754 Ninth Avenue (New York City, New York)

 commercial building  Add category

4-story Neo-Grec/Queen-Anne commercial building completed in 1887. Designed by Thom & Wilson for Charles Lehmann, who ran a butcher shop, it uses contrasting materials and colors--brick, stone and terra-cotta. Brick is used for much of the decorative elements--the imitation quoins and blocks flanking the third floor openings, a sawtooth band course, and recessed panels, for instance.

The ground floor is framed in black cast-iron, with a modernized wood-and-glass storefront. The 2nd floor has a wide, 5-paned studio window with thin, black iron mullion, and white-painted cast-iron framing around the window. The upper floors are brick and terra-cotta, now painted white, with paired windows in the center and single-windows in the end bays. Between the third and fourth floors two panels filled with terra cotta tiles provided visual interest with swirling designs featuring sunbursts and sunflowers. The windows have hooded lintels. The grey sheet metal cornice, with dentils and panels of swags and rosettes, included a stylish parapet in the middle that reads "EST. 1890", although the building was actually completed three years earlier.

Charles Lehmann reopened his butcher shop in the ground floor. The second floor was taken by Brode & Shannon, plumbers and gas fitters. The upper two floors contained apartments, leased to low-income working class families. After having been the neighborhood butcher shop for decades, the ground floor was home to H. Cohen's furniture store by the outbreak of World War I. In 1930 architect Irving Kudroff renovated the commercial floors, including the vast show windows at the 2nd floor. The upper two floors were converted for storage. Charles Lehmann's butcher shop became the Network Theater by 1979, and the Amistad Theater in 1982. By 1981 the Stanley Harrison Acting Studio was also in the building. The ground floor is now occupied by Hell's Kitchen restaurant.