Trinity Church ARCHITECT: Richard Upjohn DATE: 1839-46 STYLE: Gothic Revival, Church The present Church is a Gothic Revival monument, executed in brownstone by the noted ecclesiastical architect Richard Upjohn in a free rendering of English Gothic. The Church displays a wealth of ornament and detail, that it is a truly outstanding Church of one of New York’s oldest parishes and through its beauty and its wealth of historical associations, it is one of the outstanding monuments of the Gothic Revival.

New York County Lawyers Association, ca. 1930. This very handsome little building, although basically an eclectic version of Federal architecture, is executed in stone instead of brick and vaunts a fine row of Corinthian pilasters, floral swags, and medallions. These features are reminiscent of Adamesque design and British prototypes.

20 Exchange Place, 1931. Built as the Wall Street headquarters of one of the country's largest financial institutions, the City Bank Farmers Trust Building (more commonly today known at 20 Exchange Place) was a striking addition to the lower Manhattan skyline when completed in 1931. The Cross & Cross-designed, 59-story structure was styled in the restrained modern style once known as “Modern Classic." The massing of the lower portion is broad and highly vertical in design, an overwhelming presence on the narrow streets it fronts. The ornamentation is minimal and rendered in a combination classical and subtle Art Deco styles. The original financial institution became a part of Citibank in 1976 and sold the building three years later. Today the building is a commercial office space with residential tenants occupying floors 16 through 57.

New York City is full of interesting eateries that have been around for decades, centuries, even! In this collection, we'll give you the inside scoop on where to grab a bite. Here's our guide to New York's historical restaurants.

Headquarters of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, the mighty AT & T, and erected on the site of the early highrise headquarters of the Western Union Building (1874), 195 Broadway is an important address in the history of business communication. The monumental scale of the current landmark dates from a second building campaign in 1924 that completed the imposing mass. The building was constructed in two phases. In the first, it had narrow frontages on both Broadway and Fulton Street, as AT\&T did not have title to the corner. The tower was expanded out to the corner when the company was able to acquire that property. The western end of the Fulton Street façade is capped by a small stepped pyramid, formerly the plinth for Evelyn Beatrice Longman's figure in bronze, the Spirit of Communications. The sculpture was spirited away by AT\&T when it moved from 195 Broadway in the early 1980's first to midtown and subsequently to a new corporate campus in New Jersey. The building's lobby has an air of temple-like solemnity to it. Five rows of monumental Doric columns dwarf visitors. Distinctive chandeliers in a Greco-Roman style illuminate the space. At the center of the lobby is a poignant bronze monument to the soldiers of the First World War sculpted by Chester Beach.

Corbin Building ARCHITECT: Francis H. Kimball DATE: 1889 STYLE: Skyscraper The Corbin Building was constructed in 1888-89 as a speculative office building by Austin Corbin. Corbin was a successful banker and businessman who had developed Coney Island as a resort area. The Corbin Building was the tallest structure on the block when it was first built. It was constructed using the cage technique, with cast-iron columns and wrought-iron beams and non-load bearing masonry walls, before true steel skeleton structures had been developed. The flamboyant exterior, composed of a variety of materials, window shapes and decorative ornament belongs to the category of early, artistic skyscrapers that were built in New York City in the 1870s and 80s.

Reformers and philanthropists in New York generated many projects aimed at helping the poor by underwriting the cost of food. One of the most famous was inspired by the widespread unemployment in the city during the Great Depression. In the fall of 1930 Joseph Sicker, chairman of the International Apple Shippers’ Association, had the idea of putting unemployed New Yorkers to work selling apples on the street. A fund supported in part by produce suppliers helped the plan get started, and a surplus of Washington State apples made it possible to sell boxes of the fruit cheaply. The apple vendor on the streets of New York became a lasting image of the Depression. The image, however, lasted longer than the apple selling. Although an estimated 4,000 to 6,000 of the unemployed sold apples, they were out of business in less than a year. Overcrowding at busy street corners led to police intervention, sales were banned in many high-traffic locations, and apple cores littered the streets. Finally, even the supply of cheap apples ran out. When the price per box went from $1.75 to $2.25, the vendors saw their profits shrink, and the plan collapsed.

Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House ca. 1910 Cass Gilbert’s design for the Rotunda of the U.S. Custom House at Bowling Green called for an elliptical, skylit dome spanning 85 by 130 feet. The size and shape of such a structure posed substantial engineering challenges. Guastavino Sr. devised a solution consisting of a pair of thin tile domes—one inside the other—supported by two elliptical steel rings: one at the top of the supporting walls and another at the skylight’s perimeter. Ornamental plaster covers the inner dome, obscuring the tiles from view.

The Cunard Building, also known as the Standard & Poors Building, was designed by Benjamin Wistar Morris with the firm of Carrère & Hastings in a consulting role and constructed in 1920-1921. The 22-story neo-Renaissance style office tower was originally occupied by a number of steamship companies including Anchor Line and the Cunard Line. The exterior sculpture on the building, which features nautical iconography related to its principle tenant, was designed by Rochette and Parzini, a New York-based modeling, sculpting, and stone carving company. Cunard and the White Star Line company (of Titanic infamy) merged in 1934 and assisted in the Allied movements during the Second World War. The line sold the building in the 1960s when they moved from passenger service to cargo service, as airplanes replaced ocean travel. Later tenants of the building included USPS who leased space in the massive Grand Hall (the former Cunard ticketing lobby) and Standard and Poor's Corporation, a financial services firm. Today the building is still home to the S\&P and the Grand Hall is operated as an event space by Cipriani's.

New York State Attorney General Letitia James has led a political life deeply rooted in New York City. A few points of interest around town highlight the career of "Tish." Resources used include the New York Times; designation reports published by the Landmarks Preservation Commission; the City Council legislation database; the Office of the Attorney General; New York Amsterdam News; The Chiseler; the NYC Green Book; and HPD. By Andy McCarthy, Reference Librarian, NYPL Milstein Division of U.S. History, Local History, and Genealogy.

By Alexander Wood The reign of Beaux-Arts architecture reshaped the landscape of the city at the turn of the century with grand public buildings that projected a new found sense of national power. The architects who embraced this style emphasized classicism, monumentality, and embellishment in their work, and were skilled at adapting historical precedents for modern building types. This article can be read in its original format here on the Gotham Center for New York History's Blog.

Keuffel & Esser Company Building ARCHITECT: De Lemos & Cordes DATE: 1982-93 STYLE: Renaissance Revival The 8-story Keuffel & Esser Co. Building was constructed in 1892-93 to the design of De Lemos & Cordes as the general offices and salerooms for the firm that imported and manufactured drawing materials, drafting tools, and mathematical and surveying equipment. The richly-detailed Renaissance Revival style primary façade of this building on Fulton Street has a tripartite division, with a 2-story, arched cast-iron storefront that bears the firm’s name and representations of its products, and buff brick- and terra-cotta-clad upper stories, with the midsection having a recessed monumental round-arched window capped by a foliated sculptural relief of a knight’s helmet, shield, and winged orb, and the upper section featuring a 2-story angled metal window bay and culminating in a decorative cornice and balustrade.

22 Cortlandt Street, 1936. This East River Savings Bank branch was constructed in 1933. Designed by the same firm, Walker & Gillette, as the National City Bank of New York on Broadway and Canal, the two buildings share a number of features. This Art Deco structure also includes stylized eagles surrounding the bank seal, towering over the main entrance of decorate metalwork. Today the building houses a section of the enormous flagship Century 21 department store.

“Aftermath of the Equitable Fire,” January, 1912. A fire broke out before dawn on January 9, 1912, spreading to an eighth floor kitchen via a dumbwaiter and eventually engulfing the entire structure. The ten-story skyscraper had been the headquarters of the Equitable Life Assurance Society since 1870, and was purportedly fire-proof. However, weather conditions rendered firefighting efforts ineffective: freezing temperatures and gusts measured at 68 miles per hour reduced spray from fire hoses to droplets, eventually encasing the building’s facade in ice formations while the interior structure continued to burn. The ice made the fire-damaged building something of a local attraction. As the New York Times reported: “\[the ice] settled over the building in a gleaming sheath of white that made the fire a wonderful thing to see. Ice converted the ruined building into a fantastic palace, with the rainbows arching at every turn as the sunlight filtered through the spray and smoke.” The building was unsalvageable and what remained of its facade was eventually razed. The new, 40-story Equitable Life building was built on its site in 1915, becoming a National Historic Landmark in 1978.

Whitehall Building (at right), May 12, 1936. Named for the 17th century home of Peter Stuyvesant, which was located nearby, the Whitehall building is a 20-story office building constructed between 1902 and 1904. Henry J. Hardenbergh designed this speculative building with bold brick colors. A major real estate success for its developers, they quickly planned the construction of an annex. The 31-story annex with tower (seen behind the earlier building here) is called the Greater Whitehall, and was designed by the firm of Clinton & Russell in the same neo-Renasiance style. Completed in 1910 the combined building complex was the largest office structure in the city at the time. Because of this size and the landfill on which they were constructed, the buildings necessitated innovative foundation design and installation. To make the foundations strong and watertight the engineers created a system of timber-lined pneumatic caissons inside steel-lined pneumatic caissons sunk into the rock and a reinforced concrete coffer dam with a 2-foot-thick floor and 7-foot-thick walls. One of the best known 20th century tenants was the Moran Towing Company, a tugboat firm. Supposedly prior to the use of work radios, a worker located on one of the upper floors would watch with a telescope for incoming ships, and when he spotted one, he would use a six-foot megaphone to shout instructions to the Moran tugboats docked at the Battery.

Firemen on the third-floor fire escape at No. 82 Front Street, October 1923.

Bankers Trust Company ARCHITECT: Trowbridge & Livingstone DATE: 1910-12 STYLE: Classical Revival The 14 Wall Street Building, with its distinctive pyramidal roof, is one of the great towers that define the lower Manhattan skyline. This 539-foot-high tower, utilizing the latest in building technology, including one of the first cofferdam foundation systems in the city, was the tallest bank building in the world when it was completed. The building’s design was inspired by the campanile of San Marco in Venice and features an austere Classical Revival decorative scheme incorporating specific Greek architectural motifs, notably the stepped pyramid top.

National City Bank Building Interior ARCHITECT: Isaiah Rogers DATE: 1836-41 STYLE: Roman The National City Bank’s president, James Stillman wanted an impressive banking hall as the symbol for his bank which was, at the time, the most important financial institution in the country. The bank interior was designed to suggest a classical Roman hall on a grand scale. The monumental Corinthian columns support an elegant entablature, the huge barrel vaults, and the tall, arched windows with the delicate balconies which traverse them. The elegant materials and fine details show the mastery that the architects achieved. Fine proportions and elegant details are combined here to form one of New York’s grandest interior spaces.

Trinity Church ca. 1895 The present is the third Episcopal church on this site. Its spire was long a landmark on the horizon. Today we see it surrounded by high buildings, which tend to dwarf it, although in its day it was quite a large church. The quality of the Gothic Revival is well exemplified by the rather naive detail, the plaster vaults, and the traceried windows. The beautiful bronze doors, added at a later date under the supervision of Richard Morris Hunt, depict biblical scenes based on Italian precedent. That all the figures on the doors are not biblical is testified to by a little head on the frame of the right hand door; here we find sculptor Karl Bitter's "cher patron," Hunt himself, complete with beret and pointed beard.

The Woolworth Building, framed by the base of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers., ca. 1977.

1 Hanover Square, 1913. This Italianate Brownstone was thought to be built by Robert F. Carman in 1851-54 for the Hanover Bank. Carman, a developer and builder made his fortune rebuilding the "burnt district" that had witnessed a fire that ravaged the area in 1835. The exterior of the building has largely remained unchanged since its construction. The three-story masonry structure is decorated with windows that diminish in size and ornament at each successive level. At the top floor, windows are almost square in proportion, while on the ground floor they are large and tall, flanked by pilasters and topped by an arch. The entry to the building is in the center, though the building once had two stoops because it hosted multiple businesses. The Cotton Exchange assumed ownership in 1871 and, serving as its sole tenant, unified the building. In doing so, the Exchange added the clock above the entrance with the words "Cotton Exchange" on a scroll around it. The Cotton Exchange was the country's first bank dealing in commodity futures and the second in the world that operated this way. Following the departure of the Cotton Exchange, 1 Hanover Square had a series of tenants, including Tobacco Importers Maitland and Company, the Grace shipping company, and the Haitian Embassy. In 1914, "the India House" came to take over the building. Diplomat Willard Straight and industrialist James A. Farley conceived of it as a place where merchants and bankers could converge and discuss American commerce and trade. The name India House was chosen to evoke the exoticism of the faraway indies. They hired the architects Delano and Aldrich to convert the building to a club. Delano and Aldrich stripped the interior of much of its ornament, adding maritime accents to take its place. The India Club is still operational today, though its restaurant can be enjoyed by any member of the public, so long as they respect the dress code.

New York Stock Exchange, 1908. Though the history of a stock exchange in New York dates to the late 18th century, the building at 11 Wall Street, that houses the current New York Stock Exchange, was constructed between 1901 and 1903. Designed by George B. Post, the Roman-inspired neo-classical building replaced the 1865 Second Empire structure on Broad Street which was increasingly too small for the Stock Exchange functions. The main facade of the new building, with its large portico, imposing columns, and crowning pediment, gives the building the look of a temple. This temple of finance was designed to symbolize the power, strength, and security of the country's financial infrastructure.

Chamber of Commerce ca. 1902 The New York Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1768 to promote the development of business in the City. The organization held meetings at various locations until 1900, when it decided to build its prestigious marble headquarters on Liberty Street. Its Great Hall, with a stained glass ceiling, mahogany paneling, and gilded ornament, was acclaimed as one of the most impressive interiors in the City. Designated a landmark in 1966, the building was sold to the International Commercial Bank of China in 1979, and its restoration was completed in 1991.

DePeyster Statue at the northern end of Bowling Green, July 23, 1936. Abraham De Peyster was mayor of New York City from 1691 to 1694, governor of New York State between 1700 and 1701 and a city comptroller, alderman and judge, as well. Born in New Amsterdam to a wealthy Dutch family, he was a successful politician, public figure, and land owner. In 1699 he donated a plot of land which a city hall, later the original Federal Hall, would be constructed. In the late 19th century, a descendant of New York's 20th mayor, commissioned a bronze statue. Created by sculptor George Edwin Bissell, the statue of De Peyster, in an uncommon pose (seated not on a horse, but a chair), was intended for a place in Battery Park. In 1895, the New York Times, among others, suggested that Battery Park was not the appropriate location, being already too full of "park statuary." Despite other objections, the statue was finally realized in Bowling Green the next year (as seen in this photograph). Supposedly the De Peyster descendant who commissioned the statue had issues with city officials (or the newspapers, depending on the story) and, in his annoyance, offered the statue to a school in Pennsylvania. He did end up donating a statue to Franklin & Marshall College, a place with no tangible connection to either the original nor the late 19th century De Peyster. The historical record is not entirely clear as to if the original New York statue was sent to the school and replaced or if the Pennsylvania cast is the copy. The two version have different footwear. The Pennsylvania statue has also had issues with maintaining a permanent location. The New York statue stood (or sat, really) in Bowling Green until 1972 when it was removed during a major renovation. Next he sat on a new pedestal in Hanover Square until 2004, when he was removed for the creation of the British Memorial Garden, honoring the British victims of September 11th. After being stuck in storage for a decade the statue was installed in Thomas Paine Park at Foley Square in 2014. The rededication ceremony was attended by descendants, ten generations removed.

