McCutcheon Department Store Building

 office building, bank

144-foot, 13-story office building completed in 1925 for McCutcheon's Department Store. Designed by Cross & Cross with Starrett & Van Vleck, it is also known as the DZ Bank Building. Past building owners have included: KLM Airline, Union Chelsea National Bank, John Hancock Insurance Co., DZ Bank (609 Fifth Avenue Corporation), 609 Fifth Avenue Partners LLC and 609 Owners LLC. The L-shaped building is clad with limestone and ornamented with terra-cotta masonry.

The 2-story base was originally clad in lighter-colored stone, with the piers resting on grey granite plinths, but was remodeled in 2019 to house a Puma flagship store. It is now clad in a glass with black metal framing and a grid of X-braces in three tiers above the ground-level show-windows and glass doors.

The 6-story midsection has smaller single-windows, two in each bay (three at the west end bay and one in the east end bay), but they are arranged uniformly across the facade. There are five per floor on the west facade, where there are also two projecting flagpoles between the outer two windows on each side at the 3rd floor. A stone cornice runs below the 7th floor. The 7th-8th floors have 2-story moldings joining the window bays, with spandrels featuring shields. There are Corinthian capitals topping the piers at the 8th floor, above which is a dentiled cornice running around both main facades.

The top floors are set back, narrowing to four windows on the west facade and 16 on the north. The 10th floor has shallow round-arched above each window. There is a smaller setback above the 11th floor, with another cornice. A final setback occurs above the 12th floor at the middle of the north facade, between the end bays. The east end bay has the windows of the 12th-13th floors grouped in 2-story moldings ending in round-arches; the western of the two windows at the 13th floor is filled in. The west end bay has a wide window across the 13th floor. Both end bay pavilions are topped by ribbed parapets. Fronting the recessed area of the 13th floor are four small, peaked dormers. On the west facade, the middle section ends at the 12th floor, leaving the two end bays to extend up to the 13th, where they have rounded corners and are topped by corbelled parapets.

The rear section of the building's L-shape extends back into the block. Its south elevation has a middle bay of three windows flanked by a bay of paired windows on each side. There are setbacks above the 7th, 10th, & 12th floors. There are large, square windows on the west-facing wall of the rear section, narrowing from four windows to one as the setbacks drop off. There is also a bay of two windows on the south-facing front section near the avenue and above the lower, neighboring building. This section has ornament matching the main facades, including the cornice on the 8th floor. The base is occupied by the Puma flagship store, as well as Vince apparel and accessories, and Joe's Home of Soup Dumplings.

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