1930 Hotel St. Moritz, converted 2002, 11 residences across 36 floors.
50 Central Park South, 10019
50 Central Park South opened in 1930 as the Hotel St. Moritz, designed by Emery Roth, and was remodelled from 1999 by Handel Architects into a hotel with residences above. It is thirty six storeys. The lower part remains a hotel and the top twelve floors hold eleven condominiums.
Eleven apartments across twelve floors is an unusually low density and it comes from the conversion rather than from the original plan. These are hotel floors reorganised into very large residences, so the party walls, risers and corridors an apartment inherits were laid out for hotel rooms and had to be worked around rather than with.
One consequence is visible in the ceilings. Heights vary considerably and reach about fifteen feet in places, including one apartment whose living room was the hotel ballroom. A room of that origin has a ceiling, a window pattern and a proportion drawn for public assembly rather than for living, and it will not take a domestic scale of joinery without looking underscaled.
Roth designed this as he designed the San Remo and the Beresford, and the massing still reads as a building of 1930 whatever has happened inside it.
Within walking distance
Building facts
Built
1931
Last altered
2001
Floors
36
Residences
11
New York City Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output, version 26v1. Tax lot 1012747503.