West Chelsea Arts Building

 office building, art museum / art gallery

10-story Industrial Neo-Classical office, gallery & museum building completed in 1910. Designed by William Higginson as a factory. It is clad in buff-colored brick, with nine central bays flanked by slightly projecting 10-story towers featuring two bays each. Rusticated brick piers with concrete capitals separate the first-story bays containing windows and entrances. The ground floor windows feature canted brick sills, and there is a stylized classical entablature featuring brick frieze and concrete cornice above first story. The piers at the 2nd & 3rd floors are also rusticated, with the bays of the 4th through 9th floors separated by continuous brick piers.

There is a molded concrete cornice featuring fretwork above the 3rd story. Each of the bays above the ground floor have triple windows, with paired windows separated by thin brick piers in the end towers. Above the 9th floor, the central bays are recessed (the 10th story is a 1920s addition). The cornice above the 9th floor is pierced by central tower; cornices and pinnacle-like terra-cotta elements cap the center-most bay and outer towers.

The exposed west elevation is clad in red brick, and has a single column of segmental-arched windows above the 3rd story. (no window at the 7th floor). Remnants of painted advertisements for “Grosset & Dunlop Publishers” and the “H.Wolff Book Manufacturing Company" are still faintly visible. The Wolff Book Manufacturing company operated out of several large buildings in the area. All aspects of the book-binding process were performed by one of the company’s several thousand employees. The company continued to expand throughout the 1940s and 50s, taking leases for more than five additional spaces in 1946. By the time the company was acquired in 1968 by American Book-Stratford Press, a major competitor and manufactures of encyclopedias and other books, the bindery was reporting annual sale exceeding $10 million. Presently the building is occupied, like many in the West Chelsea neighborhood, by art-related businesses, including galleries such as the Robert Miller Gallery, Galerie Lelong, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, and Lehmann Maupin.