The stately stone building at 54 West 40th Street has had many incarnations in its 100-year-plus existence: a church, a gathering place for Republicans (the early 20th-century kind), the headquarters for the Overseas Press Club, and, via a less hoity-toity tenant, the Daytop Village rehab center for drug addicts. Last summer, a bankrupt Daytop sold the building for $32 million to real estate titan Eric Hadar, who also owns the property next door and can now build a 40-story apartment or hotel tower after 2020 if he so chooses. So the Times' David Dunlap ponders the fate of an "orphaned" modernist mural by Lumen Martin Winter painted on canvas along the building's neo-Classical staircase. Will it survive? (Click through for more photos.) [City Room]
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