224 Canal Street

 apartment building  Add category

8/7-story residential building originally completed in the mid-late 1800s as two separate structures on a triangular lot, hence the disparity in floor count. Sometime in the early 1900s, the much narrower western building was joined with the eastern structure, and a unifying top floor was added. Both facades are clad in brick, but were re-surfaced in beige and brown smooth stucco during renovations in 2012. There are matching facades on both Canal and Walker Streets.

The wider structure has a higher ground floor, lined with storefronts. Its upper floors are divided into five bays of two windows each, separated by brown-painted pilasters, while the narrower building is three windows wide. Across both facades, the windows on the 2nd, 3rd & 4th floors (and the 5th on the narrower building) are segmental-arched. The next floor has square-headed windows, and the top two floors have round-arched windows. All of the windows have brown-painted molded lintel courses connecting them. There are continuous dentiled sill courses at the base of the windows on the 3rd & 5th floors. On the5th & 6th floors on the wider facade, the 2nd & 3rd bays from the east have three windows in each bay instead of two. The pilaster end at the top of the 6th floor in ornamented capitals supporting a corbelled cornice. A brown-painted, dentiled parapet caps the roof line. There is a very narrow black iron fire escape over the easternmost bay, with a wider fire escape at the two western bays of the wider facade, and a medium-width fire escape over the western two windows of the narrow facade.

On the south facade, the westernmost window bay of the wider building has been filled-in, as it contains the elevator shaft, with a tall elevator penthouse rising above the roof line. A round rooftop water tower is located further to the east. Both the narrow facade and the center bay of the wide facade have iron fire escapes. The narrow end facade of the building facing Baxter Street has two narrow bays of one window each, mostly following the fenestration pattern established on the main facades, but covered by a large billboard from the 3rd to 6th floors. At the top floor, three round-arched windows have been filled in, below a peaked dentiled pediment decorated with a circle above the center window opening. The exposed portion of the western elevation above the neighboring building is faced in plain parged brick.

For most of the 20th century, the building housed commercial and mercantile businesses, and became a hotbed for merchandise counterfeiting operations. All the storefronts along this building were shuttered following raids by authorities in 2009. The renovations in 2012 converted to building to apartments, resurfaced the exterior and installed new storefronts. The ground floor is occupied by TJ's Coffee World, a souvenir stand, and several handbag, jewelry and other merchandise stands.