3 West 87th Street (New York City, New York) | apartment building

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5-story Renaissance-revival (with Romanesque elements) residential building completed in 1890. Designed by James W. Cole, it is clad in brownstone. The stone is rough-faced at the 1st floor and the piers of the basement level, planar rusticated at the 2nd floor, and smooth on the upper floors. A wide, low stoop at the center has short sidewalls with fanciful, swirling iron handrails. Wrought-iron fencing fronts the basement areaways on either side. The round-arched entrance has wood-and-glass double-doors; they are flanked by low, engaged columns topped by stylized capitals from which springs a foliate-carved architrave of the arch, highlighted by a keystone. These are flanked by paneled pilasters with elaborate foliate ornament hiding a face, topped by another pair of columns. A band foliate ornament tops the ground floor, with a dentiled cornice above it. To either side is a narrow slit window and two single-windows with iron grilles and foliate carved panels below that also incorporate small faces. Below these are basement windows.

The upper floors have six bays of single-windows. At the 2nd floor they have splayed lintels, and a cornice caps this level. 2-story moldings line the windows at the 3rd-4th floors, with intricately-carved spandrel panels between floors. The center pier has equally intricate panels and the other piers each have a vertical column of small square buttons with faces. The top floor, set off by another cornice, has round-arched windows. A black iron fire escape runs down the middle two bays, with a full-width landing at the top floor. The facade is crowned by a bracketed black metal roof cornice.