Chester Court is a handsome product of the 1920s transformation of the Upper West Side into a neighborhood of major apartment houses. Designed by famed apartment-house expert Emery Roth for developer Sam Minskoff, Chester Court combines a solid, economical, efficient plan with Italian Renaissance-inspired ornament, including some remarkably beautiful multi-colored glazed terra-cotta on its façade, and a handsome lobby including elaborate Adamesque plasterwork on its ceiling.

Emery Roth lived a classic immigrant success story. Sent alone at age 13 by his family in Hungary to the New World, having no formal training but a love of painting, he learned to draw the Classical orders, and then landed a job as a draftsman at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition – the grand Classical “white city” in Chicago. There he met New York society architect Richard Morris Hunt, who eventually hired him for his New York office and sent him up to Newport to work on The Breakers, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s vast “cottage.” Roth went on to become one of New York’s most prolific designers of hotels and apartment buildings of the 1920s and ‘30s, including some of the best-known names: the San Remo, the Eldorado, the Ritz, the Beresford, the Normandy. Though his buildings can be found all over the city, Roth has always been especially associated with the Upper West Side.