51 Fifth Avenue

The primary bedroom takes a corner of the building and looks north and east over open city views. The main room is a sunken living room with a wood-burning fireplace and a ceiling tall enough to carry a dining bay above it, still ringed by the building's original iron railing.

Two bedrooms, two renovated windowed bathrooms, and a windowed eat-in kitchen that overlooks the living room, with Caesarstone counters and a built-in banquette. There is a washer-dryer in the apartment and central air throughout. Off the living room sits a small bonus room the listing offers as storage, a reading nook or a study, and above the living room the separate dining area. Maintenance runs $3,819 a month and the co-op permits financing up to 75%.

51 Fifth Avenue went up in 1929 at the corner of 12th Street, and the architect was Thomas W. Lamb, the man behind the Loew's movie palaces. Here he worked about as quietly as he ever did: a restrained Colonial Revival block of sixteen stories and 89 apartments, which is still what the city's lot record shows for it (Block 569, Lot 5, owned by 51 Fifth Avenue Owners Corp).

Behind the double-height windows on the 12th Street front Lamb ran a series of double-height "Studio" living rooms, among the first in New York. 15C has rooms of that type, a sunken living room under a soaring ceiling with the original iron railing wrapping the dining bay above it, and it faces north and east, which is the 12th Street side. The published record does not say which lines got the Studio rooms, so the match is to the plan type rather than to a documented unit.

To clear the site, the corner house of H. C. de Rham came down. His family had bought the old Brevoort mansion back in the 1850s.

The building opened months after the 1928 presidential election, and one of its first residents was Alfred E. Smith, who had just lost that election to Herbert Hoover. He called the place "aristocratic yet democratic as well." Six decades later the exterior played the couple's apartment building on Mad About You.

The building converted to a cooperative in 1988. There is a full-time doorman, a live-in resident manager, a central laundry room, a fitness room, and private and bicycle storage. The lot carries no landmark designation: the Greenwich Village Historic District stops short of it, though it covers 40 Fifth Avenue across the street.

The apartment is asking $3,695,000, with an open house on Sunday, October 4, from 1 to 2 in the afternoon, by appointment only.