Riverside Memorial Chapel Funeral Home

 mortuary / funeral home, interesting place

4-story Neo-French Renaissance (with Gothic elements) mortuary, chapel, & office building completed in 1926. Designed by Furman & Segal, it is clad in red brick, stone, and terra-cotta. A new entrance vestibule and marquee were created on the Amsterdam Avenue side in 1934, but the building still maintains a main address on 76th Street. A narrow adjoining building to the east was connected to the corner building and given a new facade to match in 1946, designed by Joseph M. Berlinger.

The ground floor is clad in stone, painted a salmon color, with a grey granite water table. The main entrance on the avenue is slightly recessed, and has wood-and-glass double-doors; there is a separate opening above with a 4-over-2 window. To the left is a matching bay, but filled by a 4-over-4 window grid (divided into four 2-over-2 squares), with a sloped granite base. Both of these bays are covered by the suspended black metal marquee. To the right are three bays of small, square, 2-over-2 windows, slightly recessed above sloped niches below. At the south end is a garage door with a roll-down metal gate. To the north are three more of the small, square window bays, and the north end has a wide bay with a secondary entrance (a similar glass-and-wood door) flanked by plate-glass windows.

The upper floors have a pattern of projecting brick headers, and brick banding framing the end bays, which have narrow double-windows at the 2nd & 3rd floors. These have stained glass, and the 2nd-floor windows are framed by red terra-cotta with some Gothic ornament above. In the center are three bays of large, double-height pointed-arch windows with leaded-glass and terra-cotta tracery, featuring trios of quatrefoils at the tops, inside the arches. The 4th floor is set off by a terra-cotta band with a pattern of sunbursts along the bottom and foliate ornament along the top. There are triple-windows at the three main center bays, with a pair of smaller windows flanking the middle bay. The triple-windows have colorful stained glass, are divided by terra-cotta pilasters, and are topped by terra-cotta round-arches with rosettes. The end bays have paired windows with matching pilasters and round-arches. A green copper gutter is broken by Gothic brick gables rising up at the end bays, ornamented with terra-cotta. Behind them is the steep-pitched slate roof, with three small copper gables above each of the center bays. There is a brick chimney at the south end.

The ground floor on the north facade on 76th Street has a plate-glass window near the west end, followed by two wide bays with stainless-steel service entrances (the eastern one at the building that was joined to the main building), both covered by another suspended black metal marquee. The original building section has banded end piers and three bays of windows on the upper floors, with the design and ornament similar to the end bays on the wider west facade. A single gable breaks the copper gutter at the roof line. At the adjoining facade, the 2nd floor has four single-windows, while the top two floors have three (smaller on the top floor), with brick sills, lintels, and band courses. A simple brick roof parapet crowns this section.

The Riverside Memorial Chapel is a Jewish funeral home chain with their main facility at this location. The original company, Meyers Livery Stable, was founded in 1897 by Louis Meyers on Norfolk Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.