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.

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.

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.

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.

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

On September 29th, 1899, a two-day land and sea parade welcomed Rear Admiral George Dewey (1837-1917) home. Dewey had become the nation’s great naval hero, the first and only admiral to be titled “Admiral of the Navy”, after his 1898 victory at the Battle of Manila Bay, in the Philippines, during the Spanish–American War. Take a virtual walk into the Manhattan of 1899, and see the celebrations with the photographs of amateur photographer Thomas W. Kennedy (active ca. 1890-1915.) The Spanish–American War ended with the 1898 Treaty of Paris, and the US took possession of several former Spanish colonies including Puerto Rico, the island of Guam, and the Philippine Islands. The US occupation of the Philippines would lead to the brutal Phillipine-American War.

Photographs of New York City streets can show us sites and scenes that have long disappeared from the ever-changing city. Along with more permanent features like monuments and buildings, these snapshots can capture some of the most ephemeral aspects of New York: the broadsides, building signs and billboards that constantly changed with new businesses, consumer products and entertainments. From soap to Broadway shows, the street advertising in the Thomas W. Kennedy photographs in the Seaport Museum's collection can tell us a lot about what late 19th and early 20th century Manhattan was selling.

2 Broadway, as seen from the stairs of the Customs House, ca. 1970-1990. 2 Broadway is an International style skyscraper that replaced the 1884 red brick New York Produce Exchange Building in 1959. Designed by Emery Roth, the 32-story building originally had a checkerboard modernist facade. The design of the building was generally panned by critics when it was complete. Ada Louise Huxtable said of the facade, it looked “as if it could be demolished with a can opener." Author of Lost New York, Nate Silver said “The produce exchange, one of the best buildings in New York, was replaced after 1957 by one of the worst.” The building, which struggled to find tenants in the last couple decades of the 20th century, underwent a $100 million renovation starting in 1997 by the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. A new curtainwall of blue-green tinted glass was installed. Since the renovation the building has been the headquarters for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.