The Apthorp was designed by Clinton and Russell for William Waldorf Astor and completed in 1908. It is twelve storeys of limestone in the Italian Renaissance manner, modelled on the Pitti Palace, and it takes the entire block between Broadway and West End Avenue from 78th to 79th Street.
The plan is built around a courtyard. An arched porte cochere leads through wrought iron gates into a large interior court, and the apartments face both outward to the streets and inward to that court. Which way a room faces decides its light entirely, since a court elevation and a Broadway elevation are different conditions at the same address.
Inside, apartments retain a great deal of 1908 fabric. Original hardwood floors, plaster mouldings, marble fireplaces and decorative tilework survive in many of them, and the room proportions are the original ones.
That survival is the constraint and the reason to be there. Mouldings and tilework are the things most easily lost in a renovation and hardest to put back, and a plan that moves a wall usually meets a moulding run or a fireplace that cannot move with it.
Within walking distance
Building facts
Built
1908
Floors
12
Residences
151
Landmark
Yes
Historic district
West End-Collegiate Historic District Extension
New York City Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output, version 26v1. Tax lot 1011707502.