San
Remo Apartments
Location: 145-146 Central Park West between 74th
and 75th Streets, New York, New York
Architect: Emery Roth
Date Completed: 1930
The San Remo is one of New York's last great apartment buildings of the pre-Depression
era. The Multiple Dwelling Act of 1929 allowed apartment houses of large ground area to
rise to a greater height, and permitted the use of setbacks and towers.
Architect Emery Roth, in building this, the first of Central Park's twin towered apartment
buildings, took advantage of this new law.
Consisting of twin towers rising from a U-shaped base sheltering a courtyard in the back,
the San Remo brought together, for the first time, the sense of community afforded by
smaller courtyard apartment buildings and the advantages of the hugely scaled, high
density pre-war era residential skyscraper.
Roth perfected the Italian Baroque here, shaping his towers to create and effect of
slenderness with a great sense of lift, and crowning his composition with with circular
colonnades of Corinthian columns with bronze lanterns.
The main block of the San Remo is seventeen stories high, with terraced setbacks from the
fourteenth to seventeenth floors. Two symmetrical towers, each ten stories high, are
surmounted by the colonnades.
In the San Remo, Roth effectively combined light brick and limestone and also used
handsomely proportioned metal casement windows. The building is executed in light brick,
over a three story base of rusticated limestone. The architectural detailing in stone,
terra cotta and metal is late Renaissance in character.
Balustrades, pilasters, engaged columns, broken pediments, garlands, urns, scrolls and
consoles are all used to effectively highlight entrance and window configurations.
The elegance of the exterior was more than matched by that of the interior, which featured
tow beautifully detailed marble lined lobbies and spacious, ingeniously arranged
apartments.
