Corn Building

91 5th Avenue | Union Square | built 1896

Open on the map4 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

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.

  1. 1896

    Brothers Samuel and Henry Corn build a Beaux-Arts showroom building on Fifth Avenue

    Architect Louis Korn designed the eight-story Corn Building, completed in 1896 for developers Samuel and Henry Corn, part of a wave that replaced lower Fifth Avenue's residential brownstones with commercial buildings. Its upper floors feature nude caryatid figures rising from leaf bundles to support two-story Corinthian columns beneath a balustraded seventh-floor balcony.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1896

    Oxford University Press opens its American branch in the new building

    Publishers were among the Corn Building's first tenants: Longmans, Green & Co. moved in during 1895, followed in 1896 by the American branch of Oxford University Press. The editorial offices of the Library of the World's Best Literature also operated from the building in this period.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1909

    A cloak-factory fire tests the Fire Department's new high-pressure hoses

    A fire broke out in 1909 at the cloak manufacturer Peller Brothers, then operating in the Corn Building. The blaze became an early test of the New York Fire Department's newly installed high-pressure water system, brought in to fight fires in the district's tall loft buildings.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1938

    The Corn Building's owners lose the property to foreclosure

    By 1938, amid the Depression-era decline of the garment district that had come to fill the Corn Building's upper floors with textile, umbrella, and shirt manufacturers, the property went into foreclosure. Decades later, in the 1970s and 1980s, cheap loft space in the building drew a wave of artists and photographers before gentrification pushed them out.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

Nearby

All 28 buildings with stories in Union Square