Beaver Building

History and architecture

The 15-story Beaver Building, designed in the neo-Renaissance style by the well-known and prolific firm of Clinton & Russell and built in 1903-04, was commissioned by the Century Realty Co. as a speculative office building. The steel-framed, flatiron-shaped structure occupies a narrow quadrilateral lot at the juncture of Beaver and Pearl Streets near Wall Street. The design has the tripartite arrangement of base-shaft-capital common to many of New York's early skyscrapers, with a stone base, a midsection faced in brick laid in bands of tan and buff shades, and a top section richly ornamented with glazed terra cotta in shades of green, cream, and russet, incorporating both classically-derived and abstract geometric motifs.

The Beaver Building is a notable example of the design solution for turn-of-the-century New York skyscrapers in which each section of the tripartite scheme is differentiated by color and materials. It is also a very early example of the use of boldly polychromatic glazed terra cotta, as well as a significant survivor of this period of terra cotta development. Carved ornament depicting beavers, representing the name of the building, is found over the Beaver Street entrance and below the primary cornice of the base.

The building was the headquarters from 1904 until 1921 of the Munson Steamship Co., a prominent shipping line active in the Cuban and South American sugar and lumber trade; the company owned the building from 1919 to 1937. From 1931 to 1972, one of the building's primary tenants was the New York Cocoa Exchange, the world's first and foremost cocoa futures market, amidst the United States' emergence as the world's largest cocoa consumer. Despite some alterations in the 1980s, the Beaver Building remains a notable example of a medium-height, turn-of-the-century skyscraper on the narrow streets of lower Manhattan.