120 Wall Street

120 Wall Street is a skyscraper in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City, and was completed in 1930. The building is 399 ft (122 m) tall, has 34 floors, and is located on the easternmost portion of Wall Street, and also borders Pine Street and South Street. The architect was Ely Jacques Kahn of Buchman & Kahn.

History

Greenmal Holding Corporation announced that it had obtained a loan in February 1929 to build the building. The cost was estimated at $12,000,000, with the edifice resting upon a fifty-one caisson foundation. Designed by Buchman & Kahn, the building was planned to occupy a 23,000-square-foot (2,100 m²) plot. T. Greenberg and Malzmal purchased the property in 1928 from the American Sugar Company.

The building opened in March 1930, and the original anchor tenant of the building was the American Sugar Refining Company.

New York Life Insurance Company bid $1,000,000 to foreclose a $5,569,605 lien against the skyscraper at a June 26, 1933, auction. The insurance firm previously initiated a $5,000,000 suit to foreclose a consolidated mortgage on the property, on November 23, 1932. A first mortgage of $4,050,000 was given in 1929. Liens of $200,000 and $750,000 were made subsequently. The lawsuit was based on nonpayment of $150,000 in interest, on May 1, 1932. Of the amount owed only $46,040 was paid by Greenberg and Malzmal.

120 Wall Street was the only major high-rise building on the East River downtown waterfront for many years until the post-1970s construction boom.

Since 1980, the building has been owned by the 120 Wall Company, LLC, an affiliate of Silverstein Properties Inc., who purchased it for a reported $12 million.

In the early 1990s, in cooperation with the City's Economic Development Corporation, Silverstein Properties obtained the designation of 120 Wall Street as New York City's (first and only) Association Center. The designation creates cost-effective office space, and the building has attracted over 35 national not-for-profit organizations, including AFS-USA, Inc., the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, Illuminating Engineering Society of North America, Pacifica Foundation WBAI-FM, the Lucis Trust & World Goodwill, the world headquarters locations of the National Urban League, Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, The United Negro College Fund, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and Lambda Legal.

Architecture

The tower is tiered on three sides, forming the "wedding-cake" architecture of a New York setback skyscraper. The setbacks recede in shallow formations from a large 16-story platform. Red-granite panels frame wide-paned commercial windows at street level as part of the five-story limestone base.

The building has 615,000 square feet (57,100 m²) of space.

Text imported from Wikipedia article "120 Wall Street" and modified on 23 July 2019 under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.