30 Sutton Place

The city files 30 Sutton Place as block 1370, lot 21, a fourteen-story elevator cooperative standing on a plot of 120 by 86 feet between East 58th and East 59th Streets, and dates it to 1929. No alteration year sits against it in the lot record. The published references credit the design to Rosario Candela, the architect who drew One Sutton Place South at the other end of the same short street, though no permit has been produced here, so the building is best described as a Candela house of 1929 rather than a documented commission.

Penthouse A sits at the top, and the floor plan labels it 15A: the setback storey, which is why it has terraces on two sides rather than a balcony on one. The elevator opens onto a landing of its own and then into the foyer, and from there the plan runs west into the living rooms and east into the bedrooms. Nine rooms are recorded. Two of them hold wood-burning fireplaces, one in the living space and one in the primary bedroom, and the floor plan marks both.

The living space measures 19 feet 7 inches by 19 feet 2 inches under 10-foot ceilings, with a bar and refrigerator set into the wall beside the elevator. The dining room and the kitchen sit behind it. The solarium, 20 feet 8 inches by 9 feet 10 inches, was rebuilt as a glazed room on a pitched glass roof and opens to both terraces. The primary bedroom is 15 feet 6 inches by 18 feet 4 inches and reaches the terrace directly; the second, 11 feet 6 inches by 13 feet 3 inches, has been fitted out as a library. Two full baths, a powder room and a windowed laundry complete the floor.

Two rooms downstairs belong to the apartment and not to the building. On the lobby level, a former staff room of 10 feet 6 inches by 7 feet 7 inches with a wine closet beside it, and in the basement a storage room of 9 feet 7 inches by 5 feet 6 inches that transfers on sale. The staff room dates the plan as surely as the fireplaces do: a 1929 apartment house assumed a servant on the premises and gave the flat somewhere to put them.

Sutton Place was Avenue A until 1883, when the Board of Aldermen granted the petition to rename it, and the brownstones Effingham B. Sutton put up in 1875 were still there when the century turned. From 1920 onward Elisabeth Marbury, Anne Harriman Vanderbilt and Anne Tracy Morgan bought them one by one and had Mott B. Schmidt rework them into neo-Georgian houses with gardens down to the river. The apartment houses followed within the decade, and 30 Sutton Place is one of them. Penthouse A has changed hands three times since 1998, which for the top floor of a building this size is not often.