But if you take the elevator just a little bit higher, get out on the top floor and walk up one flight of stairs, you will find something decidedly more modest: a long hallway, only about three feet wide, with more than a dozen black doors packed into neat rows like shiny toy soldiers. Behind these doors are tiny rooms, built on a roof overlooking Central Park, which were intended for servants.
Despite their grand location, they were built without embellishment, or even private bathrooms. Today, staff quarters like these are mostly gone, gutted and collapsed into penthouses or large apartments. But at 907 Fifth Avenue and a handful of other buildings around the city, these sparse, monastic spaces are still intact at the buildings' highest point, even though today that loftiness generally makes for the swankiest location.
It's all very upstairs, downstairs — except that it's upside down.
"It would be unthinkable today to put them on the highest floor," John Burger, a managing director at Brown Harris Stevens, said of staff rooms.
"Today," he continued, speaking of a recent penthouse sale at 15 Central Park West, "that's the position of the $88 million apartment."
Until penthouse living became popular in the 1920s, extra staff rooms were often found at a building's highest reaches. Explanations from historians include a reluctance to put wealthy buyers next to rooftop laundry facilities and a distaste for views of puffing chimneys and water towers.
But many of those staff rooms had views of other things, too. Like Central Park.
At the Dakota, on 72nd Street and Central Park West, for example, the windows are much smaller on the top two floors, which were built for the staff.
But even through those relatively small windows, the long and wide views of Central Park can take the air out of your lungs.
Of the several dozen staff rooms originally built at the Dakota, only a fraction remain. The rest have been combined to make larger apartments, as has happened with most servants' quarters around the city.
These composite apartments can have great views, but the spaces tend to lack the flourish and grandeur of apartments on lower floors, because the raw ingredients were so very bare.
Staff rooms were built only a few feet across, with just enough space for a single bed against the wall and a tiny sink in the corner.
They had no kitchens — their occupants would presumably have eaten in the boss's apartment with the other staff members, said Andrew S. Dolkart, the director of Columbia University's historic preservation program. The bathrooms, often shared by occupants of a dozen rooms, were down the hall.
In most cases, they were accessible only by riding the freight elevator or hoofing it up the stairs.
Today, the few new buildings that offer staff accommodations go about it a little differently.
At 15 Central Park West, which opened in 2008, there are two dozen "staff suites," as they are called in broker parlance. They are on low floors at the back of the building, and though they do not have park views, they lack for little else.
"Anywhere else, they would be luxury studios," Mr. Burger said.
Brokers estimate that less than 10 percent of the separate servants' quarters that remain in old buildings are still used as housing — perhaps a nanny here, a child home from college there. Instead, they can be offices, guest rooms or private gyms.
Most often, however, they are elaborate storage closets, where junky old skis and off-season sweaters are bathed in sunlight.
"I don't think I've been up here in maybe two years," Arlene Simon said, standing in her rooftop staff room at 27 West 67th Street, surrounded by cardboard boxes and an old air-conditioner.
She added, however, that her children, now of middle age, used to go up there quite a bit.
"When they wanted to escape from us, this is where they would go," she said.
In Ms. Simon's building, most apartments come with rooftop staff rooms. (When Ms. Simon — who is the president of the preservation group Landmark West! — moved to the building with her husband in 1969, their rent was $600 a month. Similar apartments in the building now routinely sell for over $4 million.)
In general, however, staff quarters are available for purchase or rent, but only by people who own an apartment in the building.
That restriction means the rooms do not appreciate as quickly as they would on the open market — brokers estimate that the bare-bones spaces cost $150,000 to $200,000 — but most residents prefer to limit the rooms to other residents, so they do not have strangers wandering the halls.
"There is a whole process of getting into a co-op; it isn't like joining a gym," said Kathryn Steinberg, a managing director at the Edward Lee Cave Division of Brown Harris Stevens. "They don't want to be somebody's storage facility."
In Ms. Steinberg's apartment building on East 66th Street, there are separate staff rooms scattered on different floors, on narrow little hallways. Servants' quarters like these, especially those on low floors with views of interior courtyards, are much more likely than their top-floor counterparts to have survived into old age. But that does not mean they are any less lonely.
Kirk Henckels, director of private brokerage at Stribling and Associates, owns a staff room on the second floor of his apartment building, at 775 Park Avenue, and that space, though slender, is set up as a nice little office.
Alas, Mr. Henckels said, standing in the room last week, he almost never pays it a visit. Indeed, he said, he had last stopped by about two months before, when a building staff member called to see if he still had the room key.
Mr. Henckels said yes, he did, but asked why the key was needed. "It was because the room was on fire," he recounted cheerfully.
It was a small fire, Mr. Henckels said, probably from a power surge. Then he shrugged, smiled and left the room, locking the door. It seemed unlikely he would return anytime soon.
