By Carter B. Horsley
This building is probably best known for having a large supermarket in its basement with escalator access to the side-street, but its virtues are really more visible as its façade is one of the most appealing of the new crop of buildings that brought a renaissance to Broadway in the 1980's.
The design by Schuman, Lichtenstein, Claman & Efron with Alexander Cooper & Partners for developer Ian Bruce Eichner has a very handsome horizontal fenestration pattern that is appropriate for its full-block frontage on the "boulevard." The window casements are white and the brick is a light-colored red giving the large building a solid, but not somber look.
The 23-floor cooperative building has 354 units with 4 passenger and two service elevators. The building has a concierge, doorman, garage, health club and pool, a sundeck and racquetball and squash facilities.
Its southeast corner is rounded and there are some double-height apartments on the north facade. The top three floors have a different facade treatment that is not too successful considering how nicely the rest of the building was designed. Beneath them the facade has two floors with light-colored banding, a theme that is repeated abovve the two-story base. It is interesting that the developers opted not to provide a curved corner at 87th Street.
The building has a relative small entrance on the avenue that has a metal marquee that is angled upwards in a rather awkward and not very successful effort to be "modern."
This 23-story building occupies the west blockfront on Broadway between 86th and 87th Streets. It was erected in 1988 and contains 354 residential condominium apartments.
It was designed by Alexander Cooper & Partners and Schuman, Lichtenstein, Claman & Efron. It has a rounded corner at 86th Street and the top six floors are set-back in two-story increments and have mostly glass facades in contrast to the warm red brick facade of the building's large base. The mass of the base is broken up somewhat by a narrow indentation close to 87th Street that marks its entrance which has an angled upwards marquee, and by the fact that it has beige-brick banding and the 3rd and 4th floors as well as the top two floors of the base. In their great book, "New York 2000, Architecture and Urbanism Between the Bicentennial and the Millennium," Robert A. M. Stern, David Fishman and Jacob Tilove noted that Mr. Cooper described the Belnord right across Broadway as "formidable, marvelous, chunky" and the authors added that "The Boulevard was formidable and chunky, if not especially marvelous, filling its 30,447-square-foot site with 24,740 square feet of retail space and medical offices on four floors (including two basements), parking for 124 cards and 354 apartments." The building has a concierge, doorman, garage, health club and pool, a sundeck and racquetball and squash facilities.