Every Building on Fifth

Charging down the length of East 67th Street, the 107th Infantry Memorial commemorates the members of the 107th New York Infantry Regiment, famed as the “silk stockings” regiment and mustered largely from the blue-blooded sons of the district’s leading citizens.  Better known for their lavish Victorian lair on Park Avenue, home to some of Louis… Continue reading

A handsome limestone design by Rosario Candela, 2 East 67th Street was completed in 1928.  The façade incorporates an upper-level loggia, a device associated with the Italian Renaissance and not commonly seen in New York City. During construction, the developer was engaged in a lawsuit with a neighbor over who had the rights to the… Continue reading

One of a relative handful of Fifth Avenue mansions surviving from the Gilded Age, the R. Livingston Beeckman House of 1905 at 854 Fifth Avenue is a temperate essay in French Beaux Arts by Warren & Wetmore, best known for Grand Central Terminal. Unusually narrow for a house of its type, it appears more so… Continue reading

A private club with a focus on arts & letters, the Lotus Club was founded in 1870 and has counted Mark Twain, Orson Welles, Margaret Mead and Wynton Marsalis.  The organization takes its name from the poem “The Lotus Eaters” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who describes a land “in which it seemed always afternoon”.  Its… Continue reading

One East 66th Street is the first building on upper Fifth Avenue to dispense with the fiction of an actual avenue address.  A bit of an oddity, the not-quite-Art Deco structure was the last design of the great Rosario Candelo, who completed it in 1930 – yet the building itself was not begun until 1947,… Continue reading