Since no one else is going to do it, allow me to celebrate, on the occasion of its centennial, the building in which I was born. The Langham, at Central Park West and 73rd, turns 100 this year, and I have always felt it was among the finest structures on the avenue. Thus it irks me to find the building passed over in Philistine silence by tourists and natives alike, as they rush to take their pictures of the Dakota and Majestic, just to the south, and the San Remo, just to the north.

In case you care about such things, we have had as many celebrities as the neighboring buildings. In our time, Mick, Mia, and Woody dwelt among us, as well as the incomparable Merv (Griffin). Even Marilyn Monroe lived there for a time, and as an infant I had the pleasure of making her acquaintance (my father assures me she found me irresistible.)

Nor is the building any less photogenic than the Dakota or San Remo. It has been in many movies, from “Diary of a Mad Housewife” to “The Devil’s Advocate” (where, if I remember correctly, it served as nothing less than the entrance to Hell). In fact, I recall going once to a Cineplex in London where the two films playing side by side were Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters” and “The Money Pit” with Tom Hanks, both of them shot in the Langham.

But still that is not enough to cause New Yorkers or even the building’s inhabitants to show it the respect it deserves. Some 1,000 people, by my rough calculation, have lived in it since its foundation, and I doubt that more than a dozen ever bothered to learn the name of the architects who built it: Clinton & Russell. This is the firm that brought us the massive Apthorp at Broadway and 79th – their masterpiece – as well as the Graham Court at Powell Avenue and 116th, not to mention a bank, an office building, and even a Masonic lodge in lower Manhattan.

In Robert A.M. Stern’s great book “New York 1900,” written with Gregory Gilmartin and John Massengale, you will find a full-page illustration of the Langham, taken shortly after it was built. Objectively, it is almost identical to what you see today, but something is different. There, in the stillness of that 100-year-old photo, with nothing other than a horse and carriage stirring before its grand, wrought-iron canopy, you see the building as though new-born.

Indeed, the entire world looks newborn on this crisp and sun-flooded winter day. Aside from a gas lamp, nothing gets in the way of the architecture: no traffic lights, no garbage cans or garbage, no rows of boxes purveying the Times, the Voice, and the Sun. All you see is the classical language of architecture, in all the tinsel glory of the Beaux Arts tradition, earning its living by doing what it does better than any modern idiom can ever do: catching the sun’s rays in the flutes and runnels of its richly inflected surface.

Unlike the more articulated surface of the Dakota, with its oriel windows, the Langham cultivates a planar integrity throughout its facade, averting tedium through the lavish – some might say excessive – rustication up to the fourth floor, at the corners, and, in the center, all the way to the roof. Between these rusticated passages are smooth stretches of pale brick that make more sense than one might expect, and the occasional French balcony on the second and 10th floors.

The real fireworks, however, occur on the roof, which is divided from the lower floors by a balustraded frieze. Tall gables punctuate the four corners, which are separated by a sequence of broken curved and angled pediments above their windows. Not the least enchantment of the Langham (in this old photograph) are the awnings that shade the windows, reminding us how much the city has lost by their wholesale removal from our facades.

When I consider the anonymity of the firm of Clinton & Russell, I am reminded of the sad condition of most architects, a condition without parallel in any other arena of culture. Paintings, songs, and even the article you now read are all proudly, even vainly signed, but the vast majority of buildings, because they were not fashioned by a “starchitect,” go unascribed. And there is scarcely a building in New York so poor in invention but some architect lavished his care upon it and aspired to create – and may believe he created – something of consequence.

On a recent visit to Buenos Aires, I was struck by the way that many of the buildings bore, somewhere on their facade, the name of the architect and of the developer as well. I now see the wisdom of the architect of 515 Park Avenue, at 61st Street, in deciding to attach to his Neoclassical facade a charming cartouche with the words, “Frank Williams and Associates 2000 AD.”

We need more of that. It is a good thing, after all, to know the name of the person who brought into being the place where you will spend, perhaps, the greater part of your days.

So, on the occasion of the Langham’s 100th birthday, allow me to thank the long vanished firm of Clinton & Russell for the pleasure – the privilege – of growing up there. The Langham is proof of the felicific power of good architecture, the power to promote, both in its inhabitants and in passers-by, happiness.