Overview

About 285 Central Park West

One of the city's grand Beaux-Arts structures, the St. Urban is an exuberantly designed apartment house of great distinction.

Although it is very flamboyant and almost too robust in its assertive embellishments, it is truly one of the city's most spectacular residential properties.

Its domed corner tower topped with a cupola is an important ingredient of the Central Park West skyline despite the building's relatively short height of 13 stories. Its curved mansard roof, moreover, is punctuated by very pronounced broken pediment dormer windows. The broken-pediment dormers alternate in size and are a surprisingly strong design statement, the equivalent of a major cornice.

The building was designed by Robert T. Lyons for Peter Banner, the developer, and completed in 1906.

Lyons fashioned an extremely complex and richly facade in the French Second Empire style for the St. Urban that is very ornate and rhythmic with large continuous balustrade belt courses atop the three-story, rusticated limestone base and near the top and many angled bay windows. The corner, which is surmounted by the domed tower, is rounded and the asymmetry of the composition is effective.

The base of the building is marvelous with a very large, rectangular driveway that originally was the building's entrance. This no longer serves, however, as the building's entrance, unfortunately and is currently unused as a new entrance has been created just to the north of it with its own rather small and narrow marquee. Although the new entrance is a bit incongruous in juxtaposition with the very dramatic arched driveway, the alteration is not without its merits as the driveway now has very large floor-to-ceiling windows with handsome wrought-iron framing that open onto views of the extensive lobby, which has two separate elevator/stair banks, creating a nice feeling of openness.    

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