MacIntyre Building (New York City, New York)

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191-foot, 11-story Romanesque-revival cooperative-apartment building completed in 1892. Designed by R.H. Robertson as an office and store building, it is L-shaped, and faced in limestone, brick and terra-cotta with ornamentation derived from Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque sources. A corner tower crowns the roof at the Broadway-18th Street intersection.

The Broadway facade of the Maclntyre Building is in an unusual tripartite vertical composition with a 2-part, 4-story base; a 5-story mid-section; and a 2.5-story top. This very narrow facade (24 feet across) with a single major bay includes one, two, or three windows framed by massive corner piers. The ground story is part of a single storefront unit with an iron and glass projecting bay window that wraps around the corner of the building so that there is a stone pier on the north side but only glass around a visible interior column on the south. The limestone pier, rising out of a polished granite base is articulated by an engaged colonnette with an intricate Byzantine capital, and merges with a horizontal spandrel capped by a molding. At the top and side of the bay window is a concave molding with decorative bosses. This molding terminates at the bottom in a carved animal mask. At the upper corner of the ground level is a richly carved crest set in leaves with lions' heads. The iron and glass bay window itself has thin classical colonnettes supporting a projecting cornice, linteled doorways, and a decorative grille at the base of the corner. Only the doors themselves have been modernized.

The upper 3-story part of the base, also in limestone, is framed in a lightly scored but smooth wall articulated by corner colonnettes and continuations of the ground level colonnettes, and is crowned by a cornice. Three windows at each floor are set off by Byzantine columns rising from recessed spandrel panels.

The 5-story midsection is articulated by 4-story giant Doric brick columns that culminate in a 5-story giant arch with what appears to be terra-cotta decorative detail. The embellished capitals are connected by an embellished belt course. The arch spandrels contain rich ornamentation and smooth enframed marble panels. This level terminates in a cornice. At each floor except the arch is a pair ofwindows. Each pair is framed differently in moldings, columns, colonnettes, panels, and belt courses, with the upper pair arched.

On this facade the top level is one side of a 2.5-story square tower. It is framed in massive corner piers crowned by domed caps with fleur-de-lis finials. The outside corners of the piers are articulated by engaged colonnettes culminating in richly carved ornament. The upper parts of the piers are faceted with shallow niches. Between these piers is a steeply pitched gable in front of a tiled pyramidal tower roof. The gable is crowned by a giant cruciform finial; the roof is crowned by a flag pole with a copper base. The eaves of the gable are articulated by concave moldings with bosses. Windows in the tower consist of two stories of three windows culminating in an arcade, fronted by semi-circular balconies, with carved lunettes, all beneath a single round window in thegable. Wall surfaces in the tower are brick with ornamental features in a mixture of terra-cotta and carved stone.

The East 18th Street facade multiplies the single-bay Broadway facade design into five bays. The tower projects only above the corner bay and thus only the corner bay is identical to Broadway from ground to roof; the ground-floor storefronts are recessed instead of projecting as bay windows east of the corner bay. The top level (10th floor) east of the corner tower is a continuous Byzantine arcade, identical to that in the corner tower except for a more pronounced cornice. This long, horizontal motif is framed by massive brick piers at either end; in between, the rising vertical piers of the brick-clad iron and steel structural skeleton are de-emphasized by receding them behind the colonnade and articulating them with relieving arches identical in size to the windows on either side. These vertical piers project above the cornice where they are tied together by iron bars.

The building was built for Ewan McIntyre (who spelled his named without the "a", even though the building name includes it). The ground level was first occupied by the Sherman Bank which opened in 1892. An oval skylight and decorative details from the banking room still survive. In 1910 the Greenwich Bank occupied the corner space, and in 1928 another bank had the ground floor remodeled. Early upstairs office tenants included numerous small companies dealing in the clothing and dry-goods industries of the neighborhood.

In 1944 the MacIntyre Building Corporation had at least some of the offices converted for factory use. Sometime in the late-1970s, on the seventh floor of this building, there was an illegal nightclub called the Cobra Club. Its theme was a terrarium full of live snakes. When new owners of the apartment renovated, they found shed snakeskins in the backs of closets and so on. For years afterward, live escaped snakes were still being found.

The elevator lobby and main door were remodeled in recent years when the building was converted for mixed residential and commercial use. The ground floor is occupied by Sleepy's mattresses.