998 Fifth Avenue

Built in 1912, 18 residences across 12 floors.

998 Fifth Avenue, 10028

998 Fifth Avenue was designed by McKim, Mead and White and completed in 1912, twelve storeys of limestone in an Italian Renaissance manner. The Landmarks Preservation Commission has called it the finest Italian Renaissance apartment house in the city.

It holds eighteen apartments. No apartment has fewer than seventeen rooms and the largest may run to twenty eight. That ratio, one household to a very large floor area, is the whole character of the building and the thing that shapes any work inside it.

Rooms at that count are individually proportioned rather than repeated, and the circulation between them is a designed sequence rather than a corridor. A plan here works with an existing hierarchy of principal rooms, secondary rooms and service space that was drawn in 1912 and is generally still legible, and the useful move is usually to read that hierarchy rather than to flatten it.

The limestone front carries punched openings, so window positions are fixed in masonry and the wall between them is solid and load bearing.

Within walking distance

Building facts

New York City Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output, version 26v1. Tax lot 1014930001.