Dover Street Market (New York City, New York)

 store / shop, landmark, Neoclassical (architecture), NRHP - National Register of Historic Places, interesting place, movie / film / TV location, historical building, 1908_construction

6-story Neo-classical commercial building completed in 1908 as the School for Applied Design for Women. Designed by Pell & Corbett, it provided a new home for the art school that was founded by Mrs. Ellen Dunlap Hopkins in 1892 and had outgrown its former space. In 1944 the school merged with Lauros M. Phoenix’s art institute, and in 1974 the school merged again—this time with the Pratt Institute. Renamed the Pratt-Phoenix School of Design it continued to occupy this building. In 1992, the building underwent a renovation, led by Lemberger Brody Associates for use by Touro College. The building was put on the market in 2007 sold the building to Lexington Landmark Properties. It has been leased since 2012 to Dover Street Market, a high-end retail store founded by Rei Kawakubo of the brand Comme des Garçons.

The facade is clad in white brick and terra-cotta with a limestone base. The building, almost exactly half as wide as it is long, has its main facade facing on 30th Street. It is a symmetrical building, the symmetry interrupted only on the facade at the base where the windows flanking the central doorway are of differing heights. The side elevation is completely symmetrical and continues the composition of the facade.

The high ashlar base has deeply revealed windows and an entrance door six steps above the level of the street. Longer tiered windows are to the west of the central doorway and are separated vertically by spandrel panels with twelve panes above the panel and sixteen below. To the west of these windows is a basement doorway which rises to the string course. The double-paneled main doorway is surmounted by a paneled wooden spandrel with a cornice above and a 5-paned transom above that. Pilasters rise alongside the reveals of the doorway. The base is surmounted by a bas-relief frieze composed from casts of portions of the Parthenon frieze (part of the British Museum collection called the Elgin Marbles). Above this frieze rise four polished, unfluted, granite Ionic columns which, with their broken entablature, emphasize the verticality of the building. This entablature, executed In terra-cotta and ornamented with rich classical moldings, is boldly plastic. The tiered windows, set between the columns and the end walls and separated by spandrel panels, further enhance the verticality of the colonnade. The third section of the bulldinq --at the attic story -- is composed of a series of recessed windows aligned with those below, and has simple brick pilasters which accord with the projecting entablature end columns. A cornice of terra-cotta displays ornate acanthus scrolls punctuated by palmettes. The steep gabled roof continues the vertical emphasis of the composition. This roof, of galvanized iron and tin, which was painted green, imitates a copper roof, which the Directors of the School had determined would be too costly. The east facade on the avenue has a single column at its center.

newyork.doverstreetmarket.com/