165 East 60th Street

New York City keeps 163 and 165 East 60th Street as one record. Both street numbers return the same building identification number in the Department of Buildings property profile, both sit on Block 1395, Lot 29, and only 163 appears in the city's land use file, which describes a six-story elevator apartment house of 21 residences, roughly 25,700 square feet on a lot of 6,025, built in 1930 on the north side of the street between Lexington and Third Avenues. StreetEasy files the building under 163. Brokers advertise it as 165. It is the same house.

Some listing copy in the building dates it to the 1890s and claims a cooperative conversion in 1923. The city's own record says 1930, and so does Corcoran's listing sheet for this apartment, so 1930 is what stands here. The architect is another matter: the building has never been designated, individually or inside a historic district, so no Landmarks Preservation Commission report names one, and the New Building permit that would settle it now sits behind a login in the Office for Metropolitan History's index. The name is simply not in the open record. What is in the record is the cooperative itself, registered with the city as 165 East 60 Street Inc.

The apartment's southern exposure is the reason to care about the block. Directly opposite, on the even side of East 60th Street, stands what is left of a row of French Second Empire houses begun in 1868 and finished in 1869 by four men in the building trades: Nicholas Seger, a carpenter, George Herdtfelder, a mason, Conrad Thiele, who supplied the stone, and George Rothman, a real estate operator. Bloomingdale Brothers opened at Lexington and 59th in 1885 and began swallowing the block almost immediately, taking 166 through 170 within a year and 162 and 164 by 1890, with the last holdout on the blockfront not surrendered until 1927.

The store never demolished them. Five of the six survive. Their mansard roofs and carved window enframements are still up there under a coat of paint, sitting above a loading dock that long ago replaced the stoops and parlor floors, while Starrett and Van Vleck's Art Deco front of 1927 wraps the Lexington Avenue side. From the sixth floor of 165, the view south is a department store's service entrance with a Victorian street wall above it.

Number 6D is on the top floor, four rooms under thirteen-foot ceilings, with original leaded glass in the windows and a wood-burning fireplace. The kitchen is windowed and galley shaped, redone in marble with new stainless appliances. The bath is windowed too, lined floor to ceiling in zellige tile over marble. The primary bedroom takes the south light and holds a king bed with newly built wardrobes; the second bedroom is the flexible one, sized for a nursery, a guest, or a desk. Hardwood floors throughout, a washer and dryer in the apartment, through-wall air conditioning, an elevator, and a live-in superintendent.

The house rules are the quiet surprise. Cats and dogs are permitted, a pied-a-terre is permitted, and the board allows subletting, three positions a prewar cooperative of 21 apartments does not often hold at once. Taxes are carried inside the maintenance. Two bedrooms and one bath, on the sixth floor of a building the city has been calling by two numbers since 1930.

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