Hardman Peck Piano Co. Building (New York City, New York)

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6-story Italianate-Palazzo office building completed in 1910. Designed by F. G. Stewart & Harry Allan Jacobs for the Hardman Peck Piano Company as a store and showroom building, it is clad in off-white brick, terra-cotta and marble. The ground floor has been redesigned, with a narrow round-arched entrance on the left and plate-glass storefront on the right. The 2nd floor, set off by a band course with a Greek-fret motif, has a triple arcade formed by three tall, round-arched openings divided by round Doric columns, with scrolled keystones topping the arches. The next two floors each have three square-headed openings with bracketed sills. A small stone balcony with wrought-iron ornate railing fronts the center window on the 4th floor. A stone band across the top of this floor, with ornamental carvings at the ends, originally bore the name and founding date of the piano company that the building was built for, but the lettering has since been removed. Above a band course, the top two floors each have three windows grouped toward the middle; at the 5th floor they are flanked by panels with elaborate bas-relief carvings of musical instruments. The facade is topped by a stone cornice and parapet with bluestone coping, stepped up in the center where it is surmounted by a flagpole. There was originally a prominent modillioned and dentiled metal cornice at the 5th floor, topped by a balustrade.

Hardman pianos rivaled Steinways and the firm enjoyed not only the patronage of the Metropolitan Opera Company and the famed tenor Enrico Caruso, but it was the chosen piano for the White House during the Franklin Delano Roosevelt term of office. After more than a half-century in their building, Hardman, Peck & Co., moved to their new location at 33 West 57th Street in 1934. In March 1958 Bill Meyer-Fifth Avenue, Inc. bought the building for a home furnishings retail store and wholesale showrooms. But by the end of the century, the once-elegant piano showrooms were used as a discount merchandise store. The upper floors now contains office space, and the ground floor is occupied by MedMen NYC cannabis store.