Few people today will recognize the name Hyman Isaac Feldman. A Yale-educated architect, Feldman was quietly responsible for dozens, perhaps hundreds, and maybe even thousands of buildings in the course of his long life, which began in Poland in 1896 and ended in New York in 1981.

It would be pleasant to proclaim the discovery of some forgotten master, but, if the truth be told, Feldman was responsible for some of the most pallid and uninspired buildings in Manhattan, theBronx, and beyond. It is something of a relief to learn that his daughter, Naomi Fatouros, for all her filial affection, remains modest in the claims she makes for him. In a letter to the Web log, City Review, Ms. Fatouros writes that:

quite simply, my father had to make money to support his wife and children. … [He] had no pretensions about being artistic. Many of his designs … were products of ‘hack work.’ Nevertheless, respected and honored by the building trade … my father was awarded contracts because he was good at creating plans which would minimize building costs and which would afford prospective renters or buyers a fair amount of views and apartment layouts which were livable.

There, in a nutshell, is the nature of the architectural trade, or most of it, in the five boroughs. And even if one cannot quite believe Ms. Fatouros’s claim that her father built 4,000 buildings (is it a typo for 400?), the fact remains that he was furiously prolific. The Emporis Web site alone lists 86 projects that he completed in New York between 1926 and 1972. Among these is the Park Lane Tower at 86th Street and Third Avenue. Despite its bucolic name, this rust-colored high-rise from 1965 has all the bucolic charm of a World War II artillery turret. Its only distinction is that it is the building inhabited by the Jeffersons in the 1970s sitcom of that name. Curiously, Feldman was so prolific that he designed another building, The Jefferson Apartments, also entirely without distinction, on 9th Street in Greenwich Village.

But perhaps the most notable act of his career was conceiving 1025 Fifth Ave., one of the most audacious instances of real estate promotion ever seen in Manhattan. The building is really a grayish nonentity ducking for cover along 84th street near Madison, and properly it has as much to do with 5th Avenue as with the Champs-Élysées. But the developer purchased a lot along 5th, between 83rd and 84th streets and, at Feldman’s prompting, snaked an entrance through the pre-existing houses — all so that residents could claim a Fifth Avenue address! Feldman’s daughter hastens to point out, however, that he had nothing to do with the entrance that you see today: “He hated it, saying it looked like a tongue sticking out.”

All of this is by way of preamble to a consideration of the United Jewish Appeal Federation building at 130 East 59th Street, built in 1954. I have walked by this building a thousand times and never noticed it. In architectonic terms it recalls Oscar Wilde’s quip about the man whose face, once seen, is never remembered. A blandly zigguratted structure, it was covered for exactly half a century in the white brick that Manhattanites unaccountably favored back in the 1950s and ’60s.

For the past year and half, the building was thoroughly reclad, and the entire block between Lexington and Park avenues has been going through hell. Now these labors, by the accomplished firm of Swanke Hayden Connell Architects, are finally complete and the results are something of an event. By all appearances, this firm has done nothing to the exterior other than transfigure it from glazed brick to a curtain wall of clear and translucent glass, with a vaguely greenish tint. The curtainwall is not sheer, however, being enlivened by stylishly discrete coursing lines along its horizontal axes. The building is further dignified by white accents along the sides and the first two stories, as well as by a few square feet of brise soleil, the sort that has become largely de rigueur in Manhattan over the past three or four years.

Once the blandest of the bland, 130 E. 59th St. now seems to have been suffused with an abundance of energy and life. The cleanness of its lines brings it fully up-to- date, to such a degree that it forms a remarkable visual rhyme, both in massing and in detail, with the new Bloomberg building, designed by Rafael Pelli, directly across the street.

While we’re on the subject of brise soleil, allow me to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to the new headquarters of the New York Times, designed by Renzo Piano, at 41st Street and Eighth Avenue. As you look down the enchanting corridor formed by the pre-war buildings of Central Park West and the trees along the park, your eye now comes to rest, unexpectedly, upon the fussy brise soleil fretwork at the summit of the Times building. For all the world it looks, from two miles away, like the airy spire of a Gothic cathedral. But above all, the effect must be seen at sunset on a midsummer’s evening, as the golden rays of the dying light insinuate themselves amid the spun-sugar filigree that crowns this new tower.

jgardner@nysun.com