Where Life Insurance Once Lived
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Broadway between Chambers and Canal Streets is not a fashionable thoroughfare, nor one where pedestrians often stop to look at buildings. Though it runs through TriBeCa, none of the neighboring chic stores or restaurants have made it onto Broadway itself, unlike in SoHo. The Chambers-Canal stretch, however, contains some remarkable 19th-century buildings, as you can see at Thomas Street.
The street is named for Thomas Lispenard, from the Huguenot family whose landholdings once comprised much of present-day TriBeCa. At the northwest corner of Broadway and Thomas Street is a cleanly designed and stately cast-iron building. It once had a twin – the “Thomas twins” – at the southwest corner, but it’s gone. The one remaining, built around 1870, was once the home office of Metropolitan Life Insurance. Its facades were made by the famous ironworks of Daniel Badger.
Met Life moved in 1893 to its first building at Madison Avenue and 23rd Street, the adjoining tower annex of which was, in 1909, the tallest building in the world. Two blocks north of Met Life’s Madison Avenue tower is the home of New York Life, and two blocks north of Thomas Street, at Leonard Street, stands the former home of New York Life. Like Lord & Taylor and Arnold Constable, the competitors liked being near each other.
The New York Life building at Leonard Street is this part of Broadway’s most beautiful building. It was built between 1894 and 1898 and is confusingly ascribed to two very different architects, Stephen Hatch and McKim, Mead & White. New York Life constructed a building at Broadway and Leonard Street in 1870.
In 1894 the company hired Hatch to design an eastward extension. He did, then died. McKim, Mead & White were then hired to replace the original 1870 building that was in the process of being added onto, and in so doing also to oversee the continuing work on the addition. Apparently everything extending back from the Broadway facade is or closely follows Hatch’s design, while the front is McKim, Mead & White, specifically the work of one of the firm’s designers, Henry Bacon, who later designed the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.
Back to Met Life, walk a few steps to the west, to 8 Thomas Street. Commissioned by a soapmaker and built in 1876, the building was designed by Jarvis Morgan Slade, an apparently extremely talented architect who died in 1882 at the age of 30.We call this building’s style by the funny name of “Ruskinian Gothic.” What that means is that there was a vogue inspired by John Ruskin’s intoxicating prose for a very loosely adapted Venetian quattrocento Gothic.The adapted style largely was a collection of tics, like multicolored banded stonework and sometimes goofily variegated skylines.
Seldom was the style rendered with the exuberance and conviction given it by Slade at 8 Thomas Street. Chiefly, Slade brought an excellent sense of proportion to the style, in so doing giving us one of those surprise treats that makes walking in Manhattan rewarding.
