Sire Building

 store / shop, pianos, apartment building, commercial building

5-story High Victorian-style residential building completed in 1885. Designed by William Graul for Benjamin Sire, it is clad in red brick with limestone trim above a ground floor re-clad in grey granite. There is a large, central show-window on the ground floor, flanked by entrances on both sides. The east entrance has a deeply-recessed alcove with a glass door in the side accessing the ground-floor retail space. The west entrance has exquisite paneled wooden double-doors to the upper floors. These original doors feature heavy carving (including lions' heads), glass panels with wheel-cut designs, and unusual star-burst oval glass insets. Both the doorways and the show-window have bright blue canvas clamshell canopies.

The upper floors have four bays of single-windows, round-arched on the 2nd floor, where they are framed by slender colonnettes. Another pair of colonnettes are located at the edges of the top of the 2nd floor; between their capitals is a band course with an ornate pattern running below the 3rd floor. Four stone pilasters accents the 3rd floor, with a shorter pilaster between the two middle windows. A decorative string course runs across the shoulder of the outer-bay windows, and all four have flat stone lintels, carved with rosettes at the outer bays. Similar pilasters line the 5th floor, while the 4th floor has brick pilasters (except for the center one, which is still stone).

Above the 5th-floor windows, the original owner's name "SIRE" is carved in the stone beneath the Gothic arch-headed stone lintel at the parapet wall, which rises between the two short sections of brown metal roof cornice. A brown metal fire escape runs down the middle of the facade.

Sire sold the building in 1901, when the former carriage house in the ground floor was converted to a store. It has had a variety of tenants including a Studebaker car dealer in the 1910s, a pet shop in the 1930s, the Museum of the American Piano in the 1980s and 1990s, Klavierhaus, a retailer of custom pianos, in the 2000s, and now Beethoven pianos (since 2013).