401 West 50th Street (New York City, New York)

USA / New Jersey / West New York / New York City, New York / West 50th Street, 401
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5-story residential building completed in 1894. It is clad in orange brick with red-painted brownstone trim above metal, glass, and stucco ground-floor storefronts. The main residential entrance is near the center of the south facade on 50th Street. It has a metal-and-glass door at the top of a couple steps, set in a round-arch. Textured, red-painted stone columns project in front of and next to the top half of the door, springing from large bases, and support a foliated architrave of the arch, with a cornice on top. To the left is a tall, narrow window.

The upper floors have a single-window bay at the west end, followed by two bays of paired windows separated by a projecting brick pier. Farther to the east is another bay of paired windows, separated by a matching projecting pier section from a single-window bay. Next is another paired-window bay and a rounded corner bay with three single-windows spaced around the corner. At the 2nd floor the windows have flat, red lintels connected by red-painted bands. The projecting brick pier sections begin near the tops of these windows, with red-painted stone bases. A red-painted band with a sawtooth course below it runs along the bottom edge of the 3rd-floor windows, and brick spandrels with dogstooth brickwork patterns separate the 3rd & 4th floors within each bay. The 4th-floor windows are topped by brick segmental-arched topped by red-painted brownstone lintels, except at the west bays where they have been removed. The projecting piers have three vertical grooves spanning the 3rd-4th floors. The windows of the top floor are similar to those on the 2nd.

On the east facade facing the avenue, to the north of the rounded south corner, there is a bay of paired windows, a bay of wider-spaced paired windows, another bay of narrower-spaced paired windows, and a north bay of single-windows. The ornament is similar to the south facade, but without the projecting brick piers. There are two black metal fire escapes running down the narrow paired-window bays.

Both main facades are crowned by a dark-green metal roof cornice with paired brackets and a frieze featuring lions' heads and swags. The cornice wraps around the rounded corner. The ground floor is occupied by Hibernia bar & grill, Green Rancho/Rancho Tequileria, and Nica & Sam hair salon.
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Coordinates:   40°45'49"N   73°59'20"W
This article was last modified 4 years ago