The New York Tribune Building (also the Nassau-Tribune Building) was a building in the Financial District of Manhattan in New York City, across from City Hall and the Civic Center. It was at the intersection of Nassau and Spruce Streets, at 154 Printing House Square. Part of Lower Manhattan's former "Newspaper Row", it was the headquarters of the New-York Tribune from 1875 to 1923.
The Tribune Building contained a brick-and-masonry facade and was topped by a clock tower. The building was originally ten stories high, including a mansard roof, and measured tall to its pinnacle. It was expanded in the 1900s to nineteen stories, with an enlarged mansard roof and a pinnacle height of . The Tribune Building was one of the first high-rise elevator buildings and an early skyscraper. Its design received mostly negative commentary during its existence.
The Tribune Building, on the site of two previous Tribune buildings, was announced in 1873 and completed in 1875 to designs by Richard Morris Hunt. It was a ten-story building when it opened, making it the second-tallest building in New York. Hunt's original design was not completed until 1882, when the building was extended to cover a larger lot area. Between 1905 and 1907, the mansard roof was removed and ten more floors were added by the architects D'Oench & Yost and L. Thouyard. The Tribune Building served as the Tribune headquarters until 1922, but also housed office tenants, as well as the early classrooms of Pace University. It was demolished in 1966 to make room for Pace's 1 Pace Plaza building, and only a few remnants of the Tribune Building exist.
Site The New York Tribune Building was at 154 Printing House Square (also known as 154 Nassau Street), at the northeast corner of Nassau and Spruce Streets in the Financial District of Manhattan. The site was L-shaped, with an arm on Spruce Street running east from Nassau Street and then northward to Frankfort Street. When completed, it had frontage of about on Nassau Street to the west, about on Spruce Street to the south, and on Frankfort Street to the north, with a depth of between Frankfort and Spruce Streets. The Tribune site was formerly three separate land lots, which were combined into one lot under Tribune ownership.
The New York World Building, headquarters for the New York World, was located one block north. Adjoining the building to the south was the New York Times Building and the American Tract Society Building. In addition, the building sat across from City Hall and the Civic Center to the west.
Architecture The New York Tribune Building was originally a ten-story brick and masonry structure designed by Richard Morris Hunt and opened in 1875 as the headquarters of the New-York Tribune. Originally, the building stood tall, including a clock tower, which made the Tribune Building the second-tallest in New York City, after Trinity Church. Edward E. Raht supervised the construction of the original section of the building for Hunt, and was also listed as the architect of an 1882 addition to the building, which was part of Hunt's original plans.
The Tribune Building reached its maximum size in 1907, after D'Oench & Yost and L. Thouyard removed the mansard roof, added ten stories to the existing building, and built a 19-story annex in a similar style on Frankfort Street. The expanded structure contained a glazed-brick light shaft on the eastern side, which measured square. As completed, the building measured to the finial of the tower.
Multiple contractors provided the material for both the original structure and its additions. The granite foundation, masonry, concrete, glass, plastering, tiling and marble work, iron, slate, window shutters, and woodwork were all supplied by different companies. Other contractors were hired to install the steam heating, elevators, plumbing, gas, light, pneumatic-tube, and speaking-tube systems.
Facade
As originally built, the facade contained projecting piers made of Croton pavers' brick laid in Portland cement, while the inner walls were made of Haverstraw brick laid in Rosendale cement. The piers divided each elevation into bays. There were four bays each on Frankfort, Spruce, and Nassau Streets, and each bay typically had three windows per floor. On Nassau Street, the second bay from south was two windows wide, projected approximately , and contained a campanile-like clock tower measuring square. Additionally, because of the shape of the site, the Nassau Street elevation was bent slightly outward: the two northern bays of that elevation, north of the clock tower, were oriented further northwest than the two southern bays. There was a bulletin board on the Nassau Street elevation, which would display major headlines to crowds in City Hall Park.
The raised basement and the first story were clad with granite blocks. The main entrance at Nassau Street, at the base of the clock tower, was flanked by large polished Quincy granite columns. Bold string courses wrapped above the first and second floors. The second through eighth stories, as built, were composed mostly of Baltimore front brick in black mortar; granite trimming was used around windows, cornices, and towers. The facade also contained geometrical designs in white, black, and red brick. The second through fourth floors, and the fifth through seventh floors, were each treated as a single group, with string courses above the fourth and seventh stories. The fourth story was topped by flat arches and the seventh story was encircled by smaller polished granite columns. These divided the facade into a series of stacked flat-arched arcades. A projecting granite cornice ran above the seventh floor, while the eighth story had granite mullions between each set of windows.
