The Lost Manhattan Life Insurance Bldg - 64-68 Broadway

 

Real Estate Record & Builders' Guide, June 25, 1898 (copyright expired)

On May 14, 1892, the Record & Guide announced, "The Manhattan Life Insurance Company means to have the finest building on their new site at Nos. 64 and 66 Broadway, and 17 and 19 New street, that architectural and building skill and money can assure them."  An open competition, said the article, "ought to result in a structure in every way creditable to the company and the city."  The specifications included "a building of sixteen stories on Broadway and seventeen on New street."

The competition drew the attention of Francis H. Kimball and George Kramer Thompson.  Both were early proponents of steel framed construction.  The pair partnered as Kimball & Thompson and would remain together through 1898.  The firm's first design won the commission for the Manhattan Life Insurance Building.

Kimball & Thompson's task was more daunting on the engineering side than the design.  On July 11, 1893, The Syracuse Daily Journal noted, "This is to be the highest office building in the world."  Therefore, said the article, Kimball & Thompson was, "introducing an interesting process for securing permanent and stable foundations in yielding soil or where quicksand abounds...It is nothing more or less than the sinking of caissons to bed rock."  (It took George Kramer Thompson's personal guarantee that the process would work before the Commissioner of Buildings gave approval.)  Fifteen massive caissons, varying "in size from 10 feet in diameter up to nearly 25 feet square" were sunk into the bedrock.  

While the skyscraper rose, William Harvey Birkmire published his 1893 Skeleton Construction in Buildings.  In it, he mentioned, "The new building erected by the Manhattan Life Insurance Company at 64, 66, and 68 Broadway, New York, is undoubtedly one of the most conspicuous and the highest office-building in the world."  The Renaissance Revival-style building would be clad in limestone on the Broadway elevation, and light-colored brick and terra cotta on New Street side.

Skeleton Construction in Buildings, 1893 (copyright expired)

Ground was broken on September 1, 1893.  Completed in 1894, the Manhattan Life Insurance Company rose 16 floors on the Broadway side, capped with a three-story tower.  In the spandrels of the two-story, arched entrance were cartouches inscribed with the year of the company's founding, the year of the building's construction, and the seal of the firm.

The building had five hydraulic elevators for the public and two electric elevators that were reserved for the Manhattan Life Insurance employees.  "All the floors, halls, and corridors are laid with mosaic," said Birkmire, "and tile are [sic] largely used throughout."

Because office workers in 1892 were essentially all men, Kimball & Thompson needed to provide only one restroom per floor.  Skeleton Construction in Buildings, 1893 (copyright expired)

The soaring height of the Manhattan Life Insurance Building inspired awe and, in some instances, alarm.  On March 22, 1894, The World commented, "Almost without exception the constant stream of passers-by pauses momentarily to survey the impressive height of the new Manhattan Life Insurance Company's building."  Even the workmen who had erected the edifice had "punctuated their enjoyment of the contents of their dinner-pails by frequent glances at the graceful lines of the enormous creation of steel and stone that towers 350 feet above them."

As the steel construction rose, in 1893 the Insurance Record captioned this illustration, "Push dem clouds away."  (copyright expired)

When the building was being erected, meteorologist Farmer Dunn from the Weather Bureau in Washington D.C. "arranged with the insurance people for the tower," related the New York Journal & Advertiser.  The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company provided the 19th-floor room in the tower rent-free as a weather observatory.  A curious condition of the contract was that the terms would last, "so long as Farmer Dunn was in charge."

A stereoscope slide shows the Manhattan Life Insurance Building soaring above the neighboring structures.  from the collection of the New York Public Library

New Yorkers regularly received updates from the lofty heights.  During a stifling heat wave in 1896, for instance, the New York Journal & Advertiser reported on August 7, 

The air New Yorkers breathed at noon yesterday was loaded with moisture to within 13 per cent of complete saturation.  That air was heated to 91 degrees on top of the Manhattan Life Insurance building, where the Government's weather observers are, and to 105 degrees on the pavements, where the thousands sweltered.

