40. Equitable Building

Location: 120 Broadway
Built: 1915
Architect: Ernest R. Graham
National Register Number: 78001869
Listed: June 2, 1978
Visited: December 1, 2007



It's a cold weekend day and the old building stands mute.

It's a massive thing. Its sides are vast expanses of window uninterrupted by horizontal detail the way the nearby Empire Building is. The front and back reveals it to be h-shaped, probably to give more offices a window view, even if views of other windows. This prevents the Equitable from being a total exploitation of the volume one could get out of the city block, but it's still friggin huge. 1.2 million square feet in one building--even today, that's a lot, something like the square footage of a sizable mall.



All my sources (except, curiously, the National Register nomination application) cite the erection of this building as the catalyst for the passing of landmark zoning laws meant to prevent bastard cousins of the Equitable from preventing light and air from reaching New York City's streets. For the next couple of decades, No more walls of sheer verticality; instead, in order to achieve both great height and mass, buildings had to be tiered something like elongated wedding cakes. Considered out of its surroundings, the Equitable is something of a monster, something hard to really swallow in one view, but it doesn't seem quite so freakish thanks to its neighbors--the Bank of New York Mellon building, the Trinity Building and United States Realty buildings across the street, 140 Broadway, and 1 Liberty Plaza--who, while not as utterly domineering as the Equitable, do complement it in height or width or detail.



Mainly what I love about it though is purely accidental, nothing the builders could've planned for: the way the late afternoon light catches and enflames the building's crown.