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New York Architecture Images- Lower Manhattan MORGAN GUARANTY TRUST BUILDING Landmark |
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architect |
Trowbridge & Livingston |
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location |
23 Wall Street at Broad Street |
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date |
1913 |
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style |
Neo-Classicism 2 |
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construction |
limestone clad |
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type |
Office Building |
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On September 16, 1920,
person or persons unknown exploded a bomb in front of 23 Wall Street,
then as now the offices of J.P. Morgan Inc., causing 400 injuries, some
of them horrific, and 33 deaths.
When 23 Wall Street was constructed in 1913-1914, the Morgan name was so well-known that it was considered unnecessary to mark the building with his name, and it continues to be unmarked today...except in one respect. A single warning had come in the form of a note placed in a mailbox at Cedar Street and Broadway just before the blast, Remember we will not tolerate any longer. Free the political prisoners or it will be sure death for all of you. American Anarchists Fighters. Investigations centered on known Sicilian, Romanian and Russian terrorist groups. But no sure leads developed and the FBI dropped the case in 1940. Whoever was responsible for this crime is almost surely dead by now. The exterior of 23 Wall Street is weirdly pockmarked. These marks were put there by the bombs that exploded on September 16, 1920. Morgan has never repaired the building facade, and as long as the building stands, it will never be repaired; this has been made clear by Morgan Inc. repeatedly. It is widely surmised that the blast was done by anarchic terrorists bent on destroying a building symbolic of American capitalism. The Bolsheviks had taken Russia by force some three years earlier. Special thanks to Kevin Walsh's www.forgotten-ny.com |
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Streetscapes/J. P. Morgan Bank at Wall and
Broad Streets;
A 1914 Landmark That Reflects Its Founder By CHRISTOPHER GRAY Published: April 20, 2003, Sunday IT is remote, reserved and silent -- just like its founder, J. Pierpont Morgan. The 1914 J. P. Morgan & Company bank headquarters, at Wall and Broad Streets, has been empty for several years, and it is not clear who will turn the lights back on, or when. J. Pierpont Morgan began dealing in financial instruments around 1860, and in 1871 he joined forces with Drexel & Company. They soon built a white marble headquarters with a mansard roof at the southeast corner of Wall and Broad Streets. The firm emerged as J. P. Morgan & Company in the 1890's. It was around this time that Morgan, magnetic in personality but also subject to fits of depression and self-doubt, became widely known as the top financial figure in the United States. In 1901 he financed the creation of the U.S. Steel Corporation, a $1.5 billion project. He was also important in stabilizing the American markets in the panic of 1907. However, by the early 1910's he was near the end of his career, taking more and more time off to travel and concentrate on his art collection. It was in these circumstances that Morgan decided to demolish the old building at Wall and Broad and, according to The New York Times in 1912, ''fall in line with the big modern improvements all around him.'' This included both smaller, town-house-like bank buildings and a new generation of towering office buildings, like the 37-story Bankers Trust tower diagonally across the intersection, finished in 1912. PUBLISHED sources do not indicate who came up with the idea and chose the architects, Trowbridge & Livingston. But Goodhue Livingston's granddaughter, Katherine Moore of Rye, N.Y., has researched the careers of the two partners for two decades. She says that an unpublished Livingston memoir of 1930 contains a recollection linking the new Morgan bank with the Bankers Trust building across the street, which was also by Trowbridge & Livingston, after winning a competition. ''Mr. Morgan Sr., admiring this building, gave us the commission,'' Livingston's account says. Morgan never got to see his new bank. The banker's house on 36th Street and Madison Avenue was draped in black in April 1913, just as demolition began on the old bank on Wall and Broad; Morgan had died in Rome on March 31. Finished in 1914, the new bank was described by the Real Estate Record and Guide as ''a rival to the Parthenon.'' ''The best skill which Athens could command at the height of her glory was given the construction,'' the trade journal said, adding, ''The quarries at Knoxville, Tenn., were torn to pieces to produce the blocks.'' This was the same pink marble McKim, Mead & White used in Morgan's library of 1906 on 36th Street east of Madison. The interior -- a single large space on the main floor -- is an irregular pentagon, originally constructed with a ceiling 30 feet high, decorated with a central domed skylight 35 feet wide and hexagonal and circular coffers, the architectural