Carter's Review

Some blocks in Manhattan just knock your socks off.

This short block between Madison and Park Avenues has four distinctive towers and this is the most exquisite of the lot.

It is a mixed-use tower that was designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, one of the world's leading architects of commercial buildings. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill handled the interiors.

The building combines five stories of private club facilities, known as The Core Club, and has 76 condominium apartments including a duplex penthouse on the 44th and 45th floors with terraces.

It was one of the first residential designs to be undertaken by Kohn Pedersen Fox, which would follow it up in 2006 with its undulated glass façade design by William Pedersen for an 11-story apartment building at 122 Greenwich Avenue.

Park Avenue Place, as 60 East 55th Street is known, was developed by Davis/RFR of which Aby Rosen was a principal. Mr. Rosen, who owns Lever House and the Seagram Building, both nearby Park Avenue Place, is a partner with Hines Interests in the residential project at 122 Greenwich Avenue.

Park Avenue Place looks a little like a high-tech, stainless-steel aircraft carrier, minus its superstructure, standing on one end, which is to say that it is very elegant and has a precision feel.

As such, it is a good neighbor to Heron Tower, the slightly smaller tower just to its east that is a pleasant, conservative, pin-strip office building that lends a calming effect to an otherwise "wild" block.

Across the street from the Heron Tower is Helmut Jahn's obelisk office building, known as Park Avenue Tower, that has four slanted towers, an open pyramid roof ornament, bulbous stringcourses, and a very large plaza across from the Heron Tower.

While Jahn s design is flamboyant and colorful, it is quite tame compared with the building on the southeast corner at Madison Avenue where shards of glass façades shimmy and shake their angled way from the top down to the second floor, as if scurrying to get out of the way of the avalanche of polished red granite on the angle base of the skyscraper across the avenue at 520 Madison Avenue.

In the midst then of such slanting mayhem, Park Avenue Place introduces the stability of its traditional, set-backs, that are too shallow to diminish its quite imposing mid-block height.

The Core Club is an expensive new private club with a Tom Colicchio restaurant, a fitness center, private dining rooms and meeting spaces.

The tower occupies all of its 86 by 100 feet lot and it has a built floor-to-area-ratio (F.A.R.) of 17.38.

The offering plan of November 24, 2003 was $141,175,000.

The building has a 24-hour attended lobby with doorman and concierge, a garage, an on-premises valet, private storage lockers.

This building was initially named "de Resident" when ground was broken for it in early 2000 by Trevor Davis because of a recent trip he had made to the Netherlands.

Apartment layouts were designed by H. Thomas O'Hara and range in size from abut 446 to 2,950 square feet. Prices started at $675,000 and ascend to $9,000,000.

The kitchens have stainless steel Miele and Sub-Zero appliances, wine coolers and espresso coffee makers, with black granite counters and white-lacquer wood cabinetry. Each apartment has its own Bosch washer/dryer.