The San Remo - History of The Building

History of The Building

The building's architect, Emery Roth, took advantage of new zoning regulations to build the first of New York's twin towered apartment blocks. Each of San Remo's ten-story towers is topped with an English Baroque mansion in the manner of John Vanbrugh and capped with an homage to the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates. The Athenian monument was known to Roth from the reproduction that had featured in the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893. Roth also designed The Beresford and other landmark apartment houses and office blocks in New York. Construction began in 1929, weeks before the market crash initiated the Great Depression. The San Remo's construction process took approximately two years. When the building was completed in the early 1930s, New York and the rest of the nation had just finished the Roaring 20s and was headed into economic distress and World War II. In 1940 both buildings were sold, for $25,000 over the existing mortgages.

Read more about this topic:  The San Remo

Famous quotes containing the words history of, history and/or building:

    The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Like their personal lives, women’s history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.
    Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)

    Notice how he has numbered the blue veins
    in my breast. Moreover there are ten freckles.
    Now he goes left. Now he goes right.
    He is building a city, a city of flesh.
    He’s an industrialist.
    Anne Sexton (1928–1974)