Manhattan House
Manhattan House is a 21-story residential condominium building at 200 East 66th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, New York, United States. The building was designed in the modern style by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, in partnership with the firm of Albert Mayer and Julian Whittlesey. It occupies a full city block bounded by Third Avenue to the west, 66th Street to the north, Second Avenue to the east, and 65th Street to the south. Constructed between 1949 and 1951, Manhattan House was developed by the New York Life Insurance Company as a middle-class apartment building. The complex is a New York City designated landmark.
Manhattan House consists of a central "spine" with five wings each facing north and south, as well as low-rise retail podiums to the west and east. The structure is set back from both 65th and 66th Streets and only occupies about two-fifths of the lot. To allow the construction of a tall structure with fewer setbacks, New York Life donated the northern part of the site to the New York City government, and it placed a garden on the southern part. The facade is made of pale white brick. The main entrances are on the north side of the building, facing 66th Street, while there are various storefronts on Second and Third Avenues. Manhattan House contains a lobby with glass walls, as well as a basement parking garage and a roof garden. The upper stories were originally divided into five sections and contained approximately 582 apartments, each with two to seven rooms. Most of the apartments contained glass balconies, and some of the apartments included fireplaces.
The structure was built on the site of a 19th-century car barn, which New York Life had acquired in 1946. After various delays, New York Life began constructing the building in April 1949, and the first residents moved into Manhattan House in October 1950. Throughout the mid- and late 20th century, New York Life operated Manhattan House, renting apartments to largely middle-class tenants; its residents included Bunshaft, clarinetist Benny Goodman, and actress and later Princess of Monaco Grace Kelly. New York Life sold the building in 2005 to developer N. Richard Kalikow and investor Jeremiah W. O'Connor Jr., who converted the apartments into condominiums. The conversion project was delayed by numerous lawsuits, complaints from existing tenants, and the 2008 financial crisis. O'Connor ultimately completed the project by himself at a cost of $1.1 billion, making it one of the most expensive condominium conversions in New York City; the last condos were sold in 2015.
Site
Manhattan House is located at 200 East 66th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, New York, United States. It occupies a city block bounded by Third Avenue to the west, 66th Street to the north, Second Avenue to the east, and 65th Street to the south. The land lot is rectangular and covers, with a frontage of about on either avenue and about on either street. The land lot originally measured wide, but the building's developer, the New York Life Insurance Company, had donated a strip of land along 66th Street to the government of New York City prior to Manhattan House's construction. This allowed the city to widen the adjacent block of 66th Street from, with separate roadways for through traffic and local traffic. Plane trees were planted on both sides of 66th Street and in the median; a wall of granite blocks separates the two roadways. The site slopes down to the east, so the Second Avenue end of the building is lower than the Third Avenue end.Prior to the construction of Manhattan House, the site had been occupied by a car barn for trolleys and horse-drawn cars, which had been constructed in the 1860s. The Second Avenue and Third Avenue elevated railway lines of the New York City Subway had been constructed in the 1880s, significantly lowering land values in the area between these lines. The car barn, which was designed in either the Italianate or French Second Empire styles, was renovated in the 1890s to designs by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh. The Second Avenue Elevated had been demolished by 1942, and the Third Avenue Elevated followed soon afterward, prompting a revival of the surrounding area.
In conjunction with Manhattan House's construction, New York Life also acquired property on all four sides of the building. The company acquired ten low-rise apartment buildings at 205–227 East 66th Street immediately to the north, then hired Carlisle H. Johnson to redesign the buildings in a modern style in 1951, with gray-green brick and continuous design details. The structures on 66th Street served as a "protective buffer", preserving views for residents of Manhattan House. New York Life also hired Fellheimer & Wagner to design a two-story structure on the east side of Second Avenue between 65th and 66th Streets, which contained the Beekman Theatre and two banks. New York Life had leased the block to the south with plans to build a parking garage and public park there, but the garage and park were never built, and the company ultimately took over the remaining structures on the site in 1958. Finally, the insurance company bought a pair of tenement houses to the west, at 1116 and 1118 Third Avenue, but was unable to acquire additional property on either side of the tenements. New York Life sold off all of these sites to developers between 1960 and 1996.
