Overview

About 515 Park Avenue

The tallest residential building on Park Avenue, this slim, 43-story tower, which was completed in 2000 and was developed by the Zeckendorf General Partnership and the Whitehall Real Estate Fund, has only 38 apartments.

Most of the apartments above the 15th floor have stunning vistas in many directions.

The building was designed by Frank Williams & Associates and replaced a pre-war, Italian Renaissance-palazzo style building.

The limestone, cast stone and beige-brick tower is a Post-Modern design that seeks to carry on the avenue's predominantly Italian Renaissance-palazzo tradition, albeit here exploded to a huge scale.

When two other high-rises, 715 and 900 Park Avenue, broached the avenue's traditional cornice line height about a generation previously, there was considerable controversy over them and their possible deleterious impact on the famous boulevard.

There was no similar outcry, however, about this project, perhaps because it is so close to the midtown business district and also because it is close to the Ritz Tower at 57th Street that for years was the avenue's tallest residential building.

This handsome, spindly tower, which seems taller than 43 stories because it has 10-foot-high ceilings, joins the Four Seasons Hotel nearby on 57th Street between Park and Madison Avenues in giving the district north of 57th Street a new skyline.

It is set back only on the north and west sides at the 15th, 33rd and 43rd floors resulting in what Robert A. M. Stern, David Fishman and Jacob Tilove described in their excellent book, "New York 2000, Architecture and Urbanism Between The Bicentennial And The Millennium" (The Monacelli Press, 2006), as an "awkward silhouette."

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