The San Remo 

The Fabulous Twin Towers of Central Park West

Initial development hit Central Park West suddenly in the 1880's, before the land had been split into single lots.

Big, full-blockfront buildings followed from 1884 to 1902; first the Dakota at 72nd Street, and then the original versions of the Beresford at 81st, the San Remo, the Majestic at 72nd and the Eldorado at 90th.

Only the Dakota survived the building boom of the 1920's: the current Beresford, designed in 1928 by Emery Roth, was the first of the namesake structures that now make the street so famous.

The current Beresford and San Remo were developed by the same owner but, despite the buildings' prominence, even conveyances and building records do not make it clear who that owner was.

Contemporary articles in The New York Times identify the original owner as the HRH Management Corporation, of which the president was Saul Ravitch.

HRH was a well-known contractor but not a developer.

HRH was also described in The Times as working for the Bank of United States, which financed the project.

The Bank of United States, which collapsed spectacularly in 1931, was established in 1913 and was headed in the 1920's by Bernard Marcus, whose aggressive expansionism increased the bank's branches from five in 1925 to 62 in 1930.

No single person or group took the credit for the San Remo, unlike other large projects, which were usually conceived and executed by one clearly identifiable person or entity, like Irwin Chanin or Fred French or Bing & Bing.

Richard Ravitch, a former chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and son of Saul Ravitch, said that his family's firm served only as the contractor for the Beresford and the San Remo and that the developer was the bank itself, probably Bernard Marcus.

Whoever conceived the San Remo benefited from a law passed in the spring of 1929 that permitted high towers on plots greater than 30,000 square feet.

The 21-story Beresford, begun before the law passed, sprouted its three short, stubby towers, but they were for mechanical and water-tank use.

The San Remo, designed in mid-1929 and finished in 1930, was the first of the four twin-tower buildings to go up on Central Park West and had freestanding square towers rising to 27 floors; 10 floors above above the 17-floor base and measuring 400 feet high to the tops of the temple-topped peaks.

Emery Roth, the San Remo's architect, gave the south tower the best apartments, five 13-room duplexes with 22- by 35-foot living rooms.

One was originally offered for rent for $21,000 a year.

The north tower had 10 six-room simplexes.

An ad for the San Remo in The Times in April 1930 called it "as modern as a flying boat, as luxurious as the Ile de France and designed for people who are at home on both."

"Birds in the sky are your only neighbors," the ad said.

The writer George Chappell, under his byline of "T-Square" in The New Yorker, considered the San Remo a successful design but singled out for particular praise a comparatively minor detail; the typical window has the usual swing-out casement, plus smaller transoms above and below.

The top one swings out and the bottom one swings in, providing multiple alternatives for ventilation.