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Posted Apr 24, 2015, 11:33 AM
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Join Date: Sep 2013
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The Sutton Tries to Fit Into Midtown East
AILEEN JACOBSON
APRIL 24, 2015
Quote:
The Sutton, a 30-story condominium rising at 959 First Avenue, already towers over the traditional walk-ups nearby, but it will also borrow from the historic flavor of the neighborhood for its design.
The building will be clad mostly in bricks rather than in glass and steel, “to be reflective of a lot of the buildings that were erected a century ago,” said David Von Spreckelsen, the president of the New York City division of Toll Brothers City Living, the owner of the Sutton, which recently started selling its 113 apartments.
In addition, many architectural details have been inspired by the surrounding area, said Adam Rolston, managing and creative director of Incorporated Architecture and Design, which designed the building’s interior and facade.
“Our biggest influences were the immediate urban fabric,” Mr. Rolston said. Those influences included the neighborhood’s “grand luxury buildings like 1 Sutton, for scale and proportion” and for details like glazed windows that offer a view of a private garden from the lobby, he said, referring to 1 Sutton Place South, a 1927 building at the corner of East 57th Street.
The site of the Sutton, which includes the addresses 953-961 First Avenue, had been a vacant lot for several years. The site originally had a row of five-story buildings with commercial space on the ground floor and apartments above — similar to many buildings that still stand on both sides of the block. Metropolitan Café, a popular hangout with a garden in back, occupied 959 First Avenue from 1982 through most of 2006. “It was casual and fun,” said Chris Karalekas, who with his brother Nikos owns Mme. Eleanor’s, a dry-cleaning store at 952 First Avenue, across from the Sutton. “They served salad and burgers and pasta.”
By 2007, however, the space had become a hole in the ground. That’s when the Alexico Group, which had bought it, broke ground for a proposed rental building, Mr. Von Spreckelsen said. But the recession intervened and, he said, “They chose not to go ahead.” At the end of 2012, he said, Toll Brothers purchased the site for $64 million in cash. His company kept the foundation that the Alexico Group had built and hired Goldstein Hill & West Architects to design its building, which provides panoramic views that include the East River.
The Sutton, where apartments are priced from $950,000 for a studio to $11.75 million for a four-bedroom triplex penthouse with its own pool, is between 52nd and 53rd Streets. (One-bedrooms start at around $1.1 million, two-bedrooms at $2.1 million and three-bedrooms at $3.3 million.)
The building, scheduled for occupancy late next year, will have amenities intended to accommodate the area’s changing demographics, which lately have been skewing younger, according to Mr. Rolston and Mr. Von Spreckelsen, including a fitness center and a children’s playroom, and open kitchens in the apartments.
Though many residents welcome the new addition, several shopkeepers and residents said that some neighbors have reservations.
“I’m all for it, but some people don’t like the new high-rises,” said Paul Enea, who with his brother Frank owns Pisacane Midtown Seafood at 940 First Avenue. “They want old-fashioned and quaint.”
Sutton Place, a pricier neighborhood east of First Avenue, contains many historic buildings, but the area to the west (also called Midtown East) has seen more new construction, including two condominiums still being completed, at 301 East 50th Street and at 305 East 51st Street, the site of a deadly construction crane disaster in 2008.
Mr. Rolston said that for his inspiration, he reached back as far as 1875, when Effingham B. Sutton began building brownstones along the East River, where the waterfront had been populated with button and cigar factories and breweries. Custom-made bath and kitchen fixtures echo that industrial past, he said.
The three penthouses — a simplex, a duplex and a triplex — that top the building use black glass and metal in homage to a modernist penthouse on Beekman Place that he admires. But all the indoor surfaces are “durable, practical, cleanable,” and suitable for today’s families, Mr. Rolston said.
He said he didn’t expect future residents to recognize the historic roots: “People may not know it, but they feel it.”
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