231 East 13th Street | Block : 469 | Lot #47

Description & Building Alterations

With a building permit dated just days before the 1901 tenement reform act went into place, 231 East 13th Street is not quite a “dumbbell” shaped Old-Law tenement, but is not fully abiding by the rules of a New-Law tenement. Designed by George Frederick Pelham, the Renaissance Revival building housed 26 families. The first floor originally had a raised-stoop entrance that would have been centered in the building. The terra-cotta beltcourse between the second and third floors is in a Greek key pattern, much like the two buildings adjacent at 235 and 239 East 13th Street. The second floor windows are arched with cartouche keystones and egg and dart beltcourses running the width of the building. The fifth floor window lintels, which are flat like floors three and four, have keystones with faces, or grotesques, on them. Three pilasters span the fifth and sixth floors in the center of the building, the bases of which are again faces. The arched, brick lintels on the sixth floor also feature grotesques as their keystones. The building would have also had a pressed-metal cornice originally.