Kipling Arms Apartments

 apartment building  Add category

177-foot, 16-story Neo-Renaissance residential building completed in 1927. Designed by Gronenberg & Leuchtag, it is clad in buff-colored brick with a white-painted stone water table. The centered entrance has black paneled glass-and-wood double-doors placed in a white stone arch, with a large fanlight and brown canvas clamshell canopy. Along the arch are carved various snakes, wyverns, dragons and such. To the right is a secondary entrance with a black metal door paired with a window, and then a double-window and wide single-window. To the left is a double-window, another secondary entrance paired with a window, and a single-window next to two small, narrow windows, the last one above a gated service door set down low. The ground-floor windows all have white stone moldings, except for the two small ones.

The upper floors have triple-windows in the center bay above the entrance, flanked by paired windows, a single-window, and another set of paired windows in the end bays. At the 3rd floor the paired windows have projecting, gold-colored terra-cotta surrounds edged in rope moldings, with colonnettes separating the windows and round-arches with rosettes on top. The surrounds have dentiled cornices on top and elaborately ornamented panels below; string courses extend from the top and bottom of the panels. The other windows on the 3rd floor have foliate terra-cotta lintels with angled impost blocks at the ends. The windows above have simple stone sills and brick lintels.

The center bay is fronted by a projecting balcony at the 9th floor carried on a pair of scrolled brackets, with four paneled posts at the front wall and balusters in between. The 13th floor is set off by a string course, and has similar balconies fronting all four of the paired-window bays. These bays have 2-story columns between the windows, ornamented terra-cotta spandrel panels between floors, and round-arched 14th-floor windows grouped under larger terra-cotta arches with wreaths. There are also wreaths located between the 14th & 15th floors at the other bays. The 15th floor is capped by a scalloped and dentiled terra-cotta roof cornice. The facade is dotted by protruding air-conditioning units. A penthouse level on the 16th floor is set back above the cornice, faced in white stucco.

The west facade is also clad in brick, with a bay of single-windows near the front. The rest is set-back, and has four bays of double-windows, with two bays of single-windows to the north of the southern two and also the northern two. The building contains 92 apartment units.