Schwarzenbach Buildings (New York City, New York)

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226-foot, 17-story and 12-story joined Renaissance-revival residential buildings completed in 1912. Designed by Mulliken & Moeller, there is a common base and design, except that the south building has a 2-story crown at the 16th & 17th floors, while the north building's identical crown begins at the 11th floor.

The 2-story base is clad in white-painted limestone, stretching six bays on 31st Street and five bays on 32nd Street. The Park Avenue South facade has five bays at the south building, and another seven at the north building. A partial bay with a single narrow window flanks each facade section (reading as a bay of paired narrow windows at the junction of the two facades on the east side). Most of the ground-floor bays are filled with storefronts above grey granite water tables (the westernmost bay on the north and south sides are service entrances). The 3-bay-wide central entrance section on Park Avenue South originally had a pair of triangular pedimented doorways, but these were remodeled in 2014. The pink granite overlay columns with Ionic capitals on the piers framing this section remain. They support a frieze with the carved words "SCHWARZENBACH BUILDINGS", with a gold rosette at each side. A cornice caps the rest of the ground floor. The 2nd floor has triple-windows in each bay, divided by brown iron mullions; the painted stone piers are paneled. Above the middle of the entrance is a wide stone panel broken by a colored mosaic of a globe encircled by the words "Scharzenach Looms" and "Darbrook Silks". The narrow single-windows at the ends of each facade are recessed and have iron frames. Another cornice caps the base.

The buff-colored brick midsection also has iron framed narrow windows at the ends, and triple-windows in the main bays. The brick spandrels are paneled and stone sills joined the windows in each bay. The 2-story crowns on both building sections have stone cornices at the bottoms, supported by large keystones from the bays below. Each main bay is clad in stone, with concave 2-story arches enclosing two windows on each floor. The top windows are themselves also round-arched. The spandrels between the two floors are ornamented with carved stone, and there are stone medallions nestled below the peaks of the main arches. Projecting black metal roof cornices cap each major facade.

The western elevations are blank brick walls. The buildings served as the home of silk importers Schwarzenbach, Huber & Co. until 1932, and were converted to residential in 2008. The ground floor is occupied by a Chipotle Mexican Grill, and an M&T Bank branch. An interesting feature is the bronze clock mounted near the top of the ground floor at the northeast corner. Created by artist William Zorach, it depicts the wizard Zoroaster “the mastermind and doer of all things” above the clock face. At his feet is a cocoon, and beyond sits a slave representing the “primitive forces and instincts of man.” Zoroaster waves his wand on the hour, and “the slave swings a hammer against the cocoon, triggering the emergence of the ‘Queen of Silk’, tulip in her hand.

www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-wizard-of-park-avenue-4...
archive.org/details/towerclocks00seth/page/23/mode/1up
archive.org/details/SweetsCatalog1931Vol.A/page/n1538/m...