No. 8 Thomas Street Building

History and architecture

Described by the prominent architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock as one of the handsomest specimens of High Victorian Gothic 'architecture which survives in the city," the building at 8 Thomas Street was built in 1875-76 from the designs of a gifted young architect, Jarvis Morgan Slade (1852-1882). Slade was commissioned through the New York Real Estate Association to design a new store for the soap manufacturing firm of David S. Brown Company Which had selected the site located on the new extension of Thomas Street.

Characterized by a red brick facade with contrasting stone arcades adorned with banded voussoirs, the style of the building is clearly derived from the Venetian Gothic mode made popular by the English writer and critic John Ruskin (1819-1900). Although New York once boasted, several brilliant examples of this style Which was in use from about 1865 to 1875, few exist today. In addition, the building is an interesting reminder of the first large-scale commercial development of the area following the destruction of the grounds of the New York Hospital which had occupied the site between Broadway, Duane, Church, and Worth since 1773.

J. Morgan Slade's store at 8 Thomas Street is a narrow five-story building, three bays wide, and ornamented with a variety of colors and patterns. The ground floor retains the original cast-iron store front with trabeated bays separated by slender iron colonnettes and flanked by coursed piers, the motif of which is carried, into the brickwork of the remaining stories. Surmounted by a transom, the central entrance flanked by a plate glass display window and a panelled delivery door.

Above this base ribs three series of dimunuating arcades interspersed with brick laid alternately in horizontal and diagonal courses. The arcades wit, their banded voussoirs of light and ark stone are supported by freestanding columns with smooth shafts and stylized Ionic capitals.