The Plaza Residences

1907 hotel, with residences above, 163 residences across 18 floors.

1 Central Park South, 10019

The Plaza was designed by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, begun in 1905 and completed in 1907. It is eighteen stories of white brick and marble in French Renaissance dress, and it is the second hotel of that name on the site.

The elevation is tripartite and the divisions are real, not decorative. A base of three marble stories, the lower two rusticated, carries a shaft of ten floors in white brick that terminates in a marble balcony. Above that the crown runs five floors of gables, dormers and steep slate roofs. On the east side two corners of the rusticated base are rounded, and those curves run up uninterrupted through fourteen floors as turrets capped by small domical roofs.

That has a consequence inside. Apartments in the turrets meet the exterior wall on a curve for their full height, so anything fitted against it is made for that radius and does not transfer to a flat wall elsewhere in the building.

Hardenbergh also designed the Dakota, twenty years earlier and on the other side of the park. The Plaza is the later and grander of the two, but the habit is the same: a mass broken into clearly marked horizontal bands, with the ornament doing the work of telling one band from the next.

Within walking distance

Building facts

New York City Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output, version 26v1. Tax lot 1012747504.