AUSTRALIAN SHADE SAILS

Financial District, Downtown Manhattan, New York City, New York

The American Surety Company Building, a key building in the evolution of the skyscraper, was erected to designs of the eminent architect Bruce Price between 1894 and 1896. Prominently sited at the southeast corner of Broadway and Pine Street, opposite Trinity Church graveyard, the building stands in the heart of the insurance district; the insurance industry played a major role in the development of this section of Broadway, at the same time fostering advances in skyscraper design. The American Surety Company, one of the leading bond insurance companies in the nation, erected the second highest building in the city.

This was the first and most important tall building by Price and reflected his innovative ideas about skyscraper design. It was one of the first buildings in the city to incorporate such structural techniques as steel framing, curtain wall construction, and caisson foundation piers that carry a cantilevered steel foundation structure. Clad in Maine granite, the twenty-three story American Surety building features a rich neo-Renaissance decorative scheme that incorporates Greek elements such as the Ionic entrance colonnade and the severe classical sculptural figures, designed by J. Massey Rhind, at the third story. Credited by the noted architectural critic Montgomery Schuyler with popularizing the tripartite column analogy for tall buildings, Price's design for the American Surety Building set a model for tall buildings on corner sites in the 1890s and was a prototype for the freestanding tower skyscrapers of the early twentieth century. Between 1920 and 1922, as the American Surety Company prospered and expanded, the building was modified with the addition of four bays on Broadway and four bays on Pine Street and by the addition of two penthouse stories. Designed by the talented and inventive New York architect Herman Lee Meader, these additions matched Price's original design in material and articulation.

DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS


The Broadway Insurance District and the American Surety Building

As New York became the nation's financial capital in the mid-nineteenth century, the banks and insurance companies that had traditionally clustered around the intersection of Broad and Wall Street began to move to new buildings on Broadway and side streets immediately to the north of Wall Street. These buildings were richly decorated, Renaissance-inspired, multi-story commercial "palaces," averaging about 65 feet in height.

The first building to break with this tradition was the Gilman & Kendall and George B. Post headquarters building for the Equitable Life Assurance Company at Broadway and Cedar Street (1868-70, demolished) which rose to a height of 130 feet by making use of such technological innovations as passenger elevators, iron floor beams, and fireproof building materials. By 1875 New York had two other "skyscrapers," the Tribune Building (1873-75, Richard Morris Hunt, demolished) at 260 feet and the Western Union Building (1872-75, George B. Post, demolished) at 230 feet. Beginning about 1879, after a hiatus in construction following the financial panic of 1873, more owners began to replace older commercial palaces with larger elevator buildings. Insurance companies commissioned many of these new buildings. Factors that caused the insurance industry to take the lead in the drive for height included the companies' need to find outlets for their large capital reserves, their openness to innovation, and their recognition of the public relations value of a prominent and handsome home office building that would "establish in the public mind not only [the individual company's] name but also a favorable impression of its operations." In 1893, a guidebook writer observed that "the life corporations have been among the prime causes of the city's architectural growth, for the life insurance buildings of New York surpass the office structures of any city in the world." In addition, intense rivalry between insurance companies often manifested itself in architectural terms. In February 1894, the American Surety Company, then quartered in the Guernsey Building at 160 Broadway, announced that it had acquired the Continental Life Insurance Company's old site at Broadway and Pine Street and intended to construct a twenty-story building to the designs of Bruce Price. Just to the south of the site were the Schermerhorn Building and the United Bank Building. The New York Times's article on the plans for the new American Surety Building observed that it "will throw a shadow over all [the Pine Street insurance buildings], having for its only rival the mammoth structure of Manhattan Life Insurance Company, now building, which will be fifty feet taller but contain two less stories."

The American Surety Company

Until the 1880s, the business of underwriting had remained largely a

Taken at a flea market just north of Tampa, Fl. A young lady makes and sells these...very good work.