Park Row Building

History and architecture

The 30-story, 391-foot-high Park Row Building was the tallest building in New York City and one of the tallest structures in the world between 1899, the year of its completion, and 1908. Located on Park Row across from City Hall Park, the Park Row Building remains, by virtue of its height and twin cupola-topped towers, one of the most distinctive buildings in lower Manhattan. It is one of several surviving late nineteenth-century office towers on a street that became known as Newspaper Row, the center of newspaper publishing in New York City from the 1840s to the 1920s.

The building housed the offices of the Associated Press news agency which had been incorporated in New York in 1900, as well as the headquarters of August Belmont's Interborough Rapid Transit Company. The building's architect, R. H. Robertson, who was prominent for his institutional and commercial buildings, designed the Park Row Building using a number of classical elements, including four large sculpted figures set on overscaled brackets, huge columns and pilasters, as well as several projecting ornamental balconies.

The two towers that rise above the crowning cornice are capped by ornamented domes which immediately distinguished this structure when it was added to the skyline of New York City at the turn of the century. Early twentieth-century artists admired the shape of the Park Row Building; Alvin Langdon Coburn and Charles Sheeler featured it in their photographs. The building remains in use as a commercial office building.