261 5th Avenue (New York City, New York)

 office building, Streamline Moderne (architecture), Art Deco (architecture)

320-foot, 26-story Art-Deco office building completed in 1929 for the Fifth Avenue & 29th Street Corp. Designed by Buchman & Kahn, it was built to house showrooms, offices and lofts. It features complex abstract red, blue, and beige terra-cotta ornament produced by the Federal Seaboard Terra Cotta Corp., with similarities to motifs used by F. Lloyd Wright.

The facade on Fifth Avenue is five bays wide, with nine bays on 29th Street. The ground floor has white marble-covered piers. The main entrance is in the middle bay on Fifth Avenue, composed of brass and glass with a surmounting grille. There is a service entrance is the far eastern bay on 29th Street, and storefronts in all the other bays.

The upper floors are clad in brown brick, and feature geometrically-patterned terra-cotta spandrels on the 2nd-5th floors, highlighted with gold above the ground floor. At the 2nd floor, the brick piers are also decorated with abstract terra-cotta ornament. The bays all have tripartite windows up to the 5th floor; above they have evenly-spaced triple-windows with brown metal mullions, and projecting stone sills up through the 12th floor. The 13th-15th floors have 3-story stone pilasters between the three windows in each bay, and the piers are decorated with additional abstract ornament.

The 16th floor, and those above return to the brown metal mullions between the windows, and projecting, multiple string courses define the top and bottom of each floor. A series of setbacks begins above the 16th floor, with more setbacks at the outer bays than those near the corner. The south elevation is clad in brick, with three bays of windows at the front half of the building. The stair-step series of setbacks at the upper floors is very apparent from this vantage point.

Throughout much of the 20th century, the building catered almost exclusively to the office and showroom needs of the housewares and carpet industries. The original ground floor tenant was the Broadway National Bank and Trust Company, which opened for business on June 25, 1929. Its Art Deco interiors were designed by Louis H. Friedland with a chairman's office paneled in French walnut mahogany and the ceiling had decorative plasterwork. It does not seem those interiors are still intact.

The ground floor is now occupied by Harounian rugs, a Subway sandwiches, Starbucks coffee, and Saint-Petersburg Russian gifts.

daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2020/06/buchman-kahns-19...
www.newspapers.com/clip/91939622/
usmodernist.org/AM/AM-1934-12.pdf
usmodernist.org/AF/AF-1929-05-2.pdf