and has a very lovely glass-enclosed restaurant designed by Bartholomew Voorsanger.