834 Fifth Avenue

Built in 1931, 24 residences across 16 floors.

834 Fifth Avenue, 10065

834 Fifth Avenue was designed by Rosario Candela and completed in 1931, sixteen storeys clad in limestone with Art Deco detail worked into parts of the elevation.

There are 24 apartments in the building, many of them duplexes and triplexes, and few are alike. Ceilings run to a minimum of about eleven feet throughout. The apartments share a set of planning devices rather than a plan: long galleries connecting the principal rooms, large libraries, internal staircases, and oversized windows.

The gallery is the element to understand before drawing anything. It is a circulation spine that also works as a room, and it sets the relationship between the entrance, the principal rooms and the private ones. A renovation that treats it as a corridor loses the organising idea of the apartment.

Because the units are duplexes and triplexes with internal stairs, the fixed points in any plan are the stair and the masonry cross walls. Those are structural and they do not move. Everything else was drawn around them in 1931 and can usually be drawn around them again.

Within walking distance

Building facts

New York City Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output, version 26v1. Tax lot 1013790001.