Gillender Building - Construction

Construction

In 1896, Helen L. Gillender Asinari, owner of a 6-story office building on the corner of Wall and Nassau decided to replace it with a 300-foot (91 m) tall tower, capitalizing on a tenfold increase in land value. The building was most likely named after Helen's father, millionaire tobacco merchant Eccles Gillender (1810–1877). Mrs. Gillender hurried to build the new tower prior to the anticipated enactment of new, stricter building codes, which explains the shortcomings of the Gillender Building (in fact, the regulations came into effect only in 1916). An alternative version presented by Joseph Korom attributes construction of the Gillender Building to Augustus Teophilus Gillender (born 1843), principal partner in a law firm.

The construction contract was awarded to Charles T. Willis Company; Hecla Iron Works, Atlas Cement Company and Okonite Company of Passaic were principal suppliers. The Gillender Building cost $500,000 to construct and attracted attention due to the disproportion of its height and footprint. The new structure occupied a narrow strip of land measuring 26×73 feet, or about 8×22 meters, ruling out efficient space plans. Quicksand under the site required use of caisson foundations; caissons consumed the underground space that could be otherwise used by bank vaults or retail storage, further reducing the building's value. Its rentable area (30,000 square feet or 2,790 square meters) was on par with Manhattan's 1897 average for pre-skyscraper buildings (26,300 square feet or 2,400 square meters) and lower than the area of adjacent six-storey Stevens Building. The disproportion was made more evident in 1903, when the new Hanover National Bank Building, built on the same Nassau Street block and being only marginally taller, dwarfed the slender Gillender Building.

Architecturally, the Gillender Building, designed by Charles I. Berg and Edward H. Clark, belonged to "a series of elegant towers in various classical modes erected in New York in the 1890s" and is now considered "a notable example" of its period along with the Central Bank Building (William Birkmire, 1897, demolished) and the American Surety Building (Bruce Price, 1894–1896, extant). Structurally, it was based on fully wind-braced steel frame with masonry infill. The main volume of the tower rose to 219 feet (67 m) without setbacks, with a three-story cupola crown reaching 273 feet (83 m). The New York Times erroneously called Gillender the "highest office structure in the world", although the earlier Manhattan Life Insurance Building (1894) was taller at 348 feet (106 m). Berg and Clerk followed the Italian rule of triple vertical partitioning: expensive decoration was limited to the three bottom floors (what the pedestrians see from the street) and the upper two floors and the crowning tower. Massive cornices above the second and third floors visually separated the lower levels from the clean wall surface stretching above up until the fourteenth floor; starting from the ninth floor, it gradually re-acquired ornaments and arched windows as if in anticipation of the ornate Italian Baroque cupola above.

Advertised as fully fireproof and as the most modern tower on the market, Gillender Building was occupied by financial firms through its short lifetime and was perceived as economically obsolete from the start. There were no notable incidents other than two lightning strikes in its spire in July 1897 and May 1900; the latter "sent splinters flying in every direction" without casualties.