The Barclay Vesey Telephone Building was one of the first skyscrapers built on downtown's gritty westside - a working waterfront dominated by piers, warehouses, and small-scale industry. The building housed offices and communications machinery for the New York Telephone Company. This dual function explains the building's unusual massiveness, as the machines housed on the interior did not require natural light. At ground level, the builders provided generous public arcades as well as a fantastically decorated lobby. Architect Ralph Walker's complex sculptural accents play off of the skyscraper's somber brick bulk. These accents on the building's exterior and in the lobby feature stylized shallow-relief trees, flora, and fauna. The Barclay Vesey Telephone Building was one of the first major skyscrapers of the "setback style," the ziggurat-like form suggested by the city's 1916 zoning law. It was also a masterpiece of Art Deco design by the architect. The famed French architect and theorist, Le Corbusier, used the Barclay Vesey Telephone Building as the frontispiece for the English language edition of his polemic, Towards a Modern Architecture. For him, it represented the functionality and power of American building in the late 1920's.

New York Telephone Building, 1936. Designed by Ralph Walker of the firm McKenzie, Voorhees & Gmelin in a Mayan-inspired Art Deco style, the massive New York Telephone Building was one of the most impressive buildings of the 1920s. The 32-story, buff brick clad structure, completed in 1927, has unusual massing with a short obliquely-angled tower, vertical piers ending on battlements at the top and sculptural ornaments on the many setbacks. It is considered one of the first skyscraper designed under the 1916 Zoning Law that required setbacks. The interior was designed as monumentally, with a neo-Romanesque Guastavino-vaulted arcade that runs the whole length of the Vesey Street side. The five sub-basement levels were built for and continue to house communications equipment, today a telephone switching center. The building's east and south facades were damaged following the collapse of WTC Building 7 in the attacks on September 11, 2001. In the years after the attacks, the original limestone carvings on the facade were reproduced.

Often overlooked, doors are perhaps the most important feature of a building. They are the means by which we escape the often crowded and chaotic streets of the city. Every building has one (well, maybe except for the Raymond Street Jail which was accidentally constructed in 1836 sans front door), but some outfit this largely utilitarian feature with more panache than others. This collection highlights some the city's loveliest historic doorways, from the simple but classic columns of early 19th century Federal rowhouses to the gloriously geometric brickwork of Art Deco apartment houses, and everything in-between.

Entrance to New York Telephone Building, ca. 1995.

In the closing decades of the 19th century, New York underwent a profound physical and cultural transformation. Fueled by the wealth of the exploding financial and manufacturing sectors, the city rapidly evolved into a world-class metropolis. The bold ambitions of civic and business leaders, architects, and engineers of the era manifested in landmarks such as the vast Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the stately U.S. Custom House, the towering Municipal Building, and the original terminus of New York City’s first official subway line—the ornate City Hall stop. The sweeping interior spaces common to all of these structures, and hundreds of others, depended upon a venerable Mediterranean building technology adapted to contemporary American construction: arched tile ceilings—or vaults—that were not only self-supporting but could also bear the weight of floors or roofs above them. These vaults were designed and built by a single New York firm, founded by Spanish immigrant Rafael Guastavino (1842-1908) and later headed by his son Rafael Jr. (1872-1950). The Guastavinos’ patented system for building domes and vaults involved multiple layers of thin ceramic tiles bonded with quick-drying mortar. The resulting structures were not only exceptionally strong, but also lightweight, easy to build, and inherently beautiful, thanks to intricate patterns of exposed tile that formed finished, decorative surfaces. Guastavino vaults figured prominently in more than 1,000 projects across the nation, including 200 in Manhattan alone. During its 73-year history, the Guastavino Company helped build some of the most impressive interior spaces in America—veritable palaces for the people. This list based on MCNY's exhibition Palaces for the People, contains many of Guastavino's masterpieces in the five boroughs, both those that remain and those that have been lost to the wrecking ball.

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.

140 West Street ca. 1926 The east side of West Street was lined with cheap hotels, bars, luncheonettes, auto repair shops, and gas stations. Rising over these low buildings and filling an entire city block was an Art Deco behemoth, the headquarters of the New York Telephone Company (1926). Designed with a huge base, setbacks, and a tower, the building offered an ingenious solution to the height and mass restrictions of New York’s 1916 zoning law. Today it is a designated landmark.

The area now known as Tribeca was originally developed in the early 19th century as a residential neighborhood close to the city’s center in Lower Manhattan. Its street grid was laid out at right angles off of Greenwich Street and on a diagonal off of Broadway, creating blocks of different lengths and irregular open spaces. The residential character of these blocks allowed for the retention of small lot sizes in future waves of development, thus creating a neighborhood with richly textured streetscapes of varying styles of architecture. After the Civil War, shipping hubs moved from the East River to the North River (later renamed the Hudson River), and South Street Seaport was traded in for steam-powered shipping on the west side via long piers. With a newly thriving industrial waterfront, the neighborhood was poised for change. Around 1812, Washington Market was established on the streets from Fulton to Vesey and Washington to West (near the current site of the World Trade Center). The market grew considerably between 1812 and the middle of the century, becoming the city’s major source for consumables. Hundreds of vendors sold all manner of imported and locally made goods and produce to store owners, restaurateurs and home cooks alike. The growth of the market was, no doubt, fueled by the shipping industry on the river nearby, facilitating the transfer of goods. The market moved to Hunts Point in The Bronx in 1967 and the World Trade Center was developed shortly thereafter. Washington Market Park, located at Greenwich Street between Duane and Chambers Streets and designed by Lee Weintraub in 1978, was named after the historic market. With the combination of a bustling industrial waterfront and thriving commerce, the Federal and Greek Revival residential buildings north of the market were transformed into food storage warehouses and over the course of the rest of the 19th and into the 20th century, the majority of these would be replaced entirely with store and loft buildings and warehouses. This architectural development, which spanned roughly 50 years from 1860 to 1910, encompasses a balance of utilitarian and decorative forms in a range of popular styles of the period, all while defining the identities of the enterprises housed within and the expression of American commercialism as a whole. These buildings still dominate the character of the neighborhood today. Originally referred to as the “Lower West Side,” there are differing accounts as to where the name “Tribeca” came from. It originated in the 1970s, after a Special Lower Manhattan Mixed Use District was adopted for the area south of Canal Street, between Broadway and West Street. A realtor, advertising real estate within the new district, referred to it as Tribeca, which stood for the Triangle Below Canal. Most likely, the realtor hoped to inspire a similar transformation to that of Soho, whose industrial buildings had been converted into artists’ lofts and trendy apartment buildings. Four historic districts were designated in 1991–92: Tribeca East, Tribeca West, Tribeca North and Tribeca South, which was extended in 2002. These are located in Tribeca’s center, while pockets around the historic districts and most of the neighborhood’s periphery remain unprotected. Community members are currently advocating for more individual landmarks and expansion of the historic district borders.