term for sunken ceiling panels. Each of the partners' offices had its own fireplace. The basement vault had four-inch nickel-steel walls, the 50-ton door with ''anti-oxyacetylene cutter-burner-proof sections,'' Architects and Builders Magazine said. Although the finished structure was only four stories high, The Times in 1914 said the foundation walls were seven feet thick to permit an eventual addition. But the new bank, low among a growing forest of towers, had ''an atmosphere of serene reticence,'' according to the journal Architectural Record. On Sept. 16, 1920, just as the Trinity Church bells tolled the noon hour, a great explosion rocked the corner of Wall and Nassau -- a wagon filled with explosives and shrapnel went up, killing at least 36 people. The wagon was parked on the Wall Street side of the Morgan bank, and the main floor was instantly in a shambles, the windows blown in, the skylight severely damaged, the grill-work of the banking cages destroyed. There were more than 400 employees inside at the time, but only two were killed: William A. Joyce, filling in for another employee on the Wall Street side, and John A. Donohue, who worked in the foreign export department, who died later. The next day, The Times reported that the Morgan offices were ''like a hospital,'' full of executives at work with bandaged heads. The Wall Street facade was pitted in 40 or 50 places by the cut-up sash weights and other metal intended to kill and maim; it is still possible to see the deadly marks visible in the marble. But the partners never repaired the damage. They may have decided to leave it as a badge of honor or perhaps they wanted to avoid the disruption of replacing the three-foot-thick blocks, which were up to 22 feet long. Shelley Diamond, consulting archivist at what is now J. P. Morgan Chase, says that no minutes or other relevant records from that period survive in the archives. IN 1929, Trowbridge & Livingston designed a new 38-story building next door on Broad Street for the Equitable Trust Company The building is now known as 15 Broad Street. J. P. Morgan & Company bought 15 Broad in 1953, and in 1959 merged with the Guaranty Trust Company, to form the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company. The next year the bank joined the two buildings, creating a jet age modern interior in parts of the lower floors of the buildings, although generally sparing the main banking hall of the old Morgan building, in an alteration designed by the architects Rogers & Burgun. A 1964 book ''23 Wall Street: Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York,'' said that the Morgan building's foundations could take another 30 floors, ''something contemplated when the companies merged.'' Perhaps with this in mind, the new Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the 1914 building a landmark among its earliest actions, in 1966. Morgan Guaranty merged with Chase Bank in 2000, and soon left its longtime headquarters. In 1998, the New York City Economic Development Commission proposed demolishing all the buildings on the Morgan block, except for the landmark itself, for a new New York Stock Exchange and 900-foot-high office tower; the original Morgan bank building was to become a visitor's center. But the deal fell apart and reports are circulating that Chase is shopping both the Morgan bank and 15 Broad Street to real estate developers, perhaps for a residential conversion. Over the last five months, Tom Johnson, a spokesman for J. P. Morgan Chase, has declined to comment on the reports or to allow access to the 1914 building, saying only that the bank was ''considering its options.'' Perhaps the bank is concerned that the landmarks agency might also designate the interior of the Morgan building; although closed now, in the past it was open to the public. Published: 04 - 20 - 2003 , Late Edition - Final , Section 11 , Column 1 , Page 5 Copyright New York Times. |
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May 11, 2004 Condos, Not Roll-Tops, on Finance's Holiest Corner By DAVID W. DUNLAP Philippe Starck is throwing a couple of curves on the Corner. He is helping design the conversion of 15 Broad Street into a condominium called Downtown by Philippe Starck. The 42-story apartment building will have an aerial front yard on the rooftop of the five-story 23 Wall Street, which it embraces on two sides, overlooking the New York Stock Exchange and Federal Hall National Memorial. Is that a spinning sound you hear as Mr. Starck holds a chandelier crystal to his head like an earring? It may be coming from the graves of old-time bankers who knew 23 Wall Street as the House of Morgan, 15 Broad Street as the Equitable Trust Company and the intersection of Broad and Wall as the Corner - epicenter of American finance. "It is fantastique to have a garden here," Mr. Starck said on a recent visit to the 5,000-square-foot rooftop. He envisions trees and teak decking, surrounded by a topiary wall with windowlike openings in which lanterns will hang. A large pool will be fed by a tall, crook-shaped pipe, looking like a giant faucet. That is a departure for a place where roll-top desks were standard issue until 1963. Twenty-three Wall Street was built in 1914 