In the late 1970s, on the heels of a star turn in the Oscar-winning Annie Hall, Diane Keaton, then just 30 years old, bought a full-floor apartment in the singular San Remo building on Central Park West.
“It was one of those remarkable apartments,” Keaton recalled in a 2017 interview with Wine Spectator magazine. “There was a window on every side. Everything was wide open. That was the beginning of my true interest in architecture.”
Forty years on, Apartment 21C remains a masterpiece, a meticulously restored prewar time warp with three bright bedrooms, a paneled library with its own full bath, a formal dining room, and a sprawling corner living room with coffered ceilings. The apartment’s outsized kitchen features two sinks, a giant hooded Viking stove, and a windowed breakfast room — with highly caffeinated black-and-white floors throughout.
And, of course, this San Remo jewel’s greatest claim to fame may be the San Remo itself. Perhaps the most architecturally imitated residential building in New York City, the Beaux-Arts-style San Remo, designed by Emory Roth and built between 1929 and 1930, is the city’s first twin-towered building — hence its unusual dual street number, 145 and 146 Central Park West. (There are separate lobbies for the building’s northern and southern halves.) The 10-story towers, which sit atop a 17-story U-shaped main building, culminate in temple-like toppers inspired by the 2,300-year-old Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens.
And over the years the San Remo has exhibited a magnetic allure to A-listers from a variety of callings, including Mary Tyler Moore, Barry Manilow, Steven Spielberg, and Steve Jobs, who purchased and renovated a duplex penthouse in the north tower, but never actually lived there, eventually selling to U2 frontman Bono. ‘Material Girl’ Madonna, however, didn’t make it through the co-op gauntlet during her 1985 play for a San Remo apartment. Only one member of the board — you guessed it: Diane Keaton — voted to approve the pop star’s application.
Priced at $14.5 million, Apartment 21C in the San Remo is represented by Corcoran agent Dan Fishman.
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