156 West 48th Street

 historical layer / disappeared object, commercial building

 Upload a photo

5-story mercantile building completed in 1920. The building was occupied by Manny's Music, which was open for 74 years. Manny Goldrich, who sold brass instruments in the early 1930s, opened the shop on 120 West 48th Street, known as Music Row because of its proximity to Broadway, recording studios and the Brill Building, where many music publishers had offices. The store hit its heyday in the 1960s, when British Invasion bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who made Manny’s a must-stop destination upon landing in America. The store moved over to this building in 1965 when the Rockefeller Center bought the original property for new development. In 1999 the Goldrich family sold Manny's and the brownstone building at 156 West 48th Street to its chainstore rival across the street, Sam Ash, who, in turn, maintained Manny's as a subsidiary and retained its staff and family managers until 2009. The Sam Ash store now sprawled into several buildings on both sides of the street, until moving to 34th Street in 2013.

The building at 156 West 48th is clad in brown brick above a 2-story base of white-painted brick and iron, with delicate and intricate foliate patterns decorating the piers, spandrels, and tops of the 2nd-floor windows. Both floors are organized into a wide middle bays and smaller end bays. The ground-floor bays are recessed, with a storefront in the middle, service door at the east, and paneled wooden door to the upper floors at the west, all painted white. The 2nd floor has large plate-glass show-windows.

The upper floors have four bays of windows with stone sills, brick lintels with keystones, and white-painted exterior wooden shutters. There is a large sign band below the 3rd-floor windows. A large, projecting, black metal, vertical sign with a clock at the bottom is attached to the west edge of the facade, from the 3rd-5th floors. The roof line is marked by green metal coping, with a central green metal chimney vent stack.