and linked in 1957 to 15 Broad Street. The buildings were later remodeled as headquarters of the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, corporate forerunner of J. P. Morgan Chase & Company. In 1998, a deal was reached under which every building on the block - except for 23 Wall, an official landmark - was to be razed to make way for a new stock exchange and office tower. That project fell through after the attack on New York. Last year, A. I. & Boymelgreen of Brooklyn bought the Morgan buildings for $100 million. It is spending about $135 million on the renovation, said Shaya Boymelgreen, the president. Ismael Leyva of New York is the project architect working with Mr. Starck on the conversion, which is to be finished next year. Prices for the 326 units will range from about $335,000 for a studio to $3.5 million for a three-bedroom apartment. Despite residential conversions all around, the Corner is still strongly financial. Barricaded behind truck blockades and patrolled by heavily armed police officers, the intersection may not be everyone's idea of a prime residential address. But Boymelgreen has guaranteed attention for its project by commissioning Mr. Starck, 55, arguably France's best-known designer, who had a large hand in recreating the Royalton, Paramount and Hudson Hotels in Manhattan. "Philippe is bringing humanity to the project," said Asi Cymbal, vice president and general counsel of A. I. & Boymelgreen. And a knack for raising eyebrows. "It will be the first fertile place on Wall Street," Mr. Starck said, peopled by families and children; a "paradise island" with its own bowling alley, basketball and squash courts, lap pool and small theater. It will, he said, embody "honesty, respect, tenderness, surrealism, poetry, surprise, vision - which have no value on the other side of the street." Speaking of which, what about that wartime security outside? Predicting a big change in foreign policy after the election, Mr. Starck answered: "All that will become quiet. Today, it's impossible to find the solution because you don't have the right people." Mr. Boymelgreen put the police presence in a more upbeat light. "This is the most secure place in the city," he said. "I can send my wife and children here 24 hours a day." A sales office is to open at 23 Wall in six weeks. Eventually, the landmark may be separated from 15 Broad Street and used as a school or hotel. Whatever happens, Mr. Cymbal said, residents will have unimpeded access to the 23 Wall Street rooftop. Another amenity they will keep is the 1,900-piece Louis XV chandelier that hung in the main banking hall like a glittering, upended elm. Morgan gave the piece to the developers, Mr. Cymbal said, on the condition that it be displayed publicly. It is to be installed in the Broad Street lobby, hovering inches off the floor, with plasma screens displaying residents' faces interspersed among the crystals. When he learned on his visit that many pieces had come from Austria-Hungary before World War I, Mr. Starck immediately identified them as Swarovski crystal. Then, after examining a faceted piece from one of the 250 or so boxes, he pretended to don it as an earring. Moments later, looking over the dull-gold curlicue framework of the chandelier, he instructed a colleague, Mark Davison: "Do it in silver. It will be more magical." With that, Mr. Starck galloped out of the basement. As Mr. Boymelgreen hurried after his whirlwind of a designer, he could be heard laughing incredulously. "Philippe," he said, "every time you come here it costs me another million dollars." Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company ----------------------- A new life for the house of Morgan By Christopher Grimes Published: June 1 2004 15:48 | Last Updated: June 1 2004 15:48 He died before it was completed but it is impossible not to feel the presence of the elder John Pierpont Morgan while roaming the halls of 23 Wall Street. That fierce visage, with its intense eyes and terrifying nose, seems to be everywhere: scowling from the building's darkened vaults, staring out across the old boardroom. For decades, 23 Wall Street was the most important address in American finance - the home of the House of Morgan. It was known popularly as The Corner, so designated because its entrance opened onto the corner of Broad and Wall streets. The Corner was a perfect perch for the rich and powerful to observe other rich and powerful people, since across from it are the New York Stock Exchange and Federal Hall, once a branch of the US Federal Reserve. Today, the building is no longer the most celebrated address in banking but a "regeneration project"; one piece of a larger effort to draw residents into Lower Manhattan's financial district. The building and an adjacent one, the 40 storeys that once housed Equitable Trust, are to be converted into 326 residences and a university. And though it would seem appropriate for a building so closely associated with wealth and power to be converted into luxury housing, the developers have a different idea. Philippe Starck and John Hitchcox, partners in the real estate group Yoo, see prices starting at about $335,000 (£183,000) for a studio - the smallest apartment. In Manhattan, where the