Overview

About Ventana, 150 East 85th Street

This 15-story condominium apartment building was built as a rental in 1988 when it was erected on the former site of Jaeger House, perhaps the most famous German restaurant in the Yorkville section of the Upper East Side.

Jaeger House was an handsome, dark red brick structure that over the decades served as a meeting hall for Nazi sympathizers prior to World War II and in its later years as a disco. Next to the larger and more celebrated Luchow's on West 14th Street, it was the most famous German restaurant in the city.

The transformation of Yorkville, which was New York City's largest German neighborhood, has seen most of its German restaurants closed and replaced by high-rise apartment buildings. In its heyday in the 1960s and early 1970s, 86th Street between Lexington and Second Avenues was one of the city's most gregarious streets, filled with pastry shops, restaurants, taverns and dance halls and singles.

In the early 21st Century, however, the area is much quieter and more sedate. Yorkville has been substantially gentrified and the western portion of it is now known as Carnegie Hill, one of the city's most desirable residential neighborhoods. 86th Street between Lexington and Second Avenue is still a busy place most of the time for shopping but not primarily for its nightlife. A large branch of Gimbel's Department Store was converted to a luxury apartment house on the northwest corner of Lexington Avenue and 86th Street, one block north of this beige-brick apartment house that sports a rather complex façade in the tradition of several nearby towers of about the same generation on 86th Street between Third and Second Avenues.

This beige-brick building has 102 apartments and a very handsome and large wood-paneled lobby with a canopied entrance with double automatic sliding glass entrance doors and a concierge. It has no sidewalk landscaping and is retail space along the avenue is occupied by Blockbusters.    

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