The Madison Belmont Building, also known as 183 Madison Avenue, is a commercial building at the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and 34th Street in Murray Hill, Manhattan, New York. It was designed by Warren & Wetmore in the Neoclassical style and built in 1924–1925. The Madison Belmont Building has a "transitional" design that deviates from Warren & Wetmore's other commissions, combining elements of the Neoclassical style and more modern influences from the Art Deco style.
183 Madison Avenue's articulation consists of three horizontal sections similar to the components of a column, namely a base, shaft, and capital. The base, comprising the lowest three stories of the facade, contains iron-and-bronze showroom frames, grilles, and doors designed by Edgar Brandt. The shaft contains brick piers, between which are recessed bays that contain windows and spandrels. The upper stories contain architectural terracotta ornamentation and a large cornice. The lobby is finished in bronze and marble, and contains a vaulted ceiling.
183 Madison Avenue was constructed as a showroom building for a development company called the Merchants & Manufacturers Exchange of New York. It originally housed showrooms for silk companies in Manhattan's "Silk District". In 2011, the building's exterior and first floor interior were made New York City designated landmarks.
Site
183 Madison Avenue is in Murray Hill, Manhattan, on the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and 34th Street. The building is shaped like an "L", running along Madison Avenue to the west and 34th Street to the north. A section extends southward toward 33rd Street, where it has a frontage measuring . Its official address is 181–183 Madison Avenue, though the building carries alternate addresses of 31 East 33rd Street and 44–46 East 34th Street. Nearby structures include the Grolier Club and 2 Park Avenue to the south, as well as the Collectors Club of New York and the B. Altman and Company Building to the north.
Architecture
183 Madison Avenue was designed by Warren and Wetmore in the neoclassical style. The doors and metal ornamentation at the base, as well as the metal work in the lobby, were designed by Edgar Brandt, a French iron worker. The building is tall, and was built with 17 stories. An additional floor was erected on the roof for mechanical equipment and commercial space in 1953. 183 Madison Avenue contains with 30 commercial units.
The design was distinguished from Warren and Wetmore's previous commissions, which had included the Grand Central Terminal and surrounding structures. 183 Madison Avenue's design also included more modern influences in the Art Deco style, which had just started to become popular when the building was completed. In addition to brick and architectural terracotta, the building used of iron. Brandt's lower-floor design was one of the first usages of Art Deco in a building in the United States. In 1925, International Studio magazine characterized the main entrance doors as being "carried to the nth power of perfection".
Facade
The articulation of the facade consists of three horizontal sections similar to the components of a column, namely a base, shaft, and capital. While the facade was made mostly of brick, it also used carved terracotta motifs designed by the New York Architectural Terra Cotta Company. The terracotta used on the Madison Belmont Building is flatter and simpler in design than on Warren and Wetmore's other structures.
The base is three stories tall. On Madison Avenue and 34th Street, the base is clad almost entirely with large display windows set between granite piers, which are twice as wide as the bays above. The windows are set within gilded bronze frames, and below the first floor windows, there are geometrically patterned iron motifs. The eastern end of the 34th Street facade contains the building's main entrance; there is also a showroom entrance on Madison Avenue and a service entrance at 33rd Street. The Art Deco-inspired entrance doors are decorated with leaves and floral patterns. Above are transoms with black-and-gold motifs resembling frozen fountains. The entrance gates on Madison Avenue and 34th Street have slightly different detailing but have similar floral motifs. On 33rd Street, the first-story opening is a steel service entrance while the second story contains a ventilation grate. The third and fourth stories on 33rd Street contain large windows with red frames, with metal spandrels underneath the windows, and a small cornice above the fourth story.