The Fifth Avenue Hotel

 hotel, bank, interesting place, Italianate style (architecture)

5-story Neo-Classical bank building originally completed in 1908, with a 230-foot, 24-story hotel tower added onto what was a 1928 addition, in 2021. Designed by McKim, Mead & White for the Second National Bank, the original building is clad in limestone, white-painted brick and terra-cotta with metalwork by the Wm. H. Jackson Company. It it was built in three stages; in 1913, a 5-story addition using similar materials and detailing was added on the north side of the original structure facing Fifth Avenue; in 1928, a 2-story addition in the same style was built facing West 28th Street to the rear of the original building. All three sections were designed by the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White for the same client, The Second National Bank. However, this design is largely credited to Charles Follen McKim and W.S. Richardson as Stanford White had died a year earlier.

The 5th Avenue facade of the old building is four bays wide, with a rusticated base featuring a round-arched entryway at the 2nd-to-southermost bay, voussoirs, bracketed window sills and hoods, and molded architraves. There is a suspended metal marquee over the main entrance, with a smaller entrance in the next bay to the north. The far northern bay has two, low, small windows around the main windows, and another smaller window above it.

The upper floors feature quoins at the edges and bordering the northern bay. The northern bay has paired windows at each floor. Most of the 2nd-floor windows have bracketed pediments, alternating rounded and triangular. The 4th-floor windows have molded hoods. The roof cornice is terra-cotta with dentils and scrolled brackets.

The West 28th Street facade spans seven bays, plus the four bays of the 1-story addition at the west end. It matches the rusticated base of the main building's alternating bays of round-arches with voussoirs and keystones, and bracketed window sills and hoods, some with an extra window set on top. The upper floors and cornice match those on 5th Avenue. The western elevation is brick and cement stucco, with no windows.

The hotel tower at the west end is clad in beige brick, rising above the existing base. Its south facade has four bays of windows in grey aluminum framing, with an interesting pattern of four stacked, very short horizontal panes on the left side of each bay paired with a larger vertical pane on the right. The east end bay is wider, with an extra, wider pane, and this bay wraps around the corner to another two narrow panes at the south end of the east facade, above the 10th floor. This is mirrored at the north end of the east elevation, and the middle of this facade has two more bays of narrow double-windows flanking a wider center bay of two sets of adjoining double-windows. A grid is formed in the masonry via recessed vertical and horizontal grooves, spaced every other floor apart. The center bay expands at the top into a glass crown that is taller in the middle. The west elevation has no windows; there is a lighter-colored band running up the middle third, and horizontal grooves at every other floor on either side of the central band.

The building was occupied by the most recent iteration of the Broadway National Bank, BNB Hana Bank, with a blue-green sign band across the ground floor at the east end at facing 5th Avenue. It was later converted into the base of a hotel which was designed by Platt Byard Dovell & White with Perkins Eastman for Cosmic Realty Partners. The tower contains 153 guest rooms decorated by Martin Brudnizki Design Studio.

The hotel is managed by Flâneur Hospitality/Alex Ohebshalom.

www.thefifthavenuehotel.com/

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daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2013/05/mckim-mead-white...
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