1 Broadway
1 Broadway is a 12-story office building in the Financial District of Manhattan, New York City. It is located at the intersection of Battery Place and Broadway, adjacent to Bowling Green to the east and the Battery to the south.
1 Broadway was built in 1882 as the Queen Anne-style Washington Building on the site of the former Washington Hotel. The building was acquired by the International Mercantile Marine Company in 1919 to serve as its corporate headquarters and extensively altered to its present Neoclassical style. It was the headquarters of IMM and its successor company United States Lines until 1979, when the firm relocated to Cranford, New Jersey. The structure continued to host office tenants as well as a bank. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 2, 1991, and was designated a city landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1995. It is also a contributing property to the Wall Street Historic District, a NRHP district created in 2007.
Site
The International Mercantile Marine Company Building is in the Financial District of Manhattan in New York City. It is bounded by Battery Place and the Battery to the south, Broadway and Bowling Green to the east, Greenwich Street to the west, and the Bowling Green Offices Building to the north. Its alternate addresses are 1 Battery Place and 1-3 Greenwich Street. The structure occupies a lot with frontages of on Battery Place, on Greenwich Street, and on Broadway. The site overlooks the New York Harbor to the south, and its Battery Place facade is adjacent to two entrances for the New York City Subway's Bowling Green station.Architecture
The building was initially designed by Edward H. Kendall as a Queen Anne style building. The current neoclassical style facade was designed by Walter B. Chambers.Form
1 Broadway is a 12-story building. The ground story is sometimes counted as two floors because of its double-height ceiling. It was erected as the 9- or 10-story Washington Building. The structure was later expanded to 14 stories, a count that included the mansard roof. The mansard roof still remains on the building and counts as the 13th story, while an attic above the mansard counts as the 14th story. The building is slightly U-shaped, surrounding a shallow light court to the north, which connects with 11 Broadway's much deeper light court.Facade
The building has side entrances facing Battery Park which are labeled "First Class" and "Cabin Class". The facade of the ground through 12th stories is composed of buff-colored Indiana Limestone, which replaced the original cladding of red Milwaukee brick and sandstone. Though the spandrels of the windows are of green marble, and the water table below the first story is faced with granite. The southwestern and southeastern corners of the building, facing Battery Park, are chamfered and formerly contained entrance doorways at the base.The ground-level windows are arched double-height openings with multi-paneled sash windows, topped by half-domed awnings. On Broadway, there are five vertical bays. At ground level, the center bay contains the main entrance archway; it includes carved reliefs of Mercury and Neptune in its spandrels, and it contains a pediment with an eagle carving at its top. The two northernmost ground-level bays on Broadway are less ornate entrance archways, while the southernmost bays are window openings. On Battery Place, there are nine bays. At ground level, the second-to-last bays on either side contain entrances: the eastern entrance was for first-class passengers, and the western entrance was for cabin-class passengers. On Greenwich Street, there are six bays; all are double-height windows, except for the northernmost bay, which includes doors and a staircase to the building's elevator hall. The basement windows are visible at the bottom of the facade, and a staircase led to the third-class passengers' entrance in the basement.
An entablature runs along the facade between the 1st and 2nd floors. Between the windows on the second floor are alternating mosaic shields of renowned port cities. On the 3rd through 7th floors, each bay contains a pair of sash windows. The spandrel panels above each pair of windows are made of yellow marble, and the spandrels above the 4th story contain roundels as well. The chamfered corners each contain a single sash window per floor.
The facades of the 8th and 9th floors comprise an arcade with one arched window in each bay, while the 10th story contains a pair of sash windows in each bay. At either chamfered corner, the 8th and 10th floors have a rectangular sash window, and the 9th floor has a rose window. The 11th and 12th stories comprise the copper mansard roof; the 11th floor is set back slightly and surrounded by a balustrade. Above the roof are three 1- and 2-story mechanical towers.
