A Rose Among the Thorns of 84th Street

It was about time that something nice happened on that luckless stretch of Manhattan that runs along 84th Street between Lexington and Third avenues. A new building, called the Legacy, has appeared, out of nowhere and seemingly overnight, at 157 E. 84th St and it immediately assumed the rank of the best building on the block.Unfortunately, that is not saying much. The block in question is illfavored after the fashion of the Upper East Side. East 84th Street is not positively atrocious or blighted. Rather, it suffers from an unending succession of architectural acts of concerted and suffocating banality. Each block in Manhattan is unique: the amount of light, the quality of the trees, the heights, styles, and juxtapositions of the buildings all conspire to create a general mood or character different from every other in the city. What makes this parcel of 84th Street exceptional, however, is that until the arrival of the Legacy, there was not a single structure that merited a second look.Nor are any of these buildings bad in an interesting way. Instead you have, on either side of the street, one or two charmless and unadorned row houses, from early in the last century, whose once numerous brethren were mowed down between the 1950’s and the 1970’s to make way for far larger and entirely soulless white and bare brick buildings. There are no engaging shops here of the boutique variety that has enlivened many a drab side street in this part of town. Instead you have an Italian restaurant, Nicola’s, and a garage with the sort of prominent signage that always imparts an air of inexpiable abjection to a Manhattan side street.The Legacy was kept under wraps until it was nearly complete. But then, only a few weeks ago, the scaffolding and the canvas covering fell away to show a chastely modern affair, whose mix of ribbon windows and inter-floor masonry recalls the International Style at its best. Even now, when the cladding of the sixstory façade is not yet entirely accounted for, you can tell this is an important building. The windows are enlivened by black metal braces and surrounded by a thin lip of concrete that affords a certain autonomy to each floor, while emphasizing the horizontal thrust of the façade.There is a generous sense of roominess in the open-plan interior spaces, to the extent that these can be judged from the exterior, and the high ceilings distinguish this building from the mid-century modernism, twice warmed-over, that informs so many of the other buildings on the street. In this we find yet another confirmation that the neomodernism of today’s younger architects comes close to realizing the original ideals of classical modern architecture. The Legacy is further enhanced by a finely calibrated passage of mullioned windows and doors that flank the entrance on the ground floor, and by an entirely ornamental strip window at the top.As it turns out, there is one other building on the block whose quality rises a little above the rest, and that is the early modern brick building that stands immediately to the east of the Legacy and that is distinguished by a fairly imaginative brickwork. Whether coincidentally or otherwise, the strict horizontality of the Legacy’s strip windows rhymes very nicely with the façade of its neighbor.It may come as a surprise to many people that the firm responsible for the Legacy is none other than Costas Kondylis and Partners, which has been better known of late for its somewhat pedestrian exercises in postmodern classicism. Certainly, the firm has been responsible for some modernist projects around the city, most conspicuously Trump World Tower, at First Avenue and 47th Street. This is a slightly better building than some critics seem willing to grant, but it cannot match the authority or the effortless refinement of the Legacy.By a curious coincidence, a far more typical example of the firm’s work will be found just up the street, at 985 Park Ave., between 83rd and 84th streets. Almost complete, this 14-story project, billed as the first new construction on Park in over a generation, rises above a single, narrow plot, formerly occupied by the Portraits Inc. store front. The best thing about this new arrival is that it fills the gap that Portraits Inc. had so long represented in the fabric of Park Avenue. Other than that, the classical detailing, from the rusticated base, to the mullioned windows and the odd distribution of balconies on every other floor, is quite graceless. There is a certain emphatic simplicity to the cornice that defines the summit of the structure, but it is too little too late. The classical language of architecture was never meant to accommodate such a tall and narrow development. A more modern idiom, like that of the Legacy, would certainly have stood a better chance of success.jgardner@nysun.com

A Rose Among the Thorns of 84th Street

A Rose Among the Thorns of 84th Street

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