Germania Life Insurance Building (Now Guardian Life Building)

History and architecture

"Regard for the safety of the assured" was the guiding principle of the Germania (now The Guardian) Life Insurance Company. Founded on the "trinity" of net reserve valuations (adequate reserves mathematically calculated), non-forfeiture of policies, and cash values for policies before such requirements legally existed, the Germania Life Insurance Company of New York received permission to operate in July of 1860. Anti-German sentiment during World War I induced the owners to chancre its name to Guardian Life Insurance Company of America in 1918.

The firm's founder and first president • (1860-1897), Hugo Wesendonck, a graduate of the University of Bonn who studied law at the University of Berlin and was admitted to the bar in Dusseldorf, was a liberal member of the Frankfort Parliament. Sentenced to death when the Revolution of 184 8 failed, Wesendonck fled to the United States with other liberals. Wesendonck entered the silk business in Philadelphia. He then decided that he wanted "to bring the benefits of life insurance to the 'little people' of German extraction."

After $200,000 in capital was subscribed, the company was incorporated on April 10, 1860. The capital was divided into 4,000 shares at a par value of $50 each. The company was established as a "mixed" company, an arrangement which entitled stockholders to one vote for each share of stock; policyholders could vote if they paid at least $100 in premiums or if they were entitled to an annuity from the company of at least $100. In 1901, a further provision insured one vote for each $100 of legal reserve upon their respective policies.

In 1868 — the year of the firm's first distribution of profits — Germania became the first American insurance company to start an agency in Europe, and in 1876, the company purchased an office building at 12 Leipziger Platz in Berlin. By 1880, over 25 percent of the firm's business was done outside the United States and Canada. The company continued to flourish and maintain a reputation for the ethical conduct of its business. King's Handbook of 1893 commented upon "the economical and successful administration of the company's affairs," noting also that the company's Board of Directors "is formed of eminent merchants, public spirited citizens of New York."

In 1905, the Armstrong Investigation prompted many reforms in the insurance business but the committee did not require Germania Life to institute any changes in its practices. Noted "for its well-defined policy of moderate but steady growth without extravagance or waste and its absolute freedom from any speculative or other objectionable practice," The Surveyor, an insurance journal, on the occasion of Germania Life's fiftieth anniversary, pronounced the company "the only American life insurance company which has complied uninterruptedly with all the rigorous requirements of the laws of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland."

The company occupied three successive headquarters on Broadway. In 1864, the company — which already had agencies in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Buffalo, St. Paul, Norwich, Connecticut, and Bloomfield, Illinois and other cities — outgrew its first office at 90 Broadway and moved into larger offices at 293 Broadway. In 1884, after occupying a third Broadway location, the company felt financially able to purchase a building for its home office on Nassau Street j which was sold in 1909. The company's new twenty-story office building on Union Square, constructed at a cost of one milliondollars and designed by D'Oench & Yost, was occupied on April 24, 1911.