The original ninth and tenth floors were enclosed in the mansard roof, with dormer windows. The tenth floor was an attic, no more than tall, and housed the original ventilation equipment, elevator machinery, and water tanks. The original clock tower had a granite balcony above the sidewalk, and four clock faces measuring in diameter. Within the clock tower, there were three additional stories above the eighth floor, but they were used for storage. The main roof topped out at above ground level. The clock tower rose to , including a pyramidal roof of and a finial of iron.
Following its 1907 expansion, the building was nineteen stories tall. The design of the lowest eight stories was kept largely intact, and continued upward with modifications to the sixteenth story, and there was a three-story mansard roof at the top. Granite window trimmings were present only on the first nine stories. The roof of the expanded building was encircled by a copper rail at its top. The roof of the clock tower was rebuilt exactly as it had been in the original construction. The flat roof above most of the building was above the sidewalk, while the clock tower was above the sidewalk. The finial of the expanded clock tower rose to , and contained a copper weather vane.
Foundation The foundation piers of the original building and its 1881 addition rested on sand below grade, and the underlying bedrock layer was . The foundation walls rested on a concrete bed wide by thick, located below grade. The concrete bed was made of a mixture of cement, sand, gravel, and stone; it was a relatively new method of foundation engineering in the city at the time, as it was both quick to harden and extremely solid once hardened. Above the concrete bed was a course of granite slabs measuring thick and between wide. The foundation walls themselves were thick and made of fine brick in Portland cement. Immediately above the foundation bed was a cellar, with a vault for printing machinery.
The foundation of the 1907 addition on Frankfort Street used steel sheet pilings. The piles weighed and were driven very close to the original foundation walls, with the tops of the piles carried to above the bottoms of the old footings.
Features
Structural features The original building's exterior walls were load-bearing, and were comparatively thick at the base, tapering at a rate of for every subsequent floor above ground level. The clock tower's walls measured from thick at the base to thick below the clock faces. The main facade's walls ranged from thick, and the rear and north walls were between thick. The southern partition wall of the clock tower had a thickness of at the base and at the top. The windows were installed near the outer faces of the exterior walls, and so they were deeply recessed from the inside, especially at the lower stories. The upper ten stories contained a steel skeleton frame, as did the 1907 addition along Frankfort Street. The masonry construction of the original building was deemed to be strong enough to support the steel skeleton of the extra floors.
The interior was designed to be fireproof and contained iron floor beams that generally spaced apart. Flat arches, made of hollow concrete blocks, were placed between each set of beams, molded into angled blocks to resemble voussoirs. The vertical supports were made of masonry and brick, rather than of iron, because of the perceived fire risk of iron columns. The floors were covered in tile, while the interior partition walls were made of tile or plaster. The staircases were made of cast iron and had stone treads. Wood was only used as a decorative element in offices, a step perceived at the time to eliminate fire risk. These structural features were also included in the 1882 extension of the building to Frankfort Street.
Interior
When the building was opened in 1875, the first floor was reached by a flight of nine steps within a vestibule just inside the main entrance. The main entrance vestibule contained a brick ceiling with marble groin vaulted ribs. The first-floor space at the corner of Spruce and Nassau Streets was occupied by the Tribune counting room; the space had a marble counter extending the length of the room. As completed in 1882, the building had 150 rooms available for rent on the basement and the second through eighth stories. The main hallways on each floor contained tile floors and blue-gray marble wainscoting on the walls. Ceiling heights generally decreased at higher stories: the cellar's ceiling was high and the first floor had a ceiling of , but the eighth-floor ceiling was high. The original ninth story under the mansard roof, with a ceiling of , had the editorial, composing, proof, and stereotype rooms of the Tribune.
Three elevators were provided in the original design. Two on Nassau Street were included in the initial section that opened in 1875, and the other was added as part of the 1882 expansion to Frankfort Street. A pneumatic tube system was also installed so that documents could be shipped between floors, and radiators were installed in each room.
In the 1907 expansion, the Tribune facilities were moved to the first and second floors, to be closer to the pressrooms in the basement. The first-floor counting room was largely unchanged. On the upper floors, there were 535 rooms made available for rent. Two staircases and eight hydraulic elevators were added, while the two original elevators on Nassau Street were removed and made into a light court. The steps at the entrance vestibule were removed to provide a direct connection to the eight new elevators. Four of the eight new elevators served all the stories; three connected the lobby with the eleventh through nineteenth stories; and the last elevator ran only to the twelfth floor. The Frankfort Street elevator was retained as a freight elevator.
History