300 Park Avenue South

 office building  Add category

192-foot, 15-story Beaux-Arts office building completed in 1911. Designed by Starrett & van Vleck as the Mills & Gibbs Building, it is clad in brown brick above a 3-story rusticated limestone base, spanning six bays along Park Avenue South and five bays along 22nd Street. The piers sit on pink granite bases and frame double-height round-arches topped by oval stone shields. There is a modernized glass entrance in the northern bay on the avenue side, with a secondary entrance in the western bay on 22nd Street, and a metal service entrance in the bay to the right; the rest of the bays have storefronts. Between the 1st & 2nd floors are tripartite windows of leaded glass blocks with black iron pilasters, topped by carved terra-cotta panels; the wider center panels feature pairs of cherubs holding a tall shield, while the end panels have floral patterns. The 3rd floor has paired square-headed windows with joined stone sills. A stone band course with a wave pattern and dentils caps the base.

The transitional 4th floor has stone-framed pairs of round-arched window openings, with small shields between the arches and medallions at the outer edges, and brown brick piers with plain stone panels in the centers. A stone cornice with a carved frieze caps the 4th floor. The upper floors each have paired, recessed windows framed in brick with stone imposts. Continuous stone sill courses delineate each floor. The 12th floor is bordered at the bottom by a dentiled string course, and at the top by a corbelled band course. The piers here have diamond-shaped stone ornament. The 13th & 14th floors have double-height round-arches encompassing paired round-arched windows at the 14th floor, separated by thin Doric columns. Above is a bracketed metal roof cornice with dentils. A penthouse level above is not visible from the street.

A new roof deck featuring an outdoor movie screen was added in 2015. The building is currently occupied by the Smithsonian Institution's New York Research Center, the New York State Council on the Arts, Wilhelmina Models, FanDuel, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The ground floor is occupied by a CVS pharmacy.

hdl.handle.net/2027/rul.39030032609481?urlappend=%3Bseq...
archive.org/details/sim_architectural-record_1910-12_28...