My Archive Spring 2019 "Three months before September 11, 2001. —Joe Curran

Although Trinity Church now appears toy-like, nestled among glass and steel giants, its spire was once the highest point on the Manhattan skyline. Until the construction, in the 1890s, of such towers as the American Surety Building at 100 Broadway and 15 Park Row, the 284-foot tall church tower afforded views to sightseers. At the entrance, note the large bronze doors designed by Richard Morris Hunt and executed by Charles Niehaus, Karl Bitter and J. Massey Rhind, dating from 1890 to 1896. Architect Richard Upjohn used local brownstone for the church's exterior, feeling its dark tone well suited the building’s romantic architecture. This was a controversial decision due to brownstone's low status. Many considered it an unsuitable material for a church, especially one of the most prominent and wealthy churches in the city. A quiet and comforting rest stop, especially during the summer months, Trinity welcomes visitors. Trinity Church is also open daily to worshipers and offers an extensive schedule of services.

My Archive Spring 2019 "My husband and I on a boat in NY Harbor on July 5, 1988. We were entertaining friends from Tokyo, showing them around the city. It was our friend Nobuko's first visit to the states although her husband Yoshio had visited on business many times before. This photo of us was taken by our Yoshio while on the Statue of Liberty ferry." —Elaine Engelstein

The powerfully sculpted form of this 57-story Art Deco tower is a result of the polygonal shape of the site, as well as the need to accommodate the headquarters of two different banks. The verticality of the tower’s shaft is accentuated by metal spandrel panels and the gray brick vertical piers. The colossal heads which survey the street from the parapet of the nineteenth-floor setback represent the giants of finance (seven scowling, seven smiling). The figures actually hide the exhaust pipes of the air circulation system. Elaborate street-level bronze grilles cover the lower parts of the windows of the banking halls. Each grille presents an allegory of a field of science or the arts. The entrance to the banking hall at the corner of Exchange Place and William Street is especially handsome. Inset panels of the doors and the cylindrical cover for the revolving-door depict modes of transport throughout history. Inside, the reception and the banking halls have the air of a 1930s movie set, employing vivid rich-hued marbles and elaborate mosaic to brilliant effect. The impressive domed rotunda and grand staircase once lead to the main banking hall and senior officers room.

Assay Office, pre-1916. In 1822 the Verplanck family sold the land on which their mid-18th century mansion sat for $40,000 (quite a sum for the time) to the Bank of the United States. On the site the institution constructed the Branch Bank of the United States, a two-story classical structure rendered in white marble. Designed by Martin E. Thompson, the bank building, completed in 1823, looked less like a bank and more like an English country estate. The bank lost its charter in 1836, got a new one, but closed the following year in the midst of a financial crash. Later used by the equally descriptively named Bank of the State of New York, the building was sold to the government in 1853 for use as an Assay Office. Here gold and other precious metals (including those coming out of the California Gold Rush) would be tested for purity before being sold. The building was also the location where the metals were melted down into bars and stamped with their weight and quality. The building operated as the United States Assay Office for more than 50 years, but the deterioration of the nearly 100 years old edifice was transparent at the start of the 20th century and the building was largely abandoned by 1911. Proposals to save the building included moving it elsewhere or attaching the new Assay Office to the old facade, while what actually occurred was a curious mix of both these ideas. In 1915, the government presented the facade to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After being deconstructed and catalogued, it was re-installed (seven years later) stone by stone in the new American Wing.

New York City was the seat of government for only the brief period between March 1789 and July 1790. Still, there is a long history of presidential interactions in the city: from presidents growing up here, to dying and being buried here, and visiting the city for social, financial, and political activities.

This enormous building, covering an entire block, stands on the site occupied successively by Fort Amsterdam, the old Government House, and finally a row of Federal town houses which were later used for the offices of shipping companies and became known as "Steamship Row." This building is richly adorned with sculpture by Daniel Chester French and boasts handsome interiors with several fine murals.

As we roam the modern streets of New York City, we can see the skyline and neighborhoods change each year. Given how complicated our city’s systems have become, it is difficult to imagine a time without the founding principles of zoning, planning, and preservation. The man who created many of those frameworks for modern-day New York is George McAneny. During his extensive civic career, he served in several official positions, including New York City comptroller, executive manager of The New York Times, first president of the Regional Plan Association, and Manhattan Borough President. The snippets of history that can be seen on Urban Archive are just a small part of McAneny’s legacy, making him one of the most remarkable New York City visionaries of the first half of the 20th century.

This Jacobean building was once the headquarters of the Bush Terminal Co., the manufacturing and shipping hub which now houses Industry City. Industry City might seem today a thriving business park, home to artists, cultural institutions’ archives and storages, restaurants, public spaces, and more, but it practically took over the Brooklyn industrial waterfront, over the first 5 decades of the 20th century, creating a self-serving city for its employees, and managing its business across two boroughs is an impressive feat.

Financial District Rooftops, June 9, 1938. Looking from 60 Wall Tower (at 70 Pine Street) northwest towards Broadway. On Cedar Street below are Chase National Bank and the Equitable Building; on Liberty Street is the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, filling an entire trapezoid-shaped block; at 149 Broadway is the Singer Tower, with its famous domed top; and at 140 West Street is the York Telephone Building, upper right.

57 Maiden Lane, ca. 1921. The origins of this now-long-gone building are a bit murky. What we do know is this: In 1790 while New York City was the capital of the United States, Thomas Jefferson moved to the city. Despite wishing for a residence on Broadway (where Washington had just taken a home), he instead ended up lodging briefly at a tavern before renting a small home here at 57 Maiden Lane. Jefferson's tenure in New York was brief; following the adjourning of Congress, he left the city on September 1, 1790. The capital then moved to Philadephia and Jefferson did not renew his lease at no. 57. The Dutch-influenced brick building seen here circa 1921 was likely a recent building on the site. The flourishes of the building, the stepped gables and lateral striping of bricks, along with its crisp lines and clean masonry, suggest construction in the Dutch Colonial Revival period in the early 20th century. Today a plaque on the 1965 building at 59 Maiden Lane recalls the location's illustrious (if brief) tenant.

A forerunner of presidential candidate, and democratic socialist Vermont US senator, Bernie Sanders, Charles Solomon seen here in 1932, addresses a large crowd of office workers on Wall and Broad Streets telling them about the relationship between "high finance" and the low economic status of workers. The image was titled “Explains meaning of Wall Street” and appeared in the Yiddish language newspaper the Forverts on September 7, 1932.” A Socialist, New York Jewish politician, Born in 1889 on Manhattan’s East Side to Russian-born, Yiddish-speaking parents, Solomon was a resident of Brooklyn for most of his life. For the better part of two decades Solomon ran for numerous government offices including governor (1934), lieutenant governor (1924), mayor (1933), NY Supreme Court justice (1928, 1938), NY State Senate (1930) and US Senate (1932). He served as Assemblyman of Kings County’s 23rd District from 1919 to 1920 and as a New York State magistrate from 1935 to 1959. He was well respected for his idealism and for refusing to compromise his principles even while on the bench. Known as a sharp logical debater Solomon made frequent appearances at public symposiums on a variety of important topics, Sundays at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Described as a passionate speaker, in September 1920, with the Jewish High Holidays in the offing, Solomon headed over to Pitkin and Broadway in Brownsville, Brooklyn in advance of the socialist special election. Young women outfitted with honey, a traditional Jewish seasonal food, sold tickets to synagogue holiday services near the local cinema. New Year's greeting cards and watermelons were equally sought after items for sale. Solomon was tasked with speaking to the crowds there about the constitution and socialism. Later that year their candidate for president Eugene V. Debs finished with a little over seven percent of the vote, considered a strong showing. August 1921 found Assemblyman Solomon working as the "Publicity Manager" for the socialist party. Open-air meetings and lectures around town offered workers opportunities to learn about the candidates and issues before September's primaries. A former newsboy, a journalist and socialist since his youth, Solomon wrote for the socialist party's “The Call,” and was frequently heard speaking on street corners and local clubs about socialism. Till late in life, he continued his public speaking, even while working as magistrate. A Brooklyn local, in May 1948, Solomon spoke at the Coney Island Liberal Party Club at 2812 Mermaid Avenue, Brooklyn. The topic of his speech was "Questions and Problems of The Day." The Forverts, now generally known as the Forward, at 123 years old, is still in operation just a few blocks away on Maiden Lane. Once a Yiddish daily, it’s currently a digital publication in both Yiddish and English. Solomon was one of five socialist New York assemblymen who were expelled from office in 1920, during the Palmer Raids/ anti-Communist Red Scare. They were tossed out for agitating for social security, public housing and against child labor and other social reforms that are, by now, law. In response to his expulsion, Solomon and a colleague issued a statement accusing the Assembly itself of treason claiming “the Constitution has been lynched.” He was later re-elected and allowed to remain. Charles Solomon died in 1963 and is buried in the Workmen's Circle section of the Mount Lebanon Cemetery in Glendale, Queens. His epitaph is said to read: “He gave the people of his best.”

American Bank Note Company ARCHITECT: Kirby, Petit & Green DATE: 1907-08 STYLE: Neo-Classical This small building was designed as a freestanding structure amid increasing numbers of skyscrapers to symbolize the company’s importance in its field. This building was built to keep the American Bank Note Company’s administrative and sales offices near New York’s main financial institutions during a company restructuring. The building’s neo-Classical style, with oversized columns and continuous window bays, continue to give it a distinctive appearance and presence in this area of Lower Manhattan.

100 Trinity Place, viewed from Liberty Plaza Park (now Zuccotti Park), ca. 1975.

Standard Oil Building, 1926. The Standard Oil Trust, founded in 1870 by John D. Rockefeller and others, quickly came to dominate the American oil market. In 1883, the trust began acquiring land on lower Broadway for a new headquarters. The massive nine-story neoclassical granite building took two years to construct at a cost of one million dollars. Twenty-six Broadway was soon the world's most famous business address, and John D. Rockefeller the first billionaire. Six stories were added to the building in 1895, as shown here. Another floor, added in 1911, was barely complete when the U.S. Supreme Court disbanded the Standard Oil Company for violating anti-trust laws. Following the First World War, the surrounding buildings were bought in order to expand the structure. Thomas Hastings of Carrère and Hastings reworked and essentially rebuilt the entire building, incorporating the first set backs in Manhattan and a pyramidal structure. Eventually reaching 31 floors, the Standard Oil Building was designated a New York City landmark in 1995.

Streetcars on Broadway, outside the Equitable Life Assurance Building, July 7, 1905. The photo was possibly taken from scaffolding for the construction of the new Trinity Building, at the southwest corner of Thames Street (visible at far right).

This elegant limestone monument was the headquarters of Standard Oil of New Jersey, the successor of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust, which was broken up into smaller components under anti-trust legislation in 1911. Through Standard Oil of New Jersey, the largest and most influential of these successor companies, Rockefeller and his board maintained control of the US oil industry. The Standard Oil Trust had operated out of buildings on this site since 1885. Their original ten-story building stood on Broadway at the northern end of the property. The new building was erected in phases, allowing the company to remain on site during construction. The last piece of construction, the center of the Beaver Street front and the light court was not completed until 1928 as tenants on that portion refused to vacate until their leases expired. The building's west front bows gently, following the curve of Broadway. Graceful terraces with balustrades, urns, and obelisks mark its setbacks. The tower is crowned with a symbolic oil-burning beacon set atop a stepped pyramid. In the classically inspired lobby, the names of the founders of Standard Oil are inscribed, like Roman emperors, in marble just above the cornice line. One of the most prolific and prominent firms of the early twentieth century, Carrère and Hastings was also the architect of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street. The Museum of American Financial History occupies part of the building's ground floor.

Originally the American Railway Express Company Building, this building remained the headquarters of the American Express Company until 1975. It now is the home of J.J. Kenny/Standard and Poors. Built in the neoclassical style, the building’s concrete and steel framed structure are faced with white brick and terra cotta over a granite base. An H shaped floor plan results in a pair of slender 23-story wings, embracing and arching over light courts fore and aft, an elegant solution to the deficiencies of electric office lighting before the introduction of fluorescent fixtures. Note the asymmetric eagle on lower arch and the symmetrical one on the arch atop the building

View of Broad Street, July 16, 1936. Berenice Abbott's view includes 41 Broad Street, U.S. Sub-Treasury (truncated, center right), Schwartz's Restaurant (left), New York Stock Exchange (with scaffolding, center left) Lee-Higginson Bank (right, curved) and in the back, the pyramid top of the Bankers Trust Building and the twin towers of the Equitable Building.

1 Wall Street, at the southern corner of Broadway, has long been a prized address. In 1905, the 30' by 40' lot that had been occupied since the early 19th century by a four-story commercial building changed hands for the highest price per square foot ever recorded for Manhattan property: $615 This story is adapted from an exhibition at the Skycraper Museum. The original version can be seen here.

In the booming prosperity of the mid-1920s, the Downtown Athletic Club abandoned its quarters in the Singer Building to establish its own, purpose-built skyscraper. This 35-story club building stacked up all of the amenities of a suburban country club including squash courts, a swimming pool, a miniature golf course, as well as a restaurant and guestrooms for overnight stays. The exterior is fittingly Spartan; only the heroically scaled entrance distinguishes the club's architecture from that of a utilitarian loft building. Dark metal decorative spandrels under the windows form vertical stripes that emphasize the height and slenderness of the tower. Large windowless areas of the façade indicate the presence of facilities such as squash courts and changing rooms. The many closely packed windows of the upper stories light the club's guestrooms. Like its neighbor, 21 West Street, the club is converting its guest facilities into condominiums.

One Wall Street was originally built as the headquarters for the Irving Trust, which was acquired by the building's present owner, the Bank of New York, in 1992. The corner of Broadway and Wall Street is a prestigious location, for which the Irving Trust Company paid dearly. It was an ideal site for a skyscraper because the graveyard of Trinity Church guaranteed direct sunlight and fresh air in perpetuity. Its rear on New Street faced the New York Stock Exchange and challenged the headquarters of rival Banker's Trust a block away at Wall Street and Nassau. Ralph Walker was the architect of numerous large-scale industrial and corporate buildings in New York. His first major work in the city was the Barclay Vesey Telephone Building. One Wall Street cuts a distinctive figure on Broadway. Unusual is the graceful façade that creates an effect of fabric-like lightness with its faceted limestone cladding. In contrast to the contemporary towers, One Wall Street depends on this subtle surface effect for its impact rather than an iconic crown or spire. Its highly expressive Art Deco styling was not for everyone: Lewis Mumford, an advocate of much more rational modes of modernist architecture, wrote in his first architectural review for The New Yorker that it was "mere swank, and unconvincing swank at that." The light colored exterior stone contrasts strongly with the opulence of the interiors, in particular, the rich red, amber, and gold mosaics of the reception hall. One of the most beautiful interiors in the Financial District, its theatricality seems more suited to the Ziegfeld Follies than to Wall Street. Designed by Walker in consultation with Hildreth Meiere, the room shimmers in tones rising from deep burgundy to gold. The lobby beyond was formerly highlighted by a wonderful abstract ceiling mural designed by Kimon Nicolaides and executed by Meiere. This space was altered beyond recognition in the 1960's, although Meiere's work may survive above the dropped ceiling. Inaccessible to the public is the observation lounge, which is marked by majestic thirty-foot windows at the tower's crown. In 1962 Walker's successor firm built an addition in a sympathetic but simplified style. But despite the grand interior design of the interior spaces, tourist visits are not currently allowed.

