Play It Again

THE FANTASY OF AN UPPER WEST SIDE COCKTAIL PARTY WHERE INTELLECTUALS GATHER AROUND THE PIANO IS REAL—THANKS TO DESIGNER ROBERT COUTURIER, WHO HAS TRANSFORMED A STORIED MANHATTAN APARTMENT INTO AN ELEGANT HAVEN FILLED WITH ART AND MUSIC.

- Nancy Hass

If you were to boil down the intellectual history of New York in the last century into a single edifice, chances are it would be an Italian Renaissance Revival building that occupies a full block from 78th to 79th Streets, between Broadway and West End Avenue. With its vast limestone facades and barrel-vaulted entries guarded by doormen in gatehouses, the Apthorp, built by the Astors in 1908, was no longer forbiddingly fancy by the time it entered midcentury lore. Instead, it had become a refuge for professors, playwrights, and eccentrics of all sorts, a high-ceilinged Brigadoon where one could hide from the clamor of the city while being dead in the center of it.

Nora Ephron rented a charmingly ramshackle fifth-floor five-bedroom in the Apthorp for decades, which she later eulogized in the New Yorker. She cooked Thanksgiving dinners for her famous friends and colleagues in her unrenovated kitchen and wrote such classic screenplays as When Harry Met Sally while she was there (conveniently, her sister and writing partner, Delia, had only to scurry across the way from her own apartment in the building). George Balanchine spent most of his career living at the Apthorp, and Lena Horne’s apartment in the building was filled with vintage 78s. Joseph Heller spent 45 years in what his daughter, Erica, in her memoir of him, called “the castle of Apthorpia,” writing Catch-22 and Something Happened while in residence. Woody Allen never lived at the Apthorp, but it is easy to imagine its influence on Manhattan, his love letter to a now-bygone city and era.