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 the, history of, history and/or building:
“The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“Spain is an overflow of sombreness ... a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)