Liberty Tower (Manhattan)
The Liberty Tower, formerly the Sinclair Oil Building, is a 33-story residential building in the Financial District of Manhattan in New York City. It is at 55 Liberty Street at the northwest corner with Nassau Street. It was built in 1909–10 as a commercial office building and was designed by Henry Ives Cobb in a Gothic Revival style.
The site is adjacent to the New York Chamber of Commerce Building, while the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Building is to the east, across Nassau Street. Upon its completion, Liberty Tower was said to be the world's tallest building with such a small footprint, having a floor area ratio of 30 to 1. The building's articulation consists of three horizontal sections similar to the components of a column, namely a base, shaft, and capital. The limestone building is covered in white architectural terracotta with elaborate ornament.
When the building opened in 1910, one of its first commercial tenants was the law office of future U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Shortly after World War I, the entire building was bought by Sinclair Oil. In 1979, architect Joseph Pell Lombardi converted the building from commercial use into residential apartments and renamed it the "Liberty Tower", in one of the first such conversions in Manhattan south of Canal Street. The building was designated a city landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1982 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. It is also a contributing property to the Wall Street Historic District, an NRHP district created in 2007.
Site
The Liberty Tower is in the Financial District of Manhattan, on the southern half of a block bounded by Nassau Street to the east, Liberty Street to the south, Liberty Place to the west, and Maiden Lane to the north. The building has a frontage of about on Nassau Street, on Liberty Street, and on Liberty Place, as well as a northern lot line measuring about long. None of these sides are parallel to each other.The tower's land lot has a total area of. The Liberty Tower is surrounded by numerous buildings, including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Building to the east, 28 Liberty Street to the southeast, 140 Broadway to the south, and the New York Chamber of Commerce Building to the west.
Architecture
The Liberty Tower was designed by Henry Ives Cobb and constructed by the C. L. Gray Construction Company, with the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company as a major contractor. It is 33 stories tall with a roof height of. The building was designed in the English Gothic style, and was influenced by Cobb's experiences in the École des Beaux-Arts and the Chicago school of architecture. Cobb intended the Liberty Tower to be "a tower rising from a solid base and growing lighter toward the top".The Liberty Tower's articulation consists of three horizontal sections similar to the components of a column, namely a base, shaft, and capital. The building is freestanding on the west, south, and east sides, which face the streets, while the northern side abuts other buildings and has a facade of white brick. The freestanding facades are covered in white architectural terracotta ornamented with birds, alligators, gargoyles and other fanciful subjects. The terracotta was manufactured by the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company, while the dull porcelain brick on the facade was made by the Sayre and Fisher Company.
The Liberty Tower, while smaller than other skyscrapers being built at the time, was one of New York City's first structures to be clad entirely with terracotta. It was also one of the earlier steel-cage skyscrapers to be built. With a floor area ratio of over 30:1, the Liberty Tower was believed to be the world's slimmest skyscraper at the time of its completion. The New York Times, reporting on the tower's conversion into a residential building in 1979, said that very few buildings had higher floor area ratios because the Liberty Tower's ratio was 50% higher than was allowed under New York City zoning code in 1979.
Facade
The main elevation is on Liberty Street, which is divided into three bays. The side elevations on Liberty Place and Nassau Street, to the west and east respectively, have five bays each. The raised basement contains storefronts facing Liberty and Nassau Streets. The 1st and 2nd floors consist of the base, and are rusticated, with a string course running above the second stories. The 3rd through 5th stories are treated as transitional stories, with lintels on the spandrels above the third and fourth stories, and a small cornice above the 5th-story windows. On Liberty Street, the 2nd-floor girder above the center bay is raised above the corresponding girders in the side bays. The entrance is beneath the raised girder, through a Tudor arch that contains a set of bronze and glass doors under a bronze transom. The 2nd through 5th stories of the central bay on Liberty Street contains a four-bay-wide, three-sided bay window. The center bay is flanked by four-story-tall paneled buttresses capped by pinnacles.On the 6th through 30th stories, each bay has two double-hung windows on each story, with two exceptions: the southernmost bay on Liberty Place has three double-hung windows per story, while the center bay on Liberty Street has two pairs of double-hung windows per story. There are cornices above the 22nd, 23rd, 26th, 27th, and 28th floors, with the 27th-floor cornice being more elaborate and projecting further outward than the others. The cornices above the 26th and 27th floor are discontinuous; they do not extend across the center bay on Liberty Street, or across the second or fourth bays on Liberty Place and Nassau Street. The bays are separated by vertical piers, which are flat between the 5th and 23rd stories, and are rounded between the 24th and 30th floors.
