54d. Fulton-Nassau Historic District

Location: Roughly bounded by Broadway, Park Row, and Nassau, Dutch, William, Ann, Spruce, and Liberty Streets
Built: Multiple dates, mainly around 1860-1930
Architect: Multiple
National Register Number: 05000988
Listed: September 7, 2005
Visited: December 1, 2007; January 6, February 28, and March 2, 2008



Temple Court
(Silliman & Farnsworth, 1890-1892/Benjamin Silliman, Jr. 1889-1890)

A serious proto-skyscraper, a deep berry-red to the Potter Building's firey near-orange, severe and square to its neighbors' terra-cotta cliffscape, and capped with pyramidal towers that--appropriately enough--look like steeples, giving the building something of an ecclesiastical flavor. It also has a nine-story atrium, and the daylight's even visible from the front doors on Beekman. It's been subject to a condo conversion seemingly forever.

"It was on this site," Moses King tells us, "in a theatre built in 1751, that Hamlet was first produced in America." Before Newspaper Row, the area was the center of New York's theater life, a past with even fewer physical traces. Theatre Alley is one exception, and Kevin Walsh can tell you about it more comprehensively than I can.



Morse Building
(Silliman & Farnsworth, 1880)

Ten years before Temple Court, another brick skyscraper by the same architects, mostly notable for its rainbow arcs of red and black piano keyboards over the windows. It loses some of its impact thanks to some weird brick replacements--the new ones seem awfully pink. Perhaps in anticipation of future skyscraper development, it has one side of sheer nothing save for a collection of windows that's ever-so-slightly eclectic in position and shape. For a long while, this blank side overlooked a parking lot, but if certain parties can get their act together, there'll be a huge-ass Gehry skyscraper to steal everyone's daylight before long.