Seicho No-Ie Building

 office building  Add category

4-story office building originally completed in the mid-1800s as a townhouse. It was sold to Frank Schaeffler in 1881, who remained in the house at least until 1888. On March 2, 1918 the Queen Mab Realty Co. announced it had hired architect Frederick P. Hill to remodel the old house at No. 247 into a clubhouse for the Prescott Mission, an organization with goals of taking neighborhood homeless boys off the streets, and to educate women in nutrition, economics and housekeeping. The Prescott Memorial Building provided “general club work, a gymnasium, and classes in household economics." Hill had transformed the Italianate brownstone to a terra cotta-fronted institutional building. Sparsely decorated, it gave tepid nods at neo-Gothic, with blind Gothic arches and crockets at the top floor and rooftop finials.

By 1922 the mission had come under the auspices of the Church of the Divine Paternity. The building was renamed the Divine Paternity House, and religious services were also provided here for neighbors. By 1927 the Divine Paternity House had instituted the Baby and Child Welfare Clinic in the building. In 1993 the building was renovated for Seicho-No-Ie, a spiritual group founded in Japan in 1930. The name means “The Home of Infinite Life, Wisdom and Abundance.”

The ground floor is wider than the upper floors, with an extra section on the west end with a metal door. To the right are glass double-doors and two plate-glass windows. The upper floors are clad in limestone, with vertical red-painted bands running up both edges. The 2nd floor has four single-windows with metal vents above them and a sign board for SEICHO-NO-IE NEW YORK. The 3rd floor has three single-windows, with a projecting flagpole below the center one. The top floor also has three windows, underlined by a small cornice, and with arched panels at the piers between each bay. A dark-grey stone roof parapet caps the facade, with a sharply peaked center and finials at the ends.