Plans for the apartment complex were announced in February 1929, with the buildings being financed by stock issues rather than mortgage loans.

The Beaux-Arts Apartments avoided foreclosure due to their financing arrangement and were initially popular among businesswomen.

The apartments are also near the Ford Foundation Building to the south, as well as the Church Center for the United Nations to the east.

Structures such as the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design and the residential Turtle Bay Gardens, Tudor City, and Beekman Tower were constructed for this community.

[7][8] Both apartment blocks were designed by Raymond Hood and Kenneth Murchison as 17-story towers, though only 16 stories are visible from the street.

To comply with the 1916 Zoning Resolution, both buildings contain setbacks on the 13th through 16th stories, similar to the Art Deco skyscrapers of New York City.

[14] On both apartment blocks, the 44th Street facade of the first two stories is clad with limestone,[10] interspersed with horizontal bands of chrome.

[15] The western ends of the buildings' ground stories are slightly beneath the sidewalk, and there are small planted areas behind iron railings.

[16][17] At both buildings, ground-story doors and windows are covered by iron grilles, which are designed as grids of rhombuses, while the walls have triangular lighting fixtures.

[19] The centers of either building have a double-height entrance pavilion that protrudes to the street, with angled bays containing casement windows on either side.

[13][20][21] These corner windows, which were included to show that the exterior walls are non-structural,[20] were built with minimal vertical mullions to avoid obstructing views.

The buildings' western and eastern sides are exposed to varying extents, but all have dark brick stripes at their centers, behind which are stairwells.

[30] Initially, the lobbies of both buildings were decorated in a modern style, with side walls made of brown glass, interspersed with aluminum and brass trim.

[2][16] According to Murchison, the metal-paneled walls of the elevators were designed without mirrors "just to hide from yourself your own appearance when you come in at 4 A.M."[13] The ground story of number 310 had a small restaurant named Cafe Bonaparte, operated in part because most units did not have full-service kitchens.

[17][25][34] Cafe Bonaparte was intended to not only provide room service for residents but also serve as a social gathering place.

[38] The original furniture in the studio apartments had simple furnishings such as kitchenettes and twin-size folding beds.

[13][16] The upper part of the pantries had a sink and kitchen cabinet,[13] while the lower section had mini-fridges designed by General Electric.

[11] Bathrooms throughout the building are built to a uniform size of 5 by 6.75 feet (1.52 by 2.06 m), with a recessed tub, a small toilet, a sink, and black tiling.

[15] Some of the rooms had galleries with wrought-iron railings, which, according to the original renting agent, gave the impression of a spacious house.

[45][46] The institute hired Hood and Murchison to find a site that was "somewhere nearer the architects' and draftsmen's zone of activity", which was in Turtle Bay.

[56] Among the investors in the corporation were Hood and Murchison, as well as architects and designers Chester Holmes Aldrich, John W. Cross, William Adams Delano, William H. Gompert, Charles Klauder, Benjamin Wistar Morris, James W. O'Connor, and Whitney Warren.

[60] Eight suites in the apartments were furnished for potential tenants to view,[42][60] including two units designed by Pierre Dutel in contrasting modernist and traditional styles.

[66][67] According to Douglas Elliman's informal survey of residents, one in five female tenants were married but had leased suites in the buildings for the workweek.

[2] In March 1933, a shuttle bus route started running between the Beaux-Arts Apartments and Grand Central Terminal.

[70] The buildings' rear apartments were more difficult to rent in part because they faced commercial concerns that operated at night, making noise.

[71] The same year, Leon and Lionel Levy filed plans to convert the southern apartment block, 310 East 44th Street, into a hotel.

[72] The Beaux-Arts Apartments' private bus services to Grand Central and Rockefeller Center were discontinued in 1943 by order of the Office of Defense Transportation; at the time, the buses carried 200 passengers daily.

[78] With the expansion of the UN headquarters in the 1970s and 1980s, all of the neighboring buildings to the east were demolished, and new structures were erected, blocking the Beaux-Arts Apartments' eastern facades.

[82] In the book New York 1930, architectural writer Robert A. M. Stern characterized the buildings as the "most interesting side street apartments" of the period between the two world wars.

[83] In 1997, Christopher Gray wrote an article headlined "A Matched Pair of 1930 Monuments to Art Deco" for The New York Times, in which he said of the ongoing restoration: "the original jazz-age optimism of this unusual project is more idea than reality".