Zoning Code

Stern said in an interview that the massing was mostly dictated by the zoning code. He refined the requirements, making the tower slimmer than the house, for example, which opens up the narrow side streets and lets the tower rise more romantically.

Passersby can glimpse the pylons and buttresses that give a Jazz Age grandeur to the private garden on the north side of the court. More of such detail was needed to relieve the flatness of the block’s massive walls. The Central Park West side suffers the most, with just minor variations in window rhythm, a pencil- thin cornice and some tacked-on railings that offer the visual impact of hairpins. The tower is better, with a surface relieved by layering and a livelier mix of windows.

The historic sources that Stern draws on are impeccable: a bit of Rockefeller Center, a dollop of decorator Dorothy Draper, a dab of Park Avenue, a wisp of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s romantic classicism.

Yet the aesthetic devices are assembled mechanically. Even with such well-made details, the big picture somehow got lost. Stern called it “a modern classical tower,” which is an oxymoron, as he knows.