International Mercantile Marine Company Building

History and architecture

The International Mercantile Marine Company Building occupies a prominent and historic location at the south end of Broadway, facing both Bowling Green and Battery Park, on a lot that extends along the entire blockfront of Battery Place to Greenwich Street. The austere neo-classical style building is the result of a remodelling of the renowned red brick, Queen Anne style Washington Building (designed by Edward Hale Kendall and built in 1882-87) by Walter B. Chambers in 1919-21.

Chambers, an architect trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts who was an associate of Ernest Flagg, is known for designs that reflect an interest in severity and simplicity of composition and details. In the re-design of the Washington Building for the International Mercantile Marine Co., the tower and dormers were removed, the roof profile was altered, and the structure reclad in Indiana limestone, granite, and marble.

The International Mercantile Marine Co., organized in 1902 by J.P. Morgan, was a mammoth and ambitious combination of six of the leading American and British transatlantic steamship companies that operated the largest American-owned merchant fleet in the world. This building, which served as the company's New York headquarters as well as its booking office, was one of the first of the major modern steamship buildings that gave this section of lower Broadway the name "Steamship Row" in the 1920s and assisted in transforming the street into the "canyon" of neo-classical masonry office towers familiar to this day.

The site of the International Mercantile Marine Co. Building was occupied in the seventeenth century by two taverns, popular for their location just north of Fort New Amsterdam. In the mid-eighteenth century, when lower Broadway was a desirable residential street for the wealthy and for government officials, John Watts and Capt. Archibald Kennedy built houses on this site. Kennedy's house served during the Revolutionary War as quarters for a number of British officers (and, legend says, for George Washington).

It remained a residence (in the 1830s-40s for prominent early banker Nathaniel Prime) until about 1851, when it became known as the Washington Hotel; the hotel stayed in operation until its demolition for the Washington Building, the predecessor of the present building. A bronze tablet on the Broadway corner of the International Mercantile Marine Co. Building commemorates this site history.