House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address

by Gross, Michael

  Significant elements of Fifteen Central Park West’s exterior are pastiche, borrowed from buildings that Bob Stern particularly admires in order to firmly place his creation in their midst despite their distance from Columbus Circle. The curved scoops just below the roof on the northern side of 15CPW call to mind a near-twin atop 1040 Fifth Avenue (long the home of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis). The colonnade at the center of the roof line is an homage to the top of 10 Gracie Square, one of New York’s most gracious co-ops. And the gated motor court, fountain, stacked bay windows, and decorative window surrounds all owe a large debt to River House, the formidable 1931 building on the East River at Fifty-Second Street that Stern calls “one of my favorite buildings.”

  Other inspirations are not as obvious. “The Dakota was very much on our minds,” says Stern, who cited its original restaurant and courtyard skylights as the inspiration for their equivalents at 15CPW. Candela buildings inspired the floor plans, which were adapted for modern life. “Wealthy people live differently today,” says Stern. “They have fewer servants, fewer live-in servants, they don’t tend to eat in their apartments.” Dining rooms are rarely used anymore except for formal entertaining. Restaurant culture barely existed in the 1930s. “We have many clients who have only a distant relationship to their kitchens,” says Stern, “but people like to make breakfast for themselves.” Closet space is far more important now. So are bathrooms. “Those 1920s and 1930s bathrooms are so tiny there’s barely room to turn around.”

  But much of the design is new, and supervised by Stern, the team that did the heavy lifting was headed by one of his longtime partners, Paul L. Whalen, whose credits include the master plan for the revival of the theater block of West Forty-Second Street off Times Square, which turned a seedy, crime-ridden strip into a shiny tourist attraction. Whalen mostly stayed behind the scenes at 15CPW. Never mind the man behind the curtain.

  Whalen ran the design process from the beginning of the bake-off, working closely with the Zeckendorfs, who, as much as he, loved getting lost in the weeds of apartment-house architecture. “They said they wanted a great New York building,” Whalen recalls. “To us, that had to do with the fantasy. When people want to live in New York, what do they think of? We looked to buildings like the Century or the San Remo. Not just their character on the skyline but also the way they meet the ground. They’re really great to walk along. At the same time, we looked to the Upper East Side—and buildings like 1040 Fifth and 740 Park—which was always thought of as the place with the most expensive, best apartments. They’re much simpler, more sheer, all limestone, not brick and limestone. They tend to not have iconic tops, so in a sense, they’re more discreet.”

  After settling on touchstones with Stern and the Zeckendorfs, Whalen weighed out a mound of clay that represented the allowable floor area ratio for the block. Clay is tactile and easy to manipulate. Whalen used it to “draw” and redraw the building in three dimensions. With the basic shape of 15CPW essentially predetermined by zoning, and the material for its skin chosen, windows were the next major factor in defining the look of the façade. Subtle arrangements of differently sized and shaped beveled windows gave them individual depth, lent variety and visual interest to the elevations, and would, along with the stone around them, affect the way light and shadow worked together to animate the building and enhance its residential character. Whalen tinkered with the SLCE floor plans, laying out wider living rooms and narrower bedrooms to see the effects of the arrangements on the building’s face—an exercise the Zeckendorfs also greatly enjoyed. “We spent countless hours sketching them together,” Whalen says. “Do you put the master bedroom and the living room on the front, or the dining room and the living room?” They decided, for example, to defy East Side convention and give the occupants of master bedrooms park views to wake up to.

  Window size and windowsill height are also important considerations for those looking out of the building as well as those looking up at them. Sills and the spaces between windows can disrupt views from within. So Whalen ran computer simulations to help him maximize those views with larger windows and lower sills. Typically, living rooms are placed in corners to maximize views through huge windows on both sides. “We wanted a difference between the front and the sides,” says Whalen, so he juggled big bay windows with smaller ones to create the illusion of vast open views.

