International Mercantile Marine Company Building (New York City, New York)

 office building, Beaux-Arts (architecture), 1882_construction

12-story Beaux-Arts office building originally completed in 1882. Designed by Edward H. Kendall, it has beautiful ornamentation on the exterior. The Washington Building originally had a rooptop cupola, which was added in 1887, and rose to 258 feet. The rooftop cupola was removed and the building reclad by Walter B. Chambers with a buff-colored Indiana limestone facade above a granite water table, instead of the old red brick facade, in a 1921 renovation for the International Mercantile Marine Company. At the 12th floor is a copper-covered mansard roof.

Rectangular in form, the building has unusual chamfered corners at either end of Battery Place. There is a tall round-arched arcade at the base (with rounded canopies and scrolled keystones) that is five bays wide on both Broadway and Greenwich Street, and nine bays wide on Battery Place. The round-arched Broadway entrance includes sculpted starfish and seashells, as well as reliefs of Mercury (Roman god of commerce) and Neptune (god of the sea), set below a triangular pediment on scrolled brackets. A panel bears the carved inscription "NUMBER ONE", referring the the building's address of 1 Broadway. The two smaller entrances on Battery Place have triangular pediments with the inscriptions "FIRST CLASS" and "CABIN CLASS" (the basement entrance at the corner of Battery Place and Greenwich once bore the inscription "THIRD CLASS", which has since disappeared), adorned with images of dolphins and water plants.

There is a transitional 2nd floor, with balustrades above a dentiled cornice, and colorful ornamental mosaic shields between the paired windows on the Broadway and Battery Place sides. The shields represent the coats-of-arms of the world's leading ports; each mosaic is set within frames and adorned with such nautical motifs as dolphins, ropes and pulleys, tridents, and anchors. Above, there is a simple shaft with paired windows from the 3rd to the 7th floor, a transitional 8th & 9th floors section forming an arcade of round-arches with scrolled keystones, and a capital with a plain 10th floor and balustrades, a recessed 11th floor with round-arched windows, and a 12th-floor copper-clad mansard with shed dormers and small oeil-de-boeuf windows at the corners. A pair of flagpoles rise from the ends of the roof.

The International Mercantile Marine Company, organized in 1902 by J.P. Morgan, was a mammoth and ambitious combination of six of the leading American and British transatlantic steamship companies that operated the largest American-owned merchant fleet in the world. This building served as the company's headquarters as well as its booking office. In 1943 the company merged with its then-principal subsidiary and became the United States Lines Co., retaining ownership of 1 Broadway until 1979. The Allstate Life Insurance company, owners since 1992, funded a major restoration of the exterior in 1993-94.

The grand hall on the ground floor is now occupied by a Citibank branch, and is worth a look. Floors 2-12 are now occupied by Kenyon & Kenyon, a prominent intellectual property law firm.

www.beyondthegildedage.com/2011/12/international-mercha...
bestworldimages.com/new-york-city-one-broadway.html
www.urbanarchive.org/sites/fXpyY3QbxXU
archive.org/details/americanarchite120newyuoft/page/279...
archive.org/details/americanarchitec45newyuoft/page/130...