The Langham (135 Central Park West)

The Langham is among the oldest tier-one residential addresses on Central Park West, predating the Art Deco twin-tower era by more than two decades. Completed in 1907 — when CPW was still establishing its identity as a residential corridor — the building represents the early luxury apartment-house tradition that the later Art Deco landmarks would build upon. Its architects, Clinton & Russell, were among the principal designers of New York's early skyscrapers; the firm's signature on the Langham is a careful Beaux-Arts-influenced composition with a relatively modest 13-story height and substantial floor plates.

The Langham occupies a particularly important position in CPW's architectural canon: it sits between the Dakota (1884, half a block south) and the Beresford (1929, half a block north). Its smaller scale and earlier vintage produce a quieter, more residentially-intimate building than the Art Deco landmarks that surround it. Unlike its neighbors, however, the Langham operates as a rental rather than a cooperative — apartments are leased, not owned.

For Manhattan luxury buyers, the Langham appears in conversation primarily as an architectural reference point and as a comp adjacent to the cooperative CPW trophies, rather than as a transactable address. If you're researching the building because you want to live on CPW, the Langham's rental structure offers a path to occupancy without a board-approval process or shares purchase. If you're researching because you want to own on this block, the cooperatives across the street — the Dakota, the Beresford, the San Remo — are the closer apples-to-apples comp set.

Development history. The Langham was developed by Abraham Boehm and Lewis Coon, who acquired eight lots in 1902; construction ran 1904–1907 at a cost of $2 million. Clinton & Russell were simultaneously designing the massive Beaux-Arts Astor Hotel on Broadway — making the Langham a contemporaneous companion commission to their most famous hotel work. A 1906 New York Times line on the building: "To what extent the idea of magnificence may be carried in apartment-house building is well shown in the Langham."

Notable original residents and events. Early residents included William C. Brown (president of New York Central Railroad), Martin Beck (theater owner and Houdini's booker), Thomas A. Sperry (founder of S&H Green Stamps), George Westinghouse, and Irving Bloomingdale. Notable events included Margaret Brown's secret 1910 wedding to a Yale student, Thomas Sperry's 1913 death after ptomaine poisoning, Helen Knickerbacker's January 1922 suicide from an 11th-floor window, and Leopold Schepp's 1925 commencement of his $10 million philanthropic estate distribution.

Architecture and unit composition

The neighborhood

For the full corridor — architecture, schools, transit, and pricing across Central Park West — read The Roebling Team Guide to Central Park West.