The San Remo is a cooperative apartment building at 145 and 146 Central Park West, between 74th and 75th Streets, adjacent to Central Park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It was constructed from 1929 to 1930 and was designed by architect Emery Roth in the Renaissance Revival style. The San Remo is 27 stories tall, with twin towers rising from a 17-story base. The building is a contributing property to the Central Park West Historic District, a National Register of Historic Places–listed district, and is a New York City designated landmark.
The 17-story base surrounds an internal courtyard to the west, while the 10-story towers rise from the eastern portion of the base. There are numerous setbacks between the 14th and 17th stories, which double as terraces. The first three stories are clad in rusticated blocks of limestone, with two main entrances at ground level. The remainder of the facade is made of light brick with terracotta ornamentation, as well as movable windows to improve air circulation. The tops of the towers contain "temples" with round colonnades and lanterns. The building has twin terrazzo and marble lobbies with molded plaster ceilings. On the upper stories, many apartments contain living and dining rooms arranged around a central gallery, as well as bedrooms in the rear. There were originally 122 apartments, each with six to sixteen rooms, but several apartments have been split or combined over the years.
The San Remo replaced an 11-story apartment building with the same name, built in 1891. The current apartment complex was the first building on Central Park West to incorporate large twin towers. The building opened in September 1930, attracting large amounts of commentary from the media. It soon went into receivership following the collapse of the Bank of United States, which held the mortgage. The San Remo experienced financial difficulties throughout much of the 1930s before being acquired in 1940 by an investment syndicate. The building was converted to a housing cooperative in 1972 following a failed conversion attempt in 1970. Over the years, the San Remo has been renovated several times. Its residents have included directors, actors, and musicians.
Site The San Remo is at 145 and 146 Central Park West on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. The building occupies the western sidewalk of Central Park West (formerly Eighth Avenue) between 74th Street to the south and 75th Street to the north. The San Remo occupies a nearly rectangular land lot with an area of . The land lot has a frontage of along Central Park West, on 74th Street, and on 75th Street. Nearby places include the Kenilworth apartment building, the Fourth Universalist Society in the City of New York, and the West 76th Street Historic District immediately to the north; the Langham apartment building to the south; and the Ramble and Lake of Central Park to the east. In addition, the Dakota is two blocks south and the New-York Historical Society library and museum is two blocks north.
The San Remo is one of several apartment buildings on Central Park West that are primarily identified by an official name. Even though a street address was sufficient to identify these apartment buildings, this trend followed a British practice of giving names to buildings without addresses. By contrast, buildings on Fifth Avenue, along the eastern side of Central Park, are mainly known by their addresses. Christopher Gray of The New York Times described the San Remo as one of several apartment buildings in Manhattan that were named after 1920; according to Gray, such structures usually "were either truly grand or had hotel-like features". The San Remo's name is derived directly from a previous building on the site.
Previous structure The construction of Central Park in the 1860s spurred construction on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but similar development on the Upper West Side was slower to come. Major developments on the West Side were erected after the Ninth Avenue elevated line opened in 1879, providing direct access to Lower Manhattan. The first large apartment building in the area was the Dakota, which opened in 1884. The city installed power lines on Central Park West at the end of the 19th century, thus allowing the construction of multi-story apartment hotels with elevators.
Among the early apartment hotels was the original San Remo at 74th Street. The structure was built in 1891 by contractor Michael Brennan and designed by Edward L. Angell. The old San Remo was 11 stories tall with 90 apartments. It was decorated in the Gothic and Romanesque Revival styles and had peaked towers at its corners. The old San Remo was operated by Brennan following a dispute in 1892 with Wilson C. Morris, a hotel operator.
Architecture The present San Remo was designed by Emery Roth. It is variously described as being in the neo-Renaissance or late Italian Renaissance style. Theodore Hofstatter decorated the building's lobby, while Lou R. Strauss Jr. designed the internal garden and exterior landscaping. Unlike other large buildings on Central Park West, which were typically attributed to a single developer, no one took credit for developing the San Remo specifically. The syndicate that developed the San Remo had also erected the Beresford, seven blocks north, shortly before the San Remo was completed.
Form The San Remo's base is 17 stories high and surrounds a T-shaped interior courtyard to the west, giving the lower stories a U-shaped plan. The presence of the courtyard allowed each apartment to receive natural light from several elevations.
