550 Seventh Avenue (New York City, New York) | office building

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282-foot, 23-story Neo-Classical office building completed in 1925. Designed by Buchman & Kahn, it is clad in buff-colored brick above a 3-story limestone base and ornate, stone-faced, transitional 4th floor; both main facades are four bays wide. The ground floor has been refaced in polished orange-pink granite, except for the westernmost bay on 39th Street, which has a freight entrance - although the bases of the piers framing this bay are granite. At the main entrance in the northernmost bay on the avenue, the granite extends all the way up to the window sills of the 2nd floor, enframing glass doors topped by a large glass panel. The other bays have brass-and-glass storefront windows and entrances for the ground-floor bank; except for the east bay, there are much smaller windows and a service door along the ground floor on 39th Street.

The 2nd & 3rd floors are defined by wide piers with imaginative capitals; each bay has three windows, with fluted stone spandrels between the floors. The 4th floor has two windows in each bay, evenly spaced across the facades by wide piers, and has very elaborate cast-stone ornament with floral patterns on both the piers and the frieze running above the windows. An ornamental string course runs along the bottom edge.

The upper floors follow the window pattern of the 4th floor, with plain brick and no decoration. The shaft rises to an elaborate arcade at the 16th floor, supported by paired, angled stone columns; the arcade marks the first of several shallow, cascading setbacks on both facades. The upper setbacks are marked by bands of brick corbelling.

The north facade, above the lower neighboring building, is also brick. The bay of windows at the front edge has wide tripartite windows with different patterns of smaller panes from the 10th-15th floors; there is a single-window at 8th & 9th floors, and from the 16th-19th floors, ending at the 2nd setback. To the west is a bay of small, narrow windows (no opening at the 17th floor, and also ending at the 19th); a bay of single-windows extending all the way to the top floor; and then after a wide gap, a second bay of small windows also extending to the top floor. Across the 15th-16th floors are darker painted areas of 2-story round arches at each bay, and in the corresponding spaces between bays. Squared 2-story painted areas also run across the top two floors, and horizontal dotted lines cross above the 17th, 19th and 21st floors, as well as below the mechanical bulkhead at the roof.

The ground floor is occupied by a Bank of America branch.

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