Wall Street looking west, 1887. This early photograph taken by Norman Wurts (who, with his brother Lionel, started an architectural photography firm in 1894) depicts the intersection of Wall and William Streets. The building at right with the two large columns is the Bank of America Building. Trinity Church can been seen in the distance at center.

Skybridges, which, though rare, could once be found in various Manhattan locations, are quickly becoming a thing of the past. While erected for pedestrian convenience, the utility of these aerial walkways became less relevant as elevator technology improved over the 20th century. Despite their decline, a handful of sky bridges remain today and are always an unexpected joy to see. In this list, we will introduce you to the history and wonder of some of our favorite "skywalks" (those long gone and those still extant)!

Since the Public Buildings Inventory was published in 1977, the Conservancy has worked to preserve and highlight the buildings in it in numerous ways. Here are some examples. You can view the Public Buildings Inventory Index here.

Park Row Building, 1912. R.H Robertson's Park Row Building (1899) was the tallest in the world until 1908. Financed by August Belmont, a pioneer of New York's first subway, the building had 30 stories, nearly 1000 offices, and cost $2,750,000 to build. The Park Row Building is 391 feet tall.

New York Produce Exchange, July 23, 1936. Described in the late 1880s by the New York Times as "the most impressive exchange structure ever seen in Manhattan," the 1884 New York Produce Exchange Building, on a massive 150- by 300-foot site, housed the 1861-founded Exchange. The organization served a network of produce and commodities dealers and by the 1880s had the largest membership of any stock exchange in the world. The Exchange building, designed by George Browne Post, was a red brick structure with inventive construction engineering. The metal framing of the building supported the floors but not the exterior walls, in a method later more common in skyscrapers. It was first building in the world to combine wrought iron and masonry in its structural construction. Post decorated the building's facade with somewhat delicate ornamentation, ships’ prows at the corners and medallions of corn, cows, and pigs. According to most reports though, the decoration was largely lost in the colossal scale of the building. Extremely successful in its first few decades (in 1900 it saw $15 million a day in business), by the 1950s its membership and influence had decreased significantly. The Exchange decided they wanted a new, smaller building. The original building was demolished in 1957. Despite original plans for a William Lescaze-designed building, the replacement structure (referred to as 2 Broadway) was constructed between 1958 and 1959 to the designs of Emery Roth.

Robert L. Bracklow Stationary Store, 1916. This stationary and printing shop, specializing in legal wares, was owned by Robert L. Bracklow, a photographer. He sold prints of his photographs entitled "Glimpses through the Camera."

J. &. W. Seligman & Company Building ARCHITECT: Francis H. Kimball; Julian C. Levi DATE: 1906-07 STYLE: Neo-Renaissance, Baroque Revival, Skyscraper Seligman & Company Building is a steel-framed and rusticated limestone-clad skyscraper, and a is a richly sculptural, neo-Renaissance style building. The design, treated in a manner similar to that of the contemporary commercial and public architecture in Great Britain referred to as “Baroque Revival,” skillfully adapts the difficult quadrilateral shape of the lot and acute angle of the primary corner by providing a dramatic vertical focus, with a round tempietto-form tower, as the building is approached from Wall Street.

70 Pine Street ARCHITECT: Clinton & Russell; Holton & George DATE: 1930-32 STYLE: Skyscraper The Cities Service Building is a 66-story skyscraper that rises from a trapezoidal site bounded by Pine Street, Cedar Street, and Pearl Street. At the time of completion it was the tallest structure in lower Manhattan, and at 952 feet, the third tallest structure in the world. It was commissioned by a major American corporation and was an expression of the owner’s success. The Cities Service Company w quickly grew to become one of the largest corporations in the United States, controlling approximately 200 energy firms in thirty states, including numerous oil and power suppliers.

Downtown's first exemplar of the International Style contrasts dramatically with the sturdy brick and stone of its neighbors. Its 1960s architecture is stripped of historical references and ornament, and its grid of glass and aluminum mirror sunlight down to street level. The sixty stories are carried on twenty columns that, at great expense, were expressed on the exterior as long verticals, faced in white anodized aluminum. At the base, the columns are stilt-like supports for the double-height entry lobby, enclosed in broad expanses of clear glass. As innovative as the architecture of the tower is the plaza in which it sits. The Chase Manhattan Bank headquarters, called "1 CMP," Lever House, and the Seagram Building, created a new paradigm. These towers occupied only a portion of their building plot (in the case of Chase, thirty percent); the rest was a "public" plaza, maintained by the owners. This "tower-in-the-plaza" was encouraged in the 1961 Zoning Law, which allowed developers to trade a bonus of two square feet of extra floor space for every square foot of plaza. One Chase Manhattan Plaza occupies a full-block site for which the street pattern was changed. The tower and plaza rest on a plinth elevated above the street. Below plaza level is the flagship branch of Chase Manhattan Bank. This sleek modern room is lit with natural light from a glass-enclosed sunken garden cut out of the plaza above. The garden, by Isamu Noguchi, synthesizes elements of the traditional Japanese Rock Garden with a 1960's corporate aesthetic. Jean Dubuffet created the large sculpture, Group of Four Trees, in 1972.

Singer Tower at night, ca. 1908.

29 Broadway Architect: Sloan & Robertson Completed: 1931 In 1930, the slender Art Deco tower of 29 Broadway replaced one of New York's early skeleton-framed office buildings, the 12-story Columbia Building of 1890. Sloan & Robertson, architects of the Chanin and Graybar buildings near Grand Central Terminal, created a dramatic Art Deco skyscraper. The bold horizontal black and white banding on the tower, the elaborately sculpted entrance, and marble-clad vestibule give the building a distinctive presence on Broadway. Also striking is the lobby with its gray marble walls and silver metal ornament. The narrow and oddly-shaped site has only 29-foot frontage on Broadway, although it extends back 184 feet, and has a 90-foot frontage on Trinity Place.

The Tower Building, 50 Broadway, 1927. Sometimes cited as the city's first skyscraper, due to its innovative steel-frame design, architect Bradford Gilbert's Tower Building was completed in 1889. Gilbert had to design the set structure to meet the need for a building to rise higher than the usual five or six stories and to take advantage of a small 25-foot wide plot. The first seven stories were supported by cast-iron columns encased within brick walls and linked across the width of the building by wrought-iron girders. Above this structure were solid masonry-bearing walls resting atop the seven story iron framework. The building lasted just 25 years, and was demolished in 1913 after a foreclosure and difficulty attracting tenants.

Singer Building, 1913. The Singer Building, constructed for the Singer Sewing Machine Corporation, was originally constructed as a small red brick building with a mansard roof in 1896. Designed by Ernest Flagg, the building was later incorporated into the larger, more well-known Singer Building, also designed by Flagg and completed in 1908. For a single year (1908-1909) it was the tallest building in the world. At 47-stories (the base was only 12 stories, while the tower topped out at 612 feet), the building was quickly surpassed by the Metropolitan Life Tower on 23rd Street. Visitors to the building could pay 50 cents to take in the view from the 40th-floor observation deck. The Beaux-Arts building had a marble columned and bronze trimmed lobby and was described by architectural historian Christoper Gray as having "celestial radiance." The building was sold in 1961 to Webb & Knapp, a real estate development company, who attempted to have the New York Stock Exchange moved into the structure. That bid was unsuccessful and in 1964 U.S. Steel purchased the building. It was demolished in 1967 (two years after the Landmarks Law was passed). Today the site is occupied by One Liberty Plaza, a 54-story office building completed in 1973. The Singer Building remains the tallest structure to be intentionally demolished.

Lebanon Restaurant ca. 1936 The blocks on Washington Street between Rector Street and Battery Place formed “Little Syria,” settled in the 1880s by Middle Eastern immigrants. Many became successful merchants and moved to Brooklyn. In the 1930s, their upwardly mobile progeny returned to the old neighborhood for family gatherings and traditional cuisine. The Lebanon Restaurant, opened in 1920, featured shish kebab, baklava, and thick Turkish coffee. Abbott may have delighted in the mixture of traditional and modern elements: the window displays of Turkish coffee cups and RCA Victor records, and the juxtaposition of Arabic calligraphy with a poster advertising a seven-course blue-plate special for $5.00. In 1946, the neighborhood was demolished for construction of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.

“Washington Market. Fish stand from balcony. April 28, 1933.” Decades before the World Trade Center was proposed, Manhattan’s Lower West Side was known for Washington Market, the city’s largest wholesale produce market. Established in 1812, the market became a prominent feature of the neighborhood, with over 500 vendor stalls by the 1880s. As regulations evolved, operations were moved into more orderly — and sanitary — quarters indoors. In 1962, the city closed Washington Market, shifting the wholesale food business to Hunter’s Point in the Bronx. Today, One World Trade Center’s base occupies the former site of the final Washington Market building.

20 Nassau Street, 1913. Stretching the entire block of Nassau Street between Pine and Cedar Street, this was the location of the Fourth National Bank. The six-story Second Empire Style building was suffering from intense structural problems when the Germania Life Insurance Company, who originally owned the structure, sold it to Fourth National. Most of the problems of the building came from its sinking foundation, which caused cracks and misalignments to appear in the facade's stones and windowsills. Many of the building's openings had to be braced by heavy timber. In some parts of the building, the ceiling sloped three or four inches and doors had to be trimmed down to be function at all. Despite the structure's impending doom, Fourth National purchased the building for 1.5 million dollars. This was "the highest figure yet paid in the financial district," at the time, at around three hundred dollars a square foot. The New York Tribune noted that the lot had ample light, and "unusual advantages," due to the building's squat neighbors. Though the building was purchased in 1909, the Germania Life Insurance Company didn't move out until two years later. In 1914, Fourth National merged with the Mechanics and Metals Bank and continued to occupy the building, despite concerns over structural problems. The Mechanics and Metals Bank was consolidated with Chase National Bank in 1926, who would ultimately call for the demolition of the building. However, razing a structurally-deficient building proved to be harder than anticipated. The safety vault of the bank was a "miniature fort in the heart of New York's financial district", according to a Connecticut newspaper, because it was encased in thirty inches of masonry and five inches of steel plates to withstand any bombing or burglary. Removing it required the effort of "fifteen men, consisting of drillers, blasters, burners, rock-men, and engineers...employed continuously trying to batter \[it] down." Once the ground was finally leveled, Chase National Bank had plans for a tower almost 500 feet in height, with stepped levels resemblant of a pyramid.

In its history, New York City has seen its fair share of accidents, disasters, and catastrophes. Some have been man-made, while others were the work of Mother Nature. These events have, over time, altered and shaped the city and its citizens.

Bankers Trust Building, 1938.

By Atiba Pertilla William Allen Butler, Jr., the founder of downtown Manhattan’s Lawyers Club, would later explain that its creation was inspired by a disturbing encounter. One afternoon in the 1880s, he went out for lunch with his father and partner, William Allen Butler, Sr.—a respected corporate lawyer, son of a former U.S. Attorney General, and co-founder of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. The restaurant was crowded, but moments later an office boy from his law firm finished lunch and “my respected father occup\[ied] that same stool to order a slice of roast beef.” Unable to find a seat for himself, the younger Butler ended up standing at the restaurant’s “oyster counter” and swallowing down a sandwich “of the genus warranted to stand on one’s chest for a couple \[o]f hours.” He found the blurring of class boundaries and the uncomfortable conditions troubling, wondering “Was there not some better way for the noon-day hour luncheon?” His conclusion was that there was a need for “a reputable and decent place” where men like himself and his father could enjoy a decent midday meal in private, dignified surroundings, away from their subordinates. He decided, in short, to establish a lunch club. Read this in its original format here

Cunard Building ARCHITECT: Benjamin Wistar Morris; Carrere & Hastings (consulting) DATE: 1917-21 STYLE: Neo-Renaissance The Cunard Building has a pivotal location within the fabric of the city, its street walls maintaining the masonry “canyons” of lower Manhattan and its limestone facade commanding a significant presence at the juncture of Bowling Green and Broadway. Morris’s design received much critical acclaim for its arrangement of subtle setbacks and ample, well-located open courts, which addressed the natural light and ventilation demands made by the zoning resolution. This interior consists of a five-bay entrance lobby, and a narrow passageway. It is modeled on ancient Roman and Renaissance Italian prototypes. The decoration, made of polychrome stucco, painted murals, and metalwork, expresses the adventure of travel over the open sea through the depiction of mythical and historical figures associated with the sea, as well as imaginary and real sea creatures. This interior and the exterior of the building have a neo-Renaissance character.

Internation Mercantile Marine Company Building ARCHITECT: Walter B. Chambers DATE: 1919-21 STYLE: Neo-Classical Walter Chambers, an architect trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts who was an associate of Ernest Flagg, became known for designs that reflect an interest in severity and simplicity of composition and details. The building has neo-Classical style, Indiana limestone, granite, and marble. It is ornamented with restrained neo-Classical details that include nautical and marine motifs.

American Express Company Building (white building at middle), ca. 1920. The American Express Company, founded in 1850, has been located at this lower Manhattan site since 1874. Housed in rental offices in two, five-story brownstones at 63 and 65 Broadway, the American Express Company purchased the lots in 1903. Constructed between 1916 an 1917, the concrete-and-steel-frame building was designed by James L. Aspinwall of the firm of Renwick, Aspinwall & Tucker. The H-shaped plan created central light courts, which allowed for maximum light and air to the interior offices. Faced in granite at the base and white brick and terra cotta on the upper floors, the massive neo-classical structure added to the canyon-esque environment on this section of Broadway. American Express moved their headquarters out of this building in 1975.

The Dutch origins of New York City are still visible in any number of places: neighborhood names, the city's flag, and its architecture. If you were to mention Dutch Colonial architecture to most New Yorkers, they might tell you about the centuries-old farmhouses that still dot the outer boroughs. But the Dutch-influenced architecture of the city did not end with gambrel-roofed, wood-frame homes, and it did not end at the colonial period. This list highlights some of the "other" type of Dutch Colonial architecture. The buildings noted here date from the actual colonial period in only a few cases but were largely constructed in the later as a Dutch Colonial Revival recalling New York's 17th century past.

Manhattan Company Building ARCHITECT: H. Craig Severance; Yasuo Matsui; Shreve & Lamb DATE: 1929-30 STYLE: Art Deco, Skyscraper The Manhattan Company Building, built in 1929-30, was planned as the tallest building in the world. The 71-story, 927-foot-tall Manhattan Company Building was completed in a year, an unprecedented feat for such a project, and ready for occupancy in May 1930. The picturesque skyscraper, with an overall massing characteristic of Art Deco style skyscrapers in New York of the period, rises through a series of setbacks to a tower, clad in buff brick and ornamented with terra cotta, with continuous vertical piers and recessed spandrels, and is crowned by a pyramidal roof capped by a spire.

My Archive Spring 2019 "This is a photograph of my great-great grandfather’s jewelry store. His name was John William Day. He was born in New York in 1866 and died in 1908." — Todd Hirsch

Firemen on the third-floor fire escape at No. 82 Front Street, October 1923.

Standard Oil Building, 1926. The original Standard Oil Building (1885) was only ten stories tall, but in 1895 Kimball \&Thompson added six new skeleton frame floors and a north extension to the building, making it 280 feet tall. (The Standard Oil Building is the tallest structure, three buildings in from the corner at right.) The building was later drastically altered and expanded (the southern section of the building now occupies the two lots to the south, seen here).