Two months later, Cardinal Francesco Satolli, the Papal Delegate in the United States, visited New York City.  On October 14, The Sun reported, "The Weather Bureau in the Manhattan Life Insurance building engaged the Cardinal's attention after luncheon, and he saw how Mr. Dunn's weather gauges worked."  The priest was shown the path of an upcoming storm and Dunn "promised to send him a forecast of the weather for the week which he will spend on the ocean."

In the summer of 1898, "unpleasantness," as termed by the New York Journal & Advertiser, developed between Farmer Dunn and Weather Bureau Chief Willis L. Moore in Washington D.C.  Dunn resigned and was replaced by a Mr. Emery.  On August 26, the newspaper reported that the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company had cancelled the gratis arrangement with the bureau and was now demanding $3,000 a year "for the privilege of dishing up weather for New York or move."  (The annual rent would translate to about $112,000 in 2025.)  The Weather Bureau refused.  Two months later, on October 18, the New York Journal & Advertiser reported that Forecaster Emery had moved the observatory to the American Surety Company building.

In the meantime, tenants in the building were varied.  Perhaps the most unexpected was the offices of the Cuban Junta.  On January 29, 1896, The Journal reported on the sinking of the steamship J. W. Hawkins, "outward bound, with $200,000 worth of arms and ammunition that were destined for the Cuban revolutionists."  Also on the ship were 120 men "going to fight for the revolutionary cause."  All but six were drowned.  The survivors were brought to the Cuban Junta offices here.

Among other firms in the building that year were E. K. Pedrick & Co., a contracting firm; the Pelletreau Lithographing Co.; and the Manhattan Investment Company, a brokerage firm headed by George E. Carpenter.  Arthur M. Pelletreau's business involvement was not limited to lithography.  He was a partner with George E. Carpenter.  Both men were arrested on January 25, 1896.  The Journal reported they "will appear to answer a charge of grand larceny in the Centre Street Court to-morrow morning."  They were accused of swindling a client, John Kroder, out of $10,000.

The skyscraper was worthy of a picture postcard at the turn of the last century.

At the turn of the century, the Manhattan Life Insurance Company Building was mainly home to brokerage firms.  The ground floor was home to the Knickerbocker Trust Company.  In 1907, the Knickerbocker became part of a shady deal organized by F. Augustus Heinze and Charles W. Morse to corner the market of the United Copper Company.  The scheme disastrously failed on October 15 when the share price of United Copper crashed.  Morse and Heinze were ruined and depositors began a run on the Knickerbocker Trust Company.

Six days after the collapse, president Charles T. Barney was asked by the board to resign.  The next day, the Knickerbocker was forced to suspend operations.  Unlike his co-conspirators, Barney was not ruined financially.  His personal fortune was estimated at the time to be $2.5 million--or about $80.3 million in 2025.  But he was disgraced and humiliated and on the morning of November 14, he shot himself in his mansion at 103 East 38th Street.  The scandal greatly precipitated the Financial Panic of 1907, the greatest economic disaster until the Great Depression.  

Three years earlier, the Manhattan Life Insurance Company added a narrow extension to the north, just two bays wide.

On February 18, 1928, The New York Times headlined an article, "66 Broadway Sold; Long A Landmark."  The buyer was the Central Union Trust Company, which owned the adjacent property.  Real estate operators who predicted the vintage structure would be razed would be proven wrong.  One of the first skyscrapers in the country, it would survive nearly four more decades.  

In his 2008 The American Skyscraper 1850-1940, A Celebration of Height, Joseph J. Korom, Jr. writes, "Then, catastrophe arrived when the building was only 69 years old; in a 1963 act of utter desecration, the Manhattan Life Insurance Building was demolished."