28 Liberty Street
28 Liberty Street, formerly known as One Chase Manhattan Plaza, is a 60-story International Style skyscraper between Nassau, Liberty, William, and Pine Streets in the Financial District of Manhattan in New York City. The building, designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, opened in 1961. It is tall.
28 Liberty Street occupies only about 28 percent of its site. It consists of 60 above-ground stories, a ground-level concourse, and five basement levels. The tower is surrounded by a [|plaza] that contains a sunken Japanese rock garden, designed by Isamu Noguchi, to the south. The building's design is similar to that of SOM's earlier Inland Steel Building in Chicago. It contains a stainless steel facade with black spandrels below the windows. The superstructure contains 40 steel columns, arranged around the perimeter and clustered around the core to maximize usable space. When the tower opened, it accommodated 7,500 employees but contained only 150 private offices.
David Rockefeller, then executive vice president of Chase Manhattan Bank, proposed the tower in the 1950s as a means to keep the newly merged bank in Lower Manhattan while merging its 8,700 employees into one facility. Construction started in early 1957, and the building's tower opened in early 1961. One Chase Manhattan Plaza was nearly fully occupied from its opening, with numerous financial and legal tenants. The building's basements and plaza opened in 1964; during its early years, the structure faced some early challenges such as the discovery of weakened facade panels, a fire, and a bombing. The building was renovated in the early 1990s, and Chase moved its headquarters out in 1997. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the building a landmark in 2008. Chase Manhattan's parent company, JPMorgan Chase, sold the building to Fosun International, a Chinese investment company, in 2013; the building was subsequently renamed 28 Liberty Street.
Site
28 Liberty Street is on the northern half of a city block bounded to the west by Nassau Street, to the north by Liberty Street, to the east by William Street, and to the south by Pine Street. Its plaza is on the southeastern portion of the site, while the southwestern portion is occupied by 20 Pine Street, which had been Chase Manhattan Bank's previous headquarters. The tower and the plaza cover in total. The site slopes down to the north so the plaza is at the elevation of Pine Street, while Liberty Street is one story beneath the plaza; there are five basements under the plaza. There are stairs leading down the east side of the plaza to Cedar Street.Within 28 Liberty Street's immediate surroundings are the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Building to the north; the Chamber of Commerce Building and Liberty Tower to the northwest; 140 Broadway to the west; and the Equitable Building to the southwest. The public plaza faces Federal Hall National Memorial to the southwest and 40 Wall Street to the south. The building's concourse has a direct entrance to the Wall Street station of the New York City Subway. There are also connections to Wall Street and to Broad Street via passageways underground.
Previous uses
The block was formerly two smaller city blocks, separated by Cedar Street, which ran west to east. The Middle Collegiate Church was built on the northern portion of the lot in 1731. Later becoming the city's main Post Office in the mid-19th century, the church building was torn down in 1882. The building site then served as the headquarters of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York starting in 1884. The firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst & White designed a 38-story building for Mutual Life at 18 Pine Street, which was completed in 1928. The insurance company moved to Broadway in 1950. Mutual Life had expanded into several annexes on Liberty and Cedar Streets, as well as rented space in two buildings on Cedar Street.Cedar Street was closed in the late 1950s to make way for 28 Liberty Street's construction. In exchange for acquiring the block of Cedar Street, Chase agreed to cede on each side of the lot for street-widening, paid the city $100,000, and took responsibility for utilities under the newly closed portion of Cedar Street. The city had rarely closed streets for private commercial development, except when there was "substantial" benefit to the public, such as with Grand Central Depot and the original Pennsylvania Station. Chemical Bank, which purchased the adjacent 20 Pine Street, agreed to carve out an arcade in the entrance area of the building along Pine Street, allowing the entranceway to be set back and widening Chemical's section of the Pine Street sidewalk to the same 8 feet agreed to by Chase. The sidewalk therefore runs under the building's second floor, with the building's support columns at the edge of the redesigned sidewalk space.
Architecture
designed 28 Liberty Street. Four of the firm's thirteen general partners were most involved with 28 Liberty Street's design, namely Gordon Bunshaft, Edward James Mathews, Nathaniel A. Owings, and J. Walter Severinghaus. Bunshaft, who was tasked with the building's general design, passed most of the planning responsibilities to Roy O. Allen and Jacques E. Guiton, since Bunshaft was also involved in several other projects at the time. Three contractors were hired to excavate the foundations, while Turner Construction was hired as the general contractor. Weiskopf & Pickworth was hired as the structural engineer.The building comprises a 60-story tower atop a base composed of five basement stories and the ground floor on Liberty Street. It has a total height of, making it the third-tallest building in the Financial District upon its completion, after the 40 Wall Street and the 70 Pine Street. In addition, 28 Liberty Street was the first curtain-walled building to be taller than.
