Baudouine Building

The Baudouine Building, located at 1181 Broadway, features a small, meticulously detailed Greco-Roman temple perched atop its roof. Architectural observers have often called this eccentric rooftop feature a little Parnassus in the sky. Designed by architect Alfred Zucker and completed in 1896, the building replaced a former hotel known as the Brower House during a period of rapid commercial expansion in what is now the NoMad neighborhood. Its steel and iron frame, faced with brick, limestone, and terra cotta, was a hallmark of the high-rise engineering that defined late nineteenth-century Manhattan.