It Looked Familiar: Nice Digs

As the caption from an old Thor comic book reads, the sorceress Lorelei lives in that apartment building. The question is which building is it? That slender tower is reasonably recognizable. “Overlooking Central Park” doesn’t narrow it down much, but Central Park West has four similar apartment buildings that have pairs of slender towers above large bases. Two – the El Dorado and the San Remo – have historicist designs to the ornament on the towers. The other two – the Century and the Majestic – are moderne, and look very much like that drawing. Here’s another view that shows the pair of towers and the large base:

Still can’t tell which of the two it is. Finally:

We’ve got it. There’s the building on the left. The low building with the complex roof just to its right is the Dakota, at Central Park West and 72nd Street, and the building to the right of that is the Langham, where we worked on a facade restoration project with Thomas A. Fenniman Architects a few years ago. That puts Lorelei’s home at Central Park West and 71st Street, which is the Majestic.

I’m never surprised when a comic-book artist uses photos as the source for backgrounds, as it saves a lot of effort and makes the backgrounds look more realistic. It is remarkable how faithfully the backgrounds here reproduced the building Lorelei was living in.