27 W 72nd St

The Olcott

The Olcott, a 15-story condo building on West 72nd Street, turns 100 in 2024. The street was lined with mansions in the early 19th century and was so exclusive that only residents — or those delivering their coal or groceries — could drive carriages down it. Later, during the depression, the street was a center for mobsters who set up brothels in many of the apartment buildings on the thoroughfare, an example of how quickly New York City neighborhoods can change, according to Tom Miller, a New York historian and blogger. The area morphed again around World War I, he explains. “Developers were trying to lure people away from private houses into multi-family dwellings, and that was a hard thing to do,” he says. “By providing all the amenities of a hotel — maid service and such — you could lure people into what were essentially apartment buildings. One of the things they would say was, ‘well, this solves the servant problem.’” Although they might still staff a butler or a lady’s maid, they no longer needed chambermaids or cooks. It was still a residential hotel in the 1990s and was converted to condos in the mid-aughts, with Thomas O’Hara as architect. Many Upper West Siders were “curious and enthusiastic” about the conversion, says Cathleen Carmody, a broker at The Corcoran Group who headed up sales when the building launched and is still the primary resale agent there. “It’s located in the Gold Zone on the West Side, a Central Park block in the 70s,” she says. “It was an unusual offering in that it’s a pre-war condominium, and there were only a handful of those on the Upper West Side.” Although there were some investors, many buyers were local to the area and wanted to stay on the Upper West Side, she adds.