Room & Board Furniture

 office building  Add category

 Upload a photo

6-story office building completed in 1902 as the Siegel Cooper Dry Goods Store Warehouse/Wagon House Building. Designed by De Lemos & Cordes, who also designed Siegel Cooper's 6th Avenue store, it spans through the block to 18th Street. It was built to house the enormous department store's extensive stable of horses, delivery wagons, and large stocks of goods.

The matching facades have a tripartite design defined by two thick stone band courses spanning the six bays of both elevations. Clad in coursed red brick, the building's piers rest on white stone bases. At the ground floor, the central segmental-arched bay (once the main wagon entrance, and now a storefront window) has an interlocking S-C-Co. logo in the keystone, and is flanked by two circular windows (filled in with brick on the north facade) wrapped in terra-cotta wreaths. The current entrances are in the end bays; green cast-iron framing highlights all of the outer ground-floor bays. At the 2nd floor, above the entrance, there are five narrow windows separated by narrow piers on a dentiled sill course, topped by a bronze panel reading "SIEGEL COOPER CO". The main piers are topped by red terra-cotta winged orbs.

Above the 2-story base, the 3-story midsection has 2x2 windows in each bay, segmental-arched at the 5th floor, with rough-faced keystones. The top floor has similar windows to those below, square-headed and topped with a silver-colored band. The facades both end in brick parapets, having lost the original roof cornices. The western bay on the 18th Street side is filled with metal vents.

By 1913 the expansive 17th Street warehouse was no longer used for storage of goods; but had been converted to the Greenhut store’s cabinet-making shop. For at least two years 20 men worked on custom furniture here. In 1915 the Greenhut operation failed. Eventually Gimbel Brothers purchased the property, retaining it for decades. But by 1940 the department store was no longer using the warehouse and had converted it to offices and loft space. In January that year the Saxon Paper Products Company took space.

The old warehouse building received a startling internal make-over in 1983 when Benny Zucker took over 10,000 square feet for his silk flower business. The flower showroom made way for Barneys New York at the turn of the century. It served as their Co-Op location until 2013 as well as the lower level for their annual warehouse sale. Here the luxury retailer offered customers discounted merchandise for more than a decade. In 2013 Savanna, a real estate private-equity firm, purchased the old Siegel-Cooper warehouse along with the adjacent building at No. 245 West 17th Street. In was renovated in 2014 by Studios Architecture.

The ground floor is now occupied by Room & Board's flagship showroom; the offices above serve as Twitter's East Coast headquarters beginning in 2014. The interior was renovated by Studios Architecture that same year.

daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-1902-siegel-...
www.14to42.net/17street5.html
studios.com/projects/245_249_west_17th_street/
www.jstor.org/stable/community.12082617