St. George's Tavern

 restaurant, interesting place, 1930_construction

5-story Neo-Gothic former St. George's Syrian Catholic Church, now attached to the Holiday Inn and housing its restaurant. The original three stories were built in 1812. By 1850, it was used as a boarding house for immigrants, and in 1870 an additional two floors were added. In 1925, the building was purchased for the use of the Syrian Catholic Church. Harvey F. Cassab, a Lebanese-American draftsman, was hired to create a new facade for the building. His neo-Gothic design in white terra-cotta with a polychrome relief of St. George and the Dragon was completed by 1930, and remains intact. Despite its relatively small size, St. George's projects an aura of permanence and monumentality, gained largely through Cassab's use of terra-cotta manufactured to look like stone. Nearly all of the main façade mimics white marble, but its base is sheathed in terra-cotta with a dark granite glaze. While the church is essentially monochromatic—its bright color made the building stand out on a street of old, weathered brick buildings—Cassab provided a burst of color at the second floor, where the façade's chief highlight appears: St. George in armor on a white horse, slaying a green dragon with a long, red tongue, all finely modeled in vivid polychrome terra-cotta.

Because of the building's height, Cassab concentrated most of its ornament within the first three floors, where it would be most readily noticed by passing pedestrians and those entering the building. This lower portion of the building is richly textured and separated into three bays defined by buttresses; its first floor features a recessed main entrance, which is flanked by grouped, engaged columns supporting an archivolt decorated with foliate ornament and grapes. Above the main entrance, “St. George Chapel” is spelled out in a medieval typeface, below a tympanum filled with quatrefoils. At the second floor, a blind half-round opening with simulated tracery mimics a rose window. The first three floors terminate with an angular gable containing a quatrefoil and crowned by a cross; Gothic pinnacles above the buttresses assist in setting off the lower three floors from the upper two, making the lower portion of the façade read as a smaller church within the larger, 5-story composition.

The façade's top two floors have the sense of being extruded from the lower three, with the large buttresses at the building's edges extending beyond their third-floor pinnacles, to additional pinnacles above the roof line. An ogee arch spanning the otherwise blank façade above the fifth-floor openings appears to be Cassab's sole nod to the East, recalling, perhaps, the domes of Byzantine churches. A small belfry crowns the façade. All of the window openings, in Gothic tradition, are headed by lancet or depressed arches, and many retain their historic terra-cotta mullions and plate tracery with small oculi.

In 1982 the building was bought by Moran Inc. and turned into an Irish pub. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the building a New York City landmark on July 14, 2009. In 2014, the interior was renovated for use by the new Holiday Inn tower next door as a restaurant.

6tocelebrate.org/site/st-georges-syrian-melkite-church/