33 Gold Street Apartments

 Romanesque (architecture), interesting place, apartment building, Queen Anne style (architecture), 1899_construction

8-story Queen Anne-style residential building completed in 1888 as a utility building. Designed by William Grinnell for Martin B. Brown's Excelsior Power Company, it was one of the first electrical generation plants. Tucked away on narrow Gold Street, the red brick, stone and terra-cotta building features a cast iron sign over the doorway, with a whimsical font. Just below is a terra-cotta sign with the date of construction (1888 A.D.).

The facade consists of two end bays on each side that are in line with the streetwall, and an asymmetrical center section that is recessed several feet back. There is a large round-arch above the cast-iron sign, flanked by three smaller round-arches on the right and one on the left at the 2nd-floor level. Each sits on a base of rough-hewn stone, with additional heavy, rough stone banding on the piers below the main arch, and above the ground-floor windows and doorway. Above the center section's four smaller round-arches are fields of elaborate terra-cotta. The two end sections each have a pair of similar round-arches at the 2nd level, with the windows of the first two floors deeply recessed within the arches.Additionally, both of the side walls formed by the end bays projecting from the center section have a shallower arch; the southwestern one has narrow 1st- and 2nd-story windows, while the northeastern wall has a taller opening that has been bricked-in. All the ground-floor windows are covered by green iron grilles.

The red brick facade continues on the upper floors, which have segmental-arched window openings with brick voussoirs and dentiled stone sills. There are two such openings in the wide bay above the main arch (which projects just slightly forward from the rest of the center facade), two narrow openings in each bay to the right, one wider openings in the bay to the left, and in the far right bay of the center section, a wide round-arch (the only arch that is rounded on the 3rd-5th floors). Each of the end sections has two bays of wide segmental-aches, with a narrow segmental-arched opening on the side wall. This pattern actually continues through the 6th floor on every bay except the main bay, which has another wide round-arch at this level.

The 7th floor has round-arches in each bay; with two in the main center bay, and three narrower openings in each of the end sections. This floor is capped by a brick parapet underlined by a series of small, corbelled round-arches. A small, 1-story section extends above the main center bay, framed by thick piers and having four narrow round-arches.

Along with the power company and his printing business, Brown filled the building with other printing firms and jewelry manufacturers.In the first decades the new building seemed cursed by fire. A fire on Fulton Street on July 29, 1894 damaged the rear of the building. Four years later, on June 1, 1898 the Clark and Zugalla company on the fourth floor caught fire doing $3000 damage. Again, on January 25, 1901 the building caught fire. Through it all the substantial building never sustained serious structural damage.

It was converted to apartments in 1979, with 197 units.

6tocelebrate.org/site/excelsior-power-company-building/
s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/0962.pdf