James E. Ware (1846–1918) was the New York architect whose defining commission is The Osborne (1885) at 205 West 57th Street — among the oldest extant luxury apartment buildings in New York City and a National Register property. The Osborne's Romanesque Revival massing, rusticated brownstone exterior, and the interior program of Byzantine lobby (with surviving Tiffany glass and La Farge / Saint-Gaudens decorative elements) established a luxury-apartment standard a full decade before the broader Manhattan high-end apartment cohort emerged. The building's irregular layouts — a function of the era's experimental apartment planning before the standardized post-1900 floor-plate vocabulary took hold — produce significant per-unit variance in size and configuration that continues to define the building's resale market. Ware's broader portfolio includes substantial tenement-reform work and several other Manhattan residential commissions of the 1880s–1890s; the Osborne remains his most influential surviving building.
Buildings designed by James E. Ware
The drawings are public. The rest isn't.
How these buildings have actually traded, which lines deliver what the plans promise, and how each board handles financing and approvals.