29 Broadway (New York City, New York) | office building, skyscraper, Art Deco (architecture), 1931_construction

 office building, skyscraper, Art Deco (architecture), 1931_construction

345-foot, 30-story Art-Deco office building completed in 1931. Designed by Sloane & Robertson, with a 6-story addition in 1964 by Boak & Raad. The original narrow, asymmetrical Broadway facade has just two bays. As built, it had just a 30-foot-wide frontage, but an 84-foot front on Trinity Place, and 180 feet on Morris Street. An adjoining 6-story building was incorporated into the tower in 1964 and given a matching facade.

The main feature on the Broadway side is its 3-story stone-faced base with 2-story entrance portico - an open vestibule set within a heavily sculpted projecting frame, suggesting an arch. The doorway is deeply recessed, behind a hanging lantern. The sides of the arch are in the form on stylized floral stalks rising to a tightly curled spiral, crossed by projecting heavy horizontal stone blocks. The arch's keystone is a heavy, ribbed sculptural block which is then repeated as a spandrel in the strongly vertical window bay that rises above it.

In the bay to the south is a double-height, square-headed opening with a storefront at the ground floor, and a tripartite window set in a grey metal frame, with typically Art-Deco abstract geometric ornament, at the 2nd floor. The 3rd floor functions as an attic story, with square windows; the stone at its top is edged in a stylized floral pattern. Above, the shaft rises with paired windows and black brick wall segments, alternating with horizontal bands of white brick. The tower rises 15 floors to the first setback, then to a series of setbacks at two stories, three stories, and three stories up.

The 1962-64 addition has two wide bays. The first two floors are clad in grey granite and have two double-height openings with storefronts and 2nd-story windows. The four upper floors match the horizontal bands of white bricks and the black brick piers of the main building.

The Trinity Place elevation is a wider, symmetrical version of the Broadway elevation. Because Trinity Place is at a lower elevation than Broadway (Morris Street slopes downward to the west), it has an additional story in its base, clad in polished dark-grey granite. The 2nd & 3rd floors are divided into four wide bays, each with a double-height, four-part window similar to the one on Broadway. The 4th floor has a row of rectangular windows. The shaft rising above is also divided into four bays. The bay at either end has two square-headed windows at each floor, set off against abstract, geometrically patterned stone facing. The central bays, by contrast, are organized horizontally, with two sets of four windows separated by a vertical black brick spandrel. Shallow setbacks at the top create a towered effect. The Morris Street facade effectively doubles the Trinity Place facade.

The bottom two floors of the addition section on Broadway are occupied by a Bank of America branch, while the ground floor of the main building is occupied by Travelex Currency Exchange.