210 Fifth Avenue

A wonderfully opulent Beaux Arts fantasy by John B. Snook & Sons, who also completed the far more prosaic 118 Fifth Avenue to the south, 210 Fifth Avenue is a double-height wedge of Second Empire Paris, replete with scrolls, balconies and cartouches and topped with one of the avenue’s best mansard roofs. Built for a Dr. E. Hoffman (no relation to the author, one assumes, although the building’s playful quality would be in keeping with his fiction), 210 Fifth Avenue originally held a combination of commercial lofts and bachelor apartments and is notable as an early example of the mixed-use type.

Sometime between the building’s construction in 1902 and 1938 a penthouse apartment was added.

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