Park Row Building ARCHITECT: R. H. Robertson DATE: 1896-99 STYLE: Skyscraper The 30-story, 391-foot Park Row Building was the tallest building in New York City and one of the tallest structures in the world between 1899, the year of its completion, and 1908. It is one of several surviving late nineteenth-century buildings that formed Newspaper Row, the center of newspaper publishing in New York City from the 1840s to the 1920s. Among its many tenants, the building housed the offices of the Associated Press news agency, as well as the headquarters of August Belmont’s Interborough Rapid Transit Company. The great height and irregular plan of this building led to the use of innovative construction techniques including a pile and steel-grillage foundation, a Roehling concrete floor system for fireproofing, and Sprague Electric elevators to transport the thousands of people using the building each day.

Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, 1975. The U.S. Customs Service is the oldest of the federal agency, established in 1789. The first Customs House was on the site of Bowling Green, where the current building sits. That first building burned down in 1814 and the agency moved to a series of other locations throughout the 19th century. In 1892 the government bought the land at Bowling Green for a massive new building. Designed by Cass Gilbert, ornate Beaux-Arts style building was constructed between 1900 and 1907. Interestingly, the building was designed to face the historically significant Bowling Green and not the harbor (whereas most other customs buildings faced the water). Spectacular in and out, the most notable exterior decorative features are the four female figures representing America, Asia, Europe, and Africa, created by famed sculptor Daniel Chester French. Inside the massive rotunda features a domed ceiling created by Raphael Guastavino and murals by Reginald Marsh that depict the New York Harbor. Today the building is occupied by the National Archives and the Museum of the American Indian.

Hudson Terminal, ca. 1928. Hudson Terminal was a rapid transit station on the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad (H & M). The terminal, which contained five tracks and three platforms, was located along Radio Row. The two 22-story office skyscrapers, which sat above the terminal, were among the world's largest when the terminal opened in 1909. The main purpose of the H & M buildings was to connect the railroad and streetcar terminals on the New Jersey waterfront with Manhattan. The H & M's only station downtown near Wall Street was designed to handle as many passengers as possible to meet the demands of rush hour traffic. In 1962, as part of the construction of the World Trade Center, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey took over the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad. The terminal was eventually rebranded as the PATH and later, in 1972, demolished to make way for the World Trade Center. It was replaced by the original World Trade Center and an entirely new PATH station.

"New Street looking toward Wall Street, Blizzard of 1888." The Blizzard of 1888 was a catastrophic snowstorm that blanketed large parts of the East Coast. New York had 85 mph wind gusts and snow drifts that reached the second stories of some buildings. The wind and snow combined to create a dangerous situation with overhead electrical and telegraph wiring (as can be seen in this photograph). Just walking down the street was dangerous as the ice and snow made the tall poles and wires ready to fall at any time. A number of people, including Senator Roscoe Conkling, New York’s Republican Party leader, collapsed in the snow. He ended up with pneumonia and died a few weeks later. In all more than 200 people died in New York City alone. In the aftermath of the storm, city officials realized that above ground electrical, gas, telegraph, and water lines were dangerous in these types of natural events. In the ensuing decades the infrastructure that once loomed over the streets on utility poles was moved underground in Manhattan.

Thames Cafe, February 15, 1938. The the signage visible in this 1938 photograph, it seems likely that Thames Street was a busy lunch spot for the workers of the surrounding Financial District buildings including the twin Gothic skyscrapers at 111 and 115 Broadway, seen at center. The eateries include the Thames Tavern, the Thames Cafe Grill, and the Cooperative Cafeteria.

In 1900, the consolidated Greater New York City was only two years old and it was growing, not just outward but skyward. These are the ten tallest buildings in New York City in 1900. They were constructed in the decade before the turn of the century. Today half of these structures remain standing, though now dwarfed by their neighbors. This story is adapted from the Skyscraper Museum's "Ten & Taller."

“Federal Hall National Memorial, ca. 1975. The Federal Hall National Memorial commemorates historic events at the former Federal Hall, which occupied the same site until 1812. The original building, completed in 1703 as New York’s second City Hall, became a meeting place for colonial delegates prior to the Revolutionary War, and later for representatives of the nascent American government in the First United States Congress. Federal Hall became the first Capitol of the United States in 1789, when the Constitution came into force. Under the first Congress, Federal Hall was the site of Washington’s Inauguration and the proposal of the Constitutional amendments that today make up the Bill of Rights. After Congress moved to Philadelphia in 1790, New York’s City government operations returned to Federal Hall until a new City Hall building was completed in 1812. The building was razed thereafter. The current temple-front Greek Revival marble structure was designed by John Frazee and completed in 1842.

25 Broad Street - Broad-Exchange Building Architect: Clinton & Russell Completed: 1902 This 20-story speculative office tower was the largest building in the world at the time of its completion. With 326,500 square feet of revenue- producing space, it was nearly one and a half times larger than its closest rivals. Its proximity to the New York Stock Exchange made it a sought after address for brokers and bankers, and the New York Curb Exchange, which met in the street in front of the building. The 1987 Stock Market Crash and subsequent depression of the Downtown real estate market preempted plans for the Broad Exchange Building’s demolition and redevelopment. From 1988 until 1995, the building was entirely vacant. It was converted into condominiums under the auspices of the 1995 Downtown Revitalization Plan - a state program that provided a fifteen-year abatement of property taxes for owners who converted older office buildings to residential use. The conversion was remarkably sympathetic to the building’s original character, as one can see in the beautifully restored entrance hall. The project, successful both architecturally and economically, is a model for the adaptive re-use of outmoded office buildings in downtown New York.

Built as a speculative office building, this 17-story steel skeleton structure was the largest in Manhattan before the turn of the century. It housed the offices of many shipping companies, being near the start of lower Broadway's "Steamship Row" and convenient to the Custom House. It was here that the friends and family of those aboard the Titanic came in April 1912 to get what news they could from the White Star Line Offices. The Audsley brothers were a surprising choice for such a large and prominent commission. They had no prior experience in New York, having recently immigrated to America from Glasgow. They had, however, completed many projects in England and were known on both sides of the Atlantic for their pattern books on Greek ornament. They designed the building in a style they dubbed "Hellenic Renaissance" a mannerist mode of the Greek Revival. They created a rich layering of Greek ornament and forms that are enlarged to suit the massive scale of the building. The base of the tower is clad in a light granite and the upper portion in terra cotta.

Bowling Green, ca. 1975. Bowling Green is the oldest public park in New York City. The land, which originally served as council grounds to Native American tribes, was the site of the historic sale of Manhattan to Peter Minuit in 1626. He purchased the entire island in exchange for traded goods, 60 gilders, an amount worth around $1,050 in 2015 dollars. The Dutch who later came to occupy the southern tip of Manhattan referred to this spot as “the Plain.” Farmers and businessmen used its grounds for parading, as well as a place to sell cattle. The site also marked the start of Heere Staat, now Broadway, which was a trade route that extended from this point and into the Bronx. In 1658, the city dug its first public well here. It was the only public well in Manhattan until 1677, long after the Dutch were replaced by the British. Not until 1733, when the land was rented to John Chambers, Peter Bayard, and Peter Jay at the cost of one peppercorn per year, was Bowling Green designated as a park. The lessees were responsible for enhancing the park with grass, trees, and a wood fence. A gilded lead statue of King George III was erected here in 1770, and one year after, in 1771, an iron fence. The fence, which still stands today, fared better than the statue. On July 9, 1776, after the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence in New York State, the statue was taken down by angry citizens and recast as ammunition. In the early 20th century, the construction of the IRT subway disrupted Bowling Green. The park was rebuilt, but only as part of a larger, citywide effort to prepare for visitors to the 1939 World Fair. A Charging Bull statue was erected at the north end of the park in 1989. According to the sculptor, Arturo DiModica, the three-and-a-half-ton bronze figure represents “the strength, power and hope of the American people for the future.”

Fraunces Tavern, ca. 1905. The Fraunces Tavern, built in 1719 as a mansion for the family of Stephen De Lancey, was opened as the Queen’s Head Tavern in 1762. A meeting place for Loyalists during the British occupation of New York, it was the site of Governor DeWitt Clinton’s Evacuation Day celebrations in 1783, when remaining British troops departed New York. Shortly thereafter, the Fraunces Tavern — named for its owner and proprietor, Samuel Fraunces, who may have been a spy for the Continental Army during the British occupation — hosted General George Washington’s farewell meeting with his officers. During the 19th century, Fraunces Tavern suffered a series of fires, with subsequent reconstructions, including the addition of two upper stories, substantially altering the building’s appearance. In 1900, the tavern was under the threat of demolition before being temporarily designated a “park” by the State of New York, an ad hoc ruling in an era with scant historic preservation protections. The designation was lifted in 1904 when the Sons of the Revolution in the State of New York purchased the building and undertook a conjectural reconstruction project that shaped the Fraunces Tavern you see today (there is no definitive record of the tavern’s original appearance; the 1904-07 reconstruction took cues from the surviving structure and extant period buildings). In 1975, it was the site of the Fraunces Tavern bombing, when an extremist Puerto Rican separatist group set off an explosive device, killing four and injuring 50.

20 Broad Street, New York Stock Market Annex, 1957. In 1956 the Commerical Cable Building and Blair Building were replaced by a new 27-story annex building for the Stock Exchange next door. Designed by the firm of Kahn & Jacobs, the Modern structure was rendered with prominent setbacks. Purchased by a developer in 2015, the building will soon undergo a residential conversion (to luxury rentals), with added stories and more than 500 units planned.

The iron fence around Bowling Green was put up in 1771 to protect the park and its new statue of King George III. While the statue was torn down when the Declaration of Independence reached New York, the fence itself is still there, a few changes notwithstanding. Originally, the posts are said to have been decorated with royal crowns or iron balls that didn’t survive the Revolution, and in the 1868 painting above, you can see one elegant lamp remaining, which no longer exists. In 1914 the fence was actually removed and left in Central Park while a subway line was constructed, but in 1919 it was thankfully brought back to Bowling Green. Having achieved landmark status in 1970, the fence will, like the park it surrounds, remain a relative constant in an ever-changing downtown.

The Corbin Building was erected in 1889 by architect Francis Hatch Kimball. The structure is a rare surviving example of late 19th-century commercial architecture. While hardly qualifying as a skyscraper today, at nine stories the building towered over its neighbors in 1889. Its slender form, dark stone, and eclectic detail stand in stark contrast to the neoclassical and International Style towers around it. This building is an early design of Francis Kimball, who emerged as a leading skyscraper architect in the 1890s and early 1900s. His buildings include 71 Broadway, 111 Broadway, and 115 Broadway.

Completed in 1896, at 312 feet, the 22-story American Surety Building towered over surrounding structures. The design by architect Bruce Price was one of the most elegant of New York's early skyscrapers. Price divided the tower's height into three zones - base, shaft, and capital - corresponding to the parts of a classical column. Far above the street level, life-sized figures flank the round windows above the second cornice line. The tower stood in splendor until the 1910s when its neighbors rose to equal its height. In 1921 the company expanded the tower, doubling its mass and broadening its elegant proportions. The architect of this expansion, Herman Lee Meader, recycled stone elements from the obscured back façades in his extension of the Broadway and Pine Street façades to ensure visual continuity. In 1975, the Bank of Tokyo renovated the interiors. This modernization, which maintained the tower's historic shell, was at the time a bold strategy for balancing the needs of a modern company with preservation interests. This juxtaposition of mid-seventies modernism and late nineteenth-century classicism is best observed in the starkly minimalist open colonnade between the building's nineteenth-century Broadway façade and the banking hall inserted behind it. Certain period elements were retained in the new interiors, namely the ornate coffered ceiling and the dark red marble columns.

The Columbia tavern on Trinity Place, in the shadow of the Sixth Avenue El, February 23, 1913. This photo was taken ahead of construction of the IRT Broadway Line (1/2/3), though the stretch of Trinity Place pictured is today directly above the Rector Place station of the BMT Broadway Line (N/Q/R/W).

38 Greenwich, back view, August 12, 1936.

20 Exchange Place, entrance with transportation motif, ca. 1994.

21 West Street ARCHITECT: Starrett & Van Vleck DATE: 1929-31 STYLE: Art Deco The 21 West Street Building, constructed in 1929-30, is a particularly fine example of the numerous Art Deco skyscrapers built during this period in New York City. The architects were trying to create a new stylistic expression which they felt would best represent the Jazz Age. The use of brick cladding on this building in different colors and textures was influenced by North German Expressionist architects, while the numerous and varied setbacks near the top of the building were the architects’ response to New York’s 1916 Zoning Resolution.

Rector Street elevated station on the Sixth Avenue line, above Trinity Place, August 17, 1912. The photographer is facing downtown; Trinity Church is out of frame at left.

Edmund Vincent Gillon shot thousands of photographs documenting New York’s architecture and public art from the 1970s to the 1990s. Among Gillon’s rolls, his keen eye for civic sculpture stands out. Admire this set of memorable monuments, part of the Museum of the City of New York’s collection:

City government in New Amsterdam had met in the Dutch Stadt Huys, built as a tavern in 1642 on Pearl Street, then known simply as The Waterside. After the British takeover, in 1703, a new building, seen in the upper image, was constructed to serve as City Hall. Together with Trinity Church and the First Presbyterian Church, City Hall gave weight to the dignity of the west end of Wall Street. After the Revolutionary War, in 1788, Pierre L'Enfant, who was best known for his later planning of the new capital city of Washington D.C., designed the renovation and enlargement of City Hall, which became knows as Federal Hall when it housed the Continental Congress. The balcony served as the location of the inauguration of George Washington as the nation's first president on April 30th, 1789. The nation's capital moved to another temporary home in Philadelphia in 1790 and the building resumed its previous function of city hall until the current City Hall was constructed in 1812.

Singer Building ca. 1908 Architect Ernest Flagg had already designed two buildings for the Singer Manufacturing Company when, in 1906, the company declared it would build the world's tallest building. Flagg achieved the company's goal by utilizing innovative techniques in wind bracing and the anchoring of the building's steel frame, which allowed it to soar to a height of 612 feet. Completed in 1908, the ornate Beaux-Arts tower, with its distinctive lantern top, stood out in the Manhattan skyline and served as a billboard for the Singer Company. For 50 cents, visitors could ascend to the 40th-floor observation deck. In accordance with newly enacted zoning laws, the slender tower was set back from the street and occupied only one-fourth the area of the building from which it arose. The success of the design influenced the use of setbacks, which became a standard feature of successive skyscrapers. In 1968, the Singer Tower became the tallest building ever demolished when its new owner, U.S. Steel, sacrificed it for the glass and steel One Liberty Plaza.

Commercial Cable Building, 1927.

In 1711, New York's first slave market opened in downtown Manhattan. Introduced by the Dutch, Slavery had become an active part of New York's life. Brooklyn and Long Island numbered among the Northern regions with the largest captive populations. An estimated 40% of New York households contained an enslaved person. From farming to carpentry to blacksmithing, blacks worked a number of trades and were a vital source of labor. Situated next to the piers on the East River where the ships were moored, captives would be unloaded from the hellish conditions on the ships and sold. Previously, enslaved people had been sold informally, but a city 1711 ordinance established that they should be sold through this market. Though many of the people sold at the New York Slave Market were black, the market also sold Native Americans into slavery. In 1726, the market was renamed the Meal market due to the fact that grain, corn, and meal were also sold exclusively at the market. By the mid-18th Century, one in five New Yorkers was enslaved. Meanwhile, New York began to grow into the financial and trade center of the colonies. Blocks away from where men, women, and children were sold, their labor, bodies, and futures were financed and insured. The meal market itself would be closed in 1762, but that didn't mark the end of the slave trade throughout the city. Men, women, and children would continue to be sold. The abolition of slavery in New York in 1827 didn't even mark the end as non-resident Slave owners could maintain enslaved people until 1841. The city would continue to be interlinked with the South. Mayor Fernando would even suggest succeeding in 1861 in order to maintain the profitable cotton trade with the Confederacy.

