The practice began as Kelly & Gruzen, founded in the 1930s by B. Sumner Gruzen, and ran under four names before IBI Group acquired it in 2009. Its reputation rests on the Lower Manhattan concrete work of 1959 to 1971 — Chatham Green, the award-winning Chatham Towers, and Southbridge Towers — and on One Police Plaza. A second body of work came in the 1980s development wave, when Gruzen Samton Steinglass designed postmodern masonry towers in Midtown, Lenox Hill, Tribeca, and Battery Park City. Eleven buildings in our catalog carry one of the firm's names.
Who they are
The practice began as Kelly & Gruzen, founded in the 1930s by B. Sumner Gruzen. It ran under four names over seventy years and was absorbed into a Canadian engineering and design company in 2009. Eleven buildings in our catalog carry one of those names, spread across five decades, and the name on a building is a reliable way to place it in time.
Jordan L. Gruzen, B. Sumner Gruzen's son, was born in Jersey City in 1934, took his undergraduate degree at MIT in 1957 and a master's at Penn in 1961, and joined his father's office in 1962. Peter Samton came in around the same period. Jordan Gruzen practiced for six decades and died in January 2015 at eighty.
The name sequence, with the caveat that published accounts disagree on the middle of it:
- Kelly & Gruzen — from the 1930s through the mid-1960s
- Gruzen & Partners / The Gruzen Partnership — Wikipedia dates Gruzen & Partners to 1967, when Jordan Gruzen and Peter Samton became partners; a New York Real Estate Journal account puts Gruzen & Partners in the early 1960s and The Gruzen Partnership at 1967. Both agree the change followed B. Sumner Gruzen's death.
- Gruzen Samton Steinglass — the 1980s and 1990s
- Gruzen Samton — the later form of the same firm
- IBI Group–Gruzen Samton — after the 2009 acquisition by IBI Group, which was itself acquired by Arcadis in 2022
The same trade account that gives 1967 for The Gruzen Partnership dates Gruzen Samton to 1986, but Gruzen Samton Steinglass appears on the architect line of five buildings in our catalog completed in 1986 and later. Where the two conflict, our building pages follow the credit as filed rather than the published firm chronology.
The work
Three distinct phases show up in the catalog, and they have almost nothing in common with one another.
Urban renewal concrete, 1959 to 1971. This is the part of the record that architectural historians care about. 185 Park Row, the central spine of Chatham Green, was designed by Kelly & Gruzen and built between 1959 and 1962: a long, gently snaking reinforced-concrete slab with continuous open access galleries, the first apartment building in New York to use the curving freeform geometry that poured concrete allowed. Each apartment runs the full depth of the slab and draws light and air from both sides.
196 Park Row is Chatham Towers, designed in 1959 and built from 1963 to 1965 — twin twenty-five-story towers in site-cast, board-formed exposed concrete, among the first residential buildings in the city poured and finished on site and among the first in Manhattan with double-glazed pivoting windows. The design team included George G. Shimamoto, Raymond P. Tuccio, Salvatore Caltabiano, Jordan Gruzen, Richard Kaplan, Edwin Paul, Mario Romañach, Melvin Smith, and Peter Samton, with landscape by M. Paul Friedberg.
Southbridge Towers (1969 to 1971) came out of the Brooklyn Bridge Southwest Urban Renewal Area under the Gruzen & Partners name: 1,651 units built by Tishman, one of the largest middle-income cooperatives in the city, and a Mitchell-Lama development until the 2014 privatization vote, with the transition completed in December 2015. The firm's civic work of the same years includes One Police Plaza, dedicated in 1973, a Brutalist block that reads as an inverted pyramid in elevation.
The 1980s development wave. Seven of our eleven buildings date to 1982 through 1989, and they are developer work in the postmodern idiom of the decade. Dag Hammarskjold Tower (1982) is a forty-three-story Turtle Bay condominium with a chamfered, center-grooved corner. 145 East 48th Street, The Cosmopolitan (1986), was built by William Zeckendorf Jr. with Harshad Shah, in rose-toned brick with two rounded piers of stacked bay windows. 303 East 60th Street, Evans View (1986), is a genuine sliver with a pitched crown, angled balconies, and color accents in the Memphis vocabulary of the decade. 304 East 65th Street (1986) is a forty-story Lenox Hill tower built around an unusually complete amenity program.
Downtown, 275 Greenwich Street (1986 to 1987) is red brick with rounded corners and exposed rooftop "birdcage" domes that answer Cesar Pelli's domes at the World Financial Center. Two Battery Park City buildings round out the group: 225 Rector Place (1986), built as the Parc Place rental and converted to condominium in 2008, and The Regatta at 21 South End Avenue, where sources split between 1988 and 1989. Their red brick, stone bases, arcades, recessed balconies, and cornices come straight out of the Battery Park City design guidelines adopted with the 1979 master plan, which told every architect on those blocks what the buildings had to look like. The firm has counted five Battery Park City residential buildings in its own project list.
Contemporary. The Hudson (2004) is the outlier, a mixed-use Lincoln Square tower of eighty condominium residences above an institutional base, credited to Gruzen Samton.