  “People want to hang pictures and place furniture,” Whalen continues. Stern’s office had worked in Time Warner Center and found they sometimes had to work around support columns and block windows to make spaces more habitable. The desire for larger windows as viewed from within also had to be balanced against their effect on the façade. “You can have too much of a good thing,” Whalen says, chuckling. “There’s a point where windows get so big, there’s no wall left. It looks like a frame. It becomes totally unconvincing.”

  These decisions weren’t made in a vacuum. As they’d consulted Brown Harris Stevens brokers while formulating their bid for the block, the Zeckendorfs convened focus groups with a wider cross section of Realtors, both their own and competitors’, to help shape the final product. What would sell best? “In general, they gave us great tips,” says Arthur Zeckendorf. “ ‘We want a family room.’ ‘We want heat in the kitchen.’ ‘We love double master bathrooms—his and hers or his and his or hers and hers.’ ”

  John Burger, a top Brown Harris Stevens broker, felt it was a chance to improve on the Candela and Carpenter floor plans long considered the Gold Coast’s gold standard. “In those days,” he says, “architects were forced to provide windows in every room.” But modern vent shafts allowed far more leeway in the layouts at 15CPW. So bathrooms could be bigger because they didn’t need to be situated on an exterior wall. And those kitchens so many of the owners would never visit could be placed midbuilding, too. But with broker input, they were designed to allow long views through doorways into connecting rooms “so you don’t feel you’re in a windowless space,” Burger says. “We asked the architects to give people the flexibility to use a library as a bedroom, too.”

  Throughout the process, those and other general principles emerged to guide the apartment designs. “We like to come in the front door and see the view right away,” says Whalen. “We like to put the living room in the corner. We like a foyer that’s a room, not a corridor. Libraries separate master bedrooms from living rooms so they can flip either way. Dining rooms can open to living rooms for flexibility, with kitchens behind and family rooms off the kitchens,” where staff quarters were placed in old-school apartments. “Doors are carefully placed either clearly in the center of rooms or at the edge of the room, allowing you to use the wall for furnishing. There’s nothing worse than a door that’s slightly off center.”

  Another problem in the prewar-apartment inventory is the positioning of dining rooms and secondary bedrooms. In all but the largest apartments, second bedrooms are typically adjacent to masters. “Their emphasis was to have the staff at one end and the bedrooms together,” Burger says. But today’s wealthy buyers often want to be sequestered from their children. And prewar formal dining rooms, usually evening-only rooms, were typically placed in the dark back of apartments. So the layouts for 15CPW were changed: secondary bedrooms got their own rear wings, and dining rooms, when possible, were given views so they could easily be repurposed.

  The brokers had the Zeckendorfs’ backs, too, on another point of contention with Goldman Sachs. They were absolutely certain that there should be larger, even massive, apartments at 15CPW, even if that meant there would be fewer—two per elevator bank as opposed to three. The brokers agreed with the data coming from Brown Harris Stevens and Halstead: there was an aching need for apartments on steroids in prime locations. But the Goldman Sachs team was aghast when the Zeckendorfs told them they wanted to build about forty apartments and penthouses with price tags at or above $10 million. “I remember meeting after meeting after meeting, they would drag us down there,” Will recalls, “to explai
n to them how we were going to sell—”

  Arthur interrupts, “—four-thousand-square-foot apartments! At three thousand dollars a foot! That’s twelve million dollars!”

  Goldman “was stuck in the mud,” Will continues because of what the sales data seemed to show: that, in a recent year, only twenty trophy apartments had changed hands in Manhattan. Goldman was skeptical about their claim that they could sell twice that number of apartments over two years in a single building. “We said, ‘You’re asking the question backwards,’ ” says Will. “If there were more [apartments], there would be a lot more transactions. But it was tough to convince the Goldman guys.” One concern was paramount: profit, profit, profit.

  Despite the obvious misalignment, Goldman’s Rothenberg considers those meetings more conversation than conflict and insists all were guided by cautious realism. “Obviously, you can look at demand over the previous twelve months,” he says, “but predicting what will happen in three years? That’s not so easy.” Even if the Zeckendorfs could easily sell ten or twenty or thirty superluxury units, “the last ten are where your profit lies. Can you sell them?”

