540 Broadway

also 78 Crosby Street | SoHo | built 1910

Open on the map4 entries

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

1. 1867

   D. and J. Jardine design a marble front with carved fleur-de-lis pilasters at 540 Broadway

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   No. 540 Broadway is a five-story, three-bay classical building that D. and J. Jardine designed in marble in 1867. Quoined pilasters flank the front, and the arched windows are separated by pilasters carved in low relief with fleur-de-lis, with matching keystones. Four large brackets carry the cornice, which is topped by a small semicircular pediment bearing the date 1867.

   Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

2. 1867

   Publishers Richardson & Co. move in and advertise the Field Martelle lawn game

   Richardson & Co., publishers, were among the first tenants of No. 540 Broadway. Besides books, the firm made and sold parlor and lawn games, and in 1867, the year the building was finished, it advertised the Field Martelle, an outdoor game that mixed croquet with billiards. A complete boxed set cost $20, which the Daytonian in Manhattan put at roughly $300 in today's money.

   Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

3. 1900

   Williston & Knight, a big button maker, opens its headquarters at 540 Broadway

   In 1900 the button manufacturer Williston & Knight Co., one of the largest in the country with a factory in Easthampton, Massachusetts, opened its headquarters in the building as the area shifted from fashionable shopping to the dry goods district. Two years later it joined two other large button makers to form the United Button Company, the biggest such firm in the country.

   Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

4. 1925

   August 22

   A bookkeeper chases a payroll thief in a circle around SoHo, and the money turns up in a stranger's hand

   On August 22, 1925 Jeanne Perkus, 21, bookkeeper for the Somerset Shirt Company at No. 540, left a bank at Broadway and Canal Street with a $172 payroll envelope. It was snatched and she gave chase, with a policeman and a growing crowd, west on Broome, south on Mercer and east on Grand back to Broadway, where Patrolman George Colby caught Albert Oswang. He had no envelope, claimed he was running for a streetcar, and a passerby then handed over the payroll.

   Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Nearby

• 536 Broadway1 entry
• 542-544 Broadway542 Broadway | 5 entries
• 546 Broadway2 entries
• 83 Spring Street1 entry
• 81 Spring Street1 entry
• 530 Broadway7 entries

All 736 buildings with stories in SoHo