average sale price for an apartment has reached $998,905, this sounds like a bargain. However, for the largest apartments with the best views, prices will reach $3.5m. "Philosophically, my angle is that good design isn't something that's elitist," Hitchcox says. "The idea is very much not to go down the 'capital A' architect route." There is plenty of architecture with a capital A on the exterior. The Morgan partners bought a marble quarry in Tennessee to ensure that there would be enough for the building, according to The House of Morgan, Ron Chernow's study of the Morgan dynasty. Before his death, Morgan had planned to bring home columns from Rome to adorn the entrance. But the residents of the new complex, to be called Downtown by Phillippe Starck, will probably spend little time in the original Morgan building. They will have access to its 5,000sq ft roof, which Starck plans to convert into a garden with trees and a pool. The Morgan interior will be used by New York Law School. Beneath the buildings is a vast system of bank vaults and an elevator - known as the "money car" - that posed a challenge for the developers. But they have a plan to convert the area into recreational space, including a lap pool and squash court. Down among the vaults, Jack Morgan, JP's son, also provided a shooting range so his security guards could stay sharp. The range is still there, with pocked ceiling and a large plate dented by thousands of spent shells. This is to be converted into a bowling lane. "It's a bit like a vertical playground," Hitchcox says. Upstairs, the old Equitable building will offer residents commanding views of Lower Manhattan and the Hudson River. Some will have terraces that once held massive generators. Much of the block - all of it except the landmark 23 Wall Street building - was due to be demolished under a plan to build a new home for the New York Stock Exchange. But the plans changed after the September 11 2001 attacks, allowing a group of Brooklyn developers to buy the whole parcel of land for $100m. Renovation costs are estimated to be about $135m. Residential activity in Lower Manhattan has been surprisingly strong after the attacks. Many renters have seized on financial incentives offered by the state to move downtown - an effective programme that has helped foster an atmosphere of optimism. Without them, the mood could easily have gone the other way. "As the rest of Manhattan sees a tightening of supply of housing, developers are starting to consider [lower Manhattan] as a new residential housing market," said Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel, a real estate appraisal and consulting firm. "Also, the World Trade Center site is going to be rebuilt and that implies there is an upside in the downtown location." But challenges remain. The financial district has always been a place where people came to work, had a drink or two after leaving the office, and then left. There are no supermarkets and only a handful of restaurants. After work hours, the area can feel lonely. Redevelopment of the World Trade Center will make Lower Manhattan one of the busiest construction sites worldwide. The $12bn project, which includes a Santiago Calatrava-designed transportation hub that will be downtown's answer to Grand Central Station, is sure to enhance the area when completed. But it could mean hassles for residents in the meantime. "I think it's terribly exciting what's happening in New York," Hitchcox says. "I want to be careful in saying this, but there is a sense that out of this terrible tragedy something new is growing." He sees this development as part of the creation of the new Lower Manhattan, one with vibrant communities and some real nightlife. That has happened all over Manhattan in areas that were once either seedy or deserted, including Tribeca, Soho and the Lower East Side. But development in these areas followed the familiar pattern in which squatters, artists and musicians did the hard work first. There is not much bohemian life in Lower Manhattan, but Hitchcox says this may simply mean that residential development may happen more quickly. There will be less resistance to changes in the neighbourhood: "The World Trade Center development is going to really put downtown on the map in a few years. That's why this is a great project - it's about revival, regeneration and opportunity." www.ft.com ------------------- NYNewsday PARADISE ON WALL STREET Reincarnating a downtown bank building into pricey condos of 'managed energy,' designer Philippe Starck shares his idea of Eden BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON STAFF WRITER November 10, 2004 There are few corners in New York City with a more sober history and a more fanciful future than the squat, forbidding little former bank at 23 Wall St. Once it was the epicenter of the financial world. Soon it will become an icon of the designer life, a luxury condo called Downtown by Philippe Starck. In place of marble halls and hushed talk of money, let there be gigantic, gilt-framed mirrors and loud flaunting of money. "My idea is to bring happiness, respect, vision, poetry, surrealism, magic - these are not values you find in Wall Street," said Starck, the French designer famous for