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.

Bankers Trust Building, 1938.

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."

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.

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.

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.”

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

The Bankers Trust Building, ca. 1938. The original granite clad, Neoclassical tower, topped with a monumental stepped pyramid, rises on the corner of Broad and Wall Streets from a site ninety feet square. The pyramid, which was once the trademark of the now-defunct Banker’s Trust, is modeled on the classical Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. Until this point, the more prominent banks and investment houses of Wall Street had eschewed the novelty of high-rise construction. Trowbridge and Livingston were also the architects of the J.P. Morgan Building, diagonally across the street, and the New York Stock Exchange Extension, across Wall Street. They imbued the tower’s design with a sense of monumentality. Note how the deeply set windows in the ground and first floor give the base a sense of real solidity -- an effect also achieved by the deep-set Ionic colonnade below the pyramid top. An L-shaped Art Deco extension surrounds the tower on three sides. While the extension employs a modernist vocabulary, its design defers to the architecture of its origins. Shreve Lamb & Harmon were also the architects of the Empire State Building. Until recently the tower contained one of the most beautiful Art Deco banking halls in the city and was home to the Skyscraper Museum from 1998-1999. It has since been converted to a health club.