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The landmark, 8-story, limestone-clad, Apple Bank for Savings Building that occupies the full block between 73rd and 74th Streets, Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue is now behind construction shrouds.

CityRealty.Com today cane across a Department of Buildings permit that indicates that the top four floors of the building will be converted to 27 condominium apartments.

The huge and very impressive four-story high banking hall at the base of the building will not be altered in the conversion of the building's upper floors that until recently were used as offices.

The bank has its main entrance in the middle of its frontage on Broadway and also on 73rd Street facing Verdi Square. The residential portion of the building will have an entrance at 2112 Broadway, which is close to 74th Street.

Stahl Real Estate, the owners of the property recently presented plans to the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission to make minor changes to an exit on 74th Street that will be used as a second means of egress for the condominium apartments. The solution proposed was to leave the west side of the very handsome gates in place and to leave permanently open the east side and install a glass "panic" door with push-bar just inside the entrance.

The landmark building was built in 1928 for the Central Savings Bank that formerly was located at 14th Street and Fourth Avenue. It was designed by York & Sawyer in the same monumental, Italian Renaissance-palazzo style the architects employed at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Building in Lower Manhattan. The bank was founded in 1859 as the German Savings Bank in the City of New York and changed its name to the Central Savings Bank during World War I and subsequently it became the Apple Bank.

The bank continues to operate within the building's vast and spectacular vaulted banking hall - one of the city's most impressive interior spaces which is a designated interior landmark.

The building commands one of the few prominent "key" sites in Manhattan at the intersection of two avenues such as the Flatiron Building at 23rd Street and the former site of the Herald Tribune at 35th Street between Broadway and The Avenue of the Americas and the former Times Tower at 43rd Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue.

The building was described by Elliot Willensky and Norval White in "The A.I.A. Guide to New York City Architecture, Fourth Edition," (Three Rivers Press, 2000), as "one of the area's noblest and most imposing edifices."

An attempt by CityRealty.Com today to reach James Farley of Stahl Real Estate to ask about the project's timetable was unsuccessful.
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.