Fine Fifth Avenue Apartments

Exquisite Luxury 5th Ave Apartments For Sale

Lined with expensive park-view real estate and historical mansions, your Fifth Avenue apartment is a symbol of wealthy New York.

In the early part of the 1900s, the very rich of New York migrated to the stretch of Fifth Avenue between Fifty-ninth Street and Ninety-sixth Street, the stretch where Fifth Avenue faces Central Park.

Entries to the park include Inventors Gate at 72d Street and Engineers Gate at 90th.

This area contains many highly notable Fifth Avenue apartment buildings, many of them built in the 1920s.

A very few post-World War II structures break the unified limestone frontage, notably the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum between Eighty-eighth and Eighty-ninth Streets.

Many landmarks and famous Fifth Avenue apartment buildings are situated along Fifth Avenue in the Upper East Side.

The stretch of Fifth Avenue from the 80s through 105th Street has so many museums that it has acquired the nickname Museum Mile and includes such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

That area was known in the early twentieth century as Millionaire's Row after the many mansions built there, as the richest New Yorkers moved their residences north to face Central Park.

Earlier, several opulent Vanderbilt houses and other mansions were built in the 50s and in even earlier times farther south.

The New York Academy of Medicine is located at 103rd Street, and Mount Sinai Hospital is located at 98th Street.

Fifth Avenue apartment agents are slightly worried about who will be the next to take up the demand for the Manhattan luxury apartments.

Rising unemployment, particularly among New York's financial community, and the 20 percent hike in property taxes is spoiling the party.

Ownership of luxury Fifth Avenue apartments, a prized status symbol of America's corporate elite, has fallen victim to the volatile stock markets, scandal and recession.

Executives who once set the business world on fire are being forced to sell up as their careers and fortunes go up in smoke.

Others are taking advantage of New York's red-hot property prices to stoke up their cash reserves in one of the country's few remaining bull sectors.

The over all cost of the majority of Manhattan luxury apartments dropped as the stock market tries to recover.

The average cost of a Fifth Avenue apartment fell 7.7 percent in the first quarter of 2009, a sign that the stock market is still affecting the Manhattan luxury apartments market.

Financial market volatility, reduced corporate earnings and six rate increases by the Federal Reserve are tempering apartment demand.

The declines comes amid insecurity in the financial markets.

As a result, employees of many banking and technology-related companies, who have helped fuel the Fifth Avenue apartment market boom, are finding their compensation packages not as valuable.

Some parts of the Manhattan luxury apartment market remain strong, especially Fifth Avenue apartments.

A luxury Manhattan apartment is defined as a two, three or four-bedroom apartment on Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue or Central Park West.

The market is currently weakest is for the lower-priced Manhattan apartments.

With Fifth Avenue apartments fetching an average price of $7,500 per square foot, Fifth Avenue apartments ranked third place in a new survey of the top 10 most expensive residential streets in the world from Barclay's Wealth Bulletin.

From your new Fifth Avenue apartment, you'll enjoy a picture-postcard vantage point of Central Park and the interesting configuration of buildings on Central Park West.

And at every hour you'll have spectacular views of the verdant Central Park and the fabulous Jackie Kennedy Onassis Reservoir.

The reservoir is very peaceful. and many Fifth Avenue apartment owners jog around it every morning.

On Fifth Ave, you have the best of city, country and culture.

Walk three steps and you're in Central Park.

At night, it feels like you're in Paris. It becomes a very quiet neighborhood.

Late on Sunday afternoons, 5th avenue's doormen snap to attention as cars pull up with residents who had been away for the weekend.

Bicyclists soon arrive with delivery packages.

While Fifth Avenue runs from Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village to 142nd Street in Harlem, the most prestigious and expensive residential stretch of it faces Central Park on the Upper East Side.

Here, brick and limestone residential buildings share the avenue with museums, consulates, private clubs, churches and synagogues.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mansions were built on this part of Fifth Avenue for families like the Astors, the Vanderbilts and Marjorie Merriweather Post and her husband, E. F. Hutton.

Some of the mansions remain, but only a scant few are still Fifth Avenue townhomes.

Andrew Carnegie's 64-room chateau at 2 East 91st Street was converted into the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in the 1970's.

Henry Clay Frick's Louis XVI-style mansion at 1 East 70th Street has a collection of Old Master paintings.

And the French Renaissance-style Felix and Frieda Warburg House at 92nd Street is now the site of the Jewish Museum.

Historically, the most significant block on the avenue is from 78th to 79th, which retains all four of its original mansions.

The Payne and Helen Whitney House, on this block, at 972 Fifth Avenue, was designed in 1902 by Stanford White and is now the Office of Cultural Services of the French Embassy.

Commanding the 78th Street corner of the block is the residence designed by Horace Trumbauer for James B. Duke, now the New York University Institute of Fine Arts.

Fifth Avenue apartment living became acceptable for the wealthy after 1910.

When the land on Fifth Avenue became valuable, the mansions were torn down and Fifth Avenue apartments went up.

