1 West 67th Street #305

West 67th Street between Central Park West and Columbus is the only real concentration of artists studio apartments in Manhattan, seven residential buildings and one institution put up between 1901 and 1929 and listed together on the National Register as the West 67th Street Artists Colony Historic District. The largest of them sits at the corner. In 1914 a syndicate of artists, among them Walter Russell, Frank DuMond, and Willard Metcalf, paid 250,000 dollars for the parcel and commissioned the Brooklyn architect George Mort Pollard to build studios for people who needed height and north light to work. The Hotel des Artistes opened in 1917, eighteen stories of Gothic Revival on an H-plan, and 1 West 67th Street has carried that name ever since.

It was a hotel in name only. The apartments were built without full kitchens; meals were prepared in a central kitchen and sent up by dumbwaiter, and the building added a pool, a ballroom, and rooftop courts, amenities that also helped it clear the height rules of the day. Pollard set the double-height studios at the back of the H so their tall windows faced north, the even, shadowless light that painters want. Downstairs, the ground-floor cafe holds Howard Chandler Christy murals of pastoral nudes, painted by a tenant. The roster of residents reads like a period directory, Norman Rockwell, Isadora Duncan, Noel Coward, Alexander Woollcott, though the building wore its fame lightly.

Units 305 and 306 form a duplex that was a working artist studio for roughly five decades, by the broker account, and it still reads that way: a ceiling that rises eighteen feet nine inches, oversized north-facing windows, and a terrace shared with a single neighbor. The plan is two bedrooms and a bath and a half now, convertible to three, across what the building was built to do. The co-op asks 1,750,000 dollars with maintenance of 6,496 a month, and the amenities below remain, the pool, the roof deck, the doorman. Amjad Pervez of Compass holds the listing. What it offers is the original premise of the place, a room made for light, kept mostly intact.