Office skyscraper in Manhattan, New York
The Gillender Building was an early skyscraper in the Financial District of Manhattan in New York City. It stood on the northwest corner of Wall Street and Nassau Street, on a narrow strip of land measuring . At the time of its completion in 1897, the Gillender Building was, depending on ranking methods, the fourth- or eighth-tallest structure in New York City.
The Gillender Building was designed by Charles I. Berg and Edward H. Clark, and rose with 20 stories, comprising 17 floors in the main body and three floors in a cupola. The building contained a fully wind-braced steel frame with masonry infill, and included twelve columns atop three caisson foundations. On its completion, it was praised as an engineering novelty. It attracted attention for its disproportionate height and its low total rentable area of only about .
The Gillender Building was occupied by financial firms through its uneventful 13-year existence and was perceived as economically obsolete from the start. In 1909, financial institutions began rapidly expanding their properties within the Financial District, and that December, the building was sold to Bankers Trust for a then-record price of . The Gillender Building was demolished between April and June 1910 to make way for Bankers Trust's 39-story tower at 14 Wall Street, and much of the material from the building was saved. At the time, the Gillender Building was the tallest building ever demolished voluntarily.
Site.
The Gillender Building stood on the northwest corner of Wall Street and Nassau Street, on a narrow strip measuring on Wall Street and on Nassau Street. The 39-story Bankers Trust tower at 14 Wall Street, built in 1911, occupies both the site of the Gillender Building and the adjoining seven-story Stevens Building at 12-14 Wall Street. Surrounding lots to the north and west were incorporated as part of an annex to 14 Wall Street, built between 1931 and 1933.
In the 17th century, the area north of Wall Street was occupied by John Damen's farm; Damen sold the land in 1685 to captain John Knight, an officer of Thomas Dongan's administration. Knight resold the land to Dongan, and Dongan resold it in 1689 to Abraham de Peyster and Nicholas Bayard. Both de Peyster and Bayard served as Mayors of New York. The first known building on the Gillender Building's site, a sugar house, was built by Samuel Bayard. In 1718, most of the present-day block was sold to a church congregation, while the corner lot, cut into narrow strips, remained in possession of the de Peysters and the Bayards. In 1773, de Peyster sold the corner lot to the Verplanck family for less than $1,500; the Verplanck mansion later housed Wall Street banks.
The second New York City Hall, later renamed Federal Hall, was erected in 1700 and torn down in 1816. It occupied the eastern side of present-day Nassau Street, on the site of the present-day Federal Hall National Memorial. Though Nassau Street historically curved around City Hall, it was straightened after the demolition of the second City Hall. The street's early route was retained in the placement of the corner buildings (including the Gillender Building but not 14 Wall Street), which were set back from the street, providing a sidewalk that was wider than usual. In 1816, the corner lot was owned by Charles Gardner, who sold the property the next year for $11,200; it was further resold in 1835 for $47,500 and in 1849 for $55,000. Charles Frederick Briggs and Edgar Allan Poe operated the offices of the "Broadway Journal" on this site from 1844 until 1845. From 1849 until December 1909, the lot remained in the hands of a single family. Adjacent lots were owned by the Sampson family since 1840, and this property was developed into the Stevens Building in 1880.
Architecture.
The Gillender Building was designed by Charles I. Berg and Edward H. Clark. It was erected under the supervision of consulting engineer Henry Post and general contractor Charles T. Wills, while the foundations were built by Stephens &amp; O'Rourke (later the O'Rourke Engineering Construction Company). In addition, Maryland Steel and the Pencoyd Bridge Company provided the steel, which was erected by Post and McCord. The Gillender Building cost $500,000 to construct. 
The Gillender Building belonged to "a series of elegant towers in various classical modes erected in New York in the 1890s", and is considered "a notable example" of its period along with the demolished Central National Bank Building (designed by William Birkmire in 1897) and the still-extant American Surety Building (designed by Bruce Price in 1894–1896). "The New York Times" erroneously called the Gillender Building the "highest office structure in the world"; the Manhattan Life Insurance Building (1894) was taller at . The Gillender Building's rentable area () was on par with Manhattan's 1897 average for pre-skyscraper buildings () and lower than the area of adjacent six-story Stevens Building. The disproportion was made more evident in 1903, when the marginally taller Hanover National Bank Building was built on an adjacent lot, dwarfing the slender Gillender Building.
Form and facade.
The Gillender Building's articulation consisted of three horizontal sections similar to the components of a column (namely a base, shaft, and capital). The bulk of the tower rose to without setbacks, and a three-story cupola formed the capital, reaching . The lowest two stories of the capital covered a smaller area than the bulk of the building, though the top story comprised a dome and pinnacle.
Expensive decoration was limited to the three floors of the base, the upper two floors, and the cupola. Massive cornices above the second and third floors visually separated the base from the shaft that rose until the fourteenth floor. Starting from the ninth floor, it gradually re-acquired ornaments and arched windows as if in anticipation of the ornate Italian Baroque cupola above. Copper was used to cover the dome and cornices.
Features.
The Gillender Building attracted attention due to the disproportion of its height and footprint. The new structure occupied about , ruling out efficient space plans. Quicksand under the site required use of foundations driven by yellow-pine caissons. These caissons consumed the underground space that could be otherwise used by bank vaults or retail storage, further reducing the building's value. There were three caissons, each extending across the entire width of the building site. The caissons contained air chambers, above which were placed steel foundation grillages composed of 20 I-beams, and then a series of brick piers laid atop Portland cement. Sheet piles were then driven around the three caissons to make rectangular enclosures. There was a small cellar under the building, reaching below the first floor.
Structurally, the building contained a fully wind-braced steel frame with masonry infill. The floors were made of hollow-tile concrete arches. while the interior partitions were made of cement mortar around wire lath. The superstructure consisted of a steel cage with twelve columns: four extending to the top of the 17th story, and eight to the top of the 19th story. The outermost two pairs of columns carried each; the next four columns, ; and the innermost four columns, . The 12 columns would carry a total load of . The columns were braced both horizontally and diagonally. The steel was coated with three layers of paint: one at the steel shop and two more on-site. One observer, writing about the building's frame upon its demolition, said that "the quality of paint and the application of the same were decidedly inferior", and fireproofing was provided mostly by the terracotta cladding.
Inside, the Gillender Building contained a plumbing system serving "26 water closets, 17 water basins, 12 wash basins and 5 slop sinks". The receiving tank was relatively small with a capacity of only .
History.
Construction.
During the late 1890s, Helen L. Gillender Asinari was the owner of a six-story office building on the corner of Wall and Nassau Streets, having inherited ownership of the land from her grandfather George Lovett, who had purchased the site in 1849. In 1896, Gillender Asinari decided to replace it with a tall tower, capitalizing on a tenfold increