The Story
From the fourteenth floor of 1010 Fifth Avenue, the Metropolitan Museum of Art stops being a landmark and becomes a neighbor. The oversized picture windows along the western wall of Residence 14B hold the museum's roofline and the treetops of Central Park in a single frame, and the thirty-foot living and dining room is arranged to take in the full sweep. The renovation stays quiet around it: a windowed kitchen with a desk nook tucked to one side, a primary suite with a built-in reading nook, three marble baths, and the high ceilings and crown moldings the building has carried since new.
The building itself was erected in 1925 by the Fred F. French Company, which both owned and designed it, a fifteen-story neo-Italian Renaissance anchor of limestone and buff brick at the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street. French was a Bronx kid who became one of the city's great builders; two years after this corner he opened the first towers of Tudor City, and Knickerbocker Village followed in 1932. The Landmarks Preservation Commission folded the block into the Metropolitan Museum Historic District in 1977, singling out the rusticated four-story base, the simulated quoins climbing the corners, and the deep bracketed cornice that crowns the top floor.
French believed in the address enough to move in upstairs. His fourteen-room penthouse carried a rooftop garden of 135 tons of soil and greenery on 40 extra tons of structural steel, a spread his wife described as a suburban scene of lawns, shrubs, and trees. When a later co-op board tore the plantings out around the building's 1979 conversion, the architectural historian Christopher Gray proved the garden was original to the building, and the courts ordered it put back. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher who steered The New York Times through the Pentagon Papers, lived at 1010 Fifth until his death in 2012. The building keeps that kind of company.
In Contract
