Equinox - East 85th Street (New York City, New York)

 fitness club, interesting place, historical building

Designed by Robert Maynicke in 1901 as a modestly scaled four-story brick and terra-cotta structure for the Yorkville Bank featuring elements characteristic of the Italian Renaissance Revival style, including palazzo-type massing articulated by a strong cornice above the ground-story base and a second cornice crowning the building; arched openings flanked by pilasters at the ground story; a Classical entry portico facing Third Avenue; pedimented window lintels at the second story; and detailing such as dentils, acanthus-leaf molding, roundels, metopes, and guttae. In 1923, architect P. Gregory Stadler was comissioned to enlarge Maynicke’s building using the same design and materials, and Stadler took advantage of the additional frontage of approximately 25 feet on both Third Avenue and East 85th Street to add one-and-a-half bays to each street facade. The new full bays replicated the original bays, while the half bays were narrower and simpler, having no arched openings and designed only to accommodate secondary entrances, which included an entrance for the third- and fourth-floor office tenants on East 85th Street and an emergency exit on Third Avenue. The massive cast-bronze doors were fabricated by the John Polachek Bronze & Iron Company of Long Island City, with each leaf featuring a panel depicting an allegorical figure flanked by smaller panels above and below decorated with Classical grotesques.

In 1988, the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company sold the old Yorkville Bank building. In 1991 the ground floor space was leased to the Gap clothing company, and a few years later the upperstory offices was adaptively reused for use by the Equinox Fitness Club. Both businesses are still tenants in the building. In 2006, the owners of the building entered into a transfer-of-air-rights agreement with the owners of the luxury high-rise residential building slated to be built on the southeast corner of Third Avenue and East 86th Street, immediately north of the bank. A portion of the new residential building, which was completed in 2008, cantilevers over the old Yorkville Bank building.

www.equinox.com/clubs/new-york/uptown/east85th
s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/2510.pdf