Mohawk Building, Fifth Avenue and 21st Street

The Mohawk Building, at 160 Fifth Avenue, southwest corner of 21st Street. The 9-story building was erected by the firm E. H. Van Ingen & Co., importers of woolens, principally for its own use. Photograph published in the King's Handbook of New York City, 1892.

The site was formerly occupied by the South Dutch Reformed Church, demolished in 1890 or 1891. The congregation had moved to a temple on Madison Avenue.

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Below, text that accompanied this photograph in the King's Handbook:

«E. H. Van Ingen & Co., importers of woolens, occupy one of the handsomest buildings devoted to business purposes in New-York City. It is the Mohawk Building, at Fifth Avenue and 21st Street, and it was erected by the firm principally for its own use. It measures 92 feet on Fifth Avenue and 142½ feet on 21st Street. The building is an absolutely fire-proof structure, nine stories high, built of sandstone, St. -Louis brick, and iron. The architecture is quite simple, showing plainly the lines of construction, with a touch of the Renaissance style. The feature of the Fifth-Avenue front is the entrance-porch, which projects forward slightly, and is treated in Ionic style. The two upper stories are embraced in a colonnade, which makes them appear as one very high story. The lower floors of the building, from the first to the sixth, are laid out in broad salesrooms, subdivided only by rows of columns. E. H. Van Ingen & Co. occupy the lower floors, the general offices being at the rear end of the entrance story, and the private offices on the floor above. There is a recess on the 21st-Street side which serves as a driveway, and permits the loading and unloading of goods without encumbering the sidewalk. The three upper stories are laid out in offices for professional people. They, as well as the warerooms above the ground, are reached by two passenger elevators from the main entrance. The walls of the corridors are wainscoted with handsome tiling, and the floors are laid in mosaic. The building is heated by steam and lighted by electricity ; and all the wiring and piping has been done in such a way as to avoid marring its symmetry. The firm of E. H. Van Ingen & Co. is, perhaps, the largest one in the woolen trade in the world. For more than twenty years it occupied the building at Broadway and Broome Street. It was the first house in the trade to break away from the wholesale dry-goods centre of the city and build for itself a home up-town. The Mohawk Building is so called from the famous old Indian tribe of that name. It was opened May I, 1892; and is an architectural feature of lower Fifth Avenue.»