Lost To Antiquity, Recently

From the Wurts Brothers, circa 1930, 63 Wall Street:

The vast majority of the Wurts’ photos of buildings show all of the building, or enough so that you get a good sense of it. In this case, they’re showing you a small piece of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th floors of a 37-story tower. There are, I suspect, two reasons for that. The first is that, frankly, it’s a boring building. By 1929, when this building was completed, 37 stories was nothing special downtown, and the architects, Delano & Aldrich, do not seem, based on their output, to have been particularly interested in the skyscraper form. As you can see in the photo, they used a fair amount of classical ornament (in non-classical ways) with a mostly brick facade and typical 1916-zoning-law setbacks. This is a building that I’ve seen hundreds of times and have a hard time forming a mental image of.

The second reason that the Wurts photo is focused on this level is presence of those big round ornamental plaques. They are replicas of ancient coins, which someone thought was appropriate for the building’s original owner, Brown Brothers & Co., a bank. They are also the most notable thing about the architectural design. Which coins? Who are the men in those portraits? Good question. The building is not a designated New York City landmark, which is probably for the best, but it means that the LPC staff did not perform their usual thorough research into its history and architecture. It’s a contributing building to the Wall Street Historic District of the National Register of Historic Places, but the facade description in the district nomination form is rather short. None of my usual sources seem to have anything much on the building, most likely because (see the paragraph above) it’s a boring building. Also, while it can be argued, philosophically, that no knowledge is useless, the question of the identities of men on facsimiles of ancient coins on the facade of an old skyscraper is a good counterargument.