Rosie O'Grady's Saloon (New York City, New York) | restaurant, bar, interesting place, commercial building, Irish pub

 restaurant, bar, interesting place, historical layer / disappeared object, commercial building, Irish pub

3-story commercial building completed in 1939. Designed by Buchman & Fox, it is clad in limestone and pink brick above a ground floor restaurant of wood and glass with a black granite water table. A large, black sign band with green upper and lower borders tops the ground floor.

The main upper facade on the avenue is organized into five bays, with banded pink brick at the end bays framing multi-paned double-windows. There are stone spandrels between the windows, and those at the 3rd floor have iron Juliet balconies. The middle three bays are faced in limestone, with paired sets of French doors opening onto iron Juliet balconies between the wide piers. Each set of French doors is topped by a 4-over-2 glass transom. The limestone spandrels are ornamented with carved square panels featuring pineapples. Above the 3rd floor is a central stone parapet with a wide panel outline, stepping up twice to a taller center; each stepped-up section is capped by a corbel band. The end bays are topped by brick parapets with three tiers of stone corbel bands; the wider space between the lower two has a row of embossed rectangles. The restaurant storefronts at the ground floor have sloped canvas awnings, and the entrance near the south end has a rounded red canvas canopy extending out over the sidewalk. Vertical, neon signs are mounted at both the south and north corners.

The south facade on 52nd Street matches the design of the east facade, except that the middle parapet section is missing, instead replaced by a flat metal railing. At the ground floor the west end bay is faced in white-painted brick and contains the entrance to the upper floors, covered by a separate metal canopy.

The building is now occupied by Rosie O'Grady's, a family-owned and operated restaurant that opened in 1973. It is a grand steak and seafood house in the tradition of the great New York saloons. Also housed in the building is The Manhattan Club event space on the upper floors.

In 2023, the restaurant closed after 43 years of operation,

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