Architecture
Manhattan House was designed in the modernist style by Gordon Bunshaft of architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, in partnership with the firm Mayer & Whittlesey, composed of Albert Mayer and Julian Whittlesey. Bunshaft, the project's lead architect, expressed doubts about the extent of Mayer & Whittlesey's involvement in the project, claiming that New York Life was not "excited about their kind of architecture". Bunshaft's claim conflicts with the fact that Manhattan House has many architectural features in common with Mayer & Whittlesey's design with 40 Central Park South; furthermore, New York Life had acquired the site on Mayer & Whittlesey's recommendation. Cauldwell-Wingate Company was the general contractor for the project. Chief construction engineer Richard Geoghegan; mechanical engineer Jaros, Baum & Bolles; and elevator manufacturer Otis Elevator were also involved in the building's construction.Form
Manhattan House is a 21-story structure measuring tall. The building occupies the center of the block between 65th and 66th Street and only covers about two-fifths of the lot. The structure measures long from west to east. It is set back from both 65th and 66th Streets, with a garden on 65th Street and planted areas on 66th Streets. This contrasted with older apartment buildings in New York City, where the exterior facades extended to the lot line and the gardens were placed within the building's interior. The building is divided into five sections from west to east. Each section consists of two wings that extend outward from a central "spine", which provided natural light to each apartment without the need for light courts; there are ten wings in total. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission described the floor plan as an elongated "H", while Architectural Forum and the historian Carol Herselle Krinsky characterized the layout as resembling three connected "+" symbols with a "T" at either end.The building is flanked by low-rise retail podiums to the west and east; each of the podiums is high, and there is a setback above each podium. At the time of Manhattan House's construction, the 1916 Zoning Resolution mandated the inclusion of setbacks on buildings in New York City based on the height of the adjoining street. To allow the construction of a taller structure with fewer setbacks, New York Life had donated the northernmost 40 feet of the site to the city government, which widened the adjacent segment of 66th Street. As such, the building rises as a continuous slab to the 18th story; only the penthouses on the 19th and 20th stories are set back. This design also maximizes the amount of natural light that each apartment received, as the apartments are set back as far as possible from the buildings across the street.
Joanna Diman of SOM was credited with the design of both the garden on 65th Street and the plantings on 66th Street. The garden is surrounded by a low granite wall, enabling the public to view the garden while providing residents with privacy. The garden includes meandering stone paths, black light poles, and a white-brick ventilation shaft. At the time of the garden's completion, it was New York City's second-largest private garden behind Gramercy Park. When the building was converted to condominiums in the late 2000s, Sasaki Associates redesigned the garden. Two sculptures by Hans Van de Bovenkamp, known as Trinity and Red Gateway, were installed during the renovation.
Facade
The facade is made of white brick. Manhattan House was one of the first in New York City to use pale white brick as the primary material in its facade. When Manhattan House was built, the New York Herald Tribune described the building as the first large apartment house to use "full ceramic brick impervious to dirt and stain" on its facade. The brick was glazed, which allowed dirt to wash off in the rain. There are also yellow-brick chimneys atop each of the wings.The main entrances to the apartments are placed on the north side of the building, facing 66th Street, within the second-outermost sections on either end. Each of the building's two main entrances consists of a driveway and sidewalk that curves underneath the building, which in turn leads to a set of glass-and-aluminum doors. There are curved light boxes next to the driveways, as well as recessed lights mounted onto pillars next to the driveways. In addition, there are planted areas with iron fences between either driveway and the street, as well as on either side of both entrances. To the east of the eastern entrance are a stairway and ramp leading to a doctor's office; a storefront facing Second Avenue; and a planting bed with granite-block walls topped by an iron fence. Next to the western entrance is a storefront facing Third Avenue, a granite planting bed, and an iron fence.
The building contains several storefronts at street level, facing Second and Third Avenues. The storefronts on Second Avenue contain aluminum doorways and mullions, and the center of that frontage also includes glazed concrete panels. The loading docks and an entrance to the building's garage are on 65th Street near Second Avenue. A metal air-conditioning enclosure is placed on the roof of the garage. West of the garage's entrance, there is a granite-block wall topped by an iron fence; the height of this wall decreases as the site slopes upward toward Third Avenue. There is a metal gate at the center of this granite-block wall, which leads to the garden. There is a gate near the western end of the 65th Street elevation, which leads to a staircase that descends to a doctor's office on Third Avenue. The storefronts on Third Avenue, including a two-level restaurant at the corner with 65th Street, were modified at some point after the building was completed.
The residential floors were originally arranged with casement windows and ribbon windows, which one writer described as being 40 percent larger than average windows at the time. Each of the windows is placed about behind the outer surface of the brick wall; this was done to prevent water from dripping onto, and staining, the window sills. Above the fifth floor, apartments with at least three rooms contain private balconies, which adjoin the living or dining rooms of each unit. The balconies span the entire width of the living or dining rooms; there is also a window next to all bedrooms that are adjacent to a balcony. These balconies had an average area of, measuring about deep and either,, or wide. Each of the balconies has glass railings, which were intended to reduce their visual impact. The balconies cost $750 each, and apartments with balconies were generally rented out at higher rates than their counterparts without the feature.