Gemma Gramercy | apartment building

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235-foot, 20-story modernist residential building completed in 2024. Designed by Hill West Architects, it is clad in white pre-cast concrete and off-white metal panels, with detailed vertical grooves on the spandrels between floors and metal-panel piers that very slightly angle outward. It also features a cantilever on the south side over the small neighboring building.

The ground floor is lined with plate-glass storefronts, with the building's main entrance at the east end on 23rd Street, with glass double-doors in a glass surround, covered by a black metal canopy. The upper floors on the north facade have eight bays, with the middle ones having a windows with a very narrow pane to the left of a wider pane. The larger west end bay has an additional pane on the other side of the narrow one, and wraps around the corner. The east end bay is the same, and also wraps around the corner beginning at the 7th floor.

There is a shallow setback above the 13th floor extending over to the 2nd bay from the east. From the 14th-16th floors the east end changes to floor-to-ceiling bands of glass between the concrete spandrels, and then sets back, but with projecting concrete balconies jutting out at the top three floors. The western bays at the 14th-19th floors have two of the smaller bays from below merged into a wider one. There is another setback above the 19th floor, and both setbacks are topped by glass railings. The 20th floor rises from the east half of the building with a long band of windows, and is topped by a concrete mechanical penthouse with curved ends on both sides.

The upper floors on the west facade facing the avenue have three smaller bays of windows like those on the north facade (except that the narrow pane is on the right edge of the north bay), and a slightly wider bay at the south end. A new, slightly wider bay of windows begins at the 12th floor where it cantilevers over the building to the south. The other four bays set back above the 13th floor, and again above the 19th.

The concrete on the south elevation is painted white and then grey, without the textured piers and spandrels, and no windows except for a single-window at the front and a small square window at the middle of the 9th-11th floors. The cantilevered section above continues the design of the rest of the building, with two wider bays around a single-window bay at the west half, and the east half having just concrete scored into a grid of rectangles.

The east elevation has one wider window bay wrapping around from the north facade, and a bay of single-windows farther back, these with contrasting dark-grey spandrel panels, plus one small square window only on the top floor. The building contains 108 apartment units. The ground floor is occupied by Cafe Arabique, and a Citizens Bank ATM.