Forward Building

History and architecture

Constructed in 1912, the ten-story Forward Building remains to this day a towering presence within the context of its immediate Lower East Side neighborhood. Its only competitor for dominance, apart from the modern high-rise Seward Park Houses, was and is the late 19th-century S. Jarmulowsky's Bank located a short distance west at Canal and Allen Streets. For the newspaper which avowed, The Forward will be a socialist paper and its first duty is to spread the ideas of socialism among the Jewish masses," the height of its new office building was a considered and deliberate response to that bank, capitalism's major monument on the Lower East Side.

Designed by George A. Boehm and built just fifteen years after the 1897 founding of the Jewish Daily Forward, the Forward Building is a richly ornamented terra-cotta and brick-clad Beaux-Arts style structure. It is comparable to the eminence attained by the world's preminent Yiddish-language daily and to the Forward's role as a significant determinant in the political, cultural and social history of the immigrant community it served, a history which the Jewish Daily Forward's own history parallels.