Econo Lodge Times Square | hotel, 1873_construction

 hotel, 1873_construction

6-story hotel originally completed in 1873 as a tenement. It is clad in red brick above a beige smooth-stuccoed ground floor. The east facade facing the avenue has three bays of windows, with a storefront on the ground floor. The edges of the facade are framed by red-painted terra-cotta piers decorated with rosettes and vertical grooves. Small cornices separate the floors, and all the windows have red terra-cotta surrounds with delicate, carved ornament in the form of flowers and tracery, also in the spandrels between the 2nd & 3rd floors. There are no windows at the 6th floor, which is faced in plain, red-painted stucco on this facade.

The longer north facade along 47th Street has the main hotel entrance at the far west end, with glass-and-metal doors framed by a pair of projecting, telescoping columns carrying a small entablature that is peaked at the middle and ends, and decorated with a red-painted foliate design. A projecting, square hotel sign is mounted above the left edge of the entablature. To the left of the doors are three bays of large windows and a narrower bay with the opening filled by a poster; all four have short, sidewalk-level openings below the main windows. Further to the left is a narrow service door with a roll-down metal gate.

The upper floors basically symmetrical, with two end pavilions framed by red terra-cotta pilasters like those on the east facade, both containing two single-windows with terra-cotta sill courses and eared lintels of various designs, with similar decoration as the east facade. Small cornices also articulate the floors here. The middle section has two pairs of single-windows in the center, flanked by narrow double-windows, and another bay of single-windows. These all have simpler, flat, red terra-cotta lintels. The 6th floor is stucco instead of brick, and has smaller windows in each bay, all single-windows. A red metal fire escape runs down the middle two bays. At the west end, there is a taller section with one window above the rest of the 6th floor. The ground floor storefront is occupied by NYC Gifts.