The Congress (New York City, New York)

 apartment building, 1924_construction, commercial building, Renaissance Revival (architecture)

161-foot, 15-story Renaissance-revival residential building completed in 1924. Designed by George F. Pelham, it is clad in buff-colored brick above a grey-painted stone ground floor. The main entrance is at the middle of the south facade on 54th Street, with wood-and-metal double-doors in a stone molding, topped by a frieze with three shields and floral ornament below a dentiled cornice. The dentils extend the rest of the width of the facade. Above the doors is a rounded, navy-blue canvas canopy. There is a single-window on either side of the entrance, taller at the east. The rest of the south facade has storefronts - of metal and plate-glass to the west, and of wood and glass to the east. At the far east end is a stairway up to a verandah along the edge of the building, covered by a rounded blue canvas canopy that extends down the stairs out then out over the sidewalk.

The upper floors on the south facade have two bays of single-windows in the middle, flanked by small bathroom windows, another bay of signle-windows, a bay of paired windows, and two outer bays of single-windows, all with simple stone sills. A dentiled stone cornice caps the 3rd floor, with a frieze of foliate and floral ornament. Another cornice caps the 12th floor, and the 14th floor is crowned by a projecting, brown metal roof cornice with large brackets and dentils. The penthouse level on the top floors is set back from the cornice.

The west facade on the avenue is also lined with metal-and-glass storefronts at the ground floor, and the upper floors have five bays of paired windows. Cornices cross the facade at the same level as those on the south facade, and both main facades are dotted with protruding air-conditioning units. The east facade is also brick and has a bay of single-windows at the front, followed by a bay of smaller bathroom windows, a bay of double-windows, and another bay of small windows.

The building contains 54 apartment units. The ground floor is occupied by Faces and Names lounge, 7th Avenue Cameras and Luggage, New York Attitude Gift Shop, Kaffe A Kaffe by Lavazza coffee shop, and Smoke Scene smoke shop.