Carter's Review

This building at 340 West 57^th Street is one of four handsome, mid-block apartment houses known as the Parc Vendome that share a large common, landscaped garden that differs from most of the city's other large courtyard projects because it is not enclosed by high walls at the east and south ends.

The four-building complex, which has about 575 apartments, is unusual also because the south buildings at 333 West 56th Street and 353 West 56^th Street are 11 stories tall while the north buildings at 340 and 350 East 57th Street are 19 stories tall. The south building at 353 West 56th Street was completed in 1931 while 340 East 57th Street was completed in 1932 and 350 East 57th Street was completed in 1929.

The complex actually consists of only two buildings, one on 57^th Street and one on 56^th Street, but each has two official entrances.

The Parc Vendome complex was designed by Farrar & Watmough for Henry Mandel, one of the city’s most ambitious and active developers in the 1920s.

Mandel's other project, also designed by Farrar & Watmough, included London Terrace on the block bounded by 23rd and 24th Streets and Ninth and Tenth Avenues.

The Parc Vendome complex was converted to condominium apartments in 1983.

Bottom Line

An extremely elegant apartment complex clustered about a large communal garden, this location has steadily improved in recent years with such nearby high-rise neighbors as the Time Warner Center, the Hearst Building and Central Park Place. It has excellent transportation and is convenient to both Central Park and the Whole Foods Store at the Time Warner Center.

Interestingly, history has caught up with the Parc Vendome and the area has been considerably gentrified and improved with new buildings and new stores and new tenants. Major new nearby projects include the Hearst Tower on the southeast corner of Eighth Avenue and 57th Street designed by Sir Norman Foster. The Hearst Tower’s stainless steel-notch corners hide and dominate much of the brown-brick, 50-story Sheffield 57, while the Time Warner Center on the west side of Columbus Circle designed by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and 15 Central Park West designed by Robert A. M. Stern have significantly shifted the luxury apartment market of the city to the Columbus Circle area.

In late 2012, Gary Barnet of Extell Development, which has developed the 1,004-foot-high mixed-use tower One57 at 157 West 57^th Street, announced it would erect the city’s tallest building at 225 West 57^th Street.

Description

All the buildings have similar buff-brick façades above the two-story limestone base, the lower story of which is rusticated with arched windows.

The large mass of the building is modulated with alternating fenestration patterns separated by quoins.

The elegant buildings have very attractive, tall copper mansard roofs with some lion-like head gargoyles on the sides of the tall rooftop watertank enclosures.

The 57^th Street buildings have some setbacks above the 15^th floor.

Windows are multi-paned and some have window air-conditioning units.

Amenities

The complex has a very large, formal and impressive communal garden with lush landscaping, a central fountain and seating.

There are two planted sundecks, a billiards room, a library, a dining/banquet room with kitchen, a music room and a card room.

Apartments

The complex has a health club and the four major entrances have doormen.

Some of the living rooms measure 27 by 18 feet and have separate dining rooms.

Apartment 14E is a studio unit that has a 14-foot-long dining foyer that leads to a 23-foot-long living room with a narrow alcove and a 9-foot-long kitchen.

Apartment 4D is a one-bedroom unit that has an entry foyer that leads to a 28-foot-long living room with a fireplace that opens onto a 12-foot-wide alcove next to a 9-foot-long kitchen.

Apartment 8L is a one-bedroom unit that has a 10-foot-wide foyer that leads to a 26-foot-long living room with a wood-burning fireplace that opens onto a 13-foot-wide dining room/den next to an enclosed kitchen.

Apartment 10G is a one-bedroom unit with an 8-foot-wide foyer that leads to a one-step-up 12-foot-wide living room that is next to a 28-foot-wide dining room adjacent to an enclosed 7-foot-wide kitchen and to a 13-foot-wide TV area and a 14-foot-wide den.

Apartment 16I is a one-bedroom unit that has a 9-foot-wide entry foyer that leads down one-step to a sunken 27-foot-long living room with a wood-burning fireplace that opens onto a 12-foot-wide dining room off an enclosed 9-foot-long kitchen.

Apartment 15I is a two-bedroom unit that has an 8-foot-wide entry foyer that leads to a 24-foot-long living room with a fireplace and an 11-foot-long enclosed dining room next to a 7-foot-long enclosed kitchen.

History

The buildings are remarkably elegant given their once quite seedy surroundings, a reflection perhaps of the grandiose plans that once envisioned a major bridge across the Hudson River at 57th Street.

Their site had been previously considered by financier Otto Kahn as a new home for the Metropolitan Opera House before its planners began looking at Rockefeller Center, another site that it chose not to occupy when it moved to 39^th Street south of Times Square before its next move to the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

In a May 27, 1983 article in The New York Times, Alan S. Oser wrote that the late William Zeckendorf was the broker for Mr. Kahn in the sale of the property where he hoped to build a home for the opera company to Henry Mandell, “one of the major builders of the day,” who had built the full-block London Terrace residential complex between 23^rd and 24^th Streets and Ninth and Tenth Avenues.

According to Mr. Oser, the Parc Vendome complex was “owned in the early 1970s by Hyman Shapiro, a builder who needed the use of the property’s development rights to construct what became the Sheffield, an apartment building east of the Vendome.” “Mr. Shapiro also put in an underground parking lot for the Sheffield, and a large part of it extends under the Vendome,” Mr. Oser wrote, adding that “ultimately the construction lender took over the development project, and Rose Associates finished it.”

In 1978, the article continued, “an investment group headed by Norman Dansker purchased the Vendome from a mortgagee. In 1981,…[Gerald] Guterman bought the property for $50 million, subject to a mortgage held by the Manhattan Savings Bank, and has invested an additional $20 million in it. The object was conversion, a business in which Mr. Guterman [had]…become one of the area’s largest practitioners. Besides the Vendome, he [was]…in various stages of conversion with the 1,256-unit Glen Oaks garden apartments in Queens, the 350-unit Cryder Point apartments near the Throgs Neck Bridge; 444 East 57^th Street in Manhattan, with 48 apartments; 220 East 60^th Street, 138 apartments and commercial space; 235 East 22^nd Street and eight other nearby buildings, 350 apartments; the John Adams at 101 West 12^th Street, 415 apartments; Waters Edge in Patchoque, L.I., 125 apartments, and Harrison Park Towers in Orange, NJ, 315 apartments."

Of the approximately 570 apartments in this complex at the time of the conversion, 476 were occupied and 20 percent of those were rent-stabilized. The conversion plan was non-eviction and insiders were offered prices that averaged 38 percent below outsider prices, according to Mr. Oser’s article. The total price of the conversion at the time was estimated at $124,126,800.

In his “Streetscapes” column in the May 23, 2004 edition of The New York Times, Christopher Gray noted that Mr. Mandel "had begun his real estate career building tenements and other modest buildings with his father, Samuel, who brought the family to the United States from the Ukraine in the late 1880s."

"Mandel was part of a new housing movement in New York City that built smaller, efficient dwellings in large complexes for white-collar employees who wanted to live close to work and would trade a prestige neighborhood for transit convenience," Mr. Gray wrote, adding that on Seventh Avenue north of 14th Street Mr. Mandel "sought to remake the neighborhood by dominating one stretch of real estate with complement structures, and he planned a separate building with meeting rooms and sports facilities." His other projects included the Lombardy apartment hotel at 111 East 56th Street and the Pershing Square office building on the southeast corner of Park Avenue and 42nd Street.