Metropolitan Baedeker

ASTREET CAN sometimes say as much about a city as a neighborhood does‐indeed, a city's great streets define its character as surely as its neighborhoods do. A great street, even though it is stretched out and symbolizes movement, is a place unto itself, and as vital to a sense of a city as any of its great squares, parks or monuments.

In New York, Central Park West is such a street. It is not so documented in literature as Fifth Avenue, or as celebrated in song as Broadway, but it is arguably the finest boulevard in the city of New York, with elaborate, stately apartment houses creating a majestic wall on one side, and Central Park providing a rich, leafy foil on the other.

Each building is different yet each one defers to the others to just the extent necessary to permit a coherent whole. It makes one of the best walks in New York—and not the least reason it gives such pleasure is that Central Park West (with the exception of one building, No. 80 at 68th Street) looks today essentially as it did in 1931, when the last of the four twin‐towered apartment buildings that give its skyline such drama were finished. Almost nothing is less than 45 years old—it is one of the only streets in New York abotkt which that can be said.

Background

It was Eighth Avenue when Central Park was created beside it, but later, In the hope of boosting real‐estate values in the developing West Side, its name was changed. The street has never been more than a residential boulevard, and its development has reflected the pattern of growth of most of the West Side—small shacks until the 1880's when mansions and rowhouses signaled the increasing middle‐class respectability of the area.

A few medium‐sized, middle‐class hotels and apartment houses appeared in the 1890's and early 1900's (an exception, of course, is the splendidly opulent Dakota of 1884, a luxury building way ahead of its time). Then the huge West Side building boom of the 1920's led to the replacement of most of Central Park West's houses and smaller multiple dwellings with large apartment buildings, and by 1931 the avenue's present form was established.

From the late 1920's until after World War II it was one of the city's most sought‐after upper middle‐class addresses, and the street held its own far better than did surrounding blocks when the West Side declined in the 1950's. Now, with much of the West Side again on an upward cycle, prices for good Central Park West apartments approach those of the East Side. .

Exploring

Begin a walk at Columbus Circle, the southwest corner of Central Park, where you will face the tower of the Gulf & Western Building, a slender column with one of the most unattractive (and useless) of the recent crop of outdoor plazas in the city. No building contains an official Central Park West address for another block, however; that honor belongs to the Mayflower Hotel at No. 15, a typical apartment building of the 1920's.

The first real visual treat is the Century apartments at No. 25 (at 62d Street), the first of the four twintowered structures. Completed in 1931 and designed by Jacques Delamarre of the Chanin Construction Company, the Century is one of the city's finest pieces of 1930's Art Deco‐inspired design. Look up at the machine‐like ornamentation crowning the tower tops, and glimpse into the lobby for a look at a Frank Stella painting of 1970 that plays subtly on the curving lines of the 1930's lobby ornament. (Placing it in the lobby was the splendid idea of Doris Freedman, the city art activist and a Century resident.)

The next block contains the Ethical Culture School and the Society for Ethical Culture headquarters, 2 West 64th Street, a formal but unponderous limestone pile designed by Robert D. Kohn in 1910. This block from 63d to 64th Streets was slated for demolition in the mid‐1960's for a proposed mall connecting Central Park with Lincoln Center‐a scheme that never went beyond the planning stage.

At No. 50 is the Prasada, a pompous French Second Empire apartment house dating from 1905 that has a grand formal entrance pleasing enough to excuse the building's overall pretension. No. 55, a 1929 Art Deco tower by architects Schwartz & Gross, utilizes the pleasant conceit of brick shaded in tone from red at the base to light tan at top‐done, it was said, to give the impression that the sun was always shining on the buidling.

Take a detour into West 67th Street, for years an anomaly among Manhattan side streets. It is filled not with brownstones and not with traditional apartment buildings, but with studio buildings full of double‐height living rooms, apartments that look as if they were made as stage‐sets for “La Boheme.”

The most famous of the 67th Street buildings is the Hotel des Artistes at No. 1, built in 1915‐18 to the designs of George Mort Pollard. The des Artistes was commissioned by Walter Russell, an eccentric developer who built a number of the block's other studio buildings; its style is loosely Gothic, with the double‐height windows giving the building the appearance of an Elizabethan manor house blown up to huge scale.

This is a good point to step across the street and stroll for a block or two along the walk of hexagon pavingblocks that gird Central Park; from the park side of the street you can enjoy a full glimpse of the vista of Central Park West up to the 90's. The wall of buildings breaks for the American Museum of Natural History in the upper 70's, and you will see the Beresford apartments anchoring the corner just

Bill Les above the museum, with the twintowers of the Eldorado apartments at 90th Street marking the far end of the vista.

The next few blocks up Central Park West are a pleasant mix of religious buildings and apartments of decent, but not remarkable, architectural qualitythe sort of buildings that would dominate any other city but merely blend into the landscape in New York. Still, each has a quality of its own: No. 101 looks like a Park Avenue building that drifted across town by mistake; No. 91 has some pleasant facade detailing.

Stop for a moment at 70th Street, where an Italian Renaissance‐style structure of 1897 by Bruner & Tryon houses Shearith Israel Synagogue, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States. The congregation was founded in 1655 by Spanish and Portuguese Jews.

At No. 115 (72d Street) stands the Majestic, a near twin of the Century and a venture of the same architect and development firm. The brick patterns and Art Deco ornament are different here, however, and if you view the building carefully from the park you will notice that the “twin” towers are not identical at all‐one is a good bit wider than the other.

