Ehrich Brothers Co. Department Store Building (New York City, New York)

 office building, 1889_construction

5-story Commercial Palace-style office building originally completed in 1889. Designed by William C. Schickel & Co. as a department store for the Ehrich Brothers company, it was enlarged multiple times between 1889 and 1911, by Buchman & Deisler, Buchman & Fox, and Taylor & Levi. The building is faced in cast-iron with large show windows and Italian Renaissance ornament.

The Sixth Avenue facade is divided into seven bays by heavy piers. On the ground floor several piers retain a 1911 art-tile facing embellished with the letter K for the Kesner Store (a later occupant). Above the tilework small brackets support panels decorated with cartouches and small triangular pediments. These elements frame transoms with leaded glass. This floor is crowned by a granite lintel and an iron cornice, now painted a copper color. Taylor & Levi added new storefronts with Arts and Crafts style pilasters with terra cotta panels with the initial "K" by the Hartford Faience Co. of Hartford, CT.

Above the ground floor the corner bay is faced with stucco while the older bays are faced with iron. The articulation in the two sections is similar but the projecting cornices on the older portion of the building are missing from the newer addition. In both portions of the facade the 2nd floor is trabeated with small piers subdividing the large bays into two units. The piers are articulated with pilasters--the cast-iron pilasters are decorated with cartouches, the stucco pilasters articulated by simple moldings.

The 3rd & 4th floors are grouped together, joined by giant fluted pilasters on the major piers. The narrower piers separating the window bays are treated as minor orders embellished with guilloche moldings on the cast-iron portions of the facade and as pilaster strips in the end bay. Paired windows topped by transoms are used for both portions of the facade. The 4th floor windows have arched surrounds and are underlined by a strongly projected sill course. In both sections these bays are lit by a pair of pivoting lights topped by segmental transoms. At the 5th floor the bays are further subdivided into four small units each only one-window wide containing arched surrounds. In the cast-iron sections of the facade the piers are decorated with arabesques bearing Ehrich Brothers' initials and the columns are ornamented with diagonal flutes. The plainer stucco piers framing the end bays are decorated with recessed panels and a pair of columns flanking a narrow pier form a compound pier. The entire facade is crowned by an elaborate cornice decorated with swags and lion heads.

The West 23rd Street facade was built in two stages--the three eastern cast iron-fronted bays are original to the facade, the four stone-faced were added in 1902. The ground story of both sections is largely covered with replacement storefronts but the triangular shape of the 1911 pedimented pier decoration is still discernible on several bays and on the west corner pier is completely visible. On the upper floors the cast-iron portion of the facade is identical to that of the Sixth Avenue facade except that the piers used to frame the middle bay are somewhat thinner than those used for the corner bearing walls. The masonry portions of the facade echo the major divisions of the original design but lack the subdivisions and arches of the original. Decoration is much simpler, comprised primarily of an applied pilaster order and simple cornices.

The 9-bay West 22nd Street facade was constructed in three sections: the three western bays in 1894, the three center bays in 1889, and the three eastern bays in 1911. On the older portions of the facade the ground story piers are cast iron and are articulated as banded pilasters. There are three openings per bay separated by thin iron piers. The bays are divided laterally by iron sills resting on concrete bulkeads and by transom bars supporting horizontally pivoting transoms. At present the lower windows are concealed by metal gates. Above a projecting black iron cornice the older portions of the building are faced with red brick. Following the basic composition of the Sixth Avenue facade in the arrangement of trabeated and arched window frames, these facades are articulated entirely through the carefully modulated use of projections and recessions in the brickwork. On the stuccoed corner bay an attempt has been made to follow the articulation of the older portions of the West 22nd Street facade but as on Sixth Avenue a number of the strong horizontal elements in the design have been eliminated. This facade is crowned by a simplified version of the Sixth Avenue cornice. This facade is also distinguished by a massive black iron canopy spanning the 4th and 5th bays.

Ehrich Brothers specialized in bargain sales obtaining the entire stock of a mill or bankrupt store to offer their customers excellent value. In 1911, as many of the large department stores in the district moved uptown Julius and Samuel Ehrich decided to retire from business. The building was leased to J.L. Kesner, but his store failed and by 1913 the building was vacant. In 1916, the building's upper stories had been converted to lofts for manufacturing purposes, and it continued to operate as a store-and-loft building until the 1990s, when the upper floors were converted to offices.

The ground floor is occupied by Burlington Coat Factory, DXL Men's Apparel, Essen restaurant, and Bluemercury cosmetics.

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