Form and facade
The 1916 Zoning Resolution, which required skyscrapers in New York City to have setbacks as they rose, was designed to prevent new skyscrapers from overwhelming the streets with their sheer bulk. However, these setbacks were not required if the building occupied 25 percent or less of its lot. As a result, 28 Liberty Street was designed as a single slab. While buildings with setbacks had less office space on upper floors, Chase wanted to make the upper floors as desirable to tenants as the lower floors, which led to each floor having the same area. Chase was granted a variance from the New York City Board of Standards and Appeals so that the building actually occupied 27.3 percent of the site; the extra 2.3 percent coverage allowed for an additional on each floor.The facade is composed of 8,800 plate glass panes, each measuring tall by wide. The glass panes are set within aluminum panels as well as vertical aluminum mullions. The aluminum panels are thick by up to tall and were manufactured by the General Bronze Corporation. The spandrel panels between the windows on each story are made of natural-color aluminum or black porcelain enamel. SOM chose not to use stainless steel because it was too expensive, and it did not use granite because the firm's building committee had seen the material as being too traditional.
The building's 40 columns, sheathed with aluminum, are about thick and are about apart, arranged in a 4×10 grid. The columns extend from the building on its long sides, while the floors cantilever from the columns on the building's short dimensions. The columns carry much of the weight of each floor. The New York Times described this as a relatively novel design that had never been used on such a large scale, though the design did have a precedent in Philadelphia's Loews Philadelphia Hotel. The presence of the columns at ground level creates a colonnade around the lobby, which is recessed behind the upper floors. The columns rise from steel assemblies measuring square and thick, which are placed some below ground level. In addition, stainless-steel flashing was placed on the facade's columns at four-story intervals, as well as beneath the spandrel panels on each floor. This reduced the amount of noise created by the wind passing through the columns. In total, over of steel were used, more than in any other New York City skyscraper at the time except for the Empire State Building and 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
The 11th, 31st, and 51st floors and the third basement level are mechanical floors. Each of the above-ground mechanical floors is a double-height space, with regular windows along the facade on the upper half of each floor and ventilation grates on the lower half.
Features
Interior spaces
The building has about of above-ground floor area. Each story measures, with about of area. This made 28 Liberty Street the largest new building in New York City by floor area since the mid-1930s. The innermost two rows of columns were hidden inside the building's core, which contained its elevators and service rooms. At the time, it was not possible to completely eliminate the interior columns. Nonetheless, this provided great flexibility for the interior floor plans, which many prospective tenants desired. The floor plan was slightly asymmetrical: the southern side was ten feet wider than the northern side, with columns spaced apart from north to south. This was because Chase officials considered the southern side of the building more desirable to work in.The lobby, at the same level as the raised plaza, had a footprint slightly smaller than the floors above it and was surrounded by a plate-glass wall. There are numerous revolving doors to the south and west. Originally, there was a mezzanine for the loan offices, which was removed by the 1990s. Inside the lobby are six elevator banks, surrounded by travertine walls. The concourse, directly below the lobby, was accessed from Liberty Street. Chase's main branch, beneath 28 Liberty Street's plaza, was accessed from the concourse and was lit by an oval recess surrounded by a transparent barrier. Also on the concourse was a meeting room, a foyer, and a messenger's room. Passageways in the concourse led to the three surrounding subway stations.
The floors beneath the plaza are much larger, covering the entire lot with a combined area of. There are five basement levels below the concourse. The first basement level was used mainly as a lower lobby and a banking floor. There was also dining and kitchen space on the first and second basements; printing, tabulating, and mechanical spaces on the third basement; check handling on the fourth basement; and vaults on the fifth basement. A truck ramp descends to the second basement; the truck entrance, as well as ventilation grates for air intake and outflow, are on the Liberty Street side, below the raised plaza. There is also a pedestrian entrance on the William Street side, below the plaza, which leads to the eastern part of the concourse. According to Architectural Forum, the fifth basement had a "bank vault nearly the size of a football field", which sorted $35 billion worth of securities and covered about half the site., the first basement level includes Halo, a event space, surrounding a sunken garden outdoors.
When 28 Liberty Street was completed, Chase occupied about of space. Since most Chase employees worked in open plan offices, there were only 150 private offices for the 7,500 employees who worked in the tower upon its opening. The offices of Chase's three highest-ranking executives were on the 17th floor. These executive offices were connected to the lobby and the 60th story by an express elevator that stopped only on these three floors. The interior designers Davis Allen and Ward Bennett were responsible for the furnishings of Chase's offices, including much of the furniture and accessories. In addition, a board of curators selected the artwork for the building, and the firm of Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv designed the graphics for the building. Bunshaft had planned to place a sculpture on the 60th-story landing but, after realizing that the ornamented spire of 40 Wall Street was visible from that level, he abandoned plans for the sculpture.