fusing baroque and modernist sensibilities into such objects as bulbous baby monitors, tooth-shaped stools and wall-size rococo mirrors. "Here is the center of the world, but it's also hell, so I want to create paradise. This is the Garden of Eden in downtown." The building was erected at the behest of J.P. Morgan in 1913. Despite its staid stone exterior, it did represent extravagance of a sort. Having paid a fortune for the site, Morgan decided not to take the logical next step of putting up a revenue-generating tower to house his bank. Instead, he built just the three floors he required to do business, thereby tossing away a vast and valuable tract of vertical real estate. These days, to approach "The Corner," as it is known, means braving a gauntlet of police officers in bulletproof vests, guarding one of the world's primary terrorist lures: the New York Stock Exchange. The juncture of Wall and Broad streets already has been a target. At noon on Sept. 16, 1920, a bomb hidden in a horse-drawn cart exploded in front of the House of Morgan, killing 39 people and maiming hundreds more. The bank's stonework still bears the scars from the blast. New York City wouldn't see such a gruesome attack again until another September day 81 years later. Walk through the austere portal of 23 Wall St. today and you enter a world of flamboyant frivolity. On a generous screen in the vestibule is a moving image of the impish Starck, animatedly holding forth in Inspector Clouseau inflections on the philosophic possibilities his remodeled condominiums will afford. A change of scenery Proceed through the double doors and in place of Morgan's pinstriped minions, sleekly suited salespeople await in a rose- colored room lined with gauzy white curtains and pierced by a wooden lightning bolt that wraps itself around an old spiral staircase One day last week, brand- name man Starck was holding court in the sales office. He gestured toward a chair he had designed - a Louis-the-Something throne upholstered in black shag - while sitting in a more severe steel creation of his, listening closely to a question he then proceeded to ignore. "I am not an architect, I'm not a designer, I'm not interested in all that," he began. "I'm interested in new concepts. I want a bigger scale than just if the purple is good with the gray. I've lived in New York for 25 years and for 25 years I've been saying that the future of New York is downtown. Until now, people came in to work, but either they stayed in some terrible hotel or they stayed in midtown. But we have created the first stop of the next life of downtown, which is not just Work but Life." He capitalized buzzwords by force of enthusiasm. Starck is correct that the conversion of obsolescent business centers into apartment buildings is an important part of the transformation of lower Manhattan. Until Sept. 11, 2001, the block he is remaking was slated for demolition so a new Stock Exchange tower could be built there. That plan was scrapped after the attacks. Businesses into homes The acres of high-tech office space being built at the World Trade Center site will likely suck businesses away from creaky old structures made of iron and stone. "What makes perfect sense in the evolution of the neighborhood is the old office buildings from the 1920s being converted into housing, while the new smart, wired buildings will be offices," said Carol Willis, an architectural historian and director of the Skyscraper Museum. "Given the recent announcements of conversions to apartments, and even schools, it appears that Wall Street is going to be a largely residential community, and so is Broad Street." These changes will depend on such grand forces as demographic trends, the cost of retrofitting and prices per square foot, but Starck and his backers also are betting on the chic of urban pioneering among the affluent, the young, the overworked - people who look at a yoga studio and see a basic need. "We are creating a tribe, the Smart Tribe: people who know the future is here. This is the first lighthouse for the - how do you say, the first people who arrived in Massachusetts? - the pilgrims of downtown New York. Before, the guy said to his girlfriend or wife, 'It's so boring to spend two hours on the train each day, can we live downtown?' And the girl said, 'No way!' I know it," Starck said, "because I proposed this to my wife. "Now, for the first time downtown, you will see the girlfriends, the wives and the children." Design and display Starck's curiously retro vision of a family- friendly, high-bohemian Wall Street enclave populated by restive former suburbanites rests on his belief in the life-altering power of good design and the magnetism of display. The bank eventually will become a cluster of boutiques, fused with the high-rise condominium building next door at 15 Broad St. The lobby there will boast Morgan's colossal Swarowski chandelier, restored and reinstalled not as a lavish fixture far overhead, but as a walk-around crystal cloud hovering inches from the floor. In theory, at least, the chandelier will be festooned with plasma screens bearing the images of the residents: You can't go wrong using narcissism as an element of design. Central to the Starck philosophy