355-357 West 53rd Street

 apartment building, Italianate style (architecture), 1871_construction

A pair of matching 4-story Italianate residential buildings completed together in 1871. The unified facade is clad in brick painted dark blue-grey. The matching halves have separate entrances reached by a few steps with low sidewalls; each has a metal-and-glass door with a sidelight and transom, flanked by large light fixtures. The doorways are both set beneath large, black, arched lintels and flanked on either side by a pair of tall, narrow windows with black, bracketed stone sills and arched black metal lintels. There are low basement windows at the sidewalk level.

The upper floors have four bays of single-windows at each half of the facade, with matching black stone sills and arched lintels. The facade is crowned by a pair of matching black metal roof cornice with brackets, modillions, and panels, identical to those on the neighboring buildings to the east.