Overview

About The Century, 25 Central Park West

The sister of the Majestic apartment building several blocks to the north on Central Park West, the Century is one of the masterpieces of developer Irwin S. Chanin, who also built the great 56-story Chanin Building on East 42nd Street and many famous theaters around Times Square such as the Roxy, the Biltmore and the Majestic.

Like the Majestic, it was designed by Chanin's in-house architecture department headed by Jacques Delamarre and assisted by sculptor/designer René Chambellan in a modified Art Deco style.

While the twin-towered massing is similar to that of the Majestic, it differs in its vertical emphasis of six sets of bay windows and, most importantly, in its rounded geometric elements on the west side of the tops of the towers.

At the turn of the 20th Century, the area had many automobile showrooms and in 1908 the blockfront site was acquired by a civic repertory company that erected a theater designed by Carrère & Hastings that opened the next year. For a while, the elegant building, known as the Century Theater, served as an opera house, but was acquired in 1920 by the Shubert theater organization. In his fine book, "Upper West Side Story, A History And Guide," (Abbeville Press, 1989), Peter Selwen noted that the Century Theater played host to performances by the Metropolitan Opera, Konstantin Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theater, Isadora Duncan, Eleanor Duse, Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes, and Max Reinhardt and that its basement for a while had a nightclub hosted by Texas Guinan and that its roof garden also became a nightclub, the Coconut Grove, designed by Joseph Urban.

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