At the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 49th Street stand two buildings unlike any others in the city. At the corner is the Goelet Building, now known as the Swiss Center. This Art Deco classic was designed by Victor Hafner and built in 1932. The mansion of Ogden Goelet had occupied the site since 1882.

The Goelets are a Manhattan real-estate dynasty, dating back to the 17th-century arrival in New York of the French Huguenot Francis Goelet. In the 19th century, the brothers Robert and Ogden Goelet were social pacesetters, and patrons of some very good architects. Stanford White designed an earlier Goelet Building, on Broadway and 20th Street.

The later building has a richly modeled, geometrically patterned facade, composed of luscious deep-green marble with contrasting cream-colored marble and aluminum. The building’s true glory, however, is its lobby. The compact space offers one of the richest Art Deco experiences in the city, with elegant black marble walls, aluminum ceilings, and marvelous metal light-grilles. And don’t miss the elevator doors.

Next door to the south is one of Fifth Avenue’s more curious buildings. Now a TGI Friday’s restaurant, painted in that chain’s trademark garish colors, this was once a restaurant of the Childs chain. Long gone, Childs sometimes built restaurants of architectural distinction, as here. Some of the distinction is no longer readily apparent. Notice the curving south side of the building, with its glass-block windows. When the building went up, in 1925, it had two exposures. On its south was the Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas, which was set back from the lot line behind a front garden. Thus, the Childs building walled the garden’s north side.

The architect negotiated this in an elegant manner. The building swoops sinuously around the bend. This and the curving parapets impart a willowy grace that is almost Art Nouveau in effect. The building was also possibly the first in New York to use cantilevered construction, so that floors looked like they were supported by window glass. In 1952, alas, the tall Sinclair Oil Building replaced the church and blocked the south face of the Childs building, such that it now curves westward abruptly into the wall of the office building. Glass block then replaced the curving clear glass at the corner.

The Ogden Goelet mansion was still standing when the Childs building went up, on the site of Russell Sage’s mansion.

William Van Alen designed the Childs building soon after he dissolved his partnership with Craig Severance. The Brooklyn-born Van Alen had a richly varied background. As a teenager, he worked for Clarence True, the architect-developer whose distinctive, roman tic houses dot Manhattan’s West End. While a night student at Pratt Institute, Van Alen worked as a draftsman for Clinton & Russell, one of New York’s great architectural firms. He later attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He had few high-profile commissions. Even so, it’s not a stretch to see how, when given the chance a few years later, he produced the Chrysler Building.

If you have questions about New York City’s buildings, please e-mail them to fmorrone@nysun.com.