75 Broad Street, diagonally across the street from our office, was built in 1928 and almost immediately bought by the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation for use as the company headquarters. Like a lot of New York Telephone buildings of that era, the interior was a mixture of telecoms switching equipment and office space.
The building had two “main” entrances, one in the middle of the block on Broad Street and one at the corner of Broad and South William Street. The Broad Street entrance is an ordinary, maybe even plain, lobby door. The (now-unused) corner entrance is…something else:
My guess is that the Broad Street entrance was for the offices and the corner entrance was for the lobby for whatever retail services you could buy from ITT. Sending an international telegram, perhaps. The half-dome over the door is worth a closer look:
I’ve read – I don’t necessarily believe it, but I don’t have a better description – that this represents the spirit of Commerce (the angel) uniting the world (the western hemisphere on the left, the eastern on the right) with electricity (the lightning bolt between his hands). Note that the placement of the globes allowed the artist to avoid the question of what the angel might be wearing. The mosaic is well done in a technical sense; the art seems, to me, to be on the kitschy side. We’ve been in our office for over seven years, so I’ve walked by that mosaic hundreds of times (probably close to two thousand, at a guess) and every time I have the same thought: that’s Meadowlark Lemon, palming two basketballs.
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