406 West 52nd Street

 apartment building  Add category

5-story Queen Anne-style residential building completed in 1888. Designed by C. Abbott French for Adam Huston and James R. Corbitt, it housed the store of plumbing contractors Huston & Corbitt on the ground floor, with rental apartments above. Before long the relationship between Huston and Corbitt moved from professional to familial. On April 30, 1889 Adam Huston married Annie Corbitt and the newlyweds moved into the 2-story apartment at No. 406 West 52nd Street. Rather surprisingly, C. Abbott French also lived in the building until around 1904.

After Huston died in 1907, Corbitt continued to operate the business from here until 1918. The building was sold to an investor in 1923. In 1929 architects Van Wart & Wein were hired to connect the building internally with 771 Ninth Avenue. Simultaneously the 2nd floor was converted to an office for the ground level store, and the 3rd and 4th floors to a single “housekeeping apartment” (meaning there was a kitchen included). The top floor became furnished rooms. The apartments were divided in 1959 to two per floor, including the fifth floor. It was most likely around this time that S. Wolf opened his paint and wallpaper store in the old Huston & Corbitt Co. space. The paint store continues to operate at 771 Ninth Avenue. The facade of the old Huston & Corbitt building was re-painted bright red in 2013.

It is clad in brick, with a 3-story projecting bay of pressed metal at the 2nd-4th floors. All that remains of the original ground-floor store are the rusticated cast-iron end piers, also painted red. In between is a rear entrance for the paint store, with a roll-down metal gate, and a recessed metal door on the right.

The projecting bay with angled sides takes up a little more than half of the width of the facade, situated to the left. Its decoration includes rope-twist colonnettes, a panel of honeycomb design and one of scattered nubs, leaded transoms, and a foliate cornice influenced by the Aesthetic Movement. Atop the bay a delicate, lacy cast iron cresting sat like a diadem. To the right there are single-windows at each floor, with matching leaded-glass transoms; the 4th-floor window has a round-arch above it, with ornamented cast-iron infill. The top floor has three square-headed windows, the eastern two grouped together above the projecting bay. At the top of the floor the honeycomb motif is repeated, in brick, and there is a corbel table and a layered cornice all in brick. A whimsical false gable in cast metal at this level provided a cottage-like feel.