Emery Roth's New York Apartment Buildings: Incorporating Mansions in the Clouds by Steven Ruttenbaum

The definitive volume on one of New York’s most iconic residential architects

The long list of apartment buildings and hotels designed by Emery Roth in the 1920s and 1930s includes names that will be familiar to any aficionado of Manhattan real estate: the Ritz Tower, the Beresford, the San Remo, the Ardsley. Roth’s buildings, which ranged across Beaux Arts, Art Deco, and historical revival styles, shaped the ideal of residential luxury that is still called to mind by the phrase “prewar building.”

Emery Roth’s New York Apartment Buildings, the first book to be published on this essential architect in nearly forty years, has two parts. The first is a meticulously researched catalogue raisonné of Roth’s work (including unbuilt and demolished projects), illustrated with new color photography. The second is a facsimile reproduction of Steven Ruttenbaum’s long out-of-print monograph on Roth, Mansions in the Clouds, whose invaluable text is illustrated with copious black-and-white photography of the architect’s interiors and exteriors.

Andrew Alpern is an architectural historian, architect, and attorney who is an expert on historic apartment houses in New York. He has ten prior books, six of which tell the stories of some of New York’s architectural assets and the people behind them. Alpern has also published scores of articles about historical architecture and particular buildings. He donated to the Columbia University Libraries his 50-year archive of the work of writer/artist Edward Gorey, and his 50-year collection of 300 years of architectural drawing instruments, which have been made obsolete by computer drafting. He has been a resident of Manhattan since 1938.

New Yorker writer Paul Goldberger lives in New York City.

Kenneth G. Grant is an architectural photographer with a special passion for the buildings of his native New York. Originally a journalist and web producer, he now records the buildings around him in New York and beyond, showing the results at www.newyorkitecture.com.

Steven Ruttenbaum was an architectural historian and a leading authority on Emery Roth.