Meet the #WhitehallBuilding (17 #BatteryPlace), a 3-section residential & office #building n
Meet the #WhitehallBuilding (17 #BatteryPlace), a 3-section residential & office #building near the southern tip of #Manhattan Island in #NYC. The original 20-story structure was designed on the land developed by Robert Chesebrough, a chemist known for discovering Vaseline. • Named after the nearby estate of New Amsterdam colonial governor Peter Stuyvesant, the original building was built as a speculative development in 1902–1904 & in 2000, the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission signed the Whitehall Building as an official city #landmark. The upper floors of the original building and annex were converted to apartments, while the lower floors remain in use as an office building. In fact, my close friend lives in this building now & when I saw the lobby area, I wanted to know more. • At the time, building sites near Broadway, two blocks east of the Whitehall Building, were considered to be optimal for development. The Whitehall Building’s location across from #BatteryPark ensured a direct view of the New York Harbor, since the park faced the harbor on its other end. • Rents per square foot were generally lower than those on Broadway, and so many tenants started to move into the building. The #WhitehallClub, a lunch club for Lower Manhattan merchants and businesspersons, became the premier maritime club in #NYC during that era and hosted famous shipping figures. • Do you see the attic with the window? One office tenant in the mid-20th century was the Moran Towing Company, operator of a fleet of tugboats. In the days before radio dispatching, a man high in the building would watch with a telescope for incoming ships, and then use a six-foot megaphone to shout instructions to the Moran tugboats docked at the Battery. • Other long term tenants included the Gulf Refining Company, Tide Water Oil Company, United States Weather Bureau, Internal Revenue Service, and the Penn Coal and Coke Company. The consulate of Germany and the Communist Daily Worker newspaper also had offices there, which were damaged in a 1940 bombing perpetrated by opponents of Nazi Germany. The Whitehall Building was once described as “suited as offices for little people only”. (at Whitehall Building) https://www.instagram.com/p/CLsrCOlj39m/?igshid=1mhjlzy6o8qg8 -- source link
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