470 Park Avenue (New York City, New York) | cooperative, apartment building

 cooperative, apartment building

150-foot, 14-story Renaissance-revival cooperative-apartment building completed in 1916. Designed by Schwartz & Gross, it is clad in pale red brick above a ground floor of limestone with a rather high, light-grey granite water table. The ground floor has a central entrance on the avenue, with glass double-doors flanked by 2-story, paired, fluted limestone pilasters with Corinthian capitals. The doors are covered by a rounded, green canvas canopy extending out over the sidewalk, and the 2nd floor has a tripartite window in the center, with wide, black iron mullions. A bracketed stone sill with a carved frieze sits below this windows, which is topped by a stone lintel with two roundels interrupting a line of vertical grooves. The capitals of the pilasters support a large, rounded pediment with small dentils, extending up into the base of the 3rd-floor center window bay. On either side of the main entrance, the ground floor has a double-window (with black framing and small 2-over-4 panes in each window), and a 2-bay storefront with glass doors flanked by plate-glass show-windows.

The upper floors have seven total bays on the east facade, with tripartite windows in the center bay, double-windows in the next bays, and single-windows in the two outer bays on each side. At the 2nd floor they have short, black iron balconette railings, and all of the other windows have paneled stone sills, except those on the 5th floors and above the 10th. The 2nd- & 3rd-floor windows are topped by stone lintels, with rectangular center and square end panels bearing carved medallions, connected by fluted beams. A stone band course with dentils sets off the 5th floor, and a thin string course underlines the 11th, where there is paneling at the brick piers. Another dentiled band course sets off the 12th & 13th floors, which are unified by 2-story stone surrounds at each window bay, arched with roundels at the tops. The brick spandrels between these two floors are ornamented with limestone diamond shapes, paired at the center bay.

A dentiled stone cornice marks the main roof line at the 13th floor, crowned by a brick-and-stone parapet, and there is a tall, set-back penthouse level on top.

The north facade on 58th Street has matching ornamentation to the east facade. The ground floor has a storefront at the east end, with three smaller, bronze-framed show-windows to the west; the first is narrow and tall (dipping down into the water table), the next slightly wider but shorter, and the third is the same height but wider. The next three bays to the west have black metal infill and have: a narrow opening, a double-window sized opening, and a single-window sized opening. At the far west end is a service door, up a small set of stone steps that is enclosed behind a metal gate.

The upper floor on the north facade nine total bays: a double-window in the center bay, followed by a small, narrow window, a slightly-narrower double-window, and two single-windows at each end. Black metal air-conditioning vents have been cut below some of the smaller windows. A black iron fire escape runs down the 3rd bay from the east.

The west elevation is clad in yellow brick on the lower four floors at the front (except for the red brick at the edge), and all of the floors at the rear. From the 5th floor up, the front part has red brick, with some yellow brick detailing at the top floors. The front part has a bay of wide single-windows at the front edge, with a bay of narrow single-window and two bays of more normal-sized single-windows behind. Wide, black iron fire escape landings front the northern three of these bays. There is another fire escape running down the rear section of this facade, which has a light well in the middle.

The building was converted to a cooperative in 1954, and contains 62 apartments. The ground floor is occupied by Stack's Bowers Galleries Rare Coins and Currency, and D. Porthault boutique.