Home Life Insurance Company Building

256 Broadway | also 257 Broadway, 253 Broadway | Tribeca | built 1894

Open on the map5 entries

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

  1. 1893

    April 22

    Digging Home Life's foundations tilts the neighboring bank, so Home Life buys it

    After excavation began in November 1892, the Merchants' Exchange National Bank next door at 257 Broadway developed a lean of eighteen inches. By February 1893 the neighbors had a deal: Home Life would give the bank new quarters in its tower and a favorable lease, as part payment for the bank's building. The purchase closed on April 22. The wider lot, 55 feet of Broadway frontage, led the architects to broaden the facade and add three stories.

    “…the bank building developed a list of eighteen inches off plumb…”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  2. 1894

    Pierre LeBrun's marble Home Life tower is finished and later praised as a skyscraper pioneer

    Napoleon LeBrun & Sons, with Pierre LeBrun as lead designer, gave the steel-frame, fireproof tower a marble front in the neo-Renaissance manner, with ornament concentrated at the base and the top. The building was enlarged to fifteen stories in 1893, which made it taller than the nearby Postal Telegraph Building. The critic Montgomery Schuyler later credited its clear division into base, shaft and top as an important step in skyscraper design.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  3. 1898

    December 4

    A ten-alarm fire from the Rogers Peet store climbs into the Home Life tower

    A fire began on a Sunday night at the Rogers Peet clothing store at Broadway and Warren Street. Pushed by a stormy east wind, the ten-alarm blaze reached the Home Life tower and damaged the upper part of the neighboring Postal Telegraph Building. Home Life's steel structure survived, though its front from the eighth story up was rebuilt as before under Pierre LeBrun; at the Postal Telegraph only the thirteenth floor was damaged. The fire became a test of the two buildings' fireproof construction.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  4. 1906

    Home Life moves its home office from Brooklyn into the Broadway tower

    In 1906 the insurer, founded in Brooklyn in 1860, changed its charter and moved its home office from 38 Court Street to several floors of 256 Broadway. By its mutualization in 1916 it used only floors two through six, renting out the rest. Three decades later it had taken over all fifteen floors.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  5. 1985

    October

    Home Life sells its Broadway headquarters after nearly four decades in the joined buildings

    After running its headquarters from the connected towers since 1947, Home Life sold the complex to 253 Broadway Associates in October 1985. In 1989 the two buildings became condominiums: the private owner took the retail stores, and the City of New York took the office floors. The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Home Life building and its Postal Telegraph neighbor in November 1991.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

Nearby

All 564 buildings with stories in Tribeca