Booking room
The first-floor booking room is long by wide, running parallel to Battery Place, and has a ceiling tall. Its floor was made of marble, later covered with linoleum. Inside, a compass rose was prominently depicted in the floor, and two enormous murals depicted shipping lanes. The former booking room was modeled on an 18th-century ballroom, with columns and elaborate railings at either end, along with four imposing chandeliers and marble walls. This space was later converted to a Citibank branch. To the north is the building's original lobby, which stretches across the width of the building, and also contains marble floors and walls. The lobby contains access to a bank of elevators as well as an emergency staircase.History
Early site usage
In the 17th century, two taverns operated at the site of what is now 1 Broadway. One of these was the "Knocks Tavern", built around 1649 by Dutch military officer Peter Knocks. This was likely the first permanent building at 1 Broadway. Additionally, there was a "market stand" on the site in 1656. Dutch settler William Isaacsen Vredenburgh lived at the site until 1673, when the building was scheduled to be demolished because it interfered with Fort Amsterdam's defenses. From 1678 to 1685, the property was owned by David Ackerman, a Dutchman who was subsequently one of New Jersey's earliest settlers.The lot was sold in 1745 to Royal Navy captain Archibald Kennedy. Around 1760 or 1768, Kennedy's house was erected at the site, "fashioned after the most approved English model". The house was a symmetrical two-story mansion with materials imported from the Netherlands; its features included two stone string courses and a slightly projecting center portion with a Palladian window. There was a parlor long and a connection to the adjacent house at 3 Broadway. Kennedy occupied the house until 1776, during the American Revolutionary War, when he fled to New Jersey. The Kennedy house then served briefly as headquarters for Continental Army generals Henry Lee III and Israel Putnam, and possibly served as headquarters for General George Washington, as well as by high-ranking generals of the British army.The Commander-in-Chief, America, Sir Henry Clinton, occupied Number One Broadway as his headquarters, and in 1782-3 Sir Guy Carleton also occupied Number One.
Following the war's conclusion, the structure was restored to its original condition. It was then occupied by banker Nathaniel Prime, possibly either between 1810 and 1831, or through the 1840s. The structure then became the Washington Hotel, which opened in 1854, although one source says that the house was used for entertainment as early as 1794. Sometime in the mid-19th century, the building was expanded: a drawing in the 1859 Norton's Handbook of New York City shows the hotel as being four stories tall. Adjoining the hotel was the residence of John Watts, built in 1750 on the site of the current IMM Building. It was connected to the Washington Hotel by a temporary bridge that was installed whenever the Watts family held large events.
Washington Building
In mid-1881, Cyrus West Field paid $167,500 for the Washington Hotel and $70,000 for Caroline W. Astor's adjoining house at Battery Place and Greenwich Street. The hotel's furnishings were sold that December. The prior month, in November 1881, Field had announced that he would host a competition among six of the city's most reputable architects to design the Washington Building, a commercial building, on the hotel site. The winning architect would be paid $5,500, and the other architects would be paid $500 each for submitting a design. Edward H. Kendall won the commission and prepared plans for a Queen Anne style building on the site. The Washington Building Company was set up in June 1882, upon which title was transferred to said corporation. The structure was erected by W.H. Hazzard & Son and was completed in 1884 at a final cost of $900,000. The Washington Building was often referred to as the Field Building, after its developer.The Washington Building was originally a 9- or 10-story structure rising, covering. The building was faced with red brick and sandstone, and the main entrance was through Battery Place to the south. The corners contained five-story-high columns of overhanging oriel windows. The structure was C-shaped, surrounding an interior courtyard on its north side. It initially contained four elevators, but two more were added in the 1890s. As originally designed, there were to be 17 offices on each floor between the third and ninth floors, and there were "about 860 windows and 358 rooms" in total. Tenants included the Statue of Liberty construction committee, the Manhattan Hay and Produce Exchange, the Postal Telegraph-Cable Company, and the United-States National Bank. The structure was topped by a circular tower on the Battery side and a rectangular tower on the Broadway side.
Kendall designed additional stories to the Washington Building in 1885, but sources disagree as to how this was undertaken. According to Fran Leadon, a two-story addition was built shortly after the Washington Building's completion, and another two-story expansion was added in 1886–1887. However, Christopher Gray of The New York Times mentions a single 4-story addition that was completed by 1887. Either way, following the expansion, the top story consisted of a mansard roof containing protruding dormers on its south face. After the expansions, the building was tall. Gray and a contemporary Real Estate Record article characterized the Washington Building as being 14 stories, but Moses King's 1893 Handbook of New York City and an 1896 Times article described the building as being 13 stories. The Washington Building Company hired Harry E. Donnell in 1908 to perform unspecified "internal improvements" on the structure.