This 30-story Park Row Building was the tallest office building in the world from the time of its completion until the completion of the Singer Building in 1908. Built as a speculative office building by a syndicate of investors lead by August Belmont (also the entrepreneur behind the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), a private company responsible for the building and operation of the original subway line) the office block originally accommodated 950 offices and over 4,000 workers. It exploited the newly developed all steel skeleton technology. The syndicate bought and consolidated seven smaller lots to create this large but very irregularly shaped site which lacked the corner lot. The exterior lacks the soaring profile and slender tower of the office buildings that would take the title of tallest building in the next decade, the Singer Building, Metropolitan Life Tower and Woolworth Building. The most distinctive elements of its design are the two three-story cupolas and four life-sized sculpted figures projecting from the fourth floor of the Park Row front.

Empire Building, ca. 1905.

The Federal Hall National Memorial commemorates historic events at the former Federal Hall, which occupied the same site until 1812.

122 William Street ca. 1913 This Dutch colonial building was made of brick imported from Holland and in 1913 was said to be one of the oldest homes still standing from the New Amsterdam settlement. Located near the site of the pre-Revolutionary War Battle of Golden Hill, the building housed the Golden Hill Tavern, which was a popular rendezvous for Revolutionary figures like George Washington, Marquis de Lafayette and Benedict Arnold during the Revolutionary War. The building was demolished in 1919.

These twin Gothic towers, completed two years apart, are separated by the narrow canyon of Thames Street. Their roofs are connected by a small wrought iron- bridge. The Gothic ornament on these buildings harmonizes with the architecture of neighboring Trinity Church. They contrast sharply with the classical style that the eclectic Kimball used on the Empire Building on the south side of the churchyard. Beautifully restored in the 1990's, the lobbies of both towers are wonderful examples of High Victorian Gothic with floor and lower walls paneled in marble, bronze tracery moldings, and polychrome patterns stenciled on the walls. The elevator-door surrounds, designed to resemble Gothic choir stalls, seem more suited to a sacristy than an office building, as does the ceiling with its heavy beams and the transom windows with their leaded glass

Old Steam Ship Row, 1898. Steam Ship Row was the center of ocean-going travel companies, steamships, and booking offices. Firms with locations here included the Cunard, Line (at no. 4 Bowling Green in the middle of the block), Anchor Line, Red Star Line and French and German lines. These buildings were razed in 1898 in preparation for the construction of the Custom House (built 1902-1907). The headquarters of these shipping firms moved into nearby and new skyscrapers over the next few decades, including the 1898 Bowling Green Building (11 Broadway), the 1891 Columbia Building (29 Broadway), and later the 1925 Cunard Building (25 Broadway).

A walking tours through Lower Manhattan's skyscraper canyons and more than a century of high-rise construction. This walk focuses on the buildings on Wall Street.

Bowling Green Building (at right), 1898. Architectural partners and brothers William and George Ardsley constructed the (now) 17-story Bowling Green Building in 1898 in a "Hellenic Renaissance" style, which they described as "a free but pure treatment of ancient Greek architecture.” Built in a U-shape, the central court provided ventilation and light to the offices. The facade was gleaming white, rendered in brick and terra cotta. Early tenants of the building included the Erie Railroad Company and the White Star Line. It was here that relatives and friends of Titanic passengers flocked for information in the days after the ship's sinking. The elevators, which were a major selling point for the building when it opened, caused a number of issues for the building. In 1915 seven elevators simultaneously fell, and only a few months later, a similar incident with four elevators occurred. The passengers were mostly only shaken up with one broken leg. The building had an additional story and four-story tower added between 1919 and 1920, which was seamlessly designed to reflect the building's style. Today the building is largely occupied by technology companies including a number of internet start ups.

Evening Post Building ca. 1926 Completed in 1875, the same year as the Tribune Building, the headquarters of the of the Evening Post was an imposing ten-story, 140-foot tall structure that stood on the southeast corner of Broadway and Fulton Street. Like the Tribune, it was a load-bearing brick structure with stone trim, but its vaguely Romanesque style was restrained and utilitarian, with the exception of a low mansard-like cupola above the central bay and heavy stone piers and columnettes that framed the main entrance. The architect was the little-known Thomas Stent, who took over the commission from an earlier architect dismissed from the project. The Post wrote in its July 1, 1875 supplement on the new building that its simplicity would be "admired more for its massiveness and substantiality, and for its complete adaptation to the uses for which it was constructed, than for anything peculiar or striking in its outlines or extravagant in the treatment of its interior." The main Broadway entrance, raised a half-story above street level, as was common at the time, led to the major commercial spaces and the lobby access to the hydraulic elevators. The upper floors were partitioned offices, all leased to tenants except for the top floor, which was reserved for the paper's editorial offices and space for the compositors. The printing presses and other machinery operated in the basement levels, and compositors of the job-printing department worked in the vault spaces below the sidewalks on Broadway and Fulton Street. The New-York Evening Post was originally established in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton and his political allies as a Federalist broadsheet after the election of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency. Famed poet and abolitionist William Cullen Bryant took over the paper in 1828 and served as its editor-in-chief for fifty years. The Post changed its format from broadsheet to tabloid in 1942, under the tenure of Dorothy Schiff, after which circulation grew by two thirds. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch purchased the paper in 1976.

An elaborate neo-Renaissance tower which dominates Trinity Churchyard, 2 Rector Street sports highly ornate terra-cotta cladding at the base and on the upper stories. Other notable features are the oculus windows and elaborate life-size angels with out-stretched arms. This 23-story building was built as a headquarters and speculative office venture by the U.S. Express Company, a railway delivery service.

A utilitarian 12-story addition was added onto the top of the restrained Italian Renaissance style former United States Assay Office in the 1950s. Note the very finely sculpted frieze running beneath the cornice of the first story, as well as the graceful iron-work.

New York Cotton Exchange Building, 1923. Completed in 1923, the Cotton Exchange Building was a new kind of commodities facility. Architect Donn Barber placed the trading floor at the top of the building, instead of on the ground floor, as was most common. The trading floor sat under a large skylight, surrounded on all sides by three-story windows. This building was the first major building in the Financial District to undergo residential conversion. It has been a co-op since 1985.

John Watts Jr. Statue from Trinity Courtyard, March 1, 1938. The son of a Scottish immigrant father and a mother who belonged to the city founding DeLancey family, John Watts Jr. graduated from King's College (now Columbia University) and held a number of Colonial posts. He was New York’s last Royal Recorder, a role where he served as a mayoral assistant, judge, and a player in administrative and judicial functions. Despite his father's Royalist position, Watts Jr. sided with the colonies (according to sources) and would become the only Crown official who held elected state or federal office after the Revolution in New York. Watts became a New York State Assemblyman and later Congressman. He also established the Leake and Watts Orphan Home using an inheritance from a friend left to his son, and then himself when he son predeceased him. It was one of the first private charitable institutions dedicated to child welfare in the new country. Founded in 1831, the Leake and Watts Services, Inc continues to serve children in the New York area. The statue was erected by his grandson John Watts DePeyster in 1893 in his memory at Trinity Cemetery where Watts was buried following his 1836 death.

If 1 CM Plaza typifies gossamer modernity, its neighbor represents the weighty historicism in vogue in the days before the Stock Market Crash of 1929. York & Sawyer turned to the fortified palaces of the Renaissance bankers of Florence for inspiration for this design. The fortress-like character is appropriate, as the Federal Reserve houses the world's largest concentration of gold bullion in its basement vaults. The elaborately wrought iron lamps flanking the main doorway on Liberty Street are the work of Samuel Yellin, the most noted artist of wrought iron of the twentieth century.

“Hanover Street, south from Wall Street to Exchange Place, showing (right), a portion of the National City Bank building and (left), a portion of the new Wall and Hanover building. Also shown (under demolition) is the Canadian Bank of Commerce building, at the N.W. corner of Exchange Place and Hanover Street. At the top foreground of the view, is visible part of a foot bridge, connecting the National City Bank with the Wall and Hanover buildings. September 12, 1929.” - P.L. Sperr The National City Bank building at 55 Wall Street had been the Merchants’ Exchange and a U.S. Customs House during the 19th century. Between 1899-1908, architect Charles McKim led the building’s redevelopment as the headquarters of the National City Bank (known as Citibank since 1976). During renovations, workers discovered a cannonball, gunpowder and various makeshift munitions, likely a stockpile leftover from the Draft Riots of 1863. Sperr’s series of Wall Street photographs were taken in September 1929, just one month before the calamitous stock market crash that sent financial markets into crisis.

Adams Express Building, July 16, 1936. The 32-story Adams Express Building was designed by Francis Kimball (architect of Brooklyn's Montauk Club) and constructed between 1912 and 1914. When complete the building featured over a million square feet of terracotta. The style of the structure is called palazzo by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, but it described often as simple and utilitarian, almost devoid of a style. Mirroring arguments that are still occurring today, many developers and architects complained that the Adams Express Building cast an 875-foot shadow, devaluing the real estate that fell in its shadow. Tall building that went straight up from the street level to the roof, including this one and the 40-story Equitable Building, were partial the reason for the 1916 zoning law changes that required setbacks above a certain height, determined by the width at the street. In 1916 the building had more than 300 of its windows damaged by an explosion on the Jersey City waterfront. The Black Tom explosion was a German sabotage attempt to stop the United States from arming the Allies during the First World War. The explosion damaged the Statue of Liberty and awoke people as far away as Maryland, thinking they were experiencing an earthquake. In the 1990s the building saw a $20 million renovation by new owners, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. They also discovered goldfish living in a pool of warm water created by a high water table under the building's boilers. Today it is owned by a huge real estate firm and is occupied by law firms and financial institutions, among others.

The Enduring Issues Practice set is designed to help students analyze documents for Enduring Issues to help prepare them for the NYS Regents Exam. Use the attached handout to answer the questions following each document. At the end, determine what the one Enduring Issue is and create a topic sentence that is supported by evidence from at least 3 images. Enduring Issues Practice Set 1 Handout

The NYC subway is more than a means of transit; it's a living, breathing entity that tells a story at every stop. It acts as the city's vascular network, essential in weaving together the rich mosaic of neighborhoods, cultures, and economic activities. This complex system embodies the heartbeat of New York, vibrating to the diverse culture of its people, each station providing a different window into the spirit of the city. It is also a great reflection on the dynamics of urban change by witnessing the disparity between stations that shine with modernity and those that languish in the shadows of neglect. This contrast raises critical questions about resource allocation, city planning priorities, and the impact on the communities that rely on this crucial transit network. A consideration of inequality in the subways provides a window to rethink what our city and its subway system should and could be. A place where infrastructure serves all communities with fairness and dignity, where the richness of each neighborhood is celebrated and preserved, and where the future of urban living is shaped by the voices of its people. Join me in this exploration, as we look at the layers of New York City's subway system. Together, we'll discover the challenges it faces, celebrate the vibrancy it harbors, and envision a future where it emerges not just as a transit system, but as a symbol of a more connected, equitable, and thriving city.

Manhattan Life Insurance Building, 1945. Designed by Kimball & Thompson for the Manhattan Life Insurance Company, the Manhattan Life Building became New York City's tallest skyscraper in 1893. It was also the first office building to use pneumatic caissons (watertight retaining structures) its foundation. The building was 348 feet tall. The building was demolished in 1963-1964 for the construction of a 36-story annex to the Irving Trust Company Building at One Wall Street.

American Telephone and Telegraph Building, ca. 1917. The 29-story building, also known as 15 Dey Street, was designed by architect William Welles Bosworth as the headquarters of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Construction was completed in stages between 1912 and 1916. In 1915, the building hosted the Atlantic end of the purported first transcontinental telephone conversation (the technology had previously been tested (also from this building); this call was a demonstration for marketing purposes). Alexander Graham Bell reprised his famous call to Thomas Watson, who this time answered from San Francisco.

Western Union Building ca. 1885 At 230 feet tall, the Western Union Building, completed in 1875, became the city’s second-tallest office building after the Tribune, and its spired silhouette dominated the vista of Broadway. It was the first “skyscraper” – although that term was not used in print until the 1880s – of George B. Post, who in the following decades would become one of New York’s most prolific architects of tall buildings, designing twelve of the structures featured in our survey, including Joseph Pulitzer’s World Building, which in 1890, at 309 ft., took the title of the tallest office building in the city and in the world. Like its contemporaries, the Tribune Building and the Evening Post Building, Western Union was a masonry bearing-wall structure that also employed some cast-iron columns and wrought iron girders and beams. Architecturally, it was a horizontally striped Victorian pile of red brick and gray stone, crowned with a high mansard roof built over a metal frame. The ornate roof capped an arcaded eighth story where the company’s telegraph operators sent and received messages from a net of wires that crisscrossed rooftops. From the mid-19th century, telegraphs were the major method of long-distance communication. Using code developed by Samuel Morse to covey “written messages by electricity,” competing companies connected cities, the continent, and opposite sides of oceans with wires and cables that, for considerable charges, carried vital messages. By the 1870s, through inventions and business mergers, Western Union had become the dominant telegraph company. As an article on the new building in the journal The Aldine described: “No single enterprise, in the whole world, has grown so rapidly within a few years, as the telegraph interest of America, of which the Western Union Telegraph Company is the principal exponent; and perhaps it is quite correct that the Company should be the builder and owner of one of the most remarkable structures on the continent, if not in the world…. That the Telegraph Building is to be, architecturally and practically, an immense success, there can be no question; its great height making the amount of disposable space within, simply enormous; and its location, so near the Post Office and the great business centres, rendering its availability quite as marked as its size”.… Called by The Daily Graphic the city’s new “business palaces,” the Western Union Building, like the Tribune, advertised the success of their companies, but they also offered offices for rent on their middle floors.

EXCELSIOR POWER COMPANY BUILDING, MANHATTAN Address: 33-43 Gold Street Constructed: 1888 Architect: William Milne Grinnell The Excelsior Power Company Building is the oldest power generating station in New York City. 11 power plants, whose energy helped grow New York into the city that it is, have been demolished throughout the five boroughs. The monumental Romanesque Revival style building, complete with rough-cut ashlar and rounded, springing arches, features Queen Anne terra cotta details, while the Art Nouveau letters that read “Excelsior Power Co. Bldg 1888 A.D.” add the final touch. The building, an architectural anomaly in the Financial District, has overcome functional obsolescence in its conversion to residences. Its successful adaptive reuse is a gift to Gold Street. The Excelsior Power Company Building at 33-43 Gold Street is a Romanesque Revival structure designed by the architect William G. Grinnell. The Excelsior Steam Power Company acquired this Gold Street property in 1887 from the Columbia Heating and Power Company. Two buildings from the 1840s were on the property and were altered to meet the needs of the Excelsior Company. The red brick facade is distinguished by ornamental terra cotta detail. Incorporated in the terra cotta design detail is the name of the building and the date--"A.D. 1888."

38 Greenwich, front view, October 11, 1914. 38 Greenwich was a six-story tenement building, seen here from above the elevated train line that ran down Greenwich Street (the Sixth and Ninth Avenue El lines). The windows here are filled with residents leaning out on pillows and chatting with their neighbors. The building was demolished in the early 1940s, in preparation of the Brooklyn-Battery (now High L. Carey) Tunnel.

