Both towered above their older, more dignified neighbors, while making unconvincing references to prewar materials and details, Ms. Huxtable said, like a smarmy tip of the hat. Thirty years later, it appears that both buildings have aged much as her criticism suggested they would. They might be moneymakers, but they are still, it is generally agreed, awful to look at.

“You can see why she was so upset,” Jorge Otero-Pailos, an associate professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, said of 800 Fifth Avenue. “All you have to do is look at the building.”

Take 1001 Fifth Avenue — a 23-story building with a facade designed by Johnson/Burgee, firm of the famed architect Philip Johnson — which stands opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Solid lines of black bay windows stretch along its length, dark gashes slicing through its limestone facade. (It is on this facade that Ms. Huxtable’s Tootsie Roll moldings reside.)

Perhaps the most unusual element is at the top, where the limestone facade extends beyond the roof for an additional story or so, just a lonely slab visibly propped up from behind, which lends it the look of a budget movie set, or perhaps a toupee.

“This sort of thing does not age well,” Peter Pennoyer, of Peter Pennoyer Architects, said.

Apparently, buyers agree. Compared with most of the universe, the prices found at 1001 Fifth Avenue are frighteningly expensive. But compared with its Fifth Avenue neighbors, mostly prewar co-ops on one of the most extravagant stretches of the city, 1001 Fifth has not appreciated especially well.