Apthorp Apartments ARCHITECT: Clinton & Russell DATE: 1906-08 STYLE: Italian Renaissance
This handsome apartment house built around a large central courtyard fills a short city block between Broadway and West End Avenue. Designed in the Italian Renaissance style by Clinton & Russell for the Astor Estate, it remains today much as it was when originally built with the exception that stores have been added at street level on the Broadway side. The most conspicuous feature of this handsome apartment house is the use of rustication as contrasted with the smooth ashlar masonry of the wall planes. Notable also is the adaptation of the Renaissance vocabulary from the scale of a single palazzo, perhaps three stories in height, to a block-long, twelve-story edifice.