AUSTRALIAN SHADE SAILS

Civic Center, Manhattan

The American Tract Society Building, at the southeast corner of Nassau and Spruce Streets, was constructed in 1894-95 to the design of architect R. H. Robertson, who was known for his churches and institutional and office buildings in New York. It is one of the earliest, as well as one of the earliest extant, steel skeletal-frame skyscrapers in New York, partially of curtain-wall construction.

This was also one of the city's tallest and largest skyscrapers upon its completion. Twenty full stories high (plus cellar, basement, and three-story tower) and clad in rusticated gray Westerly granite, gray Haverstraw Roman brick, and buff-colored terra cotta, the building was constructed with a U-shaped plan, having an exterior light court. Combining elements of the Romanesque and Renaissance Revival styles, the design, with two similar principal facades, has an overall tripartite vertical scheme, but is also arranged in six horizontal sections.

A three-story arcade, open at the top story and with winged caryatids at the upper corners, surmounts the western half of the building; a three-story hipped roof tower rises through the arcade, creating a picturesque feature in the skyline of lower Manhattan. The building's visibility is heightened by its corner location near City Hall Park and adjacent to Printing House Square.

The American Tract Society, founded in 1825 to publish and distribute religious tracts and literature, built on this site that same year. It emerged as one of the largest American publishers prior to the Civil War. The vicinity of Park Row and Nassau Street, center of newspaper publishing in New York City from the 1830s through the 1920s, was redeveloped, beginning in the 1870s, with a series of important tall office buildings. The American Tract Society Building, planned as a speculative venture when the Society was experiencing financial decline, was intended to provide it with a large rental income to continue its missions. The Society moved out, however, in 1914 and lost its building through foreclosure. The lower portion was leased to the publishers of the New York Sun from 1914 to 1919.

The American Tract Society Building, with principal facades on Nassau and Spruce Streets, was constructed with a steel skeletal frame and is partially of curtain-wall construction above the fifth story on the street facades and above the thirteenth story on the secondary facades. Twenty full stories high, plus cellar, basement, and three-story tower, it is clad in rusticated gray Westerly (R.I.) granite on the five-story base, and gray Haverstraw (N.Y.) Roman brick and buff-colored terra cotta on the upper stories. The principal facades, five bays each, are articulated in a similar fashion below the upper section. The building has a U-shaped plan above the fifth story, having an exterior light court to the south. Combining elements of the Romanesque and Renaissance Revival styles, the design has an overall tripartite vertical scheme, but is also arranged in six horizontal layers. The structure is surmounted by an arcade and tower on the western half. Windows are one-over-one double-hung wood sash. Base

The five-story (plus basement) base is clad in rusticated granite on the principal facades, which are similar in articulation. The base is divided into two horizontal sections. The first and second stories have a large round arch in each bay (except for the main entrance on Nassau Street), within which is rectangular fenestration on the ground floor, a stone spandrel panel, and a second-story window flanked by colonnettes and sidelights. This lower section is capped by a band course ornamented with a fret motif. The upper section (third through fifth stories) has colossal paired arches in each bay with a smooth-faced granite pier with stylized capitals, decorative spandrels, and fifth-story wrought-iron grilles. Air conditioning vents have been inserted into the spandrels above the third story on the Spruce Street facade and a portion of the Nassau Street facade.

This section is capped by a decorative band course. Ground Story: Nassau Street The original elaborate, projecting two-story main entrance portico consisted of paired Ionic columns supporting a heavy decorative entablature, which was surmounted by a large round-arched transom, bearing the inscription "The American Tract Society Building," flanked by spandrel sculptures of robed, winged female figures. This entrance portico was altered in 1912 (Alt. 174-1912, T. Markoe Robertson, architect), and in 1955, a two-story flat marble veneer surround (BN 2635-1955) was installed. The entrance currently has non-historic anodized aluminum and glass doors with sidelights and transom.

