163 & 165 West 80th Street

 apartment building  Add category

A pair of 5-story Renaissance-revival residential buildings completed together in 1896. Designed by George F. Pelham, they share similar design features, but No. 163 is much narrower - only two bays wide vs. four bays wide for No. 165. Both are clad in painted stone.

No. 163 is light-grey. The ground floor is lightly banded and has a very low stoop of grey steps on the right, with metal railings. The entrance has glass-and-wood double-doors set in a carved molding. Halfway up the doorway are pairs of projecting, angled pilasters springing from small bases in the form of faces; these extend up above the entry to flank a panel carved with foliate ornament and a medallion with a face in profile, and are topped by a modillioned cornice. The cornice (minus the modillions) extends across the rest of the facade to the left as well. To the left of the entry are narrow paired windows separated by a paneled pilaster with some Renaissance ornament at the top. Below are two basement windows, and there is a small decorative carving centered above the two 1st-floor windows. The upper floors have simple surrounds with cornices. Those on the 2nd & 4th floors have carved swags between the tops of the surrounds and the cornices, which are raised higher. Narrow sill courses cross the base of the 3rd & 5th floors, with an egg-and-dart molding on the upper one. There is a bare parapet at the top of the facade.

No. 165 is painted a light-cream color, and has a central entrance with a small, narrow stoop with metal railings. The entry has a glass door set in a wide, paneled wooden frame and surrounded by a molding. At the upper half are the same paired pilasters seen at No. 163, but the carved panel they flank above the door lacks the medallion. There are paired windows on either side of the entry, matching those at No. 163. The four bays of windows at the upper floors are likewise similar, and a black metal fire escape runs down the facade, with full-width landings. The facade is crowned by a cream-colored metal roof cornice with brackets and dentils, above a frieze with a Greek fret pattern.