130 West 30th Street Building
- Architect
- Cass Gilbert
- Year
- 1928
- Style
- Egyptian Revival
- City
- Manhattan, NY
- Collection
- cass gilbert’s downtown
130 West 30th Street, known as The Cass Gilbert, is an 18-story building designed by Cass Gilbert in 1928 for the Garment District, originally holding offices, showrooms, and manufacturing space. The 130 West 30th Street Corporation signed a lease for the plot in March 1927 and hired Gilbert through the broker M. & L. Hess. Its Assyrian Revival style is a rare choice for Manhattan, and the building is now a designated New York City landmark, its lower three floors home to a synagogue and its upper floors converted into 45 condominiums.
the building
Assyrian Revival facade. The brick facade carries architectural terracotta friezes and bands, with design elements borrowed from Middle Eastern architecture, including forms recalling ziggurats — an unusual vocabulary for a Garment District loft building.
Ground-floor entrances. Two entrances at street level are recessed within travertine marble doorways alongside a glass storefront, marking the transition between the public sidewalk and the building's commercial interior.
Setback massing. The building steps back as it rises, a massing shaped by the 1916 Zoning Resolution that required tall buildings to taper in order to preserve light and air at street level.
Synagogue within. The lowest three stories now house a synagogue for Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, including a lobby, a double-height sanctuary, and a basement with a community hall, classrooms, and chapel.
the style
Gilbert used the Assyrian Revival style here, drawing on ziggurat forms and Middle Eastern ornament for the terracotta friezes and bands — a distinctive, rarely seen idiom that sets the building apart from the Gothic and Renaissance revival styles more common on Manhattan office buildings of the era.
More on Egyptian Revivalthe architect
Cass Gilbert was one of the era's most prominent American architects, best known for the Gothic Revival Woolworth Building and New York Life Insurance Building. At 130 West 30th Street he worked in a very different register, adopting the Assyrian Revival style for a commercial Garment District building.
significance
130 West 30th Street is a New York City Individual Landmark (LP-02101), designated November 13, 2001.
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