2 Ninth Avenue

 office building  Add category

6-story Arts-and-Crafts style office building completed in 1913. Designed by LaFarge, Morris & Cullen as a warehouse for William Vincent Astor, it is clad in beige brick with stone window sills. A large, suspended black metal awning covers most of the ground floor on both the west and south facades. The upper floors on the south elevation have five bays of single-windows, with the middle three grouped together. The west elevation has four bays of double-windows, and at the north end a single-window bay alternating with smaller single-windows between floors at the stairwell. The roof line has a stone and brick bracketed cornice with a frieze decorated by red diamond shapes.

Ottman & Co., wholesale meat, game, and poultry merchants, was located here for over six decades, beginning in the 1920s. In 1987, this building (as well as the two next door at 1 & 3 Little West 12th Street) were acquired by Peter J. and Richard P. Kleinknecht, of the Kleinknecht Electric Co., which was located here. The building was renovated in 2003 and again in 2013. The ground floor is occupied by Lucid Motors Studio.