251 Fifth Avenue

 office building  Add category

7-story Queen Anne-style office building completed in 1874. Designed by George B. Post as a French-flats building with ground-floor stores, the building is L-shaped, and the exterior has been extensively altered, including the complete replacement of the lower part of the Fifth Avenue facade, enlargement of its fenestration, and the removal of the original pyramidal corner tower. It now has a 3-story red granite base on the Fifth Avenue facade, shared with the neighboring building to the north. Black, Starr & Frost, a fashionable jewelry firm, operated here from around 1876 to 1913.

On Fifth Avenue, above the granite base, the facade has a wide southern bay and a narrow northern bay. Each floor has a brown cornice with a differing pattern of brackets, each of which also wraps around the the south facade. The wide bay at the top floor has an oculus window set in an elaborately-carved panel.

The south elevation is seven bays wide, with rusticated limestone piers of varying widths at the lower two floors. The ground floor has low, modernized metal-and-glass storefronts, and the 2nd floor has large show-windows, with transoms in the three middle bays. The same style of windows are found on the 3rd floor. The western double-bay has a projecting show window on the 2nd floor, and the eastern double-bay has four windows framed in black cast-iron. The upper floors are clad in beige brick. Two of the three center bays have narrow single-windows next to regular-sized windows. The cornices at each floor match those on 5th Avenue.

The ground floor is occupied by Smoke Gift & Convenience, Juice Eternity, Spiritual Hearing Psychic, Famous Pizza, and Renew Body & Mind Wellness, with Dainty Home on the 2nd floor.