SoMA Apartments

 apartments, 1969_construction, Modern (architecture)

308-foot, 21-story Brutalist/Modernist office building completed in 1969. Designed by Carson, Lundin & Shaw as an operations center and back office banking space for Manufacturers Hanover Trust, 4 New York Plaza is a side core building with extremely efficient floor plates of 48,000 square feet per floor. It is clad in brown brick, with very narrow windows. The ground floor on the western facade recessed for the width of one bay, with the upper floors supported on brick piers that angle out toward the sidewalk. A 2-faced, analog clock fixture is attached to the northwest corner of the ground floor. The design was apparently inspired by a punchcard.

The 2nd floor has large, recessed and squared windows with steeply-sloped sills, grouped into pairs on the north elevation facing Water Street. The next three floors have recessed, narrow but widely-spaced, 3-story bands with brick spandrels between the windows. Each band has a sloped sill at its base. In each band, the upper spandrel has an ornamental black metal cylinder.

The next three floors have similar widely-spaced vertical bands of narrow windows, but grouped into pairs, and without the metal ornament. The next seven floors revert to the single band pattern. The rest of the floors up to the roof have closely-spaced bands. The south section that adjoins to Two New York Plaza consists of a windowless brick tower rising the full height of the building, separated from the windowed portion on the west (Broad Street) side by a deeply recessed, vertical band of square windows of the same size as those on the 2nd floor.

It is going to be converted and completely reclad to a new design by CetraRuddy Architects for GFP Real Estate and Metroloft Management.

www.aiany.org/news/in-the-news-february-12-2025/
www.hines.com/properties/4-new-york-plaza-renovation-ne...
ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2015/02/02/the-building-...