425 Lexington Avenue · New York
Forty floors of limestone and brass, raised in 1930 for the Mercantile Ledger Company’s four hundred clerks. Reopened this year as forty-eight residences — each one an entry worth keeping.
Floor L · The elevator hall
The lobby was built to slow people down. Verd-antique marble runs floor to cornice, the terrazzo is set in a sunburst that took the Fontana brothers eleven months to lay, and four elevator cabs wait behind brass doors chased with the building’s fan — the same ornament that crowns the fortieth floor.
Residents pass the original ledger desk on the way in: mahogany, brass-cornered, attended daily. Packages, keys, and appointments are still recorded by hand, in ink.
Halloran & Weiss · Architects — Erected MCMXXX — Designated a Landmark of the City of New York · MCMLXXXIX
The directory
The tower steps back twice on its way up — the 1916 zoning resolution, written in limestone. Each setback draws a line in the directory: residences on the broad lower floors, homes above the second setback, and the Crown where the ornament lives.
Floors 05–18
Twenty-seven residences of one to three bedrooms on the tower’s broad lower floors, where the limestone is deepest and the casements widest. Herringbone oak, plaster coves, and window seats cut into walls two feet thick. The clerks had the best light in Midtown; now it falls on breakfast tables.
Floors 19–34
Sixteen half- and full-floor homes above the second setback, each with four exposures and a private landing. The setback roofs at nineteen and twenty carry planted terraces; the corner rooms take the morning over Lexington and keep the west light until dinner. Nothing overlooks you but weather.
Floors 35–40
The floors the city looks up to.
Five homes inside the ornament itself. The gilded sunburst grilles you see from the street are your window guards; the leaded lights throw fans of sun across the floors every clear afternoon. At the top, The Lantern — the duplex at thirty-nine and forty — keeps the finial for a chandelier.
Crown residents ride a keyed cab from the lobby without a stop. The desk sends the mail up; the city stays forty floors down.
By appointment
Viewings are taken the way the building has always taken them: entered in the book, confirmed by telephone, met in the lobby.
