Morgan Court Apartments

 condominium, movie / film / TV location

32-story postmodern residential building completed in 1985. Designed by Liebman & Liebman Architects, it is one of the so-called "sliver" buildings that were constructed in Manhattan in the late 1980s - very narrow sites with tall towers. It could, in fact, be called "the" sliver building since it was the building that was the subject of the 1993 movie, "Sliver," which starred Sharon Stone. It opened as a condominium, but when sales slowed the developer started to rent many of its 40 units. In 2007, it was re-converted to a condominium building.

It is clad in dark-red brick with an impressive and elegant "gate-house" entrance" with cobblestone courtyard and a lovely garden with a multi-paned atrium at the rear of the lobby. The "gate-house" at the ground floor has two wall blocks faced in limestone, with a sloped copper roof topping each and connecting across the top of the entranceway. Behind this, the "courtyard" has a vaulted stone ceiling; there is a curved building entrance at the left, and a corridor leading further back at the right.

Above the ground floor the next four floors form the base, with brick-clad balconies alternating from right and left at every other floor and ending in rounded corners near the center of the facade, projecting forward from the recessed front wall of the base, which is framed by the outer piers. Each floor has a band of silver-tinted windows with a central glass sliding door opening onto the balcony. The final balcony is at the 6th floor, where the outer piers end at the building continues at the set-back level of the main wall. From here, each floor has a wider band of windows that wraps around the rounded south corner. At alternating floors the window bands extend just slightly onto the south facade, or a little farther.

The south facade is an expanse of plain red brick, except for the edges of the window bands wrapping around the rounded corners at both the west and east ends. There are also two bays of small, narrow windows in the middle of the facade up to the 11th floor. The east facade mostly mirrors the upper floors of the west elevation, except that there are also projecting brick balconies at alternating floor on the upper levels, straight-edged on the north side and rounding back into the facade at the south side. The north facade is also mostly brick, with two bays of double-windows running up the middle on every other floor. At the top two floors, there are wide windows on the west end of the facade. Above the main roof line rises a tall brick-clad mechanical equipment housing.

Morgan Court is the building featured in the surveillance thriller Sliver-- the name taken from the location's 33-by-100-foot footprint. More significantly, this 1985 building led to zoning changes to prevent developers from putting highrises on tiny parcels. The lot used to be J.P. Morgan's carriage house.