41 West 54th Street

 office building  Add category

5-story Beaux-Arts office building completed in 1893 as a mansion for Joseph Montgomery Strong. By 1905, however, the mansion was home to the Edward Kemp family. The former mansion was converted to a boarding house/apartment in 1921. On December 20, 1932 the Contemporary Arts gallery opened its new headquarters in the house. One of New York’s leading galleries for modern artists, it hosted exhibitions here for years. The gallery was followed in the late 1930s by Brussels Contemporary Arts. In 2000 the former Joseph Montgomery Strong mansion was converted to offices on the first two floors with a staggering three-story residence above.

The facade is clad in white stone, rusticated at the ground floor and the ends of the 2nd-3rd floors. The central entrance is segmental-arched, with glass doors. Flanking the entrance bay are smooth-paneled piers with short scrolled brackets supporting a stone cornice and balcony at the 2nd floor; the balcony is fronted by an elaborate balustrade. On either side of the entrance, up high, is a small oval window with iron grillework; below the eastern one is an iron cage protecting pipe equipment, and below the western one is an iron fence around a door and steps leading down to a basement entry.

The 2nd & 3rd floors have large tripartite windows with transoms; minimalist iron railings front the 3rd-floor lower panes. Between the center of the 2nd & 3rd floors are stone spandrel panels with simple floral ornament at the ends and a more elaborate garland in the center. A stone cornice with a central keystone tops the 3rd floor, above which is a shallow stone balcony, slightly angled at the ends, with a paneled stone front bearing a cartouche at the center panel. The 4th floor has two bays of windows. Above is another stone cornice, with small dentils, and paired brackets at the ends and a single bracket in the middle. The 5th floor also has two bays of windows, these with iron railings across the bottoms. They are topped by round-arches, and the piers around the bays are paneled and topped by short cornices. Above the cornices and behind the arches is a sloped copper mansard roof, ending in a roof deck with a wooden pergola.