“When I first looked at Fifth Avenue by sunlight, in the tranquillity of Sunday morning, and when I last set eyes on it, in the ordinary peevish gloom of a busy sailing-day, I thought it was the proudest thoroughfare I had ever seen anywhere.”

So wrote the English novelist Arnold Bennett in 1912. In that year he published “Your United States,” for me one of the best books about America ever written by a European. He says to his companion: “Fifth Avenue … always reminds me of Florence and the Strozzi. …The cornices, you know.”

The immediate occasion of Bennett’s remark was the retail store and offices of Gorham & Company, the high-class metalsmiths,at the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 36th Street. The building opened in 1905, part of the great transformation of the avenue from residential to commercial – a process largely completed by the time Bennett visited.

Among the “invading” commerce were Tiffany, whose building Stanford White designed at Fifth Avenue and 37th Street, and Gorham, also designed by White.These were among that architect’s “retail palazzi,” or stores designed to look, if not exactly like private mansions, then at least like imaginative permutations or extrusions of private mansions. And the vocabulary White employed in these unexampled buildings was that of the Italian Renaissance. The buildings are at once as American as anything by Frank Lloyd Wright, yet also imaginatively spun from the grand tradition of Western art and urbanism. Bennett got all this; few others did, or do.

The cornice is still there, carried on those bravura brackets we call modillions. It is indeed is a doublemodillioned cornice, a proud and self-assured thing. It is still amazingly beautiful. Apparently, however, it was originally enameled in different colors, which have worn away to the even green patina we see today. Would that it were restored!

Alas, the ground floor of the building was modernized in 1960. Part of the original is visible along 36th Street, though shorn of its reliefs by Andrew O’Connor. On Fifth Avenue, the modernization couldn’t possibly be more jarring. Christopher Gray reported in the New York Times in 2000 that the architect of the modernization, Herbert Tannenbaum, felt terrible about it – but knew if he didn’t do it the owner would just find another architect who would. I suspect many architects were in similarly sad positions around that time.

Though the outside ground floor and the resplendent selling-space within are gone, remarkably much of the upper portions of the building remain, including projecting elements like the cornice and lovely iron balconies that one might have thought would be ripped off rather than secured to legally mandated standards. Note the copper frieze belting the Indiana limestone building above that modernized ground floor. It’s a very unusual piece of ornamentation, apparently an example of Gorham metalwork incorporated into the design of the facade. Look up, and you will see what remains one of the most beautiful buildings in Manhattan.

fmorrone@nysun.com