70 Barrow Street

 apartment building  Add category

4-story cooperative-apartment building completed in 1852 as a 3-story firehouse. It was built for the Empire House Company, a volunteer fire brigade. It served for a time, after its abandonment by the Fire Department, as a shoe factory. In 1880 it was raised to four stories and altered to apartments above a ground floor carriage house. The original central doorway is bricked up to a high sill height and has a triple casement window. Two round-arched doorways on either side lead directly to hallways. The ground floor is separated from the upper stories by a continuous cornice, punctuated by the elongated paneled keystones of the arches below. The entire central section of the building, from the ground floor through the third story, consists of a recessed panel. The fourth story is crowned by a projecting bracketed cornice with panels.