Whitehall Building

17 Battery Place | also 1 West Street | Financial District | built 1902

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Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1902

    The Chesebroughs hire Henry Hardenbergh to design the Whitehall Building

    In 1902 the Battery Place Realty Company, run by Vaseline inventor Robert A. Chesebrough and his son William H., hired Henry Hardenbergh to design an office tower facing Battery Park. Broadway was the most desirable address, but no suitable lots were left there, so the firm looked west to the edge of the park. The location promised a prominent building with unobstructed light and air.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  2. 1904

    The 20-story Whitehall Building rises at Battery Park and takes the name of Stuyvesant's house

    Built in 1902-04, Hardenbergh's 20-story tower took its name from the White Hall, the house Governor Peter Stuyvesant built nearby in 1658. Because the park guaranteed that nothing tall would block it, Hardenbergh used little ornament and relied on massing and color: rusticated limestone below, red brick in the center and striped yellow and pink brick at the sides. Rents ran a little under Broadway's, and the building was an immediate financial success.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  3. 1910

    The Greater Whitehall annex makes the complex Manhattan's largest office building

    Clinton & Russell filed plans in 1908 for an extension north of the original tower, and the George Fuller Company began work after 17 small buildings were cleared. The 31-story West Street annex was about five times the size of the first building. With some 12,000,000 cubic feet of space, it was then the largest single office building in Manhattan and counted among the largest commercial structures in the world.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  4. 1950

    Moran tugboat watchers scan the harbor from the Whitehall Building with a telescope and megaphone

    One of the building's mid-20th-century office tenants was the Moran Towing Company, which operated a fleet of tugboats. Before radio dispatching, an observer high in the tower scanned the harbor for arriving ships with a telescope, then called out instructions through a six-foot megaphone to Moran tugs waiting at the Battery. Gulf Refining, Tide Water Oil and the U.S. Weather Bureau also stayed on as long-term tenants.

    Source: Wikipedia

  5. 1990

    The Whitehall Club, a maritime lunch club in the annex, shrinks from 1,000 members to 600

    The Whitehall Club occupied the annex's top four floors; it was a lunch club for merchants and business people of Lower Manhattan. In its day it was the city's leading maritime club and drew well-known figures from the shipping world. Membership fell from roughly 1,000 in the 1960s down to 600 by 1990, and the club had closed before the decade ended.

    Source: Wikipedia

  6. 2001

    The Whitehall Building's new apartments are hit by the September 11 attacks

    After the building was designated a landmark in 2000, the Moinian Group converted the upper floors of the original tower and annex into rental apartments and kept the lower floors as offices. The conversion was nearly finished in 2001 when the attacks struck the nearby World Trade Center. A developer involved estimated that occupancy fell from nearly full to about 10 percent, though by 2003 the building was almost completely rented.

    Source: Wikipedia

Further reading

Nearby

All 276 buildings with stories in Financial District