Architects like Rosario Candela, Emery Roth and James Carpenter designed grand apartments with high ceilings, fireplaces, sweeping staircases and huge rooms.

High-floor Fifth Avenue apartments with vistas of the Central Park reservoir, the pond and Central Park West are the most valuable and are scarce.

On a recent day there were about 136 Fifth Avenue apartments available from 59th to 96th Streets.

Fifth Avenue apartments range from $250,000 for a one-room unit in a hotel-service building to $46 million for a full-floor, prewar 16-room apartment.

There were 16 listings at more than $10 million and 25 apartments for sale at less than $1 million.

Fifth Avenue's apartments are predominantly prewar co-ops.

There are 63 co-op buildings and 5 Fifth Avenue condo buildings from 59th to 96th Streets.

Two 1920's-era hotels, the Sherry-Netherland at 59th Street and the Pierre at 61st Street, have co-op apartments, where owners have access to hotel services.

The 27th floor of the tower of the Sherry-Netherland, which has six extremely large rooms, was recently available.

There was also a seven-room apartment in the tower at the Pierre.

Several Fifth Avenue apartment buildings, namely 825 Fifth, 1 East 66th Street and 3 East 77th Street, have private dining rooms for tenants.

While 5th Avenue has many luxurious buildings, three top Fifth Avenue apartment buildings, in terms of size, quality of apartments, and price, are 820 Fifth, between 63rd and 64th Streets; 834 Fifth, between 64th and 65th Streets; and 960 Fifth, at 77th Street.

At No. 820, where one is greeted by white-gloved doormen at the brass front door, the fourth-floor apartment with tree views was on the market for $30 million.

Maintenance is $13,271 a month.

This lovely 5th Avenue apartment building has a group of very prominent residents.

A prospective shareholder should have a minimum of $100 million in liquid assets.

Buying a Fifth Avenue co-op requires substantial assets.

Many of the Fifth Avenue apartment buildings are all cash, so no financing is permitted.

You are going to need to put together a package of social and business reference letters, a credit check and very substantial financial disclosure.

Some buildings do not allow pets or welcome children.

Families tend to live farther north in the 80's and 90's.

There are many public and private schools on the Upper East Side, like the highly rated P.S. 6 at Madison Avenue and 81st Street, Spence, St. Bernard's, Dalton, Nightingale-Bamford, the Convent of the Sacred Heart and St. David's.

There are five Fifth Avenue apartment rental buildings from 59th to 96th.

One-bedroom apartments rent for $4,000 to $6,000 a month, two-bedrooms for $7,000 to $13,000, and three-bedrooms for $15,000.

North of 96th Street, the traditional, if fuzzy, boundary between the Upper East Side and East Harlem, rents, like purchase prices, are often less stratospheric.

At 1160 Fifth Avenue, between 97th and 98th Streets, a one-bedroom apartment rents for $2,800 a month, a two-bedroom for $3,500 and a three-bedroom for $6,500.

Residents of Fifth Avenue (or their housekeepers) do much of their shopping on Madison Avenue, one block east, or they let their fingers do the walking.

Among stores with a delivery clientele are Lobel's, the butcher; Marché Madison; E.A.T.; Mitchell London; and Gentile's.

Madison Avenue in the 60's, where Givenchy, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Hermès and Chanel have boutiques, feels like the Rue Faubourg St.-Honore in Paris.

Higher up, Madison Avenue becomes cozier, with a Food Emporium at 87th Street, the Corner Bookstore at 93rd and many stores for children, coffee shops, bistros and sidewalk cafes.

The only sidewalk cafe in sight on Fifth Avenue is the one at the Stanhope Park Hyatt Hotel.

There are some food and T-shirt vendors on Museum Mile (outside the Guggenheim Museum) that some residents find inappropriate for the neighborhood.

Noise has occasionally been an issue for people living on Fifth Avenue when there is a pop concert on the East Meadow. There are fewer pop concerts there now, she said.

When there are parades on Fifth Avenue, the debris is soon cleaned up.

Crime has really dropped in the park.

Over the past 20 years, as Central Park has been restored, it has made a Fifth Avenue apartment even more of a prime location to live.

In the summer, there are Philharmonic concerts in the park and strolling in the Conservatory Garden.

Many Fifth Avenue residents volunteer to garden, give tours and maintain the park's 21 playgrounds.

Fifth Avenue apartments are protected by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in three areas: the Upper East Side Historic District, from 59th to 78th Street; the Metropolitan Museum Historic District, from 78th to 86th Street; and the Carnegie Hill Historic District, from 86th to 99th Street.

Above 99th Street, Fifth Avenue apartments offer a mixture of prewar and postwar co-op and condo buildings and rentals, as well as low- and moderate-income housing.

There are also institutions, like Mount Sinai Hospital, from 99th to 101st Streets; the Museum of the City of New York, at 103rd Street; and El Museo del Bario, at 104th.

Central Park ends at 110th Street.