Windsor Tower at 5 Tudor City Place between 40th and 41st Streets is the grandest building in the famous Tudor City complex across from the United Nations at the far east end of 42nd Street.

The 7-story top of the brown-brick building is festooned with finials, piers and cartouches some triple-height, multi-paned windows giving the appearance of a Tudor palace on steroids, or at least stilts.

The building's addresses include 701-719 First Avenue, 1-19 Tudor City Place, 371-399 East 40th Street, and 358-368 East 41st Street.

"From the street," an August 1, 1991 article in The New York Times began, "the three-story windows that crown three of Tudor City's towers seem unimaginably luxurious. Cynics often presume that they conceal water tanks. In truth, they light the three-story living rooms of 14 apartments, some with terraces trimmed with gargoyles."

The complex, which its developer called "a city within a city," was created by Fred Fillmore French starting in 1925 when he assembled six blockfronts along Prospect Place, a small north-south street west of First Avenue that was lined most with brownstones.

According to a May 15, 1994 article by Christopher Gray in The New York Times, Mr. French had previously erected some luxury residential buildings such as 1140 Fifth Avenue "where he built a squash court into his own roof duplex and then 1010 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street, where he occupied the penthouse apartment with a huge roof garden."

"By 1927 he began construction on the largest single residential project New York had yet seen. By 1932 he had finished nine big apartment houses and a hotel with a total of 2,800 units that soon accommodated 4,500 residents," according to Mr. Gray.

The enclave surrounds two gardens on either side on the bluff at the end of 42nd Street.

According to Mr. Gray's article, the south garden was at first a miniaturized 18-hole golf course and "around 1950, 42nd Street was widened to produce a near-bou...