Beyond Manhattan housing, the firm's record includes Stuyvesant High School, dormitory and student-life buildings at Columbia, Cooper Union, MIT, Yale, Cornell, CUNY, and Stony Brook, nine Hebrew Home for the Aged buildings, and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
How the work is regarded
The reputation sits almost entirely with the early concrete buildings. Chatham Towers took the 1964 New York State Association of Architects Award of Merit and the 1967 Bard Award, whose jury wrote that "Kelly and Gruzen have broken new ground with their housing project." Paul Goldberger described the towers as well-scaled, comfortable, and visually attractive. The building is on the Docomomo US register and has been the subject of active preservation advocacy. Chatham Green is treated in the same literature as a genuine structural experiment.
One Police Plaza is a standard citation in accounts of New York Brutalism, and the controversy attached to it has been about the post-2001 security perimeter and the closing of Park Row rather than about the architecture.
The 1980s residential towers get very little critical attention. They were built for developers on tight sites, and they are legible as their decade. Several of them — Evans View, The Cosmopolitan, Greenwich Court — are among the more distinctive buildings of that period on their respective blocks. None of the eleven holds individual landmark designation.
What the credit means for value
The name does not move price, with one qualification. Chatham Towers and Chatham Green trade partly on architectural reputation, because buyers who want them specifically want those buildings. Nothing comparable attaches to the 1980s towers.
The firm name dates the building. Kelly & Gruzen means the concrete years. Gruzen & Partners means late 1960s through early 1980s. Gruzen Samton Steinglass means the 1980s development wave. Gruzen Samton means the later work. If a listing's date and firm name disagree, check the filing.
The 1980s cohort is now at its capital-cycle peak. These buildings are roughly forty years old, which is when facade, window, elevator, and roof cycles arrive together. Reserve balance, assessment history, and the current Local Law 11 cycle should be read before you make an offer. Our Local Law tools check a specific building's exposure.
Battery Park City is a different ownership structure. 225 Rector Place and The Regatta sit on land leased from the Battery Park City Authority. Ground rent and payments in lieu of taxes flow through common charges instead of a conventional tax bill, which is why carrying costs read high against the prices and why the prices sit below fee-simple downtown condominiums.
Exposed concrete carries its own maintenance program. At Chatham Towers and Southbridge, the facade is the structure. Concrete repair, waterproofing, and window replacement in those buildings are not comparable to a brick-and-window building of the same age.
Southbridge Towers has a specific transaction history. The 2014 privatization from Mitchell-Lama and the December 2015 completion of that transition produced ownership and pricing patterns that do not match peer Financial District inventory. Do not comp it casually.
Buying one today
Comp within the phase, not within the firm. A 1986 postmodern condominium and a 1965 concrete cooperative share an architect and nothing else that matters to a price.
Read tenure before anything else. This group includes market-rate cooperatives, a former Mitchell-Lama, ground-lease condominiums, and a condominium conversion of an original rental. Each carries a different financing and resale profile.
For the 1980s towers, the amenity program is often the value. Several were built with health clubs, pools, and garages that later buildings on the same blocks do not have, and the operating cost of those amenities shows up in the monthlies.
Verify the architect line against the offering plan. Four firm names across seventy years, plus co-credits like Abraham Rothenberg at Evans View, mean the listing copy is frequently a generation behind the record.
Working with The Roebling Team
These eleven buildings run from an award-winning concrete cooperative on Park Row to a ground-lease condominium on the Hudson, and the diligence questions are different in every one. If you are buying or selling in one of them, a thirty-minute consultation is the right starting point.
Corey Cohen, Principal The Roebling Team at Compass 646.939.7375 · c.cohen@compass.com
Run the numbers
Related architect spotlights
- Costas Kondylis and Partners — the developer-residential practice that took the same role in the following generation
- SLCE Architects — a parallel high-volume New York firm that renamed itself repeatedly as partners changed
- H.I. Feldman — the postwar apartment-house benchmark this cohort is priced against
Gruzen Samton Steinglass buildings with Roebling building pages
| Building | Completed |
|---|---|
| 145 East 48th Street (The Cosmopolitan) | 1986 |
| 185 Park Row | 1959 |
| 196 Park Row | — |
| 225 Rector Place (Rector Square) | 1986 |
| The Hudson (225 West 60th Street) | 2004 |
| Dag Hammarskjold Tower | 1982 |
| 275 Greenwich Street (Greenwich Court) | 1986 |
| 303 East 60th Street (Evans View) | 1986 |
| 304 East 65th Street | 1986 |
| Southbridge Towers | 1969 |
| The Regatta (21 South End Avenue) | 1988 |
This page reflects publicly available information and The Roebling Team transaction experience, compiled by The Roebling Research Desk from public records and the offering plans held in The Roebling Research Library. The Roebling Team at Compass does not represent any individual building's management, board, or sponsor. Where sources disagree on attribution or biography, the disagreement is noted rather than resolved. © 2026 The Roebling Team at Compass.
Buildings designed by Gruzen Samton Steinglass