is the idea of life as a form of theater and the designer as director. The merger of a former bank and a tower makes "a beautiful building in the center of an opera set," he said. "It's not architecture; it's a movie, it's opera, it's boiling life." The financial district outside the airlock provides the urban decor, an exciting backdrop to luxurious domestic drama. Who wouldn't crave a principal role in this spectacle, so amiably populated by a self-renewing crowd of extras costumed as police officers, tourists, brokers, journalists and financial workers? Life ... la Starck consists of a series of camera-ready tableaux. In its new incarnation, the roof of Morgan's folly will become a poolside arbor in which to lounge with a cocktail and admire the muscular marble figures in the pediment of the New York Stock Exchange across the street. "It will be like an Italian villa on a lake," Starck promised. "You're in the middle of a sculpture, in a garden in the middle of the world. It's an ecstasy trip." Naturally, that trip does not come cheap. A mere $4.6 million will buy a 2,300-square-foot apartment with two bedrooms and two baths on the 37th floor, while nine floors below, a 2,011-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment with a terrace looks like a steal at $2.35 million. The apartments, which Starck designed with the luxury condo virtuoso Ismael Leyva, are white-walled and blond-floored, with 11-foot ceilings and spacious rooms tucked in unexpected places. One model appears at first to be an industrial-size studio, until, at the far end, a doorway appears from behind a pilaster, leading to an airy bedroom suite. In another, a secret flight of stairs leads from the vestibule to a bedroom loft. The entrance to the rest of the apartment runs through the kitchen, which is arrayed along one side of a hallway in a gleaming array of polished surfaces and $1,000 faucets. If it were ever actually used, guests would be greeted by a display of dirty pots, and greasy smoke would billow over the partition and waft into the bedroom. No doubt, the Smart Tribe always eats out. Starck has an emphatic theory for these arrangements. "The old floor plans are completely obsolete; they come from the 18th century. They are reductions of castles. The kitchen is far down a long corridor, because there used to be doméstiques [servants], but now there are not doméstiques. Now there is the wife at the other end of the corridor. Old floor plans are static, ours are dynamic. We think about managing energy. So you can be in bed and continue to speak with your wife while she makes breakfast. My way of working is to find new solutions for the next population - how to live differently with new human values." Encouraging someone to hit the snooze button while one's spouse makes coffee may not seem like such terribly innovative social engineering, but Starck and his development partners, Yoo Ltd. and A.I.-Lev Leviev Boymelgreen, seem to have found a public for their amenity-crammed Paradise-on-Wall. The sales office opened in August, the week that Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge announced the stock exchange was on al-Qaida's to-do list. Three months later, the developers have sold 75 percent of the apartments to buyers who won't be able to move in for another year. Starck was delighted to hear that several couples were trying to time pregnancies to dovetail with their move-in dates. When the building opens and the residents arrive next fall, some of them will be met by delivery trucks from Moss, the SoHo purveyor of vertiginously high design. The crates will contain furniture and accoutrements bearing the Starck seal of approval, most items designed by him, others by a selected corps of his colleagues. "I shall never make an interior decoration," he declared. "I have made museums, which are public, and hotels, which are also public. But I don't make the residential." Eclectic catalog Instead, Starck provides apartment buyers with a catalog of fine and surrealistic furnishings: a couch deep enough to accommodate a football team, light bulbs fitted out with cherub wings, molded plastic chairs with legs too slender to trust. More than a list of expensive products, the Downtown by Starck catalog is a lifestyle manual, an odd combination of freedom and instruction, a compendium of shared principles. "We don't try to please everyone," Starck said, reverting to his habitual "royal we." "We give people the best building, the best floor plan, the best fixtures. I know it because I designed it. They're the Smart Tribe, they can recognize the right product. We say you are different; us, also. You are smart; we are not completely stupid, either." On this affinity of difference rests the relationship between guru and disciple, and Starck translates that connection into the domain of real estate. "You have not to live in a prefab life," he instructs. "You must build your own. I can't do it for you. But I can help." |
