Haffen Building
2804 3rd Avenue | also 507 Willis Avenue | Mott Haven | built 1902
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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.
- 1901
Brewer Mathias Haffen picks a Hub site for a first-class office building
In 1901 Mathias Haffen, a brewery owner active in Melrose real estate, chose a lot in the Hub running through the block from Third Avenue to Willis Avenue for an office building aimed at banks and professionals. He hired Michael J. Garvin, the borough's first Commissioner of Buildings, who served as secretary to Mathias's brother Louis F. Haffen during his terms as the first Bronx Borough President.
- 1902
Garvin's seven-story Beaux-Arts office building rises in limestone and granite
The building has a heavily rusticated limestone base on polished granite, a tripartite facade divided by monumental four-story pilasters and projecting cornices, and a deep copper cornice on scroll brackets. Carved ornament includes garlands of fruit, flowers and ribbons, wreaths of laurel and bundles of wheat. The Landmarks Preservation Commission suggests the wheat may allude to the family brewery.
“…laurel wreaths and sheaves of wheat (the latter might be an allusion to the Haffen brewery business)…”
- 1902
The Twenty-Third Ward Bank opens a branch on the ground floor
When the building opened in 1902, a branch of the Twenty-Third Ward Bank, where Mathias's brother John M. Haffen was vice president, took the ground floor. The bank renamed itself the Bronx County Trust Company in 1925 and was still a tenant in the Haffen Building as late as 1935.
- 1902
The city's new Tenement House Department leases two floors
From September 1902 into the 1930s, the city's new Tenement House Department leased the building's second and third floors. It was one of several government agencies in the building, which also housed banks from the early 1900s until the 1950s, among them the Knickerbocker Trust and the Dollar Savings Bank.
- 1919
The Dollar Savings Bank outgrows the Haffen Building and moves down the block
John Haffen's Dollar Savings Bank had its offices at 2808 Third Avenue, in the Haffen Building, but as accounts multiplied the space could not keep up with its growth. In 1919 the bank opened a new headquarters of its own at the corner of 147th Street and Willis and Third Avenues.
“…the bank's location in the Haffen building at 2808 Third Avenue was unable to accommodate its rapid growth…”
- 2010
The Haffen Building is designated a New York City landmark
The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Haffen Building on June 22, 2010, after a December 15, 2009, hearing where three people, including speakers for the Historic Districts Council and the New York Landmarks Conservancy, supported it. The commission called it a remarkably intact Beaux-Arts building and a reminder of the western Bronx's once-prominent German-American community.
Further reading
- Haffen BuildingWikipedia
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