At the 30th floor, pilasters surround the outward-facing side of the wall columns. The copper roof rises above the 30th floor. The center bay of the Liberty Street facade has a large dormer at the roof, as do the second and fourth bays on Liberty Place and Nassau Street.
Structural features
Foundation
The Liberty Tower's foundations were dug with caissons sunk deep through the layers of quicksand and hardpan to the underlying bedrock. At the time of construction, these foundations were said to be the second-deepest of any building in the city. Each of the caissons was sunk using of cast-iron ballast, although up to of force could be applied to an individual caisson. In addition to digging the foundations, the caissons were used to excavate the quicksand and hardpan. The eight caissons at the interior of the lot are cylindrical and made of steel plates with a reinforced cutting edge and a concrete deck. The thirteen caissons at the lot's perimeter are rectangular and have four vertical sides made of planed timbers; they have a chamfered wooden cutting edge with steel reinforcement. The tops of the caissons were covered by horizontal lagging supported on falsework. The perimeter caissons were situated close together so as to make the foundation waterproof.Above the caissons are twenty-one concrete piers, supporting 24 steel columns. Each of the interior columns is attached to a separate cylindrical pier; the wall columns are carried on the caissons on the perimeter of the site. A layer of concrete mixture and layer of Portland cement mortar was deposited atop each caisson, supporting the piers above. The piers were made of concrete mixture deposited in detachable forms. The piers were built in two sections, separated by horizontal "collars" that surrounded them. After the piers were built, the rest of the foundation was excavated by hand to a depth of below the curb to provide space for the basement vaults. The walls of the adjacent buildings were shored up during these excavations. Distributing girders, which supported the superstructure's columns, were deep, slightly beneath the subbasement floor. The vault walls to the east and south were made of concrete poured thick and reinforced with vertical rods whose centers were spaced apart. The vault wall to the west was made of concrete poured thick and reinforced with vertical I-beams spaced apart.
Superstructure
The superstructure is fireproof and made of metal, exerting a total live and dead weight of upon the foundations. There are 24 columns in total: one above each of the eight interior piers, two above each of the corner piers, three above each of the piers on the western and eastern sides, and two carried above cantilever girders extending to the piers on the northern lot line. The columns each carry a load of between, and are connected to the piers through I-beam grillages at the top of the piers. The spandrel girders are deep below the fifth floor and deep above that floor.Interior
The main entrance contains marble wainscoting and originally had a mural-covered vaulted ceiling. The walls on either side contained murals: one side had depictions of "Spring, Youth and Ambition", while the other had "Autumn, Age and Achievement". There was also a central figure depicting William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Evening Post, the newspaper whose headquarters occupied the Liberty Tower's site in the 19th century. The murals had been removed by the end of the 20th century. There are five passenger elevators within the building. The building's staircase and the elevators are clustered on the northern wall of the lobby.When constructed, the Liberty Tower was an office building. According to developer Liberty-Nassau Building Company, the original clientele was limited to companies and individuals in finance or law, as well as large corporations. The company offered to reorganize the configurations of the floors for tenants' needs. Keystone gypsum blocks were used to divide the interior into fireproof partitions. In the original configuration, the 31st floor was an attic, the 32nd floor was the superintendent's residence, and the 33rd floor was a tank story.
Since residential conversion, the building contains 86 cooperative residential units. The penthouse apartment occupies the 31st floor and an overhanging mezzanine, and contains four bedrooms, three bedrooms, and a spiral staircase. The penthouse was originally the attic, with steep ceilings and mechanical pipes through many rooms. However, the highest unit in the building is the 32nd floor, which is smaller because of the roof's tapering.