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IT is remote, reserved and silent — just like its founder, J. Pierpont Morgan. The 1914 J. P. Morgan & Company bank headquarters, at Wall and Broad Streets, has been empty for several years, and it is not clear who will turn the lights back on, or when. J. Pierpont Morgan began dealing in financial instruments around 1860, and in 1871 he joined forces with Drexel & Company. They soon built a white marble headquarters with a mansard roof at the southeast corner of Wall and Broad Streets. The firm emerged as J. P. Morgan & Company in the 1890's. It was around this time that Morgan, magnetic in personality but also subject to fits of depression and self-doubt, became widely known as the top financial figure in the United States. In 1901 he financed the creation of the U.S. Steel Corporation, a $1.5 billion project. He was also important in stabilizing the American markets in the panic of 1907. However, by the early 1910's he was near the end of his career, taking more and more time off to travel and concentrate on his art collection. It was in these circumstances that Morgan decided to demolish the old building at Wall and Broad and, according to The New York Times in 1912, "fall in line with the big modern improvements all around him." This included both smaller, town-house-like bank buildings and a new generation of towering office buildings, like the 37-story Bankers Trust tower diagonally across the intersection, finished in 1912. PUBLISHED sources do not indicate who came up with the idea and chose the architects, Trowbridge & Livingston. But Goodhue Livingston's granddaughter, Katherine Moore of Rye, N.Y., has researched the careers of the two partners for two decades. She says that an unpublished Livingston memoir of 1930 contains a recollection linking the new Morgan bank with the Bankers Trust building across the street, which was also by Trowbridge & Livingston, after winning a competition. "Mr. Morgan Sr., admiring this building, gave us the commission," Livingston's account says. Morgan never got to see his new bank. The banker's house on 36th Street and Madison Avenue was draped in black in April 1913, just as demolition began on the old bank on Wall and Broad; Morgan had died in Rome on March 31. Finished in 1914, the new bank was described by the Real Estate Record and Guide as "a rival to the Parthenon." "The best skill which Athens could command at the height of her glory was given the construction," the trade journal said, adding, "The quarries at Knoxville, Tenn., were torn to pieces to produce the blocks." This was the same pink marble McKim, Mead & White used in Morgan's library of 1906 on 36th Street east of Madison. The interior — a single large space on the main floor — is an irregular pentagon, originally constructed with a ceiling 30 feet high, decorated with a central domed skylight 35 feet wide and hexagonal and circular coffers, the architectural term for sunken ceiling panels. Each of the partners' offices had its own fireplace. The basement vault had four-inch nickel-steel walls, the 50-ton door with "anti-oxyacetylene cutter-burner-proof sections," Architects and Builders Magazine said. Although the finished structure was only four stories high, The Times in 1914 said the foundation walls were seven feet thick to permit an eventual addition. But the new bank, low among a growing forest of towers, had "an atmosphere of serene reticence," according to the journal Architectural Record. On Sept. 16, 1920, just as the Trinity Church bells tolled the noon hour, a great explosion rocked the corner of Wall and Nassau — a wagon filled with explosives and shrapnel went up, killing at least 36 people. The wagon was parked on the Wall Street side of the Morgan bank, and the main floor was instantly in a shambles, the windows blown in, the skylight severely damaged, the grill-work of the banking cages destroyed. There were more than 400 employees inside at the time, but only two were killed: William A. Joyce, filling in for another employee on the Wall Street side, and John A. Donohue, who worked in the foreign export department, who died later. The next day, The Times reported that the Morgan offices were "like a hospital," full of executives at work with bandaged heads. The Wall Street facade was pitted in 40 or 50 places by the cut-up sash weights and other metal intended to kill and maim; it is still possible to see the deadly marks visible in the marble. But the partners never repaired the damage. They may have decided to leave it as a badge of honor or perhaps they wanted to avoid the disruption of replacing the three-foot-thick blocks, which were up to 22 feet long. Shelley Diamond, consulting archivist at what is now J. P. Morgan Chase, says that no minutes or other relevant records from that period survive in the archives. IN 1929, Trowbridge & Livingston designed a new 38-story building next door on Broad Street for the Equitable Trust Company The building is now known as 15 Broad Street. J. P. Morgan & Company bought 15 Broad in 1953, and in 1959 merged with the Guaranty Trust Company, to form the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company. The next year the bank joined the two buildings, creating a jet age modern interior in parts of the lower floors of the buildings, although generally sparing the main banking hall of the old Morgan building, in an alteration designed by the architects Rogers & Burgun. A 1964 book "23 Wall