14 East 38th Street

 office building  Add category

167-foot, 14-story office building completed in 1923. Designed by Emery Roth, it is clad in brown brick. The ground floor has a modernized main entrance at the west end, with recessed glass doors and grey granite cladding, and a stainless steel "14" above the doors. The east end has a service entrance with the original round-arch, set in white-painted stone. It has metal doors and a metal grill above the doors, within the arch. The lower half of the ground floor's middle section is also clad in grey granite, with two modernized plate-glass show-windows and a storefront entrance in the center. Above the storefronts is a band of three joined tripartite windows surmounted by a metal spandrel with square panels and inscribed circles.

The middle section of the 2nd-3rd floors is framed by a limestone surround with rounded corners. Within the enframement are three joined tripartite windows on each floor, taller than those at the top of the ground floor. A matching spandrel with squares and circles divides the 2nd & 3rd floors. The end bays have single-windows, sightly recessed between the piers, which continue in the upper floors as well. At the upper floors the three middle bays each have triple-windows with black metal frames, and the brick spandrels have simple square panels, four to each bay.

At the 12th floor, the middle bays have paired windows with round-arches at the tops; narrow columns separate the window pairs. The 12th floor is topped by a shallow cornice, above which the middle bays set back. The two end bays continue up to the 14th floor, creating projecting end towers, each of which is also capped by a shallow cornice. The recessed middle section of the top two floors is surmounted by a triangular pediment with a corbelled cornice.