Excelsior Hotel (closed)

 Moorish Revival (architecture)  Add category

150-foot, 15-story Neo-Moorish (with Spanish Renaissance elements) hotel completed in 1923. Designed by Sugarman & Hess and A.G. Berger, it opened as an apartment hotel called Standish Hall. The name was changed to Excelsior Hotel in the 1950s.

The hotel closed in 2020 and was sold to developers in 2021 for conversion to apartments.

The facade is clad in buff-colored brick with stone and terra-cotta trim and a grey granite water table. It has a center bay of paired windows, followed on either side by two bays of single-windows, a bay of double-windows, a bay of small bathroom windows, and end bays of double-windows; the double-windows are separated by grey iron mullions, and all the windows have simple stone sills. Black air-conditioning vents are cut below the double-window bays, one side of the paired windows in the center bay, and the outer single-window bays.

At the ground floor the main entrance is in the center bay, with a revolving glass-and-bronze door in a bronze frame, below a transom and rounded, brown canvas canopy extending out over the sidewalk. The adjoining bay on either side has a black wood-and-glass door. These three center bays are set in a stone surround, extending up to the paired window on the 2nd floor at the middle bay. There are moldings around the three doorways, and panels above the outer doors that feature a shield and ribbons. Scrolls edge the surround at the 2nd floor, which has a band of carved Renaissance ornament across the top, surmounted by a dentiled cornice. There are also secondary entrances below the bathroom window bays, both with black wood-and-glass doors in shorter stone surrounds that have trios of shields linked by swags at the tops.

The 4th floor is set off by a band course with a row of Moorish arches along the underside, each highlighted by a small shield. Another band course sets off the top two floors, where there is a cross-hatch pattern in the brick, which is a paler, more orange color at the crown. The two double-window bays and bathroom windows form pavilions at both ends of the facade, where the bays are set in double-height terra-cotta surrounds, with carved spandrels and round-arched at the top floor. Rising above these arches are pediments are curve upward into peaks where they are capped by finials. At the center of both pediments is a terra-cotta roundel.

The west elevation faces an alley and is clad in brick, with a deep light well at the center (there is also a light well on the east side). The front wing to the south of the light well has two bays of single-windows, and the rear wing has another bay of windows, with more windows lining the interior walls of the light wells.