1 Wall Street
1 Wall Street is a Art Deco skyscraper in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York City, United States. The building, which occupies a full city block, consists of two sections. The original 50-story building was designed by Ralph Thomas Walker of the firm Voorhees, Gmelin and Walker and constructed between 1929 and 1931 for Irving Trust, an early-20th-century American bank. A 28-story annex to the south was designed by the successor firm Voorhees, Walker, Smith, Smith & Haines and built between 1963 and 1965.
The limestone facade consists of slight inwardly-curved bays with fluting to resemble curtains. On the lower stories are narrow windows and elaborate entrances. The massing of 1 Wall Street incorporates numerous small setbacks, and there are chamfers at the corners of the original building. The top of the original building consists of a freestanding tower with fluted windowless bays. The facade of the annex is crafted in a style reminiscent of the original structure. The original building has an ornate lobby, known as the Red Room, with colored mosaics. The 10th through 45th floors were originally rented to tenants, while the other floors contained offices, lounges, and other spaces for Irving Trust.
At the time of its construction, 1 Wall Street occupied what was one of the most valuable plots in the city. The building replaced three previous structures, including the Manhattan Life Insurance Building, which was once the world's tallest building. After Irving Trust was acquired by the Bank of New York in 1988, 1 Wall Street served as the global headquarters of BNY and its successor BNY Mellon through 2015. After the developer Harry Macklowe purchased the building, he renovated it from 2018 to 2023, converting the interior into 566 condominium apartments with some commercial space. Sales of the condo units [|have been sluggish] for Macklowe.
The building is one of New York City's Art Deco landmarks, although architectural critics initially ignored it in favor of such buildings as the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. The exterior of the building's original section was designated as a city landmark in 2001, and the Red Room was similarly designated in 2024. In addition, the structure is a contributing property to the Wall Street Historic District, a National Register of Historic Places district created in 2007.
Site
1 Wall Street occupies an entire city block in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City, United States. The site is bounded by Broadway to the west, Wall Street to the north, New Street to the east, and Exchange Place to the south. 1 Wall Street is adjacent to the Adams Express Building, 65 Broadway, the Empire Building, Trinity Church, and Trinity Church's churchyard to the west; the American Surety Company Building to the north; 14 Wall Street to the northeast; the New York Stock Exchange Building to the east; and 52 Broadway to the south. Entrances to the New York City Subway's Wall Street station, served by the, are adjacent to the building.Because of the [|curves in the facade], the original structure does not completely occupy its full land lot; instead, is used as a sidewalk. At the chamfered corners of the building, the facade is recessed as much as from the lot line. Under municipal law, any private land that was adjacent to public property would eventually revert to the government of New York City. Consequently, when 1 Wall Street was built, its main occupant Irving Trust embedded small metal plaques to delineate the boundaries of its lot, thereby preventing the city government from seizing the land.
Architecture
The original building was designed by Ralph Walker of the Voorhees, Gmelin and Walker in the Art Deco style. The annex was designed by Voorhees, Gmelin and Walker's successor firm Voorhees, Walker, Smith, Smith & Haines. Everett Meeks, the dean of the Yale School of Art, was the original building's design consultant. The original building reaches 50 stories and stands tall. The southern annex was originally 28 stories tall with a height of about, but it was expanded in 2019 to 36 stories with a height of about. SLCE Architects designed the building's residential conversion in the late 2010s and early 2020s, including the addition to the southern annex. Dormer structures of up to two stories are located on the tops of both sections.Although author Daniel Abramson said 1 Wall Street was "Art Deco in many respects", historian Anthony Robins characterized the building as being "Gothic Modern—a skyscraper reflection of Trinity Church". Walker had designed other Art Deco buildings in the New York City area, mainly telecommunications structures. These included the Barclay–Vesey Building, New Jersey Bell Headquarters Building, 60 Hudson Street, and 32 Avenue of the Americas, as well as telephone buildings in upstate New York. Architectural writer Robert A. M. Stern characterized 1 Wall Street as "Walker's only completed skyscraper".
