Other nearby places include the New York Public Library Main Branch across 40th Street to the northeast, as well as 7 Bryant Park and the Springs Mills Building to the west.

[1][2] Immediately outside the Bryant Park Studios is an entrance to the New York City Subway's 42nd Street–Bryant Park/Fifth Avenue station, which is served by the 7, <7>​​, B, ​D, ​F, , and ​M trains.

[3][17] When the Bryant Park Studios were built, the facade was visible on all sides, though subsequent development obscured the south and east elevations.

The center archway serves as the building's main entrance and contains a plate-glass door, above which is a keystone with a cartouche.

The other four bays on that elevation have wide studio windows, which are separated horizontally by terracotta bands and contain broad square-headed lintels.

[16] A simpler arrangement appears on Sixth Avenue; the outermost bays are broad square-headed openings, which flank three narrower windows.

At the sixth through eighth stories, the three middle bays have full-height recessed windows, each with volutes and splayed lintels above them.

[26] As of 2019[update], the ground-floor space was occupied by a branch of bakery chain Ole & Steen, which also had a 225-square-foot (20.9 m2) mezzanine above the ground floor.

[27] The building's basement has a "Vault Museum", as well as the New York City office of Mountain Development Corporation.

The "museum" contains artifacts from the Bryant Park Studios' last 123 years including: former tenants, such as art, letters, and pictures.

The building's manager David Seeve gives tours to people every month; the visitors typically study art or history, or they may have read the landmark-designation plaque on the facade.

[25] The "Vault Museum" includes such items as the cafe's original tiling, an antique crystal fireplace, and a letter Irving Penn wrote to Mia Fonssagrives-Solow that was lodged in the mail chute for several decades.

[25] The Bryant Park Studios building was designed with 40 units in single-story simplex and double-story duplex layouts.

[12] The site was at the southern end of Bryant Park, so sunlight could illuminate the windows even if taller buildings were erected nearby.

[34] The idea for the Bryant Park Studios in particular was devised by Abraham A. Anderson, an American who studied art in Paris during the late 19th century.

A. Anderson reflected: "My business friends said it was a foolish thing to erect so expensive a studio building in what was then the 'tenderloin district'.

[38] The Bryant Park Studios, as well as the Knox Building on 452 Fifth Avenue, were among the earliest major developments on the surrounding stretch of 40th Street, which still mostly consisted of low-rise residences.

[12] The Bryant Park Studios housed not only visual artists, photographers, and decorators, but also doctors and dentists.

[43] Louis Bustanoby sued two of his brothers, Andre and Jacques, over control of the Cafe des Beaux Arts in 1909.

[53][54] Schwartz controlled the Beaux-Arts Building and Studio Corporation, which significantly increased the rents for several artists.

The western portion, measuring 45 by 60 feet (14 by 18 m), was leased that year to Joseph M. Nimhauser, who planned to alter the storefronts there.

At the end of the five-year period in 1928, the Beaux-Arts Building Corporation tried to evict Anderson from his own apartment.

[43] The building was damaged by a fire in 1936, which started in painter Leon Gordon's studio and then burned out Louis Herzog's and Anderson's units.

[73] The ground-floor and basement storefront at the corner with Sixth Avenue was leased in 1942 by Nedick's Stores Inc.[74] That September, his daughter Eleanor transferred the building to the 80 West Fortieth Street Corporation.

For several years, Drew was involved in a dispute with the owner about whether her residence could be considered a commercial space; she ultimately won that case.

[82][83][d] In the mid-1980s, Mountain Development subsidiary 80 West 40th Street Associates cleaned the facade and renovated the interior walls, dropped ceilings, lighting, and elevators.

[9] With residential tenants' leases expiring, Lieb started to renovate the building in the late 1980s so he could rent the space to fashion firms.

[82] As part of the project, the lobby's ceiling was restored, the window frames were repaired, and exterior air conditioners were removed.

Within a year, Mountain Development wrote seven leases covering nearly all of the vacant space, and asking rents had increased to $27 per square foot ($290/m2).

[80] In 2019, Danish bakery chain Ole & Steen opened a restaurant space on the ground floor and adjoining mezzanine.