The DeVinne Press Building at 399 Lafayette Street, an eight-story brick building with a terra-cotta trim, represents a structural and aesthetic milestone for commercial structures in the city. Designed by Babb, Cook & Willard in the Romanesque Revival style and constructed in 1885, the building is an early and distinguished example of a masonry bearing-wall construction elevator building that predates the introduction of steel frame construction. As such, it exerted great influence on the design of commercial buildings that followed. Imposing in its size when it was erected, the building has been celebrated as one of the most sophisticated works of masonry in the city. Notable design elements include the three-story-high recessed window arches, the treatment at the rounded corners of the external walls, and the interplay between the round and segmental arched windows of various dimensions. The building’s most remarkable feature, however, might be its massive interior masonry archways, which held the weight of the printing presses of the DeVinne firm. The building was built at the behest of Theodore DeVinne, the leading commercial printer of his day and an authority on the history of printing as an art form and as a practical enterprise. His printing press gained prominence for the work it did for Century Magazine, St. Nicholas Magazine, and Scribner’s Monthly, and for its publication of books such as The Book of Common Prayer and, especially, the multivolume Century Dictionary, one of the largest encyclopedic dictionaries of the English language. The DeVinne building was designated a New York City landmark in 1966. Today, the ground floor is occupied by Astor Wines and Spirits, one of the great wine stores in the city and a fixture in the neighborhood since 1946, and located here since 2006. Its owners, the Fisher family, have also owned the DeVinne Building since 1983. Beyond undertaking both exterior and interior renovations of the building, they installed two natural-gas–powered microturbines in the basement, making this one of the greenest landmarks in the city.