In 1894, Charles Scribner’s Sons, a 50-year-old publisher, built its headquarters on Fifth Avenue between 21st and 22nd Streets. Designed by Ernest Flagg, this was one of the finest buildings on what was then the fashionable retail stretch of Fifth Avenue. The building contained in its base the elegant Scribner’s Bookstore. Above the base the facade sports a pair of the most delicately carved cherubs. They are by Philip Martiny, our best architectural sculptor.

Only 20 years later, Scribner’s – bookstore and company offices – moved uptown. By 1913, Fifth Avenue from the 30s through the 50s had become the city’s most fashionable street. Indeed, it was one of the nicest main streets in the world. (Which it is no longer.) For its new building, Scribner’s again hired Flagg; the company had had no problem with his earlier building, but rather with the neighborhood.

The two Scribner’s buildings are similar, and both feature Martiny cherubs. But the later one, just north of 48th Street, is a bit more elaborate, especially in the extravagant ironwork of the storefront.

I think most people would agree that this is one of the most splendid storefronts in the city. It is divided into three parts, with narrow end bays separated from the broad central section by three story-high black cast-iron columns with gilded capitals and gilded bases. There is nothing more elegant than the combination of black and gold, which recurs throughout the storefront.

The central section is one of the finest things in New York architecture. It is in fact a very wide arch, again three stories high, that articulates the dramatic barrel-vaulted selling floor. The section is almost all glass, so that it draws the eye inside the store with a magnetic pull that modern retail designers can only dream about. Once, that great vaulted space was filled with books. It wasn’t just in its windows that the store showed books to the street; rather, seemingly all the store’s books greeted you as you walked by. (The space is now occupied by a Sephora cosmetics store.) A beautiful doorway graces the base of the central section. Gilded iron brackets carry a broken pediment enclosing a glowing lamp set within a lushly rendered lamp and wreath in gilded iron.

On the entablature above the central section you see the name “Charles Scribner’s Sons.” Holding the name are cherubs on either side. The artist Pierce Rice identified the cherub as one of the defining forms of Western art. He wrote of “the presence throughout the art of the past twenty-five hundred years of an army of infants busy at perfectly frivolous tasks. These infants are like their adult counterparts in that they resemble only to a degree actual infants. In particular, the baby of art is a flying baby.”The Alsatian-born Martiny also gave us the Library of Congress’s cherub staircase, one of the astonishments of American art.

You may have to stand back to see the cherubs, but you should: A city can’t have too many flying babies.

fmorrone@nysun.com