24 Fifth Avenue: Review and Ratings

Review of 24 Fifth Avenue by Carter Horsley

This staid, but attractive building replaced the famous Brevoort mansion. Completed in 1926, the 15-story building opened as the Fifth Avenue Hotel, designed for permanent residents. The 419 apartments were subsequently converted to tenant ownership.

Designed by Emery Roth, the building has a very large and very elegant lobby with a long, wide corridor with carved plaster ceiling and marble mosaic panels set into pilasters. The first floor contained a very large dining room that originally was designed in Pompeian style with a sunken garden. Over the years, this room was converted for catering and often was used for wedding parties. The 9th Street corner was converted for restaurant use and subsequently expanded into an enclosed sidewalk cafe.

The two-story base of the building is covered with limestone and the rest of the building is covered in two shades of buff brick with terra-cotta trim.

Steven Ruttenbaum provides a good description of the building's exterior in his excellent book on the architect, "Mansions In The Sky, The Skyscraper Palazzi of Emery Roth" (Balsam Press, Inc., 1986):

"Like most buildings of this period, the upper floors are embellished more heavily than the lower floors, and they are distinguished with large brackets supporting balustrades and two-story window surrounds that incorporate spiral pilasters, cartouche spandrel panels and arched heads. The fifteenth-floor cornice level is ornamented with crenelated brickwork. The penthouse and tower sections that sit on the roof bring a playful, castle like appearance to the building with additional crenelated brickwork and arched windows. These eclectic touches easily blend into the rest of Roth's composition."

The building's most distinctive feature is its large bronze canopy on Fifth Avenue, the most impressive on this residential stretch of the famous boulevard. Although the large enclosed cafe extension on the avenue interrupted and marred the building's elegant street-level façade, it introduced some liveliness to the street as well as an important and absent retail use - a restaurant.