325-333 Broadway Building

History and architecture

This imposing commercial building at the southwest corner of Broadway and Worth Street, erected for real estate investor Henry Barclay in 1863-64, was originally three store-and-loft buildings that have been joined internally. The building is a distinguished example of the Renaissance-inspired commercial palaces that flourished from the 1850s through the1870s in the former wholesale textile and dry goods district of Lower Manhattan now known as Tribeca. In the mid-nineteenth century Broadway was the city's most prestigious business and shopping street, lined with commercial palaces. Clad in marble, with cast-iron columns employed for the ground-story storefronts, the building is articulated with a restrained design employing segmental arch arcades.

The planar quality of the upper-story wall treatment, the unusual attention to structural articulation, and the inventive detailing incorporating highly abstracted classical motifs and ahistoric forms are highly unusual for the period and suggest that this building was influenced by avant-garde European architectural trends. Today, few mid-nineteenth-century commercial palaces have survived on Broadway south of Franklin Street, making the 325-333 Broadway Building a rare survivor. Constructed during a period when Worth Street emerged as the center of the wholesale textile trade in the United States, the 325-333 Broadway Building is a significant reminder of New York's mercantile history.

It was initially leased to textile importers and ready-to-wear distributors. In the twentieth century, it was occupied by such important mill agencies as M.C. Borden & Sons and Iselin-Jefferson, Inc. In addition, the building is important in the history of technology as the international headquarters (1888-1917) of Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict, makers and distributors of the Remington typewriter, the first practicable typewriter, and the parent company of the Remington Rand Corporation. The 325-333 Broadway Building remains in commercial use with retailing and restaurants housed in its ground story and offices in the upper stories.