Hotel Elysée by Library Hotel Collection (New York City, New York)

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180-foot, 15-story Neo-Renaissance hotel completed in 1926. Designed by Harry Allan Jacobs, the Hotel Elysée is named for one of the finest French Restaurants of that era. It is clad in red ironspot brick above a 2-story rusticated limestone base with a red granite water table, five bays wide. The central entrance has glass doors and sidelights, covered by a peaked, red canvas canopy that extends out over the sidewalk. To the left are a wide and narrow windows, both with red canvas awnings. To the right is a wood-framed window and a wood-and-glass door with a blue-and-white clamshell canopy, and at the west end bay, a narrow wood-framed window and recessed metal service door. The 2nd floor has 5-over-3 multi-pane windows in the three middle bays, and single-windows flanked by brick panels at the end bays.

Above the base, the three middle bays are set-back, each with a double-window with a black metal mullion. The end bays have single-windows. All of these windows have black metal air-conditioning vents below them. The sidewalls facing inward from the end bays also each have a bay single-windows, but without vents. At the 11th floor the ends bays have round-arched above the windows (and narrower windows at the side-facing walls), with notched inner and outer corners and a setback above this floor. The recessed middle bays continue up to the 13th floor, where there are brick projections on the piers, and a stone cornice that projects out farther above the center bay.

The middle bay continues up two more floors, framed by projecting piers and ends in a shallow round-arch below a triangular pediment. On either side, black brick panels extend up to rounded urns at the 14th floor, where the middle bay has three recessed panels, crowned by an octagonal tower.

The Elysée is known for the Monkey Bar, a piano bar just off the lobby. Opened in the 1940s, it became known to the cognoscenti as "the place to go where jokes die," especially off-color jokes and double-entendre songs. The original mirrors in the bar were replaced in the early 1950s by wraparound hand-painted mural by caricaturist Charlie Vella featuring monkeys. In 1995, when the bar was redesigned by the architect David Rockwell, all of the monkeys were unified by Voyentzie with more monkeys and palm trees and foliage.

www.elyseehotel.com/