Street: Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York," said that the Morgan building's foundations could take another 30 floors, "something contemplated when the companies merged." Perhaps with this in mind, the new Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the 1914 building a landmark among its earliest actions, in 1966. Morgan Guaranty merged with Chase Bank in 2000, and soon left its longtime headquarters. In 1998, the New York City Economic Development Commission proposed demolishing all the buildings on the Morgan block, except for the landmark itself, for a new New York Stock Exchange and 900-foot-high office tower; the original Morgan bank building was to become a visitor's center. But the deal fell apart and reports are circulating that Chase is shopping both the Morgan bank and 15 Broad Street to real estate developers, perhaps for a residential conversion. Over the last five months, Tom Johnson, a spokesman for J. P. Morgan Chase, has declined to comment on the reports or to allow access to the 1914 building, saying only that the bank was "considering its options." Perhaps the bank is concerned that the landmarks agency might also designate the interior of the Morgan building; although closed now, in the past it was open to the public. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |
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January 4, 2005 Morgan Bank Is Returning to Space Downtown By CHARLES V. BAGLI Morgan Stanley, the investment bank that was one of the largest employers in Lower Manhattan until the attack on the World Trade Center, is returning downtown for the first time since 2001. The bank, whose headquarters is in Times Square, is signing a deal to lease space on six floors at 1 New York Plaza, the 2.54-million-square-foot skyscraper at the foot of Water Street, according to state officials and real estate executives. In a boost for Lower Manhattan, Morgan Stanley plans to move about 1,450 employees from various locations in Midtown to the 50-story tower, beginning in June. The move is good news for Lower Manhattan, which suffered an exodus of financial institutions after the 9/11 attack. And although a number of law firms have taken advantage of lower rents downtown, the vacancy rate has continued to inch upward. "We're encouraged that Morgan Stanley wants to be downtown," said Charles A. Gargano, chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation. "Lower Manhattan has a bright future. And it will remain the financial capital of the world." Andrew Walton, a spokesman for the company, confirmed that Morgan Stanley was leasing 447,000 square feet of space in the building, making it the bank's second-largest office in New York City. Morgan Stanley is actually subleasing the space from Wachovia, the bank that is moving out of 1 New York Plaza this month. About 3,700 people were employed at Morgan Stanley's World Trade Center branch in September 2001. Like many investment banks and insurance companies, Morgan Stanley quickly moved to Midtown and the suburbs. It bought the former Texaco headquarters in Harrison, N.Y., and moved hundreds of employees there. Lehman Brothers, a downtown stalwart, abandoned the area, buying a new headquarters in Midtown from Morgan Stanley for about $700 million. Marsh & McLennan, the insurance giant, moved workers to Midtown and New Jersey. Although American Express returned to Lower Manhattan after a brief stay in the suburbs, city officials and real estate executives worried that the neighborhood would never recover as an office district. Earlier this year, Morgan Stanley hired Jones Lang Wooton, a real estate broker, to look for expansion space. The bank eventually went downtown, unlike Lehman Brothers, which was also looking for expansion space last summer and ultimately signed a deal for 306,725 square feet at 1301 Avenue of the Americas in Midtown. Some banks are still reluctant to consider Lower Manhattan, despite rents that are 40 percent cheaper than in Midtown. The average rent in Midtown, where the vacancy rate has fallen to 10.7 percent, is $50.29 per square foot, according to CB Richard Ellis, a real estate broker. But despite downtown rents that have slipped to $30.15, the vacancy rate is 15.8 percent and slowly rising. Those conditions have cast a shadow over the proposed Freedom Tower at the trade center site and over 7 World Trade Center, the 50-story tower under construction on Vesey Street, where the developer Larry S. Silverstein is asking prospective tenants for $50 a square foot in annual rent. Morgan Stanley's deal was even more enticing than the usual downtown lease, according to real estate brokers. Wachovia, whose lease at 1 New York Plaza runs until 2014, was so eager to find a tenant that it lowered the asking rent to $19 a square foot, although one person involved in the deal said the rent was in the mid-$20's. Morgan Stanley did not even get any of the so-called Liberty Zone incentives. which are intended to encourage tenants to move to Lower Manhattan. "It was such a good deal they couldn't ask for benefits with a straight face," one downtown landlord said. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company |
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