791 Park Avenue: Review and Ratings

Review of 791 Park Avenue by Carter Horsley

Erected in 1925, this 15-story apartment building at 791 Park Avenue on the southeast corner at 74^th Street was converted to a cooperative in 1947 and contains 29 apartments.

It was designed by George and Edward Blum, whose other buildings on Park Avenue include 555, 830, 940 and 1075.  They also designed the Adlon at 200 West 54^th Street, the Viewest at 277 West End Avenue and 322 Central Park West.

Bottom Line

A pre-war building in a prime location with a highly eccentric and interesting façade treatment.

Description

The architects basically left no surface untouched by their artistry.

This building has a very unusual façade that includes small protruding elements in a geometric pattern, very unusual lintels beneath the windows, very distinctive curved balconies with “toothed” bottoms and two-story arched window surrounds in the center of the avenue façade on the top two floors, large escutcheons in the two large roofline elements, thin but strongly delineated piers, and a ragged roofline of considerable individuality.

The beige-brick building, which has a rusticated limestone, two-story base, has some discrete and protruding window air-conditioners and inconsistent fenestration.

It has a canopied entrance with a broken pediment surround and sidewalk landscaping.

Amenities

The building has a doorman, storage and a gym.

Apartments

Apartment 5A is a four-bedroom unit with a 6-foot-wide entry foyer that opens onto a 21-foot-long gallery that leads to a 24-foot-long living room next to a 20-foot-long dining room off a 9-foot-wide pantry, a 23-foot-long kitchen, a 13-foot-long breakfast room, an 11-foot-long laundry, and a 12-foot-wide maid’s room.  The apartment also has a 16-foot-long library and a 13-foot-long home office and a 37-foot-long hallway.

Apartment 6B is a four-bedroom unit that has a 23-foot-long entrance gallery that leads to a 25-foot-wide living room with wood-burning fireplace and leads to a 20-foot-long elliptical dining room next to a 22-foot-long kitchen and 13-foot-wide breakfast room.  The apartment also has a 17-foot-long library and a maid’s room.

Apartment 2B is very similar to apartment 6B except that it has a small entrance with staircase on the first floor that leads to the gallery on the second floor.

History

Ivar Kreuger, the Swedish match king, took the penthouse in 1927, according to James Trager, "Park Avenue, Street of Dreams," (Atheneum, 1990).

"Early in 1932,” Mr. Trager recounts, “the Swedish mountebank Ivar Kreuger shot himself in his Paris apartment, leaving behind a mountain of debt and a New York penthouse at 791 Park. It lay vacant for two years before being rented by Edna Ferber, a Mid-western writer of forty-eight who had lived for years on the West Side. Her novels included 'So Big (which won the Pulitzer Prize), 'Cimarron,' and 'Show Boat' (basis of the 1929 Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II musical), the women's magazines paid handsomely for her short stories and for serializing her novels, and she had collaborated with George S. Kaufman on a number of Broadway hits, including 'The Royal Family' and 'Dinner at Eight.'”

According to Mr. Trager, “Ferber wrote about the former Kreuger apartment in her 1938 autobiography 'A Peculiar Treasure,' saying that she had lived in it for three years (1933-36). It was, she said, the 'only really quiet apartment' she had ever seen in New York. Traffic noises bounded off its high brick penthouse parapet, over which 'unbelievable willow trees,' planted by Kreuger, tossed 'great leafy hoopskirts in careless abandon.' The apartment itself lay empty and 'dilapidated' in the wake of its previous owner's suicide. 'I, renting it at a surprisingly low price, became Kreuger's sole heiress, really, for I alone benefited by his going.' Ferber wrote of pulling down partitions and building 'great French windows that let in the sun.' She recalled a grape arbor thirty feet long, a peach tree eighteen inches in circumference, espaliered apple trees, 'rhododendrons, wisteria, ivy, roses, lilac bushes, iris, forsythia, privet all growing on a penthouse sixteen stories high on Park Avenue. There were three fountains, a rock garden...with...flagstone paths.' In her 1963 memoir, 'A Kind of Magic,' Ferber said she had 'come upon this unbelievable country house in the air.' (Her friend, Dorothy Rodgers, wife of the composer Richard Rodgers, had evidently found the 'sky-house.') 'It was offered me for rental at an unbelievably low figure....' Ferber now recalled that she had lived there for five years (until May 1939), not three, and the willow trees described earlier as being twenty-four inches in circumference and fully forty feet high were now remembered as 'fifteen feet high and as thick in circumference as an elephant's leg. [They] cascaded their liquid green branches over the parapet. Peach trees, espaliered apple trees, grape arbors and strawberry plants and rhubarb actually bore fruit in this bizarre Eden. Two fountains tinkled annoyingly. Jonquils popped their goldenheads in the spring..."

Ferber moved from Park Avenue to a house in Connecticut but returned in 1953 to another Manhattan apartment at 730 Park. Here she wrote the novels 'Giant' and 'Ice Palace,' and here she died, in 1968, at age eighty-three," Trager wrote.

The building was built on the site of a townhouse owned by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, the architect of St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue and 53^rd Street and St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church on Park Avenue and 50^th Street.

In his January 22, 2006 “Streetscapes” column in The New York Times, Christopher Gray noted that House Beautiful wrote that “the dwelling was full of ‘old rapiers, old guns, old everything, suggestive of life and use and memories,’ leaving ‘the impression that beauty is pre-eminently a livable quality.”  Mr. Gray added that Mr. Goodhue “saw in his side-street house a charming modesty antithetical to the bombastic, European-style palaces of the well-to-do had built along Fifth Avenue,” adding that in an article in The Times Goodhue said that “the trouble in our houses today is that we want everything to seem rich and extravagant – we want money, and then we want to show it in our surroundings.”

According to “The Sky’s the Limit, Passion & Property in Manhattan,” a 2005 book by Steven Gaines, “the legal right to blackball people from buying an apartment without explanation was affirmed by a landmark 1958 New York Court of Appeals ruling when Sidney Weisner, an attorney, and his wife were rejected by the co-op board at 791 Park avenue and Weisner sued the board to find out why they had been turned down.”

“There is no reason,” the court wrote, “why the owners of the co-operative apartment house could not decide for themselves with whom they wish to share their elevators, their common halls and facilities, their stockholders’ meetings, their management problems and responsibilities and their homes.”

Location

This building is located in one of the finest stretches of Park Avenue and is convenient to many famous boutiques and art galleries on Fifth Avenue and is not far from Lenox Hill Hospital and a local subway station at Lexington Avenue and 77th Street. Cross-town bus service is two blocks south.