Empire Building

History and architecture

The richly decorative, neo-classical Empire Building was commissioned in 1895 by the Estate of Orlando B. Potter and constructed in 1897-98 to the design of Kimball & Thompson.

The Empire Building is considered one of the finest of the surviving late nineteenth-century office towers in New York City, and is also significant as one of the earliest, as well as one of the earliest extant, steel skeletal-frame curtain-wall skyscrapers set on pneumatic caissons in the city.

Occupying a highly visible site in Lower Manhattan -- it is located between Broadway and Trinity Place, with a long facade along Rector Street across from Trinity Church and Graveyard -- it provides a handsome backdrop for the church. Clad in rusticated white granite above a polished gray granite base and originally 20 stories (plus basement), the design features the tripartite arrangement of base-shaft-capital common to many of New York's early skyscrapers, with a four-story base, arcaded on the long facade; a triumphal arch entrance on Broadway; a midsection ornamented by band courses and balconies; and an upper section with colonnaded loggias and a heavy projecting cornice. One of the first skyscrapers on the west side of lower Broadway, the building assisted in transforming the street into the "canyon" of masonry office towers familiar to this day.