  Finally, they reached a compromise. Lower floors might have as many as six apartments, but higher up, the apartment count would drop to four, two, and even one unit per floor. Even with that, the apartment-size conversation still wasn’t over. But despite its annoying persistence, the Zeckendorfs would have the last laugh.

  The tower atop Paul Whalen’s first model for the bake-off—when the building was still made of red brick—had a symmetrical top with swoops and columns at both north and south ends and made the architects nervous. “We thought it would be a pompous ass of a building,” Whalen recalls. “We had to make the top looser and more casual. It’s a slightly feminine gesture on what’s otherwise a masculine building.” Recalling an asymmetrical tower that Stern had once proposed for another building, they molded a new top with extra height to the north and a series of visually engaging stepdowns with terraces and bay windows to the south to maximize light in the upper apartments. Thanks to those setbacks, more apartments could be marketed as penthouses.

  The next priority for the Stern office was the building’s street-level appearance and entrances. The simple, sleek base is made of golden-granite stones chosen to be as close as possible in color to the limestone above, then individually hand-laid “so there are no seams on the first two or three floors,” says Whalen.

  Most modern buildings have enormous entrances that make them look like office towers. Stern and Whalen wanted to convey privacy and discretion, “like you’re entering a house and it’s not about the public looking into an atrium,” Whalen says. Spindlelike metalwork, designed for the doors and flanking lanterns, created a visual leitmotif that was continued throughout the building, as well as in its logo and promotional materials, all of which were designed by Pentagram, an eminent graphic-design firm.

  The lobby was conceived with two priorities. The first was inspired by a tour that the Zeckendorfs had arranged for their architects of lobbies along Fifth Avenue and Central Park West. “It gave us a series of precedents we could refer to, a common vocabulary,” says Whalen. “Those building don’t generally have enormous lobbies, though the best have high ceilings.” The second must was ensuring that tower residents would feel they live on Central Park West, so a long back-to-front corridor allows a glimpse of the park as one steps from the tower elevators.

  Flanking that corridor are the library (still barely stocked in 2013; the most represented author was Robert A. M. Stern) and the restaurant, both off the front lobby, with its English-oak paneling, red-, pink-, and purple-marble, fluted columns, two fireplaces, and seemingly floating ceiling with a central oval cutout that gives the illusion of sky above. The restaurant, which is small and low-ceilinged, was given translucent Veneziano-stucco walls as elegant compensation. The English-oak paneling was inspired by the work of Sir John Soane, the nineteenth-century neoclassical London architect and collector. The modern-classical furniture and rugs were custom-designed by Stern’s interiors division. Arthur Zeckendorf, a collector of contemporary art, commissioned the lobby paintings, representing summer and winter in Central Park.

  On the Broadway façade, double-height retail windows at street level were required by the zoning, as was an asymmetrical setback above, and an indentation in that long wall, to create the illusion of separate buildings. The glass storefronts raised an aesthetic issue because stone that appears to rest on glass can look peculiar. Inspired by early-and mid-twentieth-century buildings, Stern’s architects designed storefronts that appear to be applied to the masonry rather than set into it. A Doric frieze motif was used to hide required vents. “There was a big concern that Broadway retail was not Fifth Avenue, but Central Park West was one of the fanciest addresses, so somehow they had to come together,” says Whalen. “We brought them together by making the storefronts look like they belong to the building. We also stopped the storefronts so there’s a transition of masonry before you get to the residential part of the building, which brings the two worlds together.”

  Between the two wings and the worlds of Broadway and Central Park West, they placed two courtyards. The northern one features a reflecting pool that doubles as a skylight on the seventy-five-foot, three-lane lap pool in the health club, directly beneath. The court around it would eventually be used as an outdoor dining terrace for the building’s lobby restaurant and an outdoor event space for residents. The southern court had an unusual drive-in turnaround; an Edward Lutyens–style fountain made of a single piece of black granite in the middle; and an auto drop-off in front of an oval pavilion inspired by Frederick II’s Sanssouci Palace.

