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.

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

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

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.