1 Astor Place (New York City, New York)

 apartment building, 1883_construction, Renaissance Revival (architecture)

7-story Renaissance-revival residential building completed in 1883. Designed by Starkweather & Gibbs as a hotel, faced in brick, cast-iron, brownstone and terra-cotta. The Broadway facade is nine bays wide, and the Astor Place side has 12 bays, with a chamfered corner at the intersection. The dark-grey cast-iron ground-floor storefront has highly stylized piers, columns, and a cornice.

The upper stories have multi-story decorative red brick piers with carved stone caps, arched fenestration with keystones and decorative spandrels. A prominent, dark-grey bracketed cornice supported on corbels crowns the 6th floor. Above it, the 7th floor has three major bays with grouped fenestration below corbel courses, and a simple molded roof cornice. The facade follows the slight curve of Astor Place.

Built as a hotel with ground-level stores, it was converted to manufacturing lofts within a few years of its completion, as this section of Broadway was becoming increasingly commercial and industrial. A decorative roof parapet was removed sometime between 1940 and 1955. The building was converted to apartments in 1980. The ground floor is occupied by The Gap Women and The Gap Body.