Overview

About The Empire, 188 East 78th Street

With its very tall gables, this 32-story condominium apartment tower would seem more at home near the peaks of the Dakota apartment building on Central Park West at 72nd Street than in the middle of a fairly bland stretch along Third Avenue in the 70s.

It replaced a two-story building that ran between 77th and 78th Streets along the avenue and hid a spacious private garden enclave that had been known as The Cottages that was designed by E. H. Faile in 1937.

The Cottages, which contained stores on the first floor and eight one-bedroom apartments on the second floor with glass-block windows facing the avenue, were undistinguished architecturally, but the charm of the garden and the anachronism of such underdevelopment in such a prime area of the Upper East Side led to one of the city's more heated landmark controversies in the 1990s.

"A gatehouse on Seventy-Eighth Street marked the building's entrance and opened onto an 11,000-square-foot garden that originally contained two tennis courts and two badminton courts, which were eliminated with the construction of the apartment house at 177 East 77th Street in 1941," noted Robert A. M. Stern, David Fishman and Jacob Tilove in their wonderful book, "New York 2000, Architecture and Urbanism Between The Bicentennial And The Millennium" (The Monacelli Press, 2006.)

"In contrast to the Modernism of the glass and brick Third Avenue-facing facade, the garden front, with its flights of stairs leading to the raised terrace, had overtones of the late Georgian and Regency styles," the authors wrote.

A local coalition rallied to have the enclave declared a landmark but eventually the site was not so designated and five of the eight residents accepted a settlement to move and the building, which was topped out in the summer of 1999.

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