Germania Life Building, Manhattan

Photo shows Germania Life Building, Guardian Life Insurance Building (after 1917), Fourth Avenue (now 201 Park Avenue South) at East 17th Street, NYC.

Street view from Union Square Park photographed by Irving Underhill (photo copyrighted 1911). Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

This 20-story skyscraper with mansard roof, completed in 1911, was designed in Renaissance Revival by D'Oench & Yost. The entrance lobby was modernized in the 1960s and again in the 1980s.

The four-story steeply sloping mansard is clad in Spanish tile and has copper edging and crown molding. The edges are marked by an ornate banding. At the top of the mansard is a parapet with recessed blind arches, comer cartouches, and raised torches that read as acroteria.

The stair that runs from the lobby to midway between the fourth and fifth floors consists of white marble stairs, wainscot, and railings. The second-floor mezzanine lobby has marble tile floor, marble Ionic pilasters, ceiling with deeply recessed square panels ornamented with dentils and acanthus, marble doorway enframements. The elevator lobbies on the upper floors, each has five elevator surrounds with cast-bronze pilasters and capped by a cast-bronze frieze with vertical grooves and the initial G, with floors of marble tile in several different colors.

In 1988, the Guardian Life Insurance building was designated a New York City landmark and was converted into a hotel in 2000.