Ablemarle, 205 West 54th Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 205 West 54th Street by Carter Horsley

This very elegant, mid-block building at 205 West 54th Street has an impressive two-story limestone base with a two-step-up canopied entrance with sidewalk landscaping and sconces. It has a three-step-up vestibule.

It has arched windows on the first floor and a rusticated façade with banded window surrounds on the second floor. The entrance surround has four two-story pilasters surrounded by a balcony on the third floor in front of arched windows and a banded limestone and red-brick façade. There are also arched windows above the eighth floor balcony.

There are elaborate and balconies on the fifth and eighth floors and a large cornice above the 9th floor and dormer windows at the top. The building has quoins and the central of the façade has window surrounds with pediments.

The building, which is known as the Ablemarle, has an exposed rooftop watertank and low fences with deep stairs flanking the entrance, one of which leads to Flute, a drinking establishment.

The 12-story building, which was erected in 1903, has 74 co-operative apartments. It has a 24-hour doorman, live-in superintendent and laundry and storage facilities.

Mae West lived in the building in 1928 when it was known as the Hotel Harding as did Jack "Legs" Diamond. The hotel subsequently became Hotel Alba.

The building was most famous for a speakeasy known as Club Intime in the basement run by Texas Guinan and Dutch Schultz was shot in the speakeasy Club Abbey in the building in 1931.

Texas Guinan wrote a column for the New York Evening Graphic in a 1931 column she mused:

"Night clubs are a natural development because the age if one of small apartment houses. People are so 'cooped' up in their living rooms that it is impossible to entertain a group of friends. The average apartment party has to retire at midnight. The lease says so. And to find a place where one could make merry without being ejected is the beginning of the reason that gave rise to the cabaret. Perhaps I became 'Queen of the Night Clubs' because of close quarters."

One block further west was the location of Studio 54 in the 1970s and 1980s.