The Master Apartments (New York City, New York)

 skyscraper, Art Deco (architecture)

The Master Apartments is a landmark 29-story art Deco skyscraper on Riverside Drive in the Upper East Side. Its address is 310 Riverside Drive. It sits on the Northeast corner of Riverside Drive and West 103rd Street. It is one of the city's major Art Deco residential buildings and one of its first mixed-use buildings, designed c. 1929 by Hemle, Corbett & Harrison with Sugarman & Berger.

It was the first skyscraper in New York City to feature corner windows. The aesthetic recalled his One Fifth Avenue, completed a year earlier, in its overall massing and series of setbacks. He used color to emphasize the verticality of the structure--the brick morphing from dark purple at the base to light gray at the top. The original plans for the building called for only 24 stories topped by a stupa, a Buddhist shrine in the shape of a staggered pyramid with a spire on top. When the building was constructed, plans for the stupa were scrapped in favor of an additional 5 stories.

The lower three floors originally held the Roerich Museum, the Master Institute of United Arts, Corona Mundi Art Center, Urusvati Institute and other related institutions. The upper floors held 344 apartments--from one to three rooms in size--for artists. Because it was an apartment hotel, tenants had minimal kitchen facilities and ate for the most part in a large common restaurant.

The building was designated a New York City landmark on December 5, 1989.

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