170 East 78th Street

170 East 78th Street went up in 1927 as one of the Morgan Studios, a pair of artists' studio buildings that face each other across East 78th Street between Lexington and Third Avenues. Its sister at 167-169 East 78th Street followed a year later and is one story taller. The idea was the same one behind the older studio buildings on West 67th Street and East 66th Street: give painters tall living rooms, big walls to hang work, and as much natural light as a midblock lot allows. When the sister building opened in 1928, The New Yorker praised the Morgan Studios for duplex apartments with two-story studios averaging 28 by 17 feet, fireplaces, and huge banks of windows, and noted that no two apartments were identical.

That program still shapes the building. CityRealty describes a handsome Art Deco red-brick facade over a one-story limestone base, with a one-and-a-half-story limestone and gray marble entrance and most windows still in their original multipaned pattern. Inside, about half the apartments have double-height living rooms with ceilings of roughly 13 feet and oversized casement windows, many as large as 9 feet tall, and the living rooms have wood-burning fireplaces. Some layouts climb a few stairs to the living room or tuck a bedroom or office on an upper level, so floor plans vary from line to line. Josh Garay's 2022 sale of Apartment 3F, a roughly 986-square-foot one-bedroom with an office, had a 29-foot by 14-foot living room with a 12-foot ceiling, period wainscoting, and a 9-foot by 7-foot-6-inch south-facing casement window.

The Morgan Studios were rentals for decades and became a cooperative in 1989. Today it is a small, full-service co-op with a marble lobby, a doorman, and a live-in resident manager, but no gym, roof deck, or garage. Listings describe the board as allowing up to 50 percent financing, pied-a-terres, and pets with board approval, with a 2.5 percent flip tax paid by the buyer. Across the street stand the 1861 row houses at 157-165 East 78th Street, among the oldest townhouses on the Upper East Side, a New York City Landmark since 1968.