ACI Chemical Dependency Treatment Center

 office building, rehabilitation center

7-story office building completed in 1913 as a hospital. Designed by Crow, Lewis & Wickenhoefer, it opened as the Herman Knapp Memorial Eye Hospital. Charles Ekblom, a now-deceased landlord, bought it from Columbia University in the 1960s, and it was leased completely to substance-abuse treatment center ACI.

The building is clad in red brick, banded at the corners, above a limestone basement. The main entrance is at the center of the north facade on 57th Street, with glass double-doors and a tall transom in a molded frame. There are two low basement windows at the sidewalk level, one on either side, with a section of brown-painted stone below the brick of the upper section. Along the avenue the basement grows taller as the street slopes down to the south. The north end has a bay of paired windows, followed by two bays of single-windows, another bay of paired windows, two more bays of single-windows, and an end bay of paired windows (at the basement level, the south window in the end bay is replaced by a metal service door.

The upper floors are edge in banded brick quoins, and the windows have stone sills and splayed brick lintels. On the north facade there are three main bays, with small bathroom windows inserted at each floor between the bays (these openings have been bricked-in at the 3rd-5th floors at the east, and at the 5th-6th floors at the west). A stone cornice with rosettes caps the 2nd floor. The top floor is set off by a smaller cornice below and a narrow band course above, and the center bay on the north facade has a tripartite window. Both main facades are crowned by a black metal roof cornice with roundels and a metal railing on top.

The south facade is concrete and parged brick with one bay of single-windows near the center, and a continuation of the metal railing at the roof line. The north part of the west elevation is clad in beige, parged brick with one bay of windows. Farther back it is clad in brown brick with a bay of paired windows and two bays of single-windows. The south end projects out to the west, with another bay of single-windows. The north-facing wall of the projecting south section has two bays of single-windows.

The building was purchased in 2017 by Extell Development.