261 Canal Street

 office building  Add category

6-story Italianate-style office building with commercial storefronts, completed about 1857. The building owes its unusually-large footprint for a building of this period in SoHo to the fact that the site had been occupied by the St. Vincent de Paul Roman Catholic Church complex. Originally five stories, the sixth floor was added on as a later time, possibly after a major fire destroyed the building’s upper floors in 1878. It has a dark grey-painted cast-iron ground floor with Corinthian columns. On Canal Street, the upper floors are clad in white marble,with quoins at the corners. The windows have full enframements (except for the newer top floor), with corbelled feet and triangular pediments over some of the 2nd floor windows. A metal fire escape runs down the center of the Canal facade, which is topped by a black metal cornice with large modillions.

The Howard Street facade has the same base, but the upper floor windows have cornices supported by scrolled brackets instead of the marble enframements found on the opposite side of the building. A narrow fire escape runs down the center of this facade,

Over the years, the building was occupied by a variety of commercial interests ranging from dry goods firms to carriage makers, paper supply companies, and radio manufacturers, to later housing restaurant equipment companies and camera importers. The ground floor is occupied by Necessary Clothing.