New York was inhabited by Native Americans long before Dutch settled the region. Much of southern New York, New Jersey, Eastern Pennsylvania, and Western Connecticut was inhabited by an Algonquin-speaking group of Native Americans, called the Lenape. This land was called Lenapehoking. The Lenape interacted with and lived adjacent to the European settlers for many years. The relationship between the Lenape and the colonists (first Dutch and then English) was fractured and complicated. They engaged in war from time to time. However, most of their interactions were centered on trade. In particular, the Europeans traded manufactured goods for beaver pelts and other animal furs. Due to several reasons, including disease, migration, and land treaties, the Lenape population of New York shrank as more and more Europeans settled the lands. Additionally, settlers used formal documents to lay claim to the land and slowly push the Lenape out of New York City. While Lenape structures and settlements have been mostly erased from the built environment, evidence exists to show the important contributions of the original New Yorkers. NYS Social Studies Scope and Sequence Standards: 4.2, 7.1 & 11.1 For Teachers: Native Americans In New York Lesson Plan

Westinghouse Building, 150 Broadway, ca. 1924. Architects Starrett & Van Vleck erected the 23-story Westinghouse Building in 1923-1924. According to architect and critic Robert A.M. Stern, the Westinghouse Building "marked an important step toward realizing the aesthetic potential of the zoning law," the 1916 statute governing skyscraper height and lot use.

Hamburg American Building (originally known as Aldrich Court), ca. 1905. The Aldrich Court was designed by the firm of Youngs & Cable in 1886. The building, funded by the estate of deceased American businessman and philanthropist Herman Aldrich, was ten stories tall and designed in the Richardsonian Romanesque style. The large building ran through the block fully to Trinity Place, and had a light court in the middle of the building. The tall gable that topped the two northern most bays gave the impression of a tower (seen at right). The building became the headquarters of the Hamburg America Line, a German-based transatlantic shipping company in 1906. During the First World War, the building was seized from the German business, and became the Shipping Board Building. By 1935 the building was the central location for all federal bureaus concerned with the local supervision or regulation of merchant shipping. The building was demolished in 1982 and replaced by a 32-story office building.

This high-rise was erected as a headquarters for the venerable Bank of New York, which had occupied the same site on the northeast corner of Wall and William Streets since 1797. The famously conservative institution chose society architect Benjamin Wistar Morris to design a headquarters that would reflect the bank’s eighteenth-century origins. The building’s exterior is decorated in a Colonial Revival style. Windows set nearly flush with the wall and lightly incised quoins give the limestone an apparent thinness. Morris used a similar design for 25 Broadway. The tower telescopes to a slender spire crowned with a federal eagle. A marble plaque on the ground story relates back to the building of the bank’s first headquarters on this site. Note also the railings for the subway entrance at the corner, which incorporate complementary Colonial Revival motifs. The main banking hall, on the second floor, is reached via an elliptical, cantilevered, marble staircase. With its three enormous brass chandeliers and checkered marble floor, the banking hall feels as much like a ballroom as a Wall Street bank. Murals decorating the northern wall depict the bank’s founders. The five murals on the eastern wall represent facets of the bank’s business: Foreign Trade; Agriculture and Mining; National Credit; Transportation; Steel and Electricity. They were painted by J. Monroe Hewlett in 1929. The Bank of New York left its home of two centuries in 1997 and moved to One Wall Street, which it acquired in a merger with Irving Trust

Church Street, beneath the tracks of the Sixth Avenue El; April 1, 1928. This survey photo was taken in preparation for construction on the IND Eighth Avenue Line subway, just south of the future Fulton Street station. At the next intersection south, entrance stairways to the Cortlandt Street elevated station are visible either side of Church Street. At right is the entrance to No. 30 Church Street, the Hudson Terminal Cortlandt Building, one of two towers atop the Hudson & Manhattan railroad station.

American Express Company Building ARCHITECT: James L. Aspinwall; Renwick, Aspinwall & Tucker DATE: 1914-17 STYLE: Neo-Classical The American Express Co. Building was constructed in 1916-17 in neo-Classical design. It was built as the new headquarters of the American Express Co. The concrete-and-steel-framed building was designed with an H-shaped plan with tall slender wings arranged around central light courts, a type of plan employed from the 1880s through the 1910s to provide offices with maximum light and air. Both facades, clad in white brick and terra cotta above a granite base, are articulated in the tripartite composition of base-shaft-capital then popular for skyscrapers.

Broad Exchange Building ARCHITECT: Clinton & Russell DATE: 1900-02 STYLE: Italian Renaissance Revival The twenty-story Broad Exchange Building was designed in the Italian Renaissance Revival style by the well-known and prolific firm of Clinton & Russell. At the time of its construction in 1900-02, it was considered the largest office building with the highest estimated real estate value in Manhattan. It is representative of the commercial building boom in lower Manhattan in the early twentieth century. It was characteristic of turn-of the century New York City skyscrapers in its tripartite division into the base, shaft, and capital.

Former National Park Bank Building, 216 Broadway, ca. 1895.

New York County Lawyers’ Association Building STATUS Designated Individual Landmark 14 Vesey Street ARCHITECT: Cass Gilbert DATE: 1929-30 STYLE: Federal Eclectic This building is four stories high, and above the third floor, there is an attic story set back behind a handsome rail (balustrade) and roof deck. The building is an example of Federal Eclectic architecture. It is built of stone, instead of brick, as it would have been if it had been built in the Federal Period in New York.

Federal Hall, built in 1703 as New York's City Hall, later served as the first capitol building of the United States of America under the Constitution, as well as the site of George Washington's inauguration as the first President of the United States under the Constitution. It was also where the United States Bill of Rights was introduced in the First Congress. The building was demolished in 1812.

Gillender Building, 1910. Constructed on a plot of land only 25 feet 2 inches wide by 73 feet 5 inches long, the 1896 Gillender Building was the brainchild of Helena L. Gillender Asinari, who dreamed of a new skyscraper. Architect Charles I. Berg was left to create a building with innumerable issues to design and construction. Massive caissons were needed to build on the soft soil, and with such a narrow plot, much of the interior spaces was taken up by common corridors, stairways, and elevator shafts. At 306 feet from the curb to the tip of the tower it was the tallest building nearby and was, in fact, struck by lighting a number of times. In 1908 Helena sold the building to her major tenant, the Manhattan Trust Company who quickly resold it. The new owners, Bankers Trust, made plans for a new building on the two corner plots of land they now owned. In 1910 the Gillender became to the first skyscraper to be demolished. Disassembled from the top down, the structural sections of the building were examined by a chemistry professor, looking to study corrosion and the state of the metal infrastructure. The building was replaced in 1912 by the Bankers Trust Company Building, which still stands. The New York Times said of the demise of the Gillender, “Here is a modern steel skyscraper in every respect, which was finished barely twelve years ago, and yet the purchasers of the property are going to sacrifice it as ruthlessly as though it were some ancient shack whose usefulness had long outlived the demands required from it by the immediate business vicinity.”

Cotton Exchange Building, ca. 1890. The Cotton Exchange is the oldest commodities exchange in the city, dating to 1870 when it was founded by 100 cotton brokers and merchants. Chartered in 1871 by the State of New York, the Cotton Exchange was first located at 1 Hanover Square (which later became India House). In 1885 they moved into this George B. Post-designed building at the corner of Beaver and William Streets (60 Beaver or 3 Hanover Square). This 19th century structure with a broad rounded corner and cone-shaped roof was replaced in 1923 by new Cotton Exchange Building designed by Donn Barber.

Take a drive up the West Side! This story guides us along the path of the West Side Highway. Following the western shoreline of Manhattan is the West Side Highway. In history, it has passed the World Trade Center, various warehouses and slaughterhouses for livestock received on piers in the Hudson, and Moses' famous failure, the West Side Elevated Highway. Since the 19th century, the West Side Highway has been a vital part of the city's system of roadways.

In the United States, power and the ability to pass laws is spread out across three levels of government: the federal, state, and local levels. Each level has different responsibilities and is in charge of a different group of people. Government at the federal level is in charge of the entire nation. Members of the federal government include the President, the House of Representatives, and the Senate. They make laws and deal with issues that affect the whole nation. Members of the state government are in charge of making laws and protecting the interests of people in a specific state, like New York for example. The governor, and state representatives are examples of people involved with state government. Finally, every city, town, or county has their own local government. They deal with the most specific needs of a local group of people, like keeping communities clean and safe. Members of the local government, can include a mayor, city council members, or county executives. Throughout New York City's history different places have served government functions for each level of government. As you look through this story, consider some of the different responsibilities the various levels of government have and how they have changed over time. New York Social Studies Scope and Sequence Standards 4.4b,c For Teachers: Different Levels of Government Lesson Plan

“View of the New York Stock Exchange building on Broad Street at Wall Street. The J.P. Morgan & Co. building is to the left and a crowd of people stand in front of it. Ca. 1900.” Robert L. Bracklow’s photograph captures two notable buildings at the epicenter of the turn-of-the-century Financial District: the New York Stock Exchange and the Drexel Building. 10 Broad Street (at right) was home to the New York Stock Exchange between 1865 and 1901, when it was razed for the construction of the current building, after years of sustained growth in trading volume. Across the street at 23 Wall Street was the Drexel Building, the predecessor to the “corner building” headquarters of J.P. Morgan Chase. In 1869, Anthony Drexel and J.P. Morgan became partners in the new Drexel, Morgan & Company bank, and soon afterwards commissioned a grand, marble-clad French Second Empire building at Broad and Wall Streets for its headquarters. After Drexel’s death in 1893, Morgan renamed the bank and its New York headquarters J.P. Morgan & Co., and set in motion plans for a new building. Morgan died in 1913, months before the Drexel building was demolished. Anticipating its demise, the New York Times observed: “In a few days the most valuable piece of real estate in the United States will be nothing but a vacant lot, surrounded by a board fence.”

Waterfront from Roof of Irving Trust Company Building, May 4, 1938. "Broad Street and the East River from the roof of One Wall Street. The two copper domes are 20-22 Broad Street. The building on the left is the Equitable Building and on the right is the Continental Bank & Trust Co." The Commercial Cable Building (the domed building at the bottom), completed in 1897 and designed by Harding and Gooch, employed concrete-filled cast iron pipes for an innovative approach to foundation engineering used to stabilize the slender tower. The building was 304 feet tall. Demolished for a 27-story office building in the mid 1950s, today 20 Broad Street is being converted into high residences with a plan to add an additional six stories.

"Taken from the roof of a 55 story building on Broadway looking southwest toward New York Harbor. The Adams Building is in the foreground and rising to the west is the Whitehall Building on West Street. Also visible is Battery Park with Castle Clinton, and in the harbor the Statue of Liberty and the ocean liner "Ile de France, May 4, 1938."

The Bennet Building, ca. 1928. The Bennett Building is a landmark structure constructed in 1872-1873 by Arthur D. Gilman for James Gordon Bennett Jr., the publisher of the New York Herald. Originally the French Second Empire structure was only six stories tall, but in 1890-1892, the mansard roof was removed and three floors and a penthouse were added by James M. Farnsworth for the building's new owner, John Petit. In 1894, Farnsworth constructed an extension of the building to Ann Street. In each case, Farnsworth's additions carefully mimicked Gilman's original design. The Bennett Building's key feature is its facade: it is the tallest structure in the world with an entirely cast-iron facade. Its richly decorated facades meet at these distinctive curved corners.

Guaranty Trust Building ca. 1912 Here the colossal Ionic order, set off by simple ashlar masonry walls, lent great dignity to the front facade, while an equally handsome colonnade screened the windows of the main banking room along Liberty Street. York and Sawyer proved their versatility in departing from their Romanesque mode of this more purely Classical theme.

“St. Paul's Chapel, looking east from junkyard, general view of front entrance.” June 1, 1931. Built in 1766, St. Paul’s is the oldest church building in Manhattan. The Georgian chapel was designed by Thomas McBean as a northern “chapel-of-ease” outpost of the Trinity Church at Broadway and Wall Street. In its early years, St. Paul’s was a place of worship for early American luminaries like George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. More recently, St. Paul’s is known for its role related to the September 11, 2001 attacks and the aftermath. Despite its proximity to the World Trade Center site, St. Paul’s survived the towers’ collapse intact, without so much as a broken window. In the subsequent weeks, it served as a place of rest for first responders while its iron fence became the site of ad hoc memorial displays.

A horse-drawn searchlight engine passes in front of the Whitehall Building, 1910.

Johnston Building, 1915. The 15-story Johnston Building was designed by James B. Baker and constructed in 1895-1896. It replaced a small brick building that dated to the early decades of the 19th century. The limstone clad, streel-frame office building was advertised as being "absolutely fireproof." Tenants of the building included Flint, Eddy & American Trading Co., an import and export firm, as well as the New York office of the Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company. The building was replaced by the 48-story Continental Bank Building, completed in 1932 by the firm of Cross and Cross.

Once one of the largest office buildings in the city, the Whitehall Building was constructed in two phases. Planning for the larger second structure began immediately after the original 20-story building opened to great success in 1904. The 31-story addition quintupled the building's size. Cass Gilbert's newly completed U.S. Custom House had generated a new demand for office space in the district to the east of Broadway which had formerly been dominated by the port and its warehouses and small-scale industrial facilities. In the original building, the frontage on Battery Park guaranteed offices light and expansive views. Henry J. Hardenbergh (also the architect of the Dakota Apartment Building and the Plaza Hotel) created a boldly scaled design equal to its prominent riverfront site. The larger addition, by Clinton and Russell, has stylistic affinities with Hardenbergh's earlier work. The building has recently been converted into a mixed-use commercial and residential complex.

By Rob Koehler New York City’s oldest continuously operating library is the New York Society Library, currently located on 79th St. just east of Central Park. The Library was originally founded in 1754 but was forced to close for fourteen years during the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, the British occupation of the city, and the ensuing Post-War depression. It was re-founded in 1789 as part of the larger cultural revival of the city in the 1780s and has been open since. The library has always functioned on a subscription basis, with members providing the funds by which the library continues to operate and buy new books. Yet, the re-founding of the library was not just the reemergence of a lapsed cultural institution during the post-war recovery, it was also a part of larger debates about the cultural resources necessary to sustain the new national government. Read this in its original format here.

21 West Street Architect: Starrett and Van Vleck Completed: 1931 Starrett & Van Vleck designed 21 West Street in concert with its neighbor, the Downtown Athletic Club. The two designs contrast strongly in their use of color and textured brick, but set back at the same points and utilize similar materials. Built for the speculative office market, 21 West Street was converted into apartments under the incentive of the 1995 Downtown Revitalization Plan. Vertical piers in a mottled golden brick contrast with spandrels in textured red brick, creating a woven effect. Cantilevers at the building corners create wrap-around windows. The bright red aluminum window frames – which have recently been replaced – add to the liveliness of the composition. The open arcade on the street is supported by massive columns with gilded stepped capitals reminiscent of Inca and Aztec architecture. The marble lobby retains most of its original fittings, as well as a beautiful wall map rendered in marble.

Firemen on the third-floor fire escape at No. 82 Front Street, October 1923.

