Biography of a Building

One Fifth is a persnickety Village co-op with a dramafilled lobby

The Art Deco building has long been an expression of a certain type of New York–ness— where artists who have been here for decades live alongside investment bankers, the doormen leave out cookies, and intra-building relationships and tensions play out in the lobby (and don’t get anyone who lives here started on the lobby).

For almost a century, One Fifth Avenue has quietly loomed over Greenwich Village. The address itself carries gravitas, and the building, a 27-story ziggurat, has long dominated the local skyline, lurking in the background of tourists’ photos of the fountain and marble arch in Washington Square Park. And the goings-on inside its setback walls have, practically since its inception, been a thing of fascination for the rest of the city. It was in One Fifth that Robert Mapplethorpe shot the album cover for Patti Smith’s Horses; where Norman Mailer’s editor committed suicide; and Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter lived together before they split in 2014. The building is now home to both art collectors who bought apartments for under $8,000 in the 1970s and, more recently, CEOs happy to pay millions for a penthouse. Over the years, One Fifth has become as much an idea as it is a real building. “It just said New York to me,” says the novelist Lesley Dormen, “the New York of a time and period that probably every writer idealizes to some extent.”

One Fifth was completed in 1927 by developer Joseph G. Siegel. He recruited the architectural firms Sugarman & Berger and Helmle & Corbett, which had designed such Goliaths as the 30-story Bush

Tower in midtown. The idea, in essence, was to build

an apartment-hotel that would cater to the wealthy, who were drawn to the counterculture that had recently emerged in the area. In the early days, tenants and guests passed through the building’s Doric lobby to attend art auctions, benefit luncheons, and socialites’ crowded salons filled with discussions of Finnegans Wake. Outside, curmudgeonly neighbors complained that the new building was an eyesore, as did The New Yorker, which called it “a pompous shaft.” Still, it was a success: Marketexchange presidents and lawyers looking to live like (or, at least, near) Allen Ginsberg moved en masse into the building’s two- and threeroom apartments, many of which featured serving pantries, private roof terraces, and views of the river.

By 1966, NYU was expanding and, looking “to preserve the character of the neighborhood,” purchased the building outright to use as student and faculty housing. So families and other long-term renters lived in the hotel alongside undergrads who walked their neighbors’ dogs for extra cash and called many of the onetime luxury suites home. But in August 1974, the university— which was nearing the brink of bankruptcy—unloaded One Fifth. Not long after, in 1976, the building went co-op. It was around this time that a handful of artists began moving in. One Fifth was situated blocks from the burgeoning Electric Lady Studios and the newly opened Grey Art Gallery. Plus there was the restaurant on the ground floor, One Fifth. “When I first came to this country, One Fifth bar was like the place to hang out,” says Adam Tihany, a hospitality designer who later purchased a pied-à-terre in the building. Anna Wintour and Lorne Michaels were among the regulars, and the

cast of SNL descended weekly from Rockefeller Center after wrapping up the show with stars like David Bowie in tow. Upstairs, the art collector Sam Wagstaff bought a 27th-floor penthouse for less than $26,000, where he slept on a mattress on the floor, as well as a unit on the eighth floor that he used as a repository for his collection, according to his biography. Patti Smith and her then-partner, Allen Lanier of Blue Öyster Cult, shacked up below, where Smith wrote Babel during her recovery from a near-fatal fall off a stage in Tampa in 1977. In the 1980s, Courteney Cox auditioned for her “Dancing in the Dark” music-video role in Brian De Palma’s duplex apartment, and The Heidi Chronicles author, Wendy Wasserstein, called a two-bedroom on the sixth floor home.

The spirit of One Fifth has changed over the years, and so too have the actual apartments. That’s because more and more residents have scooped up and combined two, three—in some cases, even five—of these slim, former hotel units into 2,700-square-foot fourbedroom Franken-apartments with bamboo flooring and cabinetry, gold-trimmed bathrooms, and unobstructed views of the Freedom Tower. And though their apartments have appreciated by, in some cases, millions of dollars (and as neighbors eager for more space are standing by, ready to pounce), many who bought into the building decades ago say they have no plans to leave anytime soon.

“I moved in 26 years ago, and I think I was too young to realize the magnitude of it,” says Laura Pedone Evans, an art therapist. “It’s special. People knock on my door all the time. My neighbor, who has since passed, wouldn’t even knock—she’d just walk right into my apartment and leave me a plate of Persian rice. Once, it was Brian De Palma. He was asking if he could borrow a lemon.”