Just north of 72d Street is perhaps New York's most famous apartment building, the Dakota, Henry J. Hardenbergh's grandiose German Renaissance pile of 1884. Commissioned by Edward Clark of the Singer Sewing Machine fortune, the Dakota was one of the first efforts made to woo upper‐class New Yorkers into apartments; until the 18809s, multiple dwellings were considered suitable only for the poor or for those of what the Victorian age might have termed unsuitable character.

The building was so named because when Clark began building it, the West Side around 72d Street was sparsely settled, and skeptics joked that had he chosen a site just a bit farther from town he would have built his building “in the Dakota territory.” Distant or not, the Dakota was a success; it is now an official city landmark and one of the city's most venerable cooperative apartment houses.

Hardenbergh also designed a group of townhouses on West 73d Street just behind the Dakota; they are littleknown and are worth a look as a complement to the larger structure. And one block to the north, 74th Street contains perhaps New York's best row of Georgian townhouse fronts, the grouping at Nos. 18‐52 of 1904 by Percy Griffith.

The Langham, the apartment building at No. 135 Central Park West (at 74th Street) built by Clinton & Russell in 1905, is one of the city's grandest and most freewheeling pieces of eclecticism. And at No. 145 is the San Remo, the third of the four twin‐tower structures‐this one by Emery Roth, founder of the architectural firm that later gave Third Avenue most of its glass boxes. In 1930 Emery Roth preferred stone, and he fashioned it into a fine Italian Renaissance interpretation of the skyscraper apartment house.

Indeed, the San Remo and the Majestic down the block are worth comparing. They are essentially the same building, built at almost the same time, yet one is sheathed in a “modern” coating and the other in a historical one; each, in its own way, is as much of a stage set as the other.

The block of limestone‐fronted houses on 76th Street off Central Park West is one of the city's finest, and it is now an official historic district. At the end of the block at 170 Central Park West is the New‐York Historical Society, a solid classical box built in 1908 by York & Sawyer, with wings added in 1938 by Walker & Gillette. Its exhibitions are of high quality, and there is a regular concert program as well. (Phone TR 3‐3400.)

Unquestionably Central Park West's great monument‐not to mention its great tourist attraction‐is the Ameri

The New York Times/D. Gorton Boulevard of Grandeur: (clockwise from upper left) a Frank Stella painting in the lobby of the Century apartments at 62d Street and the ornaments atop its North Tower; the entrance of the Prasada at No. a detail of an iron railing at the Dakota and the building itself. can Museum of Natural History, which occupies the sprawling site from 77th to 81st Street. Its Romanesque 77th Street wing dates from 1877 and was designed by J. C. Cady, while the overwhelminkly scaled Theodore Roosevelt Memorial fronting on Central Park West was added in 1936. It was designed by John Russell Pope, an architect not given to modest gestures. The exhibit program of the museum is as ambitious as Pope's huge doorway, and impossible to do justice to here. For information, call TR 3‐4225.

Emery Roth's other major Central Park West effort was the Beresford apartments built in 1929, a glorious building whose three castle‐like towers and fine siting have made it a longbeloved West Side landmark. Above the Beresford, Central Park West loses none of its architectural quality. There is the White House at No. 262 (86th Street) which shares with the Beresford the distinction of having Central Park West's best lobby; there are the fine Art Deco buildings at No. 241, No. 320 (one of the most exuberant in town) and No. 336, as well as the last of the four twin‐towered buildings, the Eldorado at No. 300 (90th Street).

The Eldorado, designed by Emery Roth with Margon &. Holder, is like a cross between the San Remo and the Majestic:_ the towers are still highly romantic, but here they take on just a bit of an Art Deco, machine‐age quality (and end up bearing a remarkable resemblance in profile to the Empire State Building).

The street holds its own for a number of blocks yet, its masonry wall broken only by the late 1950's towers of Park West Village above 97th Street. But there are two gems uptown: the eccentric First Church of Christ, Scientist at 96th Street by Carrere & Hastings, a granite structure with a fine steeple that looks like a cautious imitation of a Hawksmoor church in London, and the altogether splendid Towers Nursing Home at 106th Street, Charles C. Haight's castle of joyous round towers.

Eating

Central Park West itself has no restaurants, but a block in on Columbus Avenue, particularly in the 60's, there is a wealth of eating places ranging from pleasant bars for hamburgers and beer to Mexican, Japanese, Chinese and Indian restaurants. And you will be well‐placed to take advantage of the great number of restaurants around Lincoln Center, although most are more expensive than the casual wanderer might prefer.

Should you want to combine a walk in the neighborhood with a more ambi

tious meal, there are several possibilities. Among the best:

Le Pciultaller at 45 West 65th Street, (799‐7600) probably the only truly distinguished restaurant to have emerged as a result of Lincoln Center.

Cafe des Artistes, in the Hotel des Artistes at 1 West 67th Street (TR 73500), famous for its Howard Chandler Christy murals and now restored and more attractive than ever.

Tavern on•the Green, in Central Park at West 67th Street (TR 3‐3200), the landmark that just reopened its doors last week after a $2.5‐million renovation •to the designs of Maxwell's Plum's guiding light, Warner LeRoy. Mr. LeRoy gave the tavern an even more extensive version of his baroque fantasy than he created at Maxwell's, and the result, if a bit unreal, is dazzling.

Shopping

Not long ago there was nothing; now there is something. Columbus Avenue from 79th Street down his become a rich bazaar of antique shops, ranging from serious dealers with rare pieces to bric‐a‐brac houses; there is enough here to justify an antiques walk down Columbus Avenue after an architectural walk up Central Park West. Many, but not all, of the shops are open on Sunday.