The 40 Wall Street Corporation was formed in 1929 to construct a speculative skyscraper for the anchor tenant, the Manhattan Company (the Bank of Manhattan). Among the principal investors was the Starrett Corporation, a company owned by the men who were also the building’s general contractors, Starrett Brothers & Eken. Architect Craig Severance and associated architect Yasuo Matsui designed a simply ornamented, setback skyscraper with raised brick patterning and cast stone-ornament, and with an elaborate crown and spire in French Gothic style. The story of the building’s height, which topped out at 927 feet above the sidewalk, has become an urban legend. In the real estate boom of the late 1920s many developers sought a PR angle to promote their buildings. In 1929 there was a celebrated “race” to erect the tallest tower in the world. The rival for the title was the Chrysler Building, then under construction in midtown. Adding an edge to the competition was the fact that Severance had only recently dissolved his professional partnership with William Van Alen, the architect of the Chrysler Building. The race between the two towers was avidly reported by the press. Both buildings were topped out within a year of their first steel columns. Van Alen was ultimately victorious, having kept secret the Chrysler Building’s 185 foot aluminum spire, erected within the tower’s fire shaft. After 40 Wall Street had been topped out, that thin needle was hoisted from inside the tower to bring the height to 1046 feet and the title to Chrysler. Bested, 40 Wall Street went on to a lackluster career. The building opened after the Stock Market crash, and many of the prospective tenants reneged on their leases. The building was not fully rented until 1944, nearly fifteen years after its construction. Its bad luck continued. In 1946 an army transport plane en route to Newark Airport got lost in fog and crashed into the building’s fifty-eighth floor, killing all five people aboard. Badly in need of renovation and eighty-nine percent vacant, in 1992 40 Wall Street was purchased by the Trump Organization for less than eight million dollars. With a great deal of investment, 40 Wall Street has been well tenanted since the late 1990s.

The New York Stock Exchange holds a certain place of privilege in the iconography of American finance. The columns and pediment of its Broad Street front are immediately recognizable, even if the name of the architect behind the design is largely forgotten.

Mortimer Building, 9-11 Wall Street ca. 1919. 50 years before this building was erected, Richard Mortimer built a four-story brick building in the same spot. After years of disrepair, the building was torn down and replaced with the Mortimer Building by the executor of the Mortimer estate W.Y. Mortimer. Completed in 1885, the Mortimer Building was used entirely for office space for lawyers, brokers, and bankers. After its construction, the New York Times detailed the interior, describing a light-filled space with wainscotting in marble and mahogany walls, accompanied by iron and stone staircases. The building was touted as completely fireproof. The building adjoined the New York Stock Exchange until it was acquired by the Exchange in 1918 in order to consolidate and make room for additional trading floor space.

Mutual Life Insurance Building, ca. 1890. Erected during the Civil War for the Mutual Life Insurance Company, this ornate, mansard-roofed building was considered the "handsomest and costliest" building in the city when completed. The building's original owners occupied the structure for less than two decades. In 1911 the building was sold to the Guaranty Trust Company who planned to raze it and rebuilt. 'Engineering News,' trade magazine reported on the intricacies of demolishing such a large structure. The grand Guaranty Trust Building was completed in 1912.

St. Paul's Chapel This chapel, where George Washington worshiped, was designed to face the North River, with its very fine spire above the entry. The porch on Broadway provided a secondary entrance. The interior with its High Georgian detail appears today much as it did when built. It is the sole survivor of all those ancient churches which once abounded in lower Manhattan, including the Dutch Reformed Lower, Middle, North churches; the Garden Street Church; and the Old Brick Church.

Alexander Hamilton's grave, ca. 1920. July 11, 1804... Weehawken, New Jersey... a duel... Hamilton and Burr...with one bullet Hamilton falls and dies the next day. On July 14, 1804, Alexander Hamilton was buried at Trinity Church, after his body was carried from the home of his sister-in-law through the street, lined with thousands of mourners, to his final resting place. The city had declared the date a day of mourning. Gouverneur Morris, a friend gave the eulogy. The large grave marker seen here was not installed right away but donated two years later by Society of the Cincinnati, a Revolutionary War fraternal group of which Hamilton was President General.

Central Hanover Bank and Trust Company, ca. 1931.

Group of Four Trees.

J. P. Morgan & Co. Building ARCHITECT: Trowbridge & Livingston DATE: 1913 J. P. Morgan & Co. Building is a fine marble structure. Due to the great impression of solid dignity and massive strength created by this building on its corner site, the Morgan Building forms a conspicuous part of the city scene at this important location. The illusion of openness is further enhanced here by the manner in which the corner of the building is cut off diagonally.

Astor Memorial Doors, ca. 1912. In 1891 William Waldorf Astor commissioned a series of bronze doors for Trinity Church in honor of his father John Jacob Astor. Karl Bitter won the competition to sculpt the largest doors at the front entrance (Charles Henry Niehaus and John Massey Rhind, the runners-up worked on the smaller north and south doors). The 14-foot pair, seen here, was created with six panels illustrating Biblical scenes. The doors are topped by a 4-foot tympanum with Christ standing above depictions of his twelve apostles. While the smaller doors were installed in 1893, Bitter was quite busy with work at the World's Columbian Exposition and his pieces were not completed until 1896.

The American Stock Exchange is housed in a distinctive Art Deco granite building facing Trinity Churchyard. The original facility, built in 1921, was enlarged with a massive new trading floor and refaced with this boldly expressive façade in 1929. Starrett & Van Vleck were the architects of both the original building and the subsequent addition. They also designed 21 West Street and the Downtown Athletic Club in a more jazzy Art Deco style. The American Stock Exchange was originally known as the New York Curb Exchange because the brokers met and traded in the street at the corner of Broad Street and Exchange Place, in front of 24 Broad Street, the Broad Exchange Building. They moved inside for the first time in 1921 when they occupied this facility. Now, to visit the interior one must be a trader, all access to the public is closed.

Mail and Express Building Completed in 1892, the odd skyscraper headquarters of the Mail and Express was an extraordinarily ornate and narrow 14-story slab embedded in a mid-block site, with a main facade on Broadway a mere 21 feet wide. The building was L-shaped, extending 211 feet deep into the lot; a second section on Fulton Street was wider, but only eleven stories. Designed by the Beaux Arts architects Carrère and Hastings, the Broadway façade had the appearance of the entrance to a French chateau squeezed and stretched vertically and capped with an attenuated mansard tower and spire. The Broadway entrance to the paper's business offices were adorned and overwhelmed by four large caryatids designed by the sculptors J. Massey Rhind and Philip Martiny representing the "four continents." The high degree of sculpture and architectural ornament, also seen in the World Building, seems to have been driven by the desires of the strong-willed client, the publisher Col. Elliott Shepard, who was married to the heiress Margaret Louise Vanderbilt. In 1888, Shepard purchased the newspaper from Cyrus Field, the prominent businessman responsible for laying the first transatlantic cable. An extremely religious man, Shepard included text from the Bible on the editorial page; the paper was politically Republican. The critic Barr Ferree reviewed the building in Stone Magazine, noting that the individual detail of the Broadway façade made a better impression than the structure as a whole. He credited Carrère and Hastings for doing the best they could under the difficult circumstances of lot size and shape and client demands, noting that, "commercial requirements, however, have little regard for the necessities of the architect." The presses of the Mail and Express occupied the basement and could turn out 98,000 papers per hour. The editorial offices and the composing room were located on the tenth and eleventh floors. Like all the other newspaper buildings of the time, the Mail and Express rented extra floors to tenants; these included technology companies and publishers, such as Electrical Engineer and the American Lithographic Company. The Mail and Express Building survived only until 1920 when it was torn down along with others on the block to make way for the monumental American Telephone and Telegraph Building.

National City Bank Building, 1931.

New York, the city of great heights. Let's admire some buildings that were at one time the tallest!

The private bank, Brown Brothers, Harriman & Company was the anchor tenant in the office tower developed and built by Starrett Brothers - who were also the contractors for 40 Wall Street and the Empire State Building. Brown Brothers have a distinctive private entrance at the corner of Wall and Hanover. Like the nearby Bank of New York building at 48 Wall Street, this entrance rotunda has a delicacy and domestic scale more typical of eighteenth-century Wall Street than of the 1920s. The form steps back from its squarish base into an irregular octagonal tower ornamented with gargoyles and ocular windows.

There were several successive Equitable Buildings on this site as the powerful insurance company headquarters expanded over the last decades of the nineteenth century to fill the entire block framed by Broadway, Pine, Nassau, and Cedar Streets. The first Equitable Building, a seven-story building designed by Kendall & Gilman, was finished in 1870 and was innovative both in terms of its structure and technology. Said to be the first office building in New York to use a passenger elevator, the building exploited technology to render the upper floors as convenient, and even more desirable, than the lower floors. In addition, the building's use of metal structural columns represented a major step towards the construction techniques that would later develop into steel cage construction. The building expanded in numerous construction campaigns, most notably George B. Post's extension of 1889 which more than doubled the building's Broadway frontage. It was a highly profitable investment that the Equitable Company was keen to optimize. On January 9, 1912, the Equitable Building was almost completely destroyed by fire, despite its much-touted "fire-proof" construction. Chicago architect Ernest R. Graham's firm was retained the day after the fire to supervise the stabilization and demolition of the ruin, and later the redevelopment of the site with a much larger structure. The company had previously discussed plans for the building's redevelopment with Graham for three years before the fire. The new Equitable Building was to represent once again the heights of modernity: ample and speedy elevator service, state-of-the-art heating and ventilation systems, fireproof construction, and fire- safety systems. At 38 stories, the Equitable Building was never the tallest, but it was the largest building in the world with 1,200,000 square feet of rentable office space. The massive size of this building galvanized the political forces necessary to enact the 1916 Zoning Resolution, which required high-rises to set-back at their upper levels. The main entrance to the building is on Broadway.

1 Hanover Square, sometimes called India House, can be called one of the survivors of downtown Manhattan. Throughout its long history, many institutions have called it home from bankers to lunch clubs.

Delmonico's ARCHITECT: James Brown Lord DATE: 1890-91 STYLE: Renaissance Revival This striking Renaissance Revival building is one of the finest surviving late-nineteenth-century buildings in Manhattan’s financial district. It is the only surviving building associated with the world-famous Delmonico’s Restaurant. Delmonico’s, founded in 1827 by brothers John and Peter Delmonico, was one of the first restaurants in the United States to specialize in fine Continental cuisine.

West Street Building, 1905. Cass Gilbert, later architect of the Woolworth Building, designed this speculative office tower for developer General Howard Carroll. Originally, 90 West Street stood across the street from the Hudson River wharves and warehouses used by its tenants. This area became landfill in the late 1960s using material excavated in the construction of the World Trade Center. It is now occupied by the World Financial Center and Battery Park City. The tower's restrained granite base and shaft contrast sharply with its crown-like finale which is marked by a graceful three-story arcade, elaborate over-hanging cornice, and mansard roof decorated by pinnacles, look-outs, and niches – all expertly rendered in terracotta in the style of the French Renaissance. This was Gilbert's most elaborate use to date of colored glazed terracotta and can be seen as a clear precursor to the Woolworth Building. Badly damaged on September 11, 2001, the debris from the towers falling just a few hundred feet away tore gashes into the facade. Two workers were killed in an elevator and the entire interior was completed gutted by fire. The facade of 90 West Street remained shrouded in a protective covering for years as restoration was undertaken. Unveiled a few years later, the rehabilitation of the building was honored by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2006.

Manhattan Company Building, 1930. 40 Wall Street, a 71-story neo-Gothic skyscraper now called the Trump Building, was built in 1930 by Craig Severance for the Manhattan Company, a bank founded by Aaron Burr in 1799. The building was also known as the Manhattan Trust Company building. During construction, Severance's ex-business partner, William Van Alen was designing the Chrysler Building. The two architects were racing for the tallest building in the world. When completed, Severance's tower measured 927 feet, a figure soon surpassed by the Chrysler Building and its famous 125-foot spire. There was debate at the time because the highest usable floor in 40 Wall Street was higher than Chrysler’s, and the spire the Chrysler building was said to be cosmetic, not functional. The debate was short-lived: less than a year later, the 1,250-foot Empire State Building was completed, robbing both architects of the coveted "tallest building" title.

The restored Fraunces Tavern design required the removal to two upper stories added during the 19th century and the controversial addition of a hipped roof, based in part on the Philipse Manor House in Yonkers. At right is the Bush Terminal Buildings Company headquarters, a five-story Dutch and English Gothic structure built in 1905. This was the business management office for the Bush Terminal, an intermodal shipping, manufacturing, and storage complex on Brooklyn’s waterfront in Sunset Park, today known as Industry City.

Isamu Noguchi's "Red Cube," ca. 1970. Noguchi's sculpture was installed in 1968, outside the Marine Midland Building at 140 Broadway.

New York City is home to coffee lovers. For centuries, coffee has been sold, traded, and enjoyed in the city. One aspect of coffee culture that has aided its popularity is the coffee house. Coffee houses' locations throughout Lower Manhattan were essential to the foundations of the City's political and financial institutions. Providing both public and private rooms to men of all classes for discussions of business, politics, new ideas, and the latest gossip, coffee houses quickly rose in popularity. Although these institutions no longer stand their influences are still felt today. Join us as we travel to the locations of several old New York City coffee houses to see what has replaced them in their stead.

Stamp Center Building, Nassau Street, 1954. Nassau Street was a hub of New York’s stamp collecting community in the early 20th century. Collecting was especially popular during the 1930s, and stamp storefronts and dealers operated along the street until 1994, when the last shop relocated to Pennsylvania.

St. Paul Building & St. Paul's Chapel, ca. 1907. While many skyscrapers were made taller by pointed roofs or cupolas, George B. Post's St. Paul Building (1897) reached its lofty height with a flat roof. Its neoclassical style, with its many-layered rows of columns, was consistent with older neighboring buildings. The St. Paul Building was 315 feet tall. The 26-story building was demolished in 1958 and replaced by the Western Electric Building.

The dark mass of 53-story One Liberty Plaza was an unusual departure from the glass curtain-wall typical of International Style office buildings. One Liberty Plaza's thick columns and horizontal steel spandrels, which have the appearance of massive I-beams, give the building enhanced strength and were appropriate for the tower’s original tenant, the U.S. Steel Company. The exterior walls, which are an integral element of the building's structure, showcase an advanced use of steel in high-rise construction. This structural system frees the building of most interior columns allowing for a more open and readily adaptable floor plan. One Liberty Plaza occupies the site of the Singer Building (once the world's tallest) and City Investing Company Building (once the world's largest) both built-in 1907 and demolished in 1969. The Singer Sewing Machine Company initially commissioned Ernest Flagg to design a 35-story tower, but soon decided to nearly double that height to 600 feet. Completed in 1908, just twenty months after the foundations were set, the Beaux-Arts style tower clad in red brick and bluestone stretched to 612 feet, besting 15 Park Row by more than 200 feet. However, the Singer Building held the title for only a year before it was surpassed by the Metropolitan Life Tower at Madison Square. The tower's demolition sparked a little protest at the time. Major losses throughout the 1960s -- Penn Station being the most prominent -- galvanized public concern regarding the preservation of landmark-quality buildings. Architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable described the Singer Building's last hours: "Piranesi anyone? The master never produced a more impressive ruin than the Singer Building under demolition. Curious New Yorkers who risk a piece of Pavonazza marble on the head by looking beyond the boarding that surrounds the tower will find a scene of rich, surrealist desolation. Domed vaults supported by bronze trimmed marble columns await the sledgehammer in the half-light and plaster dust. The distinctive tower, a triumph of 'modern' steel construction that added its Beaux-Arts silhouette to the picturesque bouquet of early skyscraper spires, will probably be replaced by one more 'flat-top,' diminishing the character of the downtown skyline." Erected simultaneously with the Singer Building was the City Investing Building, a speculative office block that contained more rentable space than any other in the city at the time of its completion in 1908. Francis Kimball, the architect of many other early skyscrapers, designed it. The building occupied an awkward and long site with narrow frontages on Broadway and Church Street. Liberty Park occupies the full block directly to the south. The developers of One Liberty Plaza in exchange for additional floors created it under an incentive available under the 1961 Zoning Law. On the block that is now the open plaza to the south of the skyscraper once stood the Washington Life Building, an early skyscraper of 1898 by Cyrus L. W. Eidlitz.

