145 East 76th Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 145 East 76th Street by Carter Horsley

This handsome, 16-story, beige-brick condominium apartment building was completed in 1999 and has only 20 units.

It was erected by the Macklowe Development Company, which has built many of the city's top luxury apartment buildings such as the Metropolitan Tower at 136 West 56th Street.

This building was designed by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, one of the city's leading architects of preservation projects, and Schuman Lichtenstein Claman & Efron.

Across Lexington Avenue from Lenox Hill Hospital, it has numerous balconies, some terraces and an attractive rooftop watertank enclosure. It has a two-story, rusticated limestone base, curved, wrought-iron balcony railings that are painted white, and limestone orbs on some of the terraces.

The building has a private residents' salon with a garden and fountain. Apartments have 10-foot-high ceilings and range in size from three to five bedrooms and have convertible libraries and formal dining rooms, a housekeeper's room, and kitchens with breakfast areas.

It is directly across 76h Street from the exceedingly attractive St. Jean Baptiste Roman Catholic Church that was erected in 1913 and designed by Nicholas Seffacino. In the late 1990s, the church sold its unused "air rights" that were used to erect a very handsome luxury apartment tower at the eastern end of the block on Third Avenue.

Although this might have been a more attractive building if it had been clad in red brick, the beige brick façade is more in "context" with the limestone façade of the church.

This is a quintessential New York location as there is tremendous bustle along the avenue here with many small stores and one block to the south on the avenue was Mortimer's, one of the city's most famous social watering holes until it closed in 1999, but it was reopened as Orsay, which is a very popular restaurant.

There is excellent cross-town bus service nearby on 79th Street and a subway station at Lexington and 77th Street.