The two original storefronts had entrances in the outer bays, with double doors and transoms, while the bays between the main and storefront entrances had display windows above bulkheads. Currently, the bays on this facade contain

Chinatown, Manhattan

Called “the first strictly high-class tall bank and office building” on the Lower East Side, with a design “equal in every respect [to] the highest grade banking buildings throughout the city,” the S. Jarmulowsky Bank Building was completed in 1912 as the architectural showpiece of one of the neighborhood’s most prominent bankers. Born in 1841 in what was then the Russian province of Lomza, its owner, Sender Jarmulowsky, established his business on the Lower East Side in 1873 and was operating at this location by 1878. Known for his honesty and conservative financial approach, Jarmulowsky grew wealthy over the following three decades providing steamship tickets and banking services to the immigrants of the surrounding neighborhood, which was unrivaled as the world’s largest Jewish community. He was also one of the Lower East Side’s leading philanthropists, playing an instrumental role in the construction of the Eldridge Street Synagogue, and serving as its first president.

In 1911, the firm of Rouse & Goldstone filed plans for this twelve-story building, which towered over the tenements of the Lower East Side when it was completed the following year. A pioneer in introducing the prevailing skyscraper aesthetic of New York’s major office districts to the neighborhood, the S. Jarmulowsky Bank Building was executed in the “modern Renaissance style” and the tripartite configuration that was standard for tall buildings of the time. Accessed through a classical corner entrance, Jarmulowsky’s banking hall and offices were housed in the building’s rusticated stone base; manufacturing lofts occupied the rest of the building, including its ornate terra-cotta crown. Sender Jarmulowsky died shortly after the building’s opening, and his bank failed in 1917. The building was then sold by his sons, and continued to house a variety of industrial tenants into the twenty-first century.

Today, the richly decorated S. Jarmulowsky Bank Building remains one of the area’s tallest and most distinctive buildings, and one of a handful of structures that “encapsulate the Jewish immigrant experience” on the Lower East Side.

Manhattan’s Lower East Side

The Lower East Side of Manhattan is one of New York’s, and the country’s, most storied neighborhoods. Historically defined as the area east of Broadway, extending from the vicinity of the Brooklyn Bridge north to 14th Street, its name is synonymous with the American immigrant experience. Although immigrants from around the world, from East Asia to Western Europe, have settled on the Lower East Side since the mid-nineteenth century, the neighborhood is most strongly associated with Jewish history and culture: from the 1880s to the 1920s, it was the country’s center of Jewish life and “the single largest Jewish community in the world, unrivaled … in terms of the sheer number of Jews who lived in close proximity to each other.”2 The historic core of this community was present-day Straus Square, located at the intersection of Canal Street, Essex Street, and East Broadway, just east of the skyscraper constructed by Sender Jarmulowsky for his bank.

Prior to the arrival of European fur traders and the Dutch West India Company, the neighborhood, like much of the Metropolitan Region, was populated by bands of Lenape Indians, who had an encampment in what would come to be known as Corlears Hook on the Lower East Side. Under the Dutch, the Lower East Side was divided into several large farms that were worked by slaves. By the mid-1700s, with New York under British control, the 300-acre farm located roughly between present-day Division and Rivington Streets was owned by James DeLancey, who served as Chief Justice, Lieutenant Governor, and Governor of New York Province. (His slave, Othello, was hanged as a conspirator following the slave uprising of 1741.) Upon DeLancey’s death in 1760, his son, also named James, inherited his property; the land was soon surveyed into blocks and lots, and Stanton, Delancey, Grand, and Rivington Streets were laid out.

A British Loyalist, DeLancey left New York for good in 1775, and after the Revolutionary War, his lands, like those of other Loyalists, were confiscated and sold off by the State. The S. Jarmulowsky Bank Building stands on property that was once part of the DeLancey farm, at the southwestern corner of Orchard Street—named for the DeLanceys’ “magnificent orchard”—and Canal Street, named for a canal constructed in the early nineteenth century to drain the fetid Collect Pond just north of City Hall.

Commercial buildings and residences for craftsmen and laborers were being constructed on the former DeLancey estate by the beginning of the nineteenth century, and by the 1820s, the Lower East Side was a desirable area. By the 1840s, the affluent had started abandoning the area south of Houston Street, and the neighborhood’s first purpose-built tenements were being constructed as increasing numbers of immigrants settled on th