Twelve showrooms, decorative trades only. Tenants keep weekday hours.
232 East 59th Street, 10022
ALSO KNOWN AS The Fine Arts Building
232 East 59th Street is the Fine Arts Building, and what it is for is showrooms. Twelve of them occupy it, the decorative trades and nothing else, on a block that also carries the D&D three doors west. The two share a tax block, which is the accident behind a useful fact: a designer can cover both in one morning without crossing an avenue.
The tenancy is the fact about this building. What a visitor can do here is set by the terms the showrooms trade on rather than by anything in the structure.
Those terms are narrower than the D&D's and wider than the shorthand suggests. The building is a trade address and it does not pretend otherwise, but it publishes no policy at the door and its tenants keep ordinary weekday hours. C&C Milano, on the ground floor, is open Monday to Friday and takes no appointment. Bennison, Bunny Williams Home, Gerald Bland, Janus et Cie and the Chinese Porcelain Company are the names that have held space here longest.
Twelve showrooms across six floors means floorplates rather than suites, and that changes what can be shown. A textile house with a whole floor hangs full widths and runs a cutting table. The same house in a tower suite shows a book. For anyone specifying fabric or carpet by the roll, the difference is whether a decision gets made on the visit or deferred to a sample sent on.
The building has been a showroom address since 1962, which is long enough that the trade treats it as one of the fixed points rather than as an alternative to them.
A twelve tenant building next door to a hundred tenant one survives by not competing with it. Go to the D&D to cover ground and come here when the thing being specified needs to be seen at full width.
Who trades here
The showrooms and galleries in this building that the guide covers. Not the full tenant list.
Within walking distance