120 Wall Street
also 62 South Street, 66 South Street, 60 South Street | Financial District | built 1929
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1930
Ely Jacques Kahn's 120 Wall Street opens as a wedding-cake tower
Developers Henry Greenberg and David Malzman hire architect Ely Jacques Kahn of Buchman & Kahn to raise a 34-story tower on the former American Sugar Company site. Completed in March 1930 at a cost near $12 million, the 399-foot limestone-and-granite building steps back in tiers to meet the city's 1916 zoning setback rules.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1933
New York Life forecloses on 120 Wall Street
The Depression guts office rents across Lower Manhattan, and in 1933 developers Henry Greenberg and David Malzman lose 120 Wall Street to foreclosure. New York Life Insurance Company takes title to the tower, which had opened only three years earlier as the only major high-rise office building on the East River waterfront downtown.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1934
WPA painter John Cunning puts 120 Wall Street into a wintry East River view
John Cunning, a WPA artist, completed Manhattan Skyline in 1934. The Smithsonian American Art Museum describes it as a Depression-era scene in which 120 Wall Street rises alongside the Singer Building, the Bank of Manhattan, 60 Wall Tower and the Farmers' Trust Building. Ferries sit tied up at the Manhattan docks, and men in the foreground clear snow from the roofs of a Water Street coffee warehouse near the Brooklyn Bridge.
Source: Ephemeral New York
- 1992
120 Wall Street becomes New York's only Association Center
Real estate investor Larry Silverstein, who bought the tower in 1980, designates it the city's only "Association Center" in 1992, marketed specifically to nonprofit and advocacy groups. Tenants over the years include the National Urban League and the United Negro College Fund, drawn by discounted rents in the Financial District tower.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1998
WBAI radio moves its studios into 120 Wall Street
In June 1998 WBAI, the Pacifica Foundation's New York radio station, moved into new studios in the Financial District, at 120 Wall Street. It left 505 Eighth Avenue, whose studios had drawn years of complaints for being outdated and filthy. In 2013 the station announced it would leave Wall Street for temporary studios in Harlem, and in 2015 it moved to Brooklyn.
Source: Wikipedia
Further reading
- 120 Wall StreetWikipedia
- A winter view of the Depression-era East RiverEphemeral New York
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