Maritime Exchange Building

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

418-foot, 36-story Art-Deco office building completed in 1931. Designed by Sloan & Robertson for the Maritime Association for the Port of New York, it rises in a series of setbacks visible on three sides. The base and lower stories are faced in stone, while the tower rising above is faced in white brick. The ground floor is lined with modernized glass storefronts, and there are recessed double-height windows at the 2nd & 3rd stories. In the spandrel between each second- and third-story window is an ornamental panel with a metal relief of a seahorse. The entrance itself, framed in dark stone set in a geometric pattern, has a set of four additional seahorses in its upper portion. At each setback, the brick spandrels are replaced by projecting stone ornament in an abstract but symmetrical geometric pattern. The regular setbacks and projecting stone ornament create a cascading effect. Decorative elements were fabricated by the Federal Seaboard Terra Cotta Co.

The facade of the upper floors is rather plain, though marked by several setbacks. They begin at the 8th floor in the center, but at the 16th floor at either corner, and continue every four or five floors. The facade of the upper shaft is organized as a series of vertical window bays separated by uninterrupted piers of white brick. In some of the bays, the window spandrels are an ornamental geometric pattern in red and black brick; in others, the spandrels are plain brick, but the windows are framed by projecting square brick blocks.

The ground floor is occupied by Pay/Half, a Citibank branch, Gregorys Coffee, and Dig Inn Farm-to-Counter market.

usmodernist.org/PA/PP-1931-02.pdf