The address 50 Broadway is famous in skyscraper history as the site of the Tower Building, the first building in New York, and arguably in the world, to be constructed with iron framing. The skeleton frame was able to fully support the extraordinarily narrow building's walls and floors through the use of wind bracing diagonal beams. Unlike in Chicago, where engineers and builders embraced metal skeleton construction, in New York, the new technology was met with conservative reaction. Some protested that the tower would be unsafe, even after the Department of Buildings had granted its permit for construction. At one point during the building's construction, after the walls had been raised to the height of 158 feet, but before the structure had been roofed in, a great windstorm struck. A crowd was said to have gathered, awaiting the structure's imminent collapse. Gilbert, who had climbed the scaffolding to the building's 11th floor to measure vibrations with a plumb line at the height of the storm, reported to the New York Times in a heroic, if perhaps self-serving narrative printed the following day, that the building "stood as steady as a rock in the sea." The Tower Building's façade was in a heavy, Romanesque style with an exaggerated, arched entranceway. It was demolished in 1914. A 37 story office building replaced it in 1927. In order to attract brokerage and investment firms, a special entrance was built at 41 New Street so that brokers and clearinghouse runners could "make quick contacts in emergencies."

City Bank-Farmers Trust Building ARCHITECT: Corss & Cross DATE: 1930-31 STYLE: Skyscraper, Modern Classic The City Bank-Farmers Trust Company Building, fifty-nine stories high, is one of New York City’s tallest skyscrapers. It was built to house what was at the time New York’s largest financial institution, formed by the merger of the National City Bank of New York and the Farmers Loan and Trust Company. Its steel-framed structure sheathed in granite at the entrances and in limestone above became, on completion, the tallest stone-clad building in the world. It was designed in a conservative “Modern Classic” style.

Empire Apartments, ca. 1975. Speculatively built by the O.B Potter estate and by designed by Kimball & Thompson, the Empire Building was completed in1898. From 1901 until 1976, the United Steel Corporation occupied the building. The building was converted into high-end residents prior to 2000. The AIA Guide to New York City refers to its entrance as, " a triumphant Roman ensemble."

59 Washington Street (center left, with the large windows), August 12, 1936. The railcar diner, seen at left, is located on the east side of West Street in the vacant lots that were once 41-45 West Street. Formerly occupied by small brick tenement buildings, the structures were razed between 1927 and 1931. Photographs from 1931 have a gas station in its location. The three-story white building with cross (at right) at the top (no. 57) is St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church. The church served the local community of Maronites, Christian from present day Lebanon. Next door, 59 Washington was once the headquarters of the Lebanon National Bank. The entire surrounding area was an ethnic enclave of Syrian and Lebanese immigrants, referred to as 'Little Syria.' In 1946 the City acquired the titles for all of the properties on this block and razed the buildings for infrastructure related to the Brooklyn-Battery (now Hugh L. Carey) Tunnel.

Trust Company of America Building Architect was erected in 1907 by architect Francis Hatch Kimball. Festooned with stone cupids and cartouches around the entrance and topped with a richly sculpted cornice, this Beaux-Arts style high-rise was built to house The Trust Company of America. At 17 stories it was one of the first truly tall buildings and is the oldest remaining high rise on Wall Street.

In 1905, James Hazen Hyde threw one of the grandest parties of the Gilded Age: a Versailles-themed costume ball at Sherry's restaurant.

Just shy of the stock market crash and at the tail-end of a real estate boom of the late 1920s, a race to the top broke out between three buildings, who vied for the title of the World's Tallest Building. A clear rivalry developed between Craig Severance, architect of 40 Wall Street, and his ex-business partner, William Van Alen, who designed the Chrysler Building. Just uptown, the Empire State Building threatened to cast a shadow over its two competitors, topped off with an unlikely crown.

Wall Street bombing, 1920. At lunchtime on September 16, 1920, as banking clerks and businessmen bustled through the streets, a massive bomb tore through the Financial District. Set off from a rickety horse-drawn wagon at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets, the bomb was heard AND felt for blocks. It derailed a streetcar a block away, sent debris as high as the 34th floor of a neighboring building, and created a rain shower of glass from broken windows. In total 38 men and women were killed, while hundreds were injured. Though the investigation into the culprits and motivations of the terrorism went unsolved, it was believed that the business of J.P Morgan was the intended target (who some felt had profited from the horrors of World War I). Most of the dead though were not high-level bankers but secretaries and clerks. Historians believe that the action was carried out by Galleanists (Italian anarchists), who had been responsible for similar, though smaller bombings in 1910. This was the deadliest domestic terror attack until the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing.

Delmonico's, 1929. What became the premiere restaurant in the nation by 1890, began in a very humble manner. When brothers John and Peter Delmonico opened their first eatery in New York City in 1827, the wealthy of New York society dined at home, while public restaurants catered to the working classes. When the first Delmonico's opened at 23 William Street, the cafe menu included fine wines, cakes, and European style delicacies. This fancy menu was only expanded when the full service, fine dining restaurant was opened next door a few years later. And despite the classist perceptions of dining out, the elite of the city began to patronize the venue. The first Delmonico's at 56 Beaver Street (or 2 South Williams Street) was constructed for the eatery in 1837 following the destruction of its original home in the Great Fire of 1835. It was informally given the name "The Citadel." A great success, by 1890 the restaurant was world renown (with multiple NYC locations) and the proprietors, descendants of the founders, wanted a larger space. They demolished the four-story triangular building and commissioned James Brown Lord to construct an eight-story Renaissance Revival edifice. It was here that lavish dinner parties were thrown by wealthy New Yorkers for birthdays, weddings, and other celebrations. Family discord and issues over finances caused the final two Delmonico's to be closed (this location in 1917) and sold (Fifth Avenue and 44th Street, sold away from the family in 1919 and closed 1923). The restaurant has been revived a number of times in this location under different management, including its current incarnation, open since 1998.

New York Stock Exchange, ca. 1970. Long before the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011, the area of Lower Manhattan near the Stock Exchange was the site of political protests. Established in 1987 as the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, the group was well known for their confrontational style of advocacy. On the same day as a planned protest of pharmaceutical companies they felt were profiting from the AIDS epidemic on the street outside of the building, a few members sneaked into the building. They chained themselves to a balcony and rained fake $100 bills onto the trading floor. This was the first time in history the opening bell of the Exchange had been disrupted.

32 and 32 1/2 Stone Street, 1938. According to the metadata attached to this 1938 photograph (i.e. the photographer's notes), the Dutch-style building midframe dates to the early 19th century (and perhaps earlier). Here the building is occupied by the American Banker, a banking magazine. The photographer notes that the building managed to survive the Great Fire of 1835, which covered 17 city blocks and destroyed about 700 buildings. While it is certainly possible that this building dates to the colonial period, given that Stone Street was one of the oldest streets in the city, it is also possible that the photographer or the sources he consulted were incorrect and the building dated to post 1835. A mention of the structure next door in a 1954 New York Times article dates that extra narrow building's origins to the early 19th century, which strengthens the argument for this pair's colonial roots. The building just left of no. 32 was no. 32 1/2, which is reported in the same article as being only six feet, five inches wide. This section of Stone Street was demapped in the 1980s with the construction of the large office building at 85 Broad Street. (The original path of the street—the first paved road in the city— is marked by special paving through 85 Broad Street's lobby).

New York Stock Exchange. Contained in this building we find, paradoxically, a complete sculptured pediment of Classic inspiration and what was probably the first all-glass curtain wall in New York. The pediment figures were executed by the sculptor J.Q.A. Ward, assisted by Paul W. Bartlett. The glass curtain wall, placed directly behind the colonnade, provides light for the great floor of the Exchange itself.

New York Stock Exchange ca. 1970 On the morning of May 8th of 1970, 700 activists, mostly college and high schoolers, gathered at the intersection of Broad and Wall Street to protest the Kent State shootings and Vietnam War. However as the day wore on, hundreds of construction workers, mobilized by the head of the AFL-CIO John Brennan, arrived as counter-protestors and began harassing the activists. At first, the construction workers simply pushed the activists but realizing the police were indifferent to their actions breached the line and started assaulting them. In what became known as the hard-hat riots, the construction workers then pursued the students and beat them, as well as forcing their way into PACE University and City Hall. Only six arrests were made as the police largely observed the riot.

Willa Cather and others at the party for Mark Twain's 70th birthday. Cather is the second woman from the left, seated at the back of the table.

Trinity Building ARCHITECT: Francis H. Kimball DATE: 1904-07 STYLE: Neo-Gothic, Skyscraper The Trinity Building, built in 1905 and 1907, is among the first skyscrapers in New York designed in the neo-Gothic style. Among the notable design features of the building is its sympathetic relationship to Trinity Church, with its southern elevation providing an important and harmonious backdrop to the graveyard, thereby enhancing one of New York’s most important landmarks.

A walking tours through Lower Manhattan's skyscraper canyons and more than a century of high-rise construction. This walk focuses on the buildings around Broadway. This story is adapted from an exhibition at the Skycraper Museum. The original version can be seen here.

“Coenties Slip, east from but not including Pearl, to and including South Streets, showing the South Ferry division of the Second and Third Aves. Elevated Line winding its course from Pearl (left foreground) down Front Street (right center) to the Battery. Also seen is Jeanette Park, a quadrilaterally shaped area which divides Coenties Slip in two parts. Coenties Slip is shaped in the form of an isosceles triangle, with Pearl Street as its vertex and South Street as its base. In the background appears the East River and the Brooklyn shore, across it. Pier 7 is visible on the left. About 1885.” South Ferry Station was the southern terminus of the combined Second and Third Avenue Elevated lines between 1878 and 1950. The station was reached by a winding section of track from Hanover Square along Pearl Street, turning left at Coenties Slip, then right at Front Street, onward to Whitehall Street and the South Ferry.

63 Nassau Street, ca. 1974. No. 63 Nassau Street, a New York City Landmark since 2007, included one of just five extant cast iron facades by James Bogardus. A trained watchmaker and inventor with Dutch colonial roots, Bogardus took out the first patent for the architectural use of cast iron in 1850. The Bogardus facade at No. 63 Nassau was an update to an 1844 structure owned by Augustus Thomas, the son of "kitchen tinware manufacturer" Thomas Thomas (real name). When the elder Thomas died in 1856, Augustus Thomas — who had offices in another Bogardus-designed cast iron-fronted building at 183 Broadway — contracted Bogardus to update his Nassau Street home to stand out among new commercial storefronts in the area's nascent jewelry district. The LPC attributes the facade to Bogardus, taking a number of indicators into consideration, including a distinctive detail: bas-relief medallion busts of Benjamin Franklin, visible at the third story. Similar details had been identified at confirmed Bogardus facades (he was known to retain and re-use wooden patterns for his cast iron molds).

Subway construction for the IRT Lexington Avenue line on Broadway, at Exchange Place, June 7, 1905.

Liberty Tower, ca. 1980. Rising 33 stories on a site only sixty-eight feet by eighty-two feet, Liberty Tower was a prominent feature of the early twentieth- century skyline. Its white terra-cotta cladding and steeply pitched copper roof evoke late English Gothic architecture. So slender a tower required elaborate wind bracing in its steel frame, and its foundations were also unusual, as caissons had to be sunk through quicksand to bedrock at a depth of 95 feet. In 1980, Liberty Tower became a pioneering example of the adaptive re-use of early office buildings when it was converted into condominiums.

City government in New Amsterdam had met in the Dutch Stadt Huys, built as a tavern in 1642 on Pearl Street, then known simply as The Waterside. After the British takeover, in 1703, a new building, seen in the upper image, was constructed to serve as City Hall. Together with Trinity Church and the First Presbyterian Church, City Hall gave weight to the dignity of the west end of Wall Street. After the Revolutionary War, in 1788, Pierre L'Enfant, who was best known for his later planning of the new capital city of Washington D.C., designed the renovation and enlargement of City Hall, which became knows as Federal Hall when it housed the Continental Congress. The balcony served as the location of the inauguration of George Washington as the nation's first president on April 30th, 1789. The nation's capital moved to another temporary home in Philadelphia in 1790 and the building resumed its previous function of city hall until the current City Hall was constructed in 1812.

This temple-like building was erected as the U.S. Custom House. Its initial design was the work of Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis, one of the famous and talented partnerships in America in the early nineteenth century. The Greek Revival style temple form used here set the standard for commercial and government architecture on Wall Street in the pre-Civil War period. This building stands on the site of the first City Hall, later called Federal Hall. George Washington took the first presidential oath of office on the site in 1789. A designated National Landmark, the building is maintained by the National Park Service and open to the public with exhibits.

Federal Hall National Memorial prior to 1883 To place a circular rotunda in a rectangular building may seem illogical, but such were the vagaries of the Greek Revival. It was originally planned to build a Roman dome over the rotunda, set squarely in the middle of this Greek temple. The dome was never built, but the handsome rotunda may still be seen. This building is located on the site of the old Federal Hall, a Federal Style building designed by Major L'Enfant, on whose balcony George Washington took the oath of office as President.

India House ca. 1975 This magnificent building was one of the first to be erected on Hanover Square after the disastrous fire of 1835. It was probably built by Richard F. Carman, who was listed in city directories as a carpenter and who reputedly amassed a fortune rebuilding the "burnt district" in 1836. He later had a country seat at Fort Washington and developed Carmanville. India House seems to have been built as an office block, being occupied subsequently by the Hanover Bank and the New York Cotton Exchange. It later became a private club that housed a maritime museum.

Known simply as 23 Wall, the buildings on the corner of Wall and Broad Street have represented the epicenter of American capitalism for over a century. The headquarters of J.P. Morgan and Co., originally Drexel, Morgan & Co., have been located here since its founding in 1873. The original building, obsolete by 1912, was replaced by this three-story structure, which could be termed the anti-skyscraper. It was an expression of the extraordinary wealth of the so-called “House of Morgan” that it could erect such a discreetly scaled banking hall on one of the most valuable and prominent plots of land in the city. The bank’s Wall Street façade still bears the scars of a 1920 anarchist’s bomb attack that killed 33 people. J.P. Morgan’s immense wealth and his near monopoly of banking, shipping, and many other industries made him a lightning rod for the discontent of many.

Climbing great heights to construct the newest buildings or digging deep underground to maintain the tunnels that carry our subway, water, and drainage systems, the city's workers make sure that New York runs like a well-oiled machine.

2 Broadway Architect: Emery Roth & Sons, 1959; redesign of curtain wall, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1999 2 Broadway replaced a landmark of the nineteenth-century city, George B. Post's New York Produce Exchange. The Exchange, a 10- story building topped by a Renaissance-style campanile, was a technological marvel at the time of its construction because of its partial steel-cage construction. Post articulated the façade with a series of arched colonnades separated by projecting cornices, which offset its height. The design was executed in a red brick and enriched with very fine brick and terra-cotta ornament