52. Liberty Tower
A.K.A.: Bryant Building; Sinclair Building; Sinclair Oil Building
Location: 55 Liberty Street
Built: 1909-1910
Architect: Henry Ives Cobb
National Register Number: 83001734
Listed: September 15, 1983
Visited: December 1 and 29, 2007; February 15, 2008
Additional Documentation: NYCLPC Report
The LPC's designation report for the Liberty Tower uses the term "romantic skyscraper" as if it the reader immediately understood what it meant. Based on the context, I have to assume it denotes those early, slender stalks of historicist design that created Manhattan's skyline--the Singer, the MetLife, the Woolworth, and Liberty--in opposition to those awful awful modernist oafs that supposedly ruined it in the sixties and seventies. Now Liberty Tower has class, no question. A creamy shaft crowned with Gothic ornamentation and crazy terra-cotta animals and gnomes, it's lithe and light where other buildings in the neighborhood seem to hulk and crowd. It's a tower that doesn't impose; its slender frame prevents it from blocking much sky.
Unfortunately, its thinness is the very reason why buildings like it aren't developed today. As a very general rule for city office buildings, it's more efficient to spread out a given amount of space over a small number of large floors than a large number of small floors. The larger a floorplate is, the more likely it'll allow a company to keep one of its divisions--or several related ones--together. When company divisions are spread out over multiple floors, it means employees have to waste time on elevators or stairs to conduct face-to-face business. The Liberty Tower's floorplate (including space for elevators and linking stairs) is roughly 5,200 square feet per floor. This is nothing in today's market, NOTHING. A floor in an Manhattan office building is typically from four to seven times that. (A floor on the World Trade Center was an acre of space.) 5K of space is fine if you're an exclusive hedge fund, a law firm with a handful of partners, or a lil' internet start-up, but if you're any bigger, it's prohibitively cramped no matter floors you take. A company bureaucracy will require much much MORE.
It's exactly this kind of office-space inefficiency that doomed the Singer Building as a corporate white elephant. But if 5K square feet is unworkable for a company, it's big enough for a movie star--and if that space is divided into multiple apartments, good for us little people, too. Liberty Tower got a new lease on life when it was subject to the first residential conversion of consequence in the Financial District back in 1979-1980, when the area must've been even more bereft of decent places to buy necessities on a weekend than now. The architect (and investor) for the conversion, Joseph Pell Lombardi, took the former Sinclair Oil boardrooms for his own apartment. Aw man, SO JEALOUS.
Location: 55 Liberty Street
Built: 1909-1910
Architect: Henry Ives Cobb
National Register Number: 83001734
Listed: September 15, 1983
Visited: December 1 and 29, 2007; February 15, 2008
Additional Documentation: NYCLPC Report
The LPC's designation report for the Liberty Tower uses the term "romantic skyscraper" as if it the reader immediately understood what it meant. Based on the context, I have to assume it denotes those early, slender stalks of historicist design that created Manhattan's skyline--the Singer, the MetLife, the Woolworth, and Liberty--in opposition to those awful awful modernist oafs that supposedly ruined it in the sixties and seventies. Now Liberty Tower has class, no question. A creamy shaft crowned with Gothic ornamentation and crazy terra-cotta animals and gnomes, it's lithe and light where other buildings in the neighborhood seem to hulk and crowd. It's a tower that doesn't impose; its slender frame prevents it from blocking much sky.
Unfortunately, its thinness is the very reason why buildings like it aren't developed today. As a very general rule for city office buildings, it's more efficient to spread out a given amount of space over a small number of large floors than a large number of small floors. The larger a floorplate is, the more likely it'll allow a company to keep one of its divisions--or several related ones--together. When company divisions are spread out over multiple floors, it means employees have to waste time on elevators or stairs to conduct face-to-face business. The Liberty Tower's floorplate (including space for elevators and linking stairs) is roughly 5,200 square feet per floor. This is nothing in today's market, NOTHING. A floor in an Manhattan office building is typically from four to seven times that. (A floor on the World Trade Center was an acre of space.) 5K of space is fine if you're an exclusive hedge fund, a law firm with a handful of partners, or a lil' internet start-up, but if you're any bigger, it's prohibitively cramped no matter floors you take. A company bureaucracy will require much much MORE.
It's exactly this kind of office-space inefficiency that doomed the Singer Building as a corporate white elephant. But if 5K square feet is unworkable for a company, it's big enough for a movie star--and if that space is divided into multiple apartments, good for us little people, too. Liberty Tower got a new lease on life when it was subject to the first residential conversion of consequence in the Financial District back in 1979-1980, when the area must've been even more bereft of decent places to buy necessities on a weekend than now. The architect (and investor) for the conversion, Joseph Pell Lombardi, took the former Sinclair Oil boardrooms for his own apartment. Aw man, SO JEALOUS.
Labels: Broadway-Nassau District, Financial District, Henry Ives Cobb
posted by Michael at
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