Former Home Life Insurance Company Building

History and architecture

The (former) Home Life Insurance Company Building, a significant, early skyscraper richly designed in the neo-Renaissance style by Pierre L LeBrun of the firm of Napoleon LeBrun & Sons, was constructed in 1892-94. In 1893 the initial twelve-story Home Life tower design was extended to fifteen stories, an enlargement that, at its completion in 1894, made this building higher than its southern neighbor and almost exact contemporary, the Postal Telegraph Building designed by George Edward Harding & Gooch and built in 1892-94.

The firm of Napoleon LeBrun & Sons, skilled at adapting the architecture of the past to new building types, designed this fireproof, skeletal steel-frame tower with a marble front in the Renaissance idiom -- an early application of the Renaissance style to a skyscraper --concentrating the wealth of finely realized low- and high-relief classical ornamental detail at the building's base and top. The distinguished architectural critic of flit-period, Montgomery Schuyler, recognized the Home Life tower as a precursor in the development of the

skyscraper, stating that the clearly articulated base, shaft, and top of the Home Life Building comprised a seminal and most satisfactory expression of the tripartite formula in skyscraper design. Founded in Brooklyn in 1860, the Home Life Insurance Company moved its Manhattan branch office from Wall Street to this block in 1866. Forty years later Home Life moved its home office from Brooklyn to this tower. In 1947 Home Life purchased the Postal Telegraph Building and joined it to its headquarters, remaining there until 1985.

The distinctively sharp silhouette of the Home Life Insurance tower, rising above City Hall Park, survives very much as it had been conceived. The design of the Postal Telegraph Building, also derived from the Renaissance style, is distinguished by a program of classical ornamental motifs used in alternating patterns, crowned by a loggia.