The Musician's Building

 apartment building, 1917_construction, housing cooperative, Renaissance Revival (architecture)

8-story Renaissance-revival cooperative-apartment building completed in 1917. Designed by Shape & Brady, it is clad in red brick with interwoven X-patterns of dark-grey brick, limestone, and terra-cotta. The building was constructed with musicians in mind, featuring sound-proofed apartments. The main entrance is at the rear of a long and narrow light court, with another at the rear, and wider, shallower light wells on the east and west elevations.

The ground floor is limestone above a low, grey granite water table. The entry has glass-and-wood double-doors flanked by two narrow leaded-glass windows, and is covered by a rounded, grey canvas canopy that extends all the way out over the sidewalk. The side walls of the light court both have two bays of double-windows flanking a bay of narrow single-windows. The two wings created by the separation of the light court are symmetrical, with a bay of double-windows nearest the center, followed by two bays of paired windows, and end bays with black metal service doors.

The 2nd floor begins the transition to brick, although both outer bays of each wing are still clad in stone, as well as the pier between the paired window bays, and the pilasters between the paired windows themselves. Framing the paired window bays are vertical, keyed stone bands extending up the facade. The window arrangement matches that of the ground floor, with paired windows above the entrance; this wall is also clad in stone on the upper floors.

Topping the outer bays at the two wings are terra-cotta lintels topped with scrolls, end finials, and rounded pediments, and these bays have curved, Juliet-style black iron rails across their window bases at the 3rd-6th & 8th floors. The paired-window bays have terra-cotta spandrel panels between floors, with elaborate coat-of-arms designs. The 6th & 7th floors are divided by a terra-cotta band course with a patterned frieze, and the roof line has a brick-and-terra-cotta parapet with crockets and quatrefoils.

The building contains 60 apartments.