Le Normandy

The Normandy is a cooperative apartment building at 140 Riverside Drive, between 86th and 87th Streets, adjacent to Riverside Park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. Designed by architect Emery Roth in a mixture of the Art Moderne and Renaissance Revival styles, it was constructed from 1938 to 1939. The building was developed by a syndicate composed of Henry Kaufman, Emery Roth, Samson Rosenblatt, and Herman Wacht. The Normandy is 20 stories tall, with small twin towers rising above the 18th story. The building is a New York City designated landmark. The lowest 18 stories of the building are H-shaped, flanking courtyards to the west and east. There are numerous setbacks, some of which double as terraces. The first two stories are clad in rusticated blocks of limestone, with horizontal Art Moderne-style horizontal grooves. There are two semicircular entrances at ground level. The remainder of the facade is made of light brick with cast stone ornamentation, as well as movable windows and curved corners. The building has a sunken lobby leading to two elevator banks. On the upper stories, there were originally 250 apartments, each with two to seven rooms. The rooms are generally more compact than in earlier luxury apartment buildings, with many rooms arranged around central galleries. There is a double-level penthouse suite in each tower with seven rooms. The building, possibly named for the French ocean liner SS Normandie, replaced twelve row houses built in the late 1890s. Plans for the Normandy apartment building were announced in August 1938; the building opened in September 1939 and was the last major apartment house developed on the Upper West Side before World War II. The Normandy was resold in 1944, 1952, and 1960. The building was converted to a housing cooperative in 1979 following a failed conversion attempt in 1971. The building was designated as a city landmark in 1985 amid a controversy over window replacements.