Gabay Building

USA / New Jersey / West New York / East 20th Street, 30-32
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7-story Beaux-Arts office building completed in 1907. Designed by Frederick C. Zobel as a store-and-loft building, it is faced in tan brick and stone. It has a 2-story commercial base set off by a wide torus molding embellished with laurel leaves and a cartouche over the central doorway. The entrance is framed by a columned limestone portico. Projecting wood and pressed metal shop windows flank the entrance. These are supported by brackets and are divided into large show windows and transoms topped by a pressed metal cornice. On the 2nd floor the center window is framed by small wood piers articulated with simple pilasters. Wood mullions separate the outer windows into three bays, the center bay being slightly wider than the outer bays. The windows have wood-framed pivoting lights and crossbars support narrow transoms.

The 3rd-5th floors are faced with banded brickwork. Square-headed windows are set off by stone sills and lintels, and there is a stone string course beneath the 3rd-floor windows and a simple cornice above the 5th-floor windows. The 6th and 7th floors are articulated by giant pilasters. The windows have stone lintels and sills and stone blocks beneath the sills on the small 7th-floor attic windows. The building is crowned by a dark-green galvanized iron cornice.

The building's eastern and western elevations visible from 20th Street have unusual double-ridged, M-shaped rooflines. The eastern wall is faced with brick and has no windows and no architectural decoration. The brick western wall, which projects beyond the building line of the adjacent Theodore Roosevelt Memorial has been partially faced with the same brownstone and coping as the house-museum up to that building's roof line. Above that point the west wall has no windows and no other applied architectural decoration.

The Crown Perfumery Company of London was among the first tenants to occupy this building. Later occupants were typical of the district and included cloak and suit merchants and several button merchants. In the 1920s it housed many showrooms for dealers in hosiery, gloves, and lingerie as well as the offices of the American Booksellers Association. The ground floor is occupied by Nemesis Thai restaurant.
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Coordinates:   40°44'18"N   73°59'20"W

Comments

  • August 2015: the ground floor is now the building site for the future French restaurant Le Coq Rico, aka "The Bistro of Beautiful Birds", run by Chef Antoine Westermann.
This article was last modified 9 months ago