Carter's Review

This 16-story, pre-war apartment building at 244 Madison Avenue on the southwest corner at 38th Street is known as the Murray Hill Plaza.

It was designed in 1916 by Arthur Loomis Harmon.

The building, which is also known as 20 West 38th Street, is a cooperative and has a doorman, high ceilings and a roof deck. It permits cats but not dogs.

It has 180 apartments and was converted to a cooperative in 1984.

It was the subject of a poem by Ogden Nash entitled "Spring Comes to Murray Hill":

I sit in an office at 244 Madison Avenue

And say to myself You have a responsible job havenue?

Why then do you fritter away your time on this doggerel?

If you have a sore throat you can can cure it by using a good goggeral,

If you have a sore foot you can get it fixed by a chiropodist,

And you can get your original sin removed by St. John the Bopodist,

Why then should this flocculent lassitude be incurable?

Kansas City, Kansas, proves that even Kansas City needn't always be Missourible.

Up up my soul! This inaction is abominable.

Perhaps it is the result of disturbances abdominable.

The pilgrims settled Massachusetts in 1620 when they landed on a stone hummock.

Maybe if they were here now they would settle on my stomach.

Oh, if I only had the wings of a bird

Instead of being confined on Madison Avenue I could soar in a jiffy to Second or Third.

The November 2008 issue of Habitat Magazine carried an article by Renee Serlin entitled "Gradual Approach" that reported 244 Madison Avenue had instituted a prohibition against new buyers who are smokers.

The ban "grandfathers" in existing smokers. "Even though one would like to live in a smoke-free building, I think that [a total ban] creates revolution and this is an 'evolutionary' way of doing it," the article quote Sonia Cooper, the co-op's president. "When I first mentioned it to the board in 2005, there wasn't much interest in taking this one," she said, adding that the clincher was her warning "that the courts could hold coops liable for injuries related to secondhand smoke."