1155 Park Avenue
Circa 1916 // ARCHITECT: Robert T. Lyons // BUILDER: Bing & Bing Cons. Co.
A few weeks back, I posted about house architects — i.e. the on-staff architects of major builder-developers in the prewar era. In the case of Bing & Bing, they worked with several prominent architects, most famously Emery Roth, whose own fame certainly has eclipsed the Bing brothers — and his protégés, Boak & Paris. However, the Bings’ actual “house architect” was Robert Lyons. 955 Park Avenue and 993 Park Avenue — two buildings I have written about — are late Edwardian Era collaborations between Bing & Bing and Lyons. 1155 Park Avenue, a 13-story cooperative, is another such collaboration of that time.
Larger than either 955 or 993, it’s facade follows the same basic formula, a two-story stone base, a transitional floor above, little ornament on the brick body, and embellishment on the top three floors. The taste of the time demanded by the upper middle-class called for relatively “quiet” buildings that blended with their neighbors. As originally conceived, there were four apartments per floor served by two passenger elevators, and two service elevators, built around a fully enclosed interior courtyard (32 feet x 34 feet). The two apartments at the front of the building facing Park Avenue are each 12 rooms. The unit that looks north over East 92nd Street is nine-rooms (and I think has the best floor plan), and the “all-interior” apartment is a Classic-6. The layouts are all good, albeit the 12-room units have hallways that are a bit long. The rooms are very large and the closet space is ample.
WHAT A BUYER CAN EXPECT TO PAY: A 9 Room will cost you around $4M, and a 12 Room around $6.5M to $7.5M
Hello! My name is David Lubell. This is my personal blog, a forum for me to talk about my passion for prewar buildings in NYC and related subjects. If any views are expressed here, they are mine, unless clearly presented as coming from someone else. You can read a little bit more 
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