Ten years ago, it would have seemed remarkable that Times Square could ever become a desirable residential area, a place to raise a family. That, however, seems to be the trend heralded by the new building that rises at 1600 Broadway.

Although this is the first residential tower in Times Square, it will almost surely not be the last. It is, rather, the first step in a process by which that onetime cauldron of iniquity, like the rest of Manhattan, will be reclaimed for residential use. All the buildings constructed in Times Square over the past 10 years have been hotels or office buildings. It is likely that, hereafter, given the state of the market, they will all be residential.

Presiding at the crossroads of the world, 1600 Broadway is directly across from the Times Zipper. Each year, at the dropping of the ball on New Year’s Eve, this will clearly be the most coveted vantage point in the entire planet. In the meantime, it will afford astounding views of the teeming city; indeed, it will seem to many the essence of the urban experience.

Cityscapes, even those that come with an abundance of infrastructure – train tracks, highways, and tunnel entrances – are the new park views of 21st-century Big Apple real estate. Only a few years ago, when Trump Place began to be built on the far West Side, the highway, which rudely separated the people from the river, seemed like an eyesore. Now it is an asset.

As so often happens in New York, the architects responsible for this new tower are variously given; the Web site for the building, though rife with seminaked women working out in the inhouse gym, does not even mention the architects’ names. Nevertheless, a bit of research uncovers that two firms, Einhorn Yaffee Prescott and SLCE, are associated with the project. You could be excused for thinking that, in a kind of plagiarism in reverse, each is attributing authorship to the other.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about those many-faceted facades – the unlikely spawn of Christian de Portzamparc’s LVMH building – that have begun to invade Midtown. Now 1600 Broadway, rising over the plot once occupied by the Studebaker building, can be added to the list.

Whereas the LVMH headquarters is off-white, 1600 Broadway is a dark affair of glass and steel that twists its way up 26 stories to a roof garden equipped with a gray water tower. Its faceted facade, with its sharp angles, is more aggressively volumetric than Mr. de Portzamparc’s building, even if it is clearly not as well-made, and never rises to the quality of 505 Fifth Avenue, designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox.

The new building also comes with a billboard affixed to one of its sides. Whether it will stay there, like the advertisement that covers an entire side of the W Hotel a few hundred feet away, remains to be seen. But if it does, that will be because such flashy adver tisements embody the popular mythology attached to Times Square.

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Far different in style is 985 Park Avenue. Designed by Costas Kondylis & Partners, it is the first new building to be constructed on Park Avenue above 62nd Street in several decades and is set to rise over what, until very recently,was the one-story home of Portraits Incorporated, an enterprise that flattered the inhabitants of the avenue by suggesting, in oil paint and pastels, an unmistakable affinity between their families and various strains of vanished European royalty.

In similar fashion, the renderings for the new building seek to flatter the vanity of potential buyers with a touch of Old World elegance. As in many other New York buildings, this usually takes the form of a splash of granite facing and a hint of rustication on the ground floor. And yet, the latest rendering does not look like much of any thing that the world has ever seen before, and with good reason.

On the assumption that buyers are more interested in the address than in the facade, the architects have conceived a rusticated frame around a mullioned curtain wall, within which each apartment will have a diminutive French balcony. The result is a curious mongrel of a building, one that manages simultaneously to invoke the canons of modernism and classicism – and to fall far short of both.

One good thing about this new structure, however, is that it will plug a most unlovely gap that has marred the Park Avenue skyline for generations. Between the two large apartment buildings on the east side of Central Park from 83rd Street to 84th Street, the tiny gap of a one-story building created a sense of perennial lack and incompletion. Now, finally, it is being filled, and the avenue will be much the better for it.

jgardner@nysun.com