55 White Street Building

History and architecture

Fifty-five White street was commissioned in 1861 by cousins John Eliot and Samuel H. Condict as a store and warehouse for a saddlery business.

The building was designed by John Kellum, one of the most important architects of the mid-nineteenth century, whose many buildings had a strong impact on the redevelopment of the Lower Broadway area as a thriving commercial center. Kellum was also a major figure in the development and design of cast-iron architecture. Daniel D. Badger, the iron founder who fabricated the building's facade, was second only to James Bogardus in his importance to the promotion and manufacture of this distinctively American building materials and method of construction.

The building has an especially noteworthy example of the so-called "sperm candle" facade, duly characterized by double-height arcades with tall and slender columns which reminded nineteenth century observers of candles made from sperm whale oil. Although this type of facade, with its emphasis on verticality, light and openness, seems particularly suited to the structural properties of cast iron, it was also employed for contemporary marble facades, which apparently imitate, in traditional materials, an innovation. Only a handful of these "sperm candle" designs, which seem to be indigenous to New York, now survive. Fifty-five White street is the largest, one of the finest, and unique in that the facade is continued in a one-bay return on the Franklin Place side elevation.

Opened in 1806, White street was initially a quiet middle-class residential street, part of a neighborhood of small Federal and Greek Revival houses. By mid-century, with the northward expansion of the city, the area had changed to a commercial district, the center for Manhattan's dry goods and especially textile merchants. With the outbreak of the Civil War and the consequent fall of the cotton industry in the South, (which could no longer adequately supply raw cotton to Great Britain, then the leading textile producer) the Northern textile industry assumed a new significance. New York's dry goods merchants prospered, and by the end of the war, the White Street area had been transformed House had been replaced by tall stone and cast-iron warehouses, many with inviting street-level store fronts, with large windows of the kind that brought the term "window-shopping" into vogue.