History and architecture
The Puck Building, originally the home of Puck magazine, is one of the great surviving buildings from New York's old publishing and printing district. The red-brick round-arched structure occupies the entire block bounded by East Houston, Lafayette, Mulberry and Jersey Streets, and has been one of the most prominent architectural presences in the area since its construction one hundred years ago. The building is further distinguished by the large statue of Puck at the building's East Houston and Mulberry Street corner; this is among the city's most conspicuous pieces of architectural sculpture.
Puck was, from its founding in 1876 until its demise in 1918, the city's and one of the country's best-known humor magazines. Published in both English-and German-language editions, Puck satirized most of the public events of the day. The magazine featured color lithographic cartoons produced by the J. Ottman Lithographic Company, largest in the country, which shared the Puck Building space.
The current building is the result of three stages of construction all supervised by architect Albert Wagner; the building and its additions read as a single unified composition. The style is an adaptation of the Romanesque Revival, which had reached great popularity in the 1880s through the works of H.H. Richardson. Wagner's Romanesque, however, was not Richardsonian. A German-born architect, Wagner had worked in New York for Prague-trained Leopold Eidlitz, and his version of the Romanesque appears to reflect the round-arched German "Rundbogenstil" that Eidlitz had brought to New York several decades earlier.
The Puck Building remains one of the most striking 19th-century industrial buildings in lower Manhattan.
Sources and further reading
This history comes from the Landmarks app’s historical catalog. Names and building uses may reflect the period described.