Gerken Building

 apartment building  Add category

14-story cooperative-apartment building completed in 1885. Designed by George Edward Harding and William Tyson Gooch of Harding & Gooch as an office building for the New York National Exchange Bank, it has a very impressive entrance surround with a deeply inset arch and two Ionic columns. Above the doorway is a faded etching with the bank's name. The lower three floors of the building are clad in brown brick (with black cast-iron on the ground floor) and capped by keystones, cartouches and a string course with Greek-fret pattern. The upper floors are covered with rusticated limestone, with paired windows. There is a chamfered corner facing the intersection, and another string course above the 10th floor. The 12th-floor windows are capped by round-arches, with festooned cartouches between the bays. The 13th floor has three deeply-recessed windows in each bay, with cartouches on the piers, and topped by a white modillioned and dentiled roof cornice. The top floor rises above the cornice. The exposed portion of the south and west elevations are clad in brown brick with a variety of differing window shapes and sizes.

The ground floor is occupied by a Capital One Bank branch, originally occupied by the New York National Exchange Bank.