Yesterday I said that “Manhattan is one of the most worked-over pieces of land on the planet” and I want to give an example of what that means in practice, with an ordinary site in the oldest part of the city. I’m going to look at the northwest corner of Broad Street and Exchange Place, a site that doesn’t attract much attention in itself, but is a block from the New York Stock Exchange and Federal Hall, and a block in a different direction from Trinity Church.
Today, there’s a 30-story building from 1956 there, with a rather boring glass and metal-panel curtain wall. That building was built by the NYSE as an expansion; in the current days of electronic trading it became redundant and is being converted to apartments. Here’s its footprint* and note the notch in the northern lot line:
Note that the city government’s online map hasn’t yet caught up with the fact that it’s no longer part of the NYSE. That building is now over 60 years old, but it obviously has predecessors. The site had two large buildings that were demolished in 1954-55: the Commercial Cable Building was a 22-story office building constructed in 1897, and the Blair Building, seen in the photo above in 1905, was a 16-story office building constructed in 1902. In other words, the boring mid-century building now there is older than the Commercial Cable and Blair Buildings were when they was torn down. Here’s a 1916 map** showing the whole area and a close-up of the site, with the Blair Building labelled as “N.Y. Trust Company”. Commercial Cable is a blunt “L” in plan and wraps around Blair:
Before Commercial Cable and Blair, the site had a group of small commercial buildings. Note that in the 1894 map*** below, pinkish red buildings are of “fireproof” construction, while blue ones have wood-joist floors. As can be seen in the over-all map, the process off replacing all the mid-1800s and earlier flammable buildings with fire-resistant ones was a work in progress at that date. This map provides the origin of the notch seen earlier: the lots facing New Street have borders that are not aligned with the lots facing Broad Street.
Those buildings were at least fifty years old when they were demolished because here they are in 1852:
I hit a rough patch here in terms of illustration. There are plenty of maps from the period 1750-1850, but they don’t show detail of building outlines. And since I’m not going to switch from maps to deeds in a blog post, we’ve got a bit of a mystery. The general form of those buildings suggests that they were built between 1820 and 1850.
Here’s the area in 1744, as drawn some 70 years later:
Obviously, the buildings are shown schematically, but the general implication is that there are several free-standing buildings with rear yards on Broad Street and a continuous row on New Street. Also, a lot of street names changed between 1776 and 1800; since the NYSE did not yet exist, there’s no Exchange Place. Instead we have Flatten Barrack and Garden Street. Some time between 1744 and 1852**** those small buildings were replaced by the group of commercial buildings seen above.
Let’s go back another big jump to 1660. This is the Castello Plan, the most famous map of the Dutch village of New Amsterdam, and arguably the most accurate.
It appears we’ve got a couple of houses on Broad Street and vegetable gardens behind. New Street had not yet been cut through the blocks between Broadway and Broad Street, Wall Street still has its wall*****, and Broad Street still has its miniature canal.
At a minimum, we have four generations of buildings on the site: the Dutch houses, the early 1800s commercial buildings, the two early skyscrapers, and the 1956 tower. It’s likely that there was one more generation from the early 1700s, with small buildings filling in the block fronts around the houses, as is suggested by the 1744 map. There’s also a subway under Broad Street constructed in the 1920s, and all the other underground paraphernalia of modern cities: water mains, sewers, electric power, communications, steam pipes, and so on. The odds that any physical trace of anything older than the Commercial Cable and Blair buildings could be found today is effectively zero.
This is what I meant by “worked over.”
* Notes on the maps: (1) The current-day map is oriented with due north straight up, as is the 1916 map. All of the others are tilted, mostly to make Broadway run straight up and down the page, except for the Costello map, where north is to the right. (2) The only meaning to the color of my annotation boxes is that I was looking for something that would stand out against the map backgrounds.
** For all the illustrations, click to enlarge.
*** No, Broadway is not a divided highway and there are not two Bowling Greens. The map-maker decided to repeat Broadway on each side of the page boundary.
**** It’s easy to skip past the fact that’s 112 years. There could have been a whole bunch of construction and demolition in that much the, but there probably wasn’t.
***** The wall likely never looked nearly as good as shown here, with a series of redoubts, but the map looks great.
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