History and architecture
No. 361 Broadway, built in 1881-1882 fOr James L. White, was designed by W. Wheeler Smith, a well respected architect active in New York during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. It was one of the last commercial buildings produced during the transformation of lower Broadway, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, from a residential boulevard into the city's commercial center. One of Wheeler's few forays into the field of cast-iron architecture, No.
361 Broadway is also one of the small number of late (post-1880) cast-iron buildings in the city. Its elevations, composed of rows of columns supporting heavy entablatures, are adorned with some of the finest and most inventive cast-iron ornament anywhere in New York or the United States. Based on abstract floral forms, the ornamentation changes from floor to floor, providing No. 361 with two unusually handsome and richly varied facades, which make the building one of the most prominent surviving on lower-Broadway.
Sources and further reading
This history comes from the Landmarks app’s historical catalog. Names and building uses may reflect the period described.