40 Rector Street

 office building, high-rise, 1920_construction, Renaissance Revival (architecture)

220-foot, 18-story Renaissance-revival office building completed in 1920. Designed by Warren & Wetmore, it was first known as the Barrett Building, and was originally L-shaped, wrapping around several old tenement buildings at 100-106 Washington Street. The building’s owners intended to tear them down when their leases expired and develop the site with a small park to protect the light to the 40 Rector Street Building’s east façade. Instead, sometime after 1951, an addition was constructed on this parcel adjacent to the 8-story wing of the existing building on the south half of the Washington Street elevation. This new facade on the northern half, which is recessed back from the sidewalk, was redesigned with a plain tan brick facade and grid of square-headed windows. In 2001, a new front entrance for this section was designed by Andres Escobar & Associates, with a faux application of a grey pattern resembling horizontal strata of stone or fabric on the ground floor.

The original building is designed with a large, 3-story rusticated stone base. At the corners are stone-enframed windows with circular windows at the 2nd-story level. At the center of each facade are double-height round-arched openings. The original main entrance on West Street is flanked by a pair of Doric columns supporting a grand entablature. A modern entrance, with metal and glass infill, was created at the three western arches of the Rector Street facade. The small, 8-story wing has three arches facing Washington Street, and a pair of double-height, square-headed openings facing Rector. The top level of the base is lined with smaller, rectangular windows, and the base itself is capped by a dentiled cornice and a stone balustrade.

The 4th floor is transitional, clad primarily in limestone, with two brown brick panels on each of the piers that separate the windows. The upper floors are brown brick, with limestone quoins at the corners, and uninterrupted brick piers running up to the 14th floor, above which the top floors are designed as a loggia with stone pilasters. Black metal spandrel panels divide the windows vertically, except at the end bays. A stone entablature and projecting copper cornice crown the building.

The building faced the Hudson River waterfront when it opened, but the subsequent development of Battery Park City, which is built on landfill (partially comprised of spoil excavated from the World Trade Center foundations) pushed the shoreline back by several hundred feet, starting in the late 1960s.

In the 1970s and beyond, 40 Rector Street ceased to be a premium address and the building fell on hard times, becoming back office space for number of City agencies. Recently, a new influx of high-profile public service organizations has revitalized the building, including the Metropolitan College of New York, The China Institute, Big Brothers Big Sisters, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Urban Justice Center.

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