The Gramcery Cooperative (New York City, New York) | interesting place, apartment building

 interesting place, apartment building

125-foot, 8-story cooperative-apartment building originally completed in 1899 as the 6-story Gramercy Exchange building of the New York Telephone Company. In 1938 it became the National Hospital for Speech Disorders, and in 1950 was converted to a residential co-op, with two new floors added on top.

The two main facades are clad in beige brick and limestone, with a darker granite base at the bottom of the ground floor that projects out slightly farther from the rest of the facade. There are low basement windows at the sidewalk level along this base, with iron grilles, and a wide, low stoop at the middle of the east elevation on Irving Place. The granite sidewalls of the stoop have, flowing scrolled keystones as toppers, and there is a small basement areaway to either side, enclosed by decorative iron fencing. Atop the low stoop, the main entrance has a set of double-doors below a rounded, grey canvas canopy that descends the steps and then extends out over the sidewalk. To either side a double-window is recessed into the lightly-banded limestone ground floor, which is topped by a cornice that projects over the central entrance, supported there by a pair of brackets and a cartouche.

The 2nd-6th floors are brick with limestone quoins at the ends. A triple-window bay in the middle and single-windows on either side all have smaller stone quoins lining them. The triple-windows have stone spandrels between floors and stone mullions separating the three windows at each floor. Thin drip moldings top the single-windows. There is a stone cornice above the 5th floor, and a larger one with flat modillions and dentils topping the 6th, where the middle bay has a double-window instead of the triple-windows seen below.

The newer top floors are stone, with smaller quoins at the edges. The 7th floor has punched single-windows at the ends, and a tripartite configuration of punched windows in the middle bay. There is a setback at the south bay, creating a terrace on the 8th floor, which has similar windows in the northern two bays, only not recessed into the facade.

The north facade on 18th Street has three bays of paired windows at the ground floor, with single-window end bays (some of these have iron grilles). The 2nd-5th floors match the east facade, with three middle bays of tripartite windows, and single-window end bays, all punched into the facade. The 6th floor also matches the east elevation, but spanning five bays, and the top floors have five bays of paired windows.

The building contains 32 co-op apartments.

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