CityRealty, a leading New York City apartment search and resource site, today announced its list of Top 10 Inspiring Manhattan Apartment Buildings.

1. Top 10 Inspiring
Manhattan Apartment Buildings
By: Carter B. Horsley
January 2012

2. “Some buildings are very important not so much for their architecture, or
celebrity, or history, but for pioneering others to follow in their path, inspiring
faith in the well-being of their neighborhoods.”
--Carter B. Horsley, CityRealty Editor
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3. 10. Time Warner Center at
80 Columbus Circle
This huge, mixed-use, twin-towered,
reflective-glass-clad project replaced the
former New York Coliseum on Columbus
Circle and includes retail space, offices, hotel,
TV studios, a jazz facility, and 225
condominium apartments. It was designed by
David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
and completed in 2004. The Related
Companies, Apollo Real Estate Advisors and
the Palladium Company took on the project
after protests by numerous civic groups over
the previous developer’s plan that would
have cast huge shadows on Central Park. The
razzle-dazzle of this project made this already
popular area the city’s most desirable.
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4. 9. London Terrace,
405 - 465 West 23rd Street
This gargantuan, 1,670-unit, full-block
apartment project was completed in1930.
Rather than have 14 different designs for the
individual buildings, this complex presents a
very handsome, unified design, a process
followed soon thereafter at Knickerbocker
Village near the Brooklyn Bridge in Lower
Manhattan. Over the decades, London
Terrace remained a mighty bulwark in
Chelsea, and remains as such as Chelsea has
become one of the city’s “hottest”
neighborhoods.
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5. 8. Zeckendorf Towers at
1 Irving Place
One of the city’s most important
development projects of the 1980’s, this full-
block complex not only led to the
renaissance of Union Square Park, but also
anchored the phenomenal emergence of
Park Avenue South and the Flatiron District
as a chic neighborhood. The four-towered
condominium enclave, which was completed
in 1987, replaced many run-down low-rise
buildings. The importance of this
development is its demonstration of how one
major project can turn a neighborhood
around. It may well prove to be the most
important achievement of the developers:
William Zeckendorf Jr., Abraham Hirschfeld,
Irwin Ackerman and others. To go forward
with such a mammoth project in the heart of
an unattractive, crime-ridden, heavily
trafficked area in a no-man’s land between
the established residential communities of
Greenwich Village to the south and Gramercy
Park to the north was a major act of courage.
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6. 7. Liberty Tower at
55 Liberty Street
One of the great skyscrapers of Lower
Manhattan, this 33-story, Gothic Revival-style
tower was erected in 1910 and designed by
Henry Ives Cobb. After World War II, many
office tenants were looking for large floors
and the older towers fell a bit out of favor. In
the 1960s and 1970s, an exodus of
commercial tenants from Lower Manhattan
to midtown and to the suburbs threatened
the viability of many downtown properties. In
1979, architect Joseph Pell Lombardi
converted this office building to a
cooperative residential building with 87
apartments, the first major such conversion
in Lower Manhattan.
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7. 6. Tudor City,
Tudor City Place
The Tudor City complex was created by Fred
Fillmore French starting in 1925 when he
assembled six block fronts along Prospect
Place, a small north-south street west of First
Avenue that was lined mostly with
brownstones. By 1932 he had completed
nine large apartment houses and a hotel, and
today the project has 12 buildings that range
in height from 10 to 32 stories with about
3,000 apartments and 600 hotel rooms. The
Tudor City project made the area
“respectable” for the United Nations to build
its headquarters across First Avenue after
World War II.
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8. 5. World Wide Plaza,
393 West 49th Street
This full-block, mixed-use development in
1989 by William Zeckendorf Jr. on the former,
second site of Madison Square Garden paved
the way for the remarkable renaissance of
Times Square and the Theater District and
West Midtown. This 38-story residential
condominium tower was designed by Frank
Williams.
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9. 4. Manhattan House at
200 East 66th Street
One of the most influential post-war
buildings in New York City, Manhattan House
marked the beginning of the age of "white-
brick monstrosities" in the eyes of some
observers and the first big splash of
International Style modernity in the city to
others. The mammoth development, which
occupies the full block between Third and
Second Avenues and 65th and 66th Streets,
actually is clad in a light gray-brick, but
niceties aside it presented a "clean," "neat,"
almost Spartan appearance in distinct
contrast to the historical styles of earlier
periods and the Art Deco stylizations of the
1920s and 1930s.
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10. 3. River House at
435 East 52nd Street
Arguably the city’s, if not the world’s, finest
apartment building, River House is the
epitome of "swell" living. Erected in 1931
when its area still teemed with tenements,
River House established the East River
neighborhoods of Beekman Place and Sutton
Place as hugely desirable addresses. The
building was mocked in the famous and
popular 1936 movie, "Dead End," which
starred Humphrey Bogart. The movie focused
on the not-always-communal coexistence of
the rich in their spectacular tower of luxury
and the poor swimming in the adjacent river
off the dead end street.
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11. 2. The Dakota at
1 West 72nd Street
The city’s most legendary apartment
building, the Dakota is a massive, fortress-like
building with a large center courtyard, very
large apartments, and an impressive, arched
entrance. When it was built in 1884, it
towered over the Upper West Side and was
an immediate success with all its apartments
rented on opening day. The Dakota’s success
opened up the Upper West Side for luxury
apartments.
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12. 1. 998 Fifth Avenue at
81st Street
One of the world’s grandest apartment
buildings, 998 Fifth Avenue was designed by
McKim, Mead & White, the architectural firm
that designed the Pennsylvania Station that
was demolished in 1964. An inflated Italian
Renaissance-style palazzo structure, the
building would delight the Medicis and is
widely credited with convincing New York’s
very rich that apartments were acceptable
habitats.
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13. About Carter B. Horsley
Mr. Horsley, editor of CityRealty, writes ----“Carter’s View on Manhattan Real Estate”
and his popular “CityRealty’s Top 10 Buildings” lists. Prior to joining the online real
estate and apartment search site, he spent 26 years writing for The New York Times as
a real estate and architecture news reporter. In addition, he produced the syndicated
radio program, “The Front Page of Tomorrow’s New York Times,” which was a WQXR
standard. He later served as real estate editor and architectural critic for The New York
Post and International Herald Tribune.
About CityRealty
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