This article originally appeared in the February 2008 issue of Architectural Digest.

It is a city of skyscrapers, and most New Yorkers want to live as high as possible. Top floors are almost always the most sought after, and those who can afford to live in dollar-feathered eagles' nests brag about views that can stretch from the Bronx to the Battery. Until recently, the owner of a newly renovated apartment on Fifth Avenue counted himself in that height-obsessed majority. "I had the mind-set that the higher you are, the better you are," he says.

But that was before he discovered that low views—those from the former mezzanine level of the Sherry-Netherland, for example—can sometimes be just as exhilarating as high ones. You may be able to see New Jersey from a penthouse, but you can't enjoy one of the greatest shows on earth, the never-ending drama of New York City street life. Of course, it helps if your windows look out on one of the New Yorkiest parts of New York, the city celebrated in the movies and the songs. "I don't know of another apartment like it," says Mica Ertegn, head of MAC II, the Manhattan firm that designed the interiors. "If you took one photograph for someone who had never been to New York, this would be the shot," says her associate Mica Duffy. "It would show everything that is so amazing about the city."

That amazing spot is the corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th Street. To the west, across the avenue, is a formal plaza, with a classically designed fountain and an Augustus Saint-Gaudens gilt-bronze statue of General William Tecumseh Sherman. Behind that postcard panorama is the elegant face of the Plaza Hotel and the southern end of Central Park. To the south, across 59th Street, is a more modern plaza, the home to CBS's Early Show and the huge glass cube of one of Apple's flagship stores.

With a remarkable 100 feet along Fifth Avenue and an even more remarkable 125 feet along 59th Street, the apartment is part of the streetscape. "You're basically down on the street," says Bernard Wharton, a partner in Shope Reno Wharton, the Greenwich, Connecticut, firm that did the architectural reconstruction. "You can see the people who walk by, but since people don't look up, they can't see you."

Such a strategically placed people-watching perch occupies the entire floor, 10,000 square feet that once housed such things as a beauty shop and air-conditioning equipment. "It was a wreck, a bomb site," is how Duffy describes what she saw when she first stepped off the elevator. "No-body had given a damn about it for 40 or 50 years."

Where others saw disaster on an unfashionably low floor, the owner, an investment banker, saw a unique opportunity. "He took the dog on the block and showed what it could be," says Jerry Hupy, another partner in Shope Reno Wharton. "My wife and I have never bought anything that was an obvious jewel," the owner says. "It has always been something funky, something that required vision."