There are setbacks at the 14th, 16th, and 17th stories. The setbacks are covered in slate and double as terraces for some units. Two towers rise an additional ten stories from the eastern portion of the base and are arranged symmetrically. The San Remo is one of four buildings on Central Park West with a twin-towered form; the others are the Century, the Majestic, and the El Dorado. By splitting the upper stories into twin towers, as opposed to a single bulky tower, the developers could increase the amount of space that was near a window. To increase natural-light exposure to the upper-story apartments, the towers were designed in an "L" shape (wrapping around the courtyard), rather than as square masses. Roth designed spires that were high; according to general contractor HRH Construction; this made the building one of New York City's tallest residential structures.
The massing of the San Remo, and those of similar buildings, was shaped primarily by the Multiple Dwelling Act of 1929. Under this legislation, the "street walls" of apartment buildings could rise one and a half times the width of the adjacent street before they had to set back. On lots of more than , the street walls could rise three times the width of the adjacent street. Apartment buildings could rise up to 19 stories; additional stories were allowed on large plots, but the floor areas of these stories were limited to 20 percent of the lot area. These upper stories were allowed on plots of at least and were required to be set back on all sides. The San Remo was the earliest apartment building on Central Park West to be built with twin towers following the passage of the Multiple Dwelling Act of 1929.
Facade The facade contains metal, stone, and terracotta decorations. These details include pilasters, engaged columns, rounded and triangular broken pediments, and balustrades, as well as smaller motifs such as roundels, scrolls, urns, cartouches, garlands, and consoles. The lowest three stories of the facade are made of rusticated blocks of limestone, while the rest of the building is clad with beige brick. The limestone blocks on the first and second stories are vermiculated. Above the base, there is a small amount of terracotta ornament, which is used to emphasize the otherwise plain brick facade. The ornament on the upper stories is oversized, allowing it to be seen from the ground.
All elevations of the facade are divided vertically into several bays. On the lower stories, the Central Park West elevation is divided into 26 bays from north to south, while the 75th Street elevation contains 16 bays and the 74th Street elevation contains 19 bays. There are two groupings of six bays near the north and south ends of the Central Park West elevation, as well as a three-bay-wide "pavilion" on either end. Additionally, the center bays on Central Park West are divided into three pairs, flanked by two single bays. Hence, the Central Park West elevation is divided in a 3-6-1-2-2-2-1-3 configuration. The six center bays and three outermost bays are treated as "pavilions", which rise above the setbacks. The towers are five bays wide on all elevations. A band course runs around the facade above the 13th story.
The windows on the primary elevations were divided horizontally into three tiers: a set of large movable casements, with movable transoms above and below. The casements and upper transoms swung outward, while the lower transoms swung inward. This design feature was intended to improve air circulation and temperature regulation, as air conditioning was uncommon when the building was completed. Roth anticipated that the upper and lower transoms would provide suitable air circulation most of the time and that the casements would only need to be opened on especially hot days. The windows on the rear elevations were arranged into multiple layouts, some of which have been altered.
Entrances
On the ground story, the Central Park West elevation has two main entrances, each two bays wide and placed in the middle of the six-bay-wide sections (bays 6–7 and 20–21 from south). Both entrances contain a set of bronze-and-glass double doors topped by a paneled bronze transom. Each door is divided into three glass panels with acanthus-leaf borders, as well as bronze medallions that resemble sunburst motifs. The sidewalk in front of each doorway is covered by a canopy. There are Art Deco metal-and-glass lanterns on either side of the doors. Above each set of doors is a triangular broken pediment and a single window on the second story. These entrances are surrounded by a limestone frame with pilasters on either side, which are topped by composite capitals. These pilasters support a curved broken pediment with corbels, as well as a central scrolled cartouche with garlands.
There are two secondary entrances: one in the 14th bay from east on 74th Street and the 13th bay from east on 75th Street. Each secondary entrance consists of a set of pilasters topped by a console table. A single bronze-and-glass door, similar in design to those on Central Park West, is recessed deeply within either entrance. There are metal-and-glass lanterns on either side of the doors. Above each doorway is a scrolled cartouche.
There are also nine entrances to individual offices on the ground floor: four on Central Park West, three on 74th Street, and two on 75th Street. Each doorway contains a single door, recessed within the rusticated limestone facade. The bronze-and-glass office doors are simple in design and are topped by a bronze-and-glass transom panel. On the far western end of the 74th and 75th Street frontages, there is a short standalone wall of rusticated blocks, which contains an archway topped by a rusticated keystone. There is a metal service gate below each archway, topped by a panel with the word "service". The westernmost end of the 74th Street frontage, next to the service gate, contains a metal fence atop a brick parapet, which encloses an unused courtyard.
Lower stories