The Plant

 office building, 1931_construction, commercial building

123-foot, 10-story office building completed in 1931. Designed by Thomas W. Golding, it has a long frontage along 44th Street, with a narrow wing extending through the block to 322 West 45th Street. The current name comes from a former long-time tenant, the Record Plant studio, where many notable musicians recorded albums, including John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Aerosmith, Jimi Hendrix and Van Halen, among numerous others. The building now serves as the headquarters of the New York Observer.

The New York Observer is a weekly newspaper first published in New York City on September 22, 1987, by Arthur L. Carter, a former investment banker with publishing interests. The Observer focuses on the city's culture, real estate, media, politics and the entertainment and publishing industries. Since July 2006 the paper has been owned and published by the American real-estate mogul Jared Kushner. The paper has its headquarters here on West 44th Street. The famous "Birdland" Jazz Club is located on the street level.

The facade is clad in buff-colored brick above a 2-story base of limestone, brick, and iron. The center section is organized as five main bays of unequal width. The middle and outer bays have black cast-iron storefronts under suspended awnings. The western two have four pairs of narrow windows with transoms, above decorative cast-iron panels, while the eastern one has a door inserted at its west side and three single-windows above the cast-iron panels to the right; it has a sloped canvas awning instead. All three have four large window panes at the 2nd floor, above four black cast-iron spandrels decorated with small rosettes in front of a wavy background pattern. The westernmost of these bays is wider, with banded wooden panels flanking both sides. The eastern of the two intermediate bays in the middle section is wider, and has the main entrance, clad in thin, grey, horizontal panels, with recessed glass doors. The remaining bay is faced in beige-gold brick, with an iron-framed restaurant entrance at the ground floor, and a single large window at the 2nd floor. At either end of the facade, the outer sections consist of a cast-iron storefront like those in the middle section, but wider, with five pairs of narrow windows above the decorative panels (five single-windows at the eastern end), and five windows and spandrels at the 2nd floor. Flanking each of these is a storefront entrance and a service entrance in bays of white-painted limestone. There are large single-windows at the 2nd floor above the entrances. The entire base is capped by a broad, painted limestone cornice.

The brick upper floors have 11 bays. There are three in the middle with triple-windows, divided by black iron mullions, flanked by wider bays of four windows. At each end are three more bays of triple-windows. The middle bay of each 3-bay end section, and the centermost bay, extend one floor past the setbacks of the bays on either side, at the 8th floor, and are capped by triangular pediments, with dentil courses, shields at the tops of the piers, and a large cartouche below the pediments. The two 4-window bays extend even higher, up the to 10th floor, where the roof line is marked by a thin dentiled band, slightly higher between the piers. These two bays also have cartouches, of a slightly different design, at the top floor. The other bays set back to the recessed upper wall, where a balustrade runs across the top of the 9th floor, between round-arched capitals on the piers. Except for at the two projecting pavilions of the wider bays, the rest of the 10th floor is windowless, ornamented with green medallions, and capped by stone coping that is stepped up at the center of each 3-bay segment.

The west elevation is clad in red brick at the front, and buff-colored brick at the rear. There is one bay of single-windows at the front section, flanked at the 5th floor by a pair of windows at the front edge, and one more behind it. The rear section has four bays of paired windows. The east elevation has a 2-bay recessed section of double-windows at the rear; the rest of the front of the elevation features a colorful mural by FAILE (a Brooklyn-based art collective), filled with images and text referencing the music building's musical history. The mural surrounds two bays of triple-windows near the front of the wall, and was painted in 2013.

The side elevations of the narrow 8-story wing extending to 45th Street are clad in red brick, with scattered bays of single- and double-windows. The north facade of the 45th-Street wing is clad in buff-colored brick above a 1-story base of painted limestone. The upper floors have triple-windows at the east end, and a group of four single-windows between vertical piers at the west. This groups culminated in a triangular pediment above the 5th floor, with a second triple-window at the 6th floor. The top two floors are set back, with two bays of triple-windows.

The north wing is occupied by the Broadway Dance Center, and Sweet Caroline's Piano Bar & Comedy Club, and the ground floor on 44th Street is occupied by Peachy Keen restaurant, Gyu-Kaku Japanese BBQ, and Birdland Jazz Cafe.

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