720 Park Avenue

Built in 1929, 17 floors, brick above a limestone base.

720 Park Avenue, 10021

720 Park Avenue was designed by Rosario Candela with Cross and Cross and completed in 1929. It is seventeen storeys and a penthouse, brick above a three storey limestone base, with carved festoons on the spandrels above the first floor windows and Doric columns flanking the entrance under a broken pediment.

Above the twelfth floor the elevation steps back, and those setbacks are what give the upper apartments their terraces. The massing is the reason no two floors here repeat, which matters more inside than it does from the street.

Ceilings in the principal rooms run from ten to fifteen feet. That range governs everything built into these apartments. A fifteen foot room takes cabinetry drawn at its own scale rather than standard casework stretched, and drapery at that height is a question of stack and weight before it is a question of fabric.

The plans put parts of the service quarters on mezzanine floors, so the section steps inside a single apartment. A room can sit half a level off the one next to it, which shows up as a change in ceiling height partway across a plan. Apartments ran from eleven to twenty seven rooms, several with log burning fireplaces. In a masonry building of this date the cross walls and the flue and riser positions are fixed, so a renovation of that footprint works around them rather than through them.

Candela is usually read through his plans rather than his elevations, and this building is the argument for that. The exterior drew complaints when it was new and the apartments behind it have outlasted the objection.

Within walking distance

Building facts

New York City Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output, version 26v1. Tax lot 1013850032.