151 West 26th Street

 office building  Add category

150-foot, 12-story Beaux-Arts office building completed in 1912 as a commercial loft building. Designed by Schwartz & Gross, it is clad in buff-colored brick and terra-cotta above a 2-story base with banded limestone piers. The facade spans six main bays between narrow end bays that begin on the 2nd floor. The main entrance is in the east bay, with glass double-doors and an arched transom set in a thin, red granite surround, topped by a scrolled shield flanked by fruit cornucopias. The west half of this bay has a metal-and-glass storefront with recessed glass double-doors, and all the middle bays also have storefronts with similar doors, mostly topped by black metal louvers. The westernmost storefront is next to a freight entrance with black metal double-doors. The 2nd floor has large tripartite windows in each bay, with upper transom panes. The end bays have narrow single-windows on each floor. The base is capped by a simple stone band course.

The upper floors have band of four windows in each main bay, with wide iron mullions, and each window is further subdivided into 2-over-2 smaller panes by thinner framing members. The terra-cotta spandrels between floors have cornices along their upper edges, and are each decorated with four panels of elaborate carved foliate ornament surrounding a central, 3-dimensional diamond shape. A stone cornice sets off the 11th floor, and the 12th-floor windows are surmounted by wide, low-arched terra-cotta panels encompassing all four windows in each bay, lavishly adorned with foliate ornament around central cartouches.

The side elevations are clad in plain, reddish-brown brick. The ground floor is occupied by Crompton Ale House, Our/New York Bar & Vodka Distillery, and the ground-floor offices of The Swedish Institute College of Health Sciences (who occupy additional space in the upper floors).