The Bar Building is a historic commercial building designed by architect Benjamin Levitan and located at White Plains,

Westchester County, New York Westchester County is located in the U.S. state of New York. It is the seventh most populous county in the State of New York and the most populous north of New York City. According to the 2020 United States Census, the county had a population ...

Description and history

It was built in 1926 and is a ten-story, 125-foot-tall building. Above the tenth floor is a two-story, recessed penthouse. The penthouse floors are enclosed with a crenellated

parapet A parapet is a barrier that is an extension of the wall at the edge of a roof, terrace, balcony, walkway or other structure. The word comes ultimately from the Italian ''parapetto'' (''parare'' 'to cover/defend' and ''petto'' 'chest/breast'). ...

which originally housed the short lived "City Club" as well as the structure's water-tank. It is a steel-frame building clad in face brick and cement with

Neo-Gothic Gothic Revival (also referred to as Victorian Gothic, neo-Gothic, or Gothick) is an architectural movement that began in the late 1740s in England. The movement gained momentum and expanded in the first half of the 19th century, as increasingly ...

and

Art Deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unite ...

terra cotta Terracotta, terra cotta, or terra-cotta (; ; ), in its material sense as an earthenware substrate, is a clay-based unglazed or glazed ceramic where the fired body is porous. In applied art, craft, construction, and architecture, terracotta ...

ornamentation. Its crenellated tower originally had glazed windows encircling its three sides. These were later bricked in. When completed, The Bar Building was the tallest structure between New York City and Albany, NY. Since 1990, the building's penthouse has been the location of J.J. Sedelmaier Productions, Inc., an animation and design studio. When the building was threatened with demolition through eminent domain in the early 2000s, Sedelmaier himself was instrumental in working with the White Plains Historical Society and NY State in insuring the preservation and listing of the structure on the National Register of Historic Places. ''See also:'' It was added to the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic ...

on May 17, 2007.

References

Commercial buildings on the National Register of Historic Places in New York (state) Commercial buildings completed in 1926 Buildings and structures in White Plains, New York National Register of Historic Places in Westchester County, New York {{WestchesterCountyNY-NRHP-stub