THIS IS PARK AVENUE

Ashe Leandro brings downtown cool all the way uptown.

- NANCY HASS

Park Avenue from East 57th to 96th Street is as much a literary and cultural allusion as it is an address. With a meticulously landscaped median, the Manhattan boulevard is a two-mile gauntlet of elegant brick apartment buildings in shades from buff to earthen, with liveried doormen and Renaissance Revival and neo-Gothic exterior ornament. Designed largely between the Gilded Age and the Great Depression by such architects as Emery Roth and Rosario Candela, this stretch of rarefied real estate is mostly void of the quaint rowhouses and twee storefronts found on nearby Madison or Lexington. The writer Gay Talese immortalized it in the 1970s as "the Park Avenue of poodles and polished brass; it is cab country, tip-town, glassville, a window washer's paradise."

As such, strolling the neutral-hued brick canyon of Park Avenue on an early summer afternoon, it is the architectural outlier that beguiles: On a corner in the 90s stands a stark white four-story structure, stuccoover-brick-a cheery cube that cuts through the staid neighborhood like a splash of Aperol. With nearly 40 steel-framed windows in its stocky facade, it seems equal parts fortress and aerie.