The apartment buildings that seem most glamorous to New Yorkers have names: River House, the Dakota, the Normandy. Splendid as those buildings are, the most prestigious apartment buildings are nameless, save for their addresses. These are found on Fifth and Park Avenues. Many were designed by luxury-apartment specialists like Rosario Candela and James Carpenter, and are often superb. Occasionally, a firm noted for its high-profile civic and corporate work designed one of these apartment houses. My favorite apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue are no. 998, opposite the Metropolitan Museum, and no. 927, at the southeast corner of 74th Street. McKim, Mead & White designed the former; Warren & Wetmore the latter.

The keynotes of Fifth Avenue apartment buildings are elegance and the disdain of ostentation. But the best of these buildings are not what Henry Hope Reed would call “anorexic.” Whereas the “classic” New York apartment house (see West End Avenue) has stone-faced lower stories yielding to brick above, the most upperclass buildings are sheathed from bottom to top in luscious Indiana limestone. It is this that gives Fifth Avenue’s apartment palisade its special character. In addition, the better of these buildings have beautifully, if soberly, composed classical facades.

We would expect beautiful composition from 927’s architect, Whitney Warren. Warren was a “character.” Scion of an old New York family and trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Warren was also an accomplished pugilist and a friend of Benito Mussolini. (Warren dissolved that friendship when Mussolini made his alliance with Hitler.)

It’s not the Mussolini connection, though, that has kept Warren’s reputation lower than it ought to be; most people who disregard Warren don’t know enough about him to know of the Mussolini connection. Rather, Warren’s greatest achievements have peculiarly not registered as such with most people.

Everyone knows Warren was one of the architects of Grand Central Terminal. But Modernist historiography has undervalued Warren’s contribution in favor of that of Reed & Stem. The latter firm was, we are told, largely responsible for the brilliant plan, which Warren merely dressed up – while unconscionably trying to take credit for the whole thing. And, we are told, it’s the planning, not the embellishment, that’s special about Grand Central. Not to take away from what is, in fact, brilliant planning, but it’s the containment of the spaces, the handling of the masonry, and the painted and sculpted decoration that we most immediately respond to, and we owe all that – and indeed a measure of the Francophile engineering – to Warren.

As though further to pay for Warren’s sins, none of the telescopes, binoculars, or cameras daily trained on 927 is in appreciation of his artistry, but rather in observation of a family of red-tailed hawks, headed by Pale Male, that has nested on an upper sill of Warren’s beautiful facade.

That facade is a gorgeous composition of classical elements, including birds: Look for Trajan’s eagles, a form from ancient Rome. Could they be what attracted the hawks in the first place?