Form and facade
1 Wall Street's facade is made primarily of limestone. This contrasts with the brick facades of Walker's telecommunications buildings, the use of which was likely influenced by Dutch and German Expressionism. At the time of 1 Wall Street's construction, limestone was a relatively expensive material and was rarely used for a building's entire facade, with cheaper brick being used instead. 1 Wall Street also contains numerous setbacks on its exterior. Though setbacks in New York City skyscrapers were mandated by the 1916 Zoning Resolution to allow light and air to reach the streets below, they later became a defining feature of the Art Deco style. The facade has uninterrupted vertical piers, similar to other Art Deco buildings. Although the piers emphasize the building's height, Walker said this effect was not the main goal of his design.Original building
The original 1931 building is on the northern portion of the site. The first twenty stories occupy almost the entire site. The building has a series of small setbacks starting at the 21st story and continuing until the 35th story, above which a slender tower rises. The setbacks on the Broadway and Wall Street elevations alternate with each other. The southern portion of the original building rises as high as a dormer on the 37th floor; the 36th floor is the highest that also connects to the annex. The original structure measures on Broadway by on Wall Street. The tower stories, from the 37th to the 48th floors, measure each. The top two stories constituted an executive penthouse.Walker's design emphasized the decorative details of the building's facade; by contrast, other early-20th-century skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan had emphasized the massing. The facade includes indented vertical bays with fluting, which are arranged like curtains, although the facade could also resemble a cliff-like natural shape from different angles. Walker said the building would "have 200 thousand people looking at it from all sides" in a single year, including workers and pedestrians, and he wanted them to have "mental relief and pleasure" when viewing it. Walker also said he "tried to superimpose one rhythm upon a basic rhythm"; as such, he treated the facade as a series of "rhythmic motifs" in different sizes. The resulting concave bays were angled inward at a pitch of 1:9. Each of the bays is separated by curved, projecting piers that rise to each setback. Several piers also have vertical incisions for emphasis. The windows of the original building contained custom curved frames to fit into the facade, which added $40,000 to the construction cost.
The base of the original building is composed of the lowest three stories. The section of the base along Wall Street is eight bays wide, with a double-width entrance in the middle of the Wall Street facade, which is reached by a short flight of stairs and leads to the main lobby. The entryway is framed by a jagged portal. The sections of the base on Broadway and New Street are seventeen bays wide. On the New Street elevation, the name "Voorhees, Gmelin & Walker" is printed in cursive script. There is an exposed granite basement on New Street with a service entrance. On the upper floors, each of the bays has a single sash window on each floor. The northwestern and northeastern corners of the building are both chamfered, which respectively connect the western and eastern elevations of the facade with the northern elevation.
Annex
The southern annex, completed in 1965, is also mostly made of limestone. On the New Street side, there are setbacks above the 5th and 10th floors; the building then rises as a slender slab with setbacks on the 29th, 34th, and 35th floors. Along Broadway, the facade of the annex was originally recessed behind that of the original building by two bays.In 2018, a glass-clad entrance to the retail space was constructed in front of the annex. The entrance structure ranges between one and seven stories high. The facade of the 2018 addition projects forward to the facade of the original structure. Eight stories were also built atop the initial portion of the annex. In total, according to zoning documents, the annex measures on Broadway and on Exchange Place.
Features
The building contains 10 elevators as of 2019, compared with 43 elevators and 14 escalators prior to the building's residential conversion. When built, 1 Wall Street had 29 elevators, some of which were near the building's exterior walls. Irving Trust had six private elevators accessed from Wall Street. There were three groups of elevators in the rest of the building, serving the lower, intermediate, or upper floors; these elevators could be reached from Broadway, New Street, or the subway. Because the New Street side of the building was lower than the Broadway side, engineers configured the original elevator shafts so that double-deck elevators could be installed if necessary, but these double-deck elevators were never built. At its completion, 1 Wall Street was the first office structure in Lower Manhattan to use alternating current for electric power. It included a network of pneumatic tubes for sending documents between floors. When 1 Wall Street was converted to residential use, all of the elevators were moved to the center of the building.There is of interior space, of which the original building had of floor space. The original building's first through 21st stories each spanned. There are also five basement levels under the original structure, three of which are below sea level. A corridor inside 1 Wall Street's basement, stretching between Broadway and New Street, provided access to the northbound platform of the Wall Street station, but it had been converted to a communications room by 2000. Upon the building's opening, Irving Trust occupied the basements, lowest ten floors, and uppermost three floors. Following its residential conversion, 1 Wall Street contained of residential space and of commercial space. The top stories of the annex were largely built as voided slabs; hollow plastic spheres were embedded into the concrete floor slabs to reduce the slabs' weight. The glass retail addition is cantilevered outward from the original annex, avoiding the need to drill into the Wall Street subway station, which is located directly underneath the retail addition.