28 West 40th Street

 apartment building  Add category

5-story Renaissance-revival cooperative-apartment building completed in 1891 as a mansion. Designed by Robert H. Robertson for Walker Gill Wylie, an esteemed physician, the house is clad in brownstone and orange Roman brick. The brownstone and Roman brick play off one another to create vertical bands and visual interest.

The ground floor has been remodeled several times, and now has a facing of grey-painted stone blocks with a commercial storefront. Above a rounded band course, the brownstone 2nd floor projects out to the building line at the west two-thirds, with three tall windows topped by panels with concave shell decorations. The west bay is recessed, fronted by a brownstone railing. A round column divides the bay into two halves, with a window and a door opening out onto the terrace.

The top three floors are also set back, with three bays of single-windows. The 3rd & 4th floor are faced in brick, with two horizontal bands of brownstone at the 3rd floor, above and below the windows, and with additional brownstone bands across the 4th floor. The attic floor has small, square windows, topped by a metal cornice.

By 1923 the handsome house where Wylie had lived for 35 years and reared his family was an anomaly—the last holdout of a previous era, squashed between two soaring clubhouses. That year, on March 13, Dr. Walker Gill Wylie died in his house at the age of 74. Surprisingly, the Robertson-designed house survived as Manhattan’s skyscrapers engulfed the neighborhood. The ground floor was obliterated for retail space and in 1957 the upper floors were converted to apartments. The ground floor is occupied by a Chipotle Mexican Grill.