Movies of the 1930s made Central Park West’s great apartment towers exemplify urban glamour. The city had improved the avenue only within the previous decade by widening its roadbed, removing its streetcar tracks, and building a subway beneath it. A soaring stock market created surplus capital for real-estate investment. The effective exclusion of Jews from many East Side luxury buildings redirected demand toward more welcoming neighborhoods. A final touch, the 1929 Multiple Dwelling Act, permitted the construction of very tall apartment buildings. These factors enabled architect Emory Roth and builder Irwin S. Chanin to create a majestic skyline dominated by their twin-towered high-rises – the Century, Majestic, Beresford, San Remo, and El Dorado – within four years.

Until 1929, most luxury residences were designed in the elaborately ornamented Beaux-Arts style. But Paris’s 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes had publicized a new style in architecture and interior decoration, Art Deco. In abstracting and abbreviating recognizable classical forms, Art Deco was evolutionary, not revolutionary. Yet, as Elizabeth Hawes wrote, “It looked fast, sinuous, exact, and racy, quite like the modern age.” It became fashionable even among Manhattan’s conservative architects.

Among them was the Hungarianborn Emory Roth. He was 13 years old when he emigrated to New York with $8 in his pocket. After working as a draftsman for the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1892-3 and serving apprenticeships under architects Richard Morris Hunt and Ogden Codman, he went into practice in 1898 by renovating a Hungarian restaurant on the Lower East Side. Five years later he created his first important work, the Hotel Belleclaire at Broadway and 77th Street.

During a career that spanned nearly half a century, Roth designed more than 500 apartment buildings, perhaps more than any other man in history. They combined beauty, comfort, and – because he instinctively understood building costs and operating expenses – efficiency. His final masterpieces were designed and built between 1928 and 1931. The San Remo (1930), between West 74th and West 75th streets, exemplifies Beaux-Arts ornamented elegance, right up to its water tanks concealed within twin Greek temples, modeled after the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens.

The Beresford (1928-29), at 81st Street, becomes more heavily ornamented as it rises, culminating in the exuberance of its triple towers, crowned with oeil-de-boeuf windows surmounted by tall, copper lanterns illuminated at night. From opening day, its tenants – drawn by large apartments, spacious rooms, extensive storage facilities, and elegant appointments – were as distinguished as its appearance. Nonetheless, the banks foreclosed on both the San Remo and the Beresford in 1940.

Yet Roth, the Beaux-Arts conservative, was simultaneously designing the El Dorado, Art Deco incarnate, between 90th and 91st streets. Insistently vertical, embellished by bronze relief work, its subtly illuminated towers are among Manhattan’s most romantic nighttime views. Moreover, sentimental reasons draw one to the building: Within hours of the September 11 attacks, some skilful patriot slung a cable between the towers to fly the Stars and Stripes: a gesture so moving that its photograph appeared even in the New York Times.

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Irwin S. Chanin studied engineering at Cooper Union. After returning from World War I with $200, he started by building two one-bedroom frame houses in Bensonhurst. Within a decade, Chanin was building Broadway theaters, such as the Biltmore, the Majestic, and the legendary Roxy, the world’s largest movie house, with more than 6,000 seats. In 1929, after completing the modestly named Chanin Building, a 56-story Art Deco skyscraper at Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street, he announced two more Deco buildings on Central Park West: the Palais de France, a 65-story office building between 62nd and 63rd Streets, and the Majestic, a 45-story apartment hotel between 71st and 72nd streets. Excavations were dug, foundations constructed, and steel erected. Then financing evaporated with the Dow Jones Index.

Chanin’s audacity shines through his immediate changes of plan. The Palais became the 32-story Century Apartments, and the 45-story single tower became 29-story twin towers. Chanin had the courage of his construction materials and methods. Concrete construction obviated ceiling beam-drops. Cantilevered floor slabs eliminated corner columns, permitting wraparound windows and wider terraces. Additional space let him preserve a certain richness: He even designed one-bedroom duplex apartments that create a sense of space within three rooms.

But even courage has to make money. Chanin completed the Majestic in 1931 and lost it through foreclosure within 18 months.

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After years of depression and world war, expensive apartments would again be built in Manhattan. But the newer apartments’ lowered standards (and ceiling heights) made them, as Andrew Alpern wrote, “bleak, mean, ungracious, cramped … you [had] to look … at the size of the monthly payments to [be sure one was] not in some municipal housing project.” Perhaps we had lost luxury’s first requirement: discernment.