  “It needed to look great from above, so it got a copper roof,” with a small stone cupola on top, says Whalen. “We asked for it, but we didn’t think we’d get it. So few developers will stick their necks out like the Zeckendorfs did. They came into this project with a big vision and a notion. They weren’t nickel-and-diming the project, which is typical.” The result of that typical caution is value engineering, cutting corners where possible, usually where compromises are less visible, to save money. “We hate value engineering,” says Whalen. “But they knew they had to shoot the moon, and that kept their architects happy and so we worked our butts off for them.”

  That fourteen-thousand-square-foot basement health club was designed to be both classical and more obviously high-tech than the rest of the building, though it also has a womblike feeling, with its glassed-in central pool surrounded by areas devoted to weights, cardiovascular machines, yoga, and workouts, as well as private massage rooms, two steam rooms, and a sauna. Stern’s office even designed its walls, which they thought of as “glass artwork,” Whalen says.

  As 2005 began, Stern’s office finalized the floor plans, but even then, they weren’t quite alone. During the bake-off, Goldman Sachs had brought in Alan Wanzenberg, who’d started his architectural career with I. M. Pei, then formed a partnership with the interior designer (and intimate friend of Andy Warhol’s) Jed Johnson. After Johnson’s death in the explosion of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island in 1996, Wanzenberg went out on his own and developed a clientele among Goldman Sachs partners, including Dan Neidich, who’d brought him into the planning for 515 Park; he was responsible for its apartment layouts. Now, Wanzenberg set to work on the mix of sizes and shapes of 15CPW units, rejecting notions such as double-height lofts like those at the Hotel des Artistes. “We worked with Stern, though once he was on the scene, we knew we’d be ushered out,” Wanzenberg says.

  At the bottom of the “house” building, the final plans showed five and six apartments per floor, the smallest in the building. Whalen’s great regret is not buying apartment 2B, a relatively affordable ($2.2 million) one-bedroom unit facing Central Park. Starting on the third floor, there were four corner units and two floor-throughs. “We always thought the best view was toward midtown,” says Whalen, “where you get the tinkle of the lights on Centra
l Park South. It’s more interesting.” Northern views were judged to be worth less, and because the Zeckendorfs considered the units on the northeast corner of the building less salable than their southern counterparts, an extra E-line, an extra apartment line, designated with the letter E, was added on two lower floors in the rear of the house to tease extra transactions out of the square footage.

  The sixth floor of the house got five apartments instead of six. On the seventh to eleventh floors, the unit number dropped to four, which would be the most common layout in both wings, with a pair of two-cornered units (the A and D lines) boasting three exposures and two floor-throughs between them. On the twelfth through fourteenth floors, above the first setback, the square footage shrinks ever so slightly, but on twelve, the units all have small terraces.

  Already thinking about potential purchasers, the Zeckendorfs had decided to do whatever they could to attract a core of local families to the house. “They targeted a generation who had young families, were looking for family living, but were having a tough time finding co-ops,” says former Whitehall executive Ralph Rosenberg. So four duplexes were planned for floors fifteen and sixteen, and three larger ones for floors seventeen and eighteen. Each of the seven two-floor units got a setback terrace on the lower floor that held its entertaining rooms, but only on eighteen would there be additional terraces off the master bedrooms and adjoining sitting rooms of the corner apartments. The upper duplexes also got his-and-hers bathrooms in their master suites, and libraries and family rooms on their upper floors to reinforce the notion that they had been designed for families. Those seven duplexes, though arguably not as spectacular as the full-floor penthouses in the tower, were designed to set the tone for 15CPW.

  Finally, there would be a simplex penthouse atop the house, complete with a three-sided, wraparound terrace accessible from all its major rooms as well as its master-bedroom suite. Early on, a house architect in Stern’s office was asked to draw up multiple floor plans for that apartment after a prominent banker expressed interest in it, “to show him how great it could be,” Whalen says. “The idea was to have all the public rooms facing the park, and this spectacular enfilade going through all the rooms so you get a block-long view of the park. Very few people can say they have that. Even the entrance hall has views over the park, which is very unusual.”