Former National City Bank of New York
296 Canal Street | also 415 Broadway, 65 Lispenard Street | Tribeca | built 1927
Open on the map4 entries
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.
- 1851
William J. Wilson, an African American boot and shoe maker, works on the corner in 1851
The Landmarks Preservation Commission records that several buildings stood in 1851 on the site of the later bank at Broadway and Canal Street. Their occupants included dealers in hardware and pianos, a carver, and William J. Wilson, an African American maker of boots and shoes. The buildings were later replaced by the Brandreth House, a hotel whose commercial tenants included James L. Palmer, an importer of European fancy goods, and the Western Union Telegraph Company.
- 1856
The Cozzens brothers run a hotel on the Broadway corner lot that later becomes the Brandreth Hotel
As early as 1856, brothers John and Sylvanus Cozzens ran a hotel on the odd sliver of land where Broadway, Canal Street and Lispenard Street meet, the corner lot where the bank would later stand. It later became the Brandreth Hotel, which Tom Miller's Daytonian in Manhattan research, republished by Tribeca Citizen, calls sleazy, pointing to a proprietor who dealt drugs and at least one murder. By about 1900 an office and studio building, the Brandreth Building, had taken its place; its tenants included the Hensel-Colladay Company, which sold dress and millinery trimmings.
Source: tribecacitizen.com
- 1926
National City Bank buys the Broadway corner from Columbia Bank and has Walker & Gillette design a new branch
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Columbia Bank had opened a branch on the corner in 1917. In October 1926 the National City Bank of New York, which began in 1812 as the City Bank of New York and had been adding branches since World War I, bought Columbia's plot. Walker & Gillette, known until then for neoclassical buildings, designed a streamlined Art Moderne block that was finished in 1927, and Lewis Mumford of The New Yorker approved, judging its modernism splendidly successful.
Source: tribecacitizen.com
- 1927
National City Bank completes a limestone Moderne branch designed by Walker & Gillette
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The National City Bank of New York put up this two-story, steel-frame branch in 1927 to a design by Walker & Gillette. Clad in limestone, it fills the whole Broadway blockfront and runs nearly 128 feet along Canal Street, and its Moderne style shows in curved corners, smooth surfaces and restrained, abstract ornament. A bronze shield flanked by eagles crowns the main Broadway opening, and the Canal and Lispenard Street fronts carry the inscriptions AD 1812 and AD 1927.
“Designed by the distinguished firm of Walker & Gillette, this structure was erected in 1927 for the National City Bank of New York…”
Nearby
- 300 Canal Street1 entry
- 302 Canal Street1 entry
- Manufacturers Trust Company Bank407 Broadway | 3 entries
- 299 Canal Street1 entry
- 414 Broadway2 entries
- 304 Canal Street1 entry