Upper East Side Rooftop foliage

Upper East Side Apartment Rooftop has some kind of arbor and signs of foliage..

This could be a penthouse up there, or a communal rooftop terrace. My guess it is probably a penthouse. Some of these buildings have more than one penthouse on the roof...

The exterior of ritzy older buildings tells you very little about what the apartments inside are like. Some of them have a combination of big and small apartments, of different room sizes and of course different lines up the building with different layouts. You can google up the floorplans of many of these buildings if type in the address...

Some of these places are on the grand side, others are just rooms of modest proportions often with small old kitchens. In cooperative apartments, they often rip out some maid's room and expand and modernize the kitchen to look like something in a magazine article on The Kitchen Beautiful.

Many of these places will have a "Master Bedroom" with its own larger bathroom and then sometimes much smaller other bedrooms...most of the older buildings such as this have separate dining rooms. Unless the interior has been totally rearranged along the way in the many years since these places were built.

I often forget that people outside of NYC, while familiar with condominiums, often do not understand how a cooperative apartment building works...here is an explanation from Wikipedia:

A housing cooperative is a legal entity, usually a corporation, renting own real estate, consisting of one or more residential buildings; it is one type of housing tenure. Housing cooperatives are a distinctive form of home ownership that has many characteristics that make it different than other residential arrangements such as single family ownership, condominiums and renting.^[1]
The corporation is membership based, with membership granted by way of a share purchase in the cooperative. Each shareholder in the legal entity is granted the right to occupy one housing unit. A primary advantage of the housing cooperative is the pooling of the members’ resources so that their buying power is leveraged, thus lowering the cost per member in all the services and products associated with home ownership.
Another key element is that the members, through their elected representatives, screen and select who may live in the cooperative, unlike any other form of home ownership.^[1] Housing cooperatives fall into two general tenure categories: non-ownership (referred to as non-equity or continuing) and ownership (referred to as equity or strata). In non-equity cooperatives, occupancy rights are sometimes granted subject to an occupancy agreement, which is similar to a lease. In equity cooperatives, occupancy rights are sometimes granted by way of the purchase agreements and legal instruments registered on the title. The corporation's articles of incorporation and bylaws as well as occupancy agreement specifies the cooperative's rules.
The word cooperative is also used to describe a non-share capital co-op model in which fee-paying members obtain the right to occupy a bedroom and share the communal resources of a house that is owned by a cooperative organization. Such is the case with student cooperatives in some college and university communities across the United States.


When you see the sale ads for some of the cooperative apartments-- millions of dollars-- you think at first, "these people have to be kidding"-- you can buy a big house in one of New York's better suburbs for that kind of money, with a swimming pool to boot...

But people crave their spaces in Manhattan for all kinds of reasons.

Most of these buildings "went co-op" years ago, but some still are rental places, with a very few old rent stabilized apartments where the oldest tenants cling on to their bargain homes. Children of these people used to be able to inherit the apartments at the same low rent but I think they did away with this. Landlords win most of the battles with tenants in NYC, especially with a Mayor like Bloomberg and his officials in office...