Barbizon 63

Barbizon 63 (formerly the Barbizon Hotel for Women and the Melrose Hotel) is a mostly residential condominium building at 140 East 63rd Street, at the southeast corner with Lexington Avenue, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. The 23-story hotel was designed by Everett F. Murgatroyd and Palmer H. Ogden in a blend of the Italian Renaissance, Late Gothic Revival, and Islamic styles. From 1927 until 1981, it was a women-only residential hotel. The Barbizon is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a New York City designated landmark. The facade consists of salmon-colored brick, with limestone and terra cotta decorations, and is divided into a three-story base, a 15-story shaft, and a five-story tower. The building contains numerous setbacks, as well as a light court to the east, and the upper stories contain large arched windows. When the Barbizon was built, it contained various amenities for its residents, including a gymnasium, private library, solarium, swimming pool, and Victorian-style Turkish baths. Generally, men were only permitted to enter the ground-level stores, the double-height lobby, and the mezzanine-level recital room. The upper stories originally contained 655 bedrooms, which were eventually downsized to 306 hotel rooms, then to 66 condominiums. The modern-day condominium building contains a three-story Equinox Fitness club at its base. The Allerton Hotel chain, headed by William Silk, developed the Barbizon on the site of a synagogue that dated from the 1870s. The hotel opened on October 31, 1927, and initially catered to women who worked in the arts. The building was sold twice in the 1930s and was profitable by the end of that decade. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, the hotel hosted numerous clubs, and entities such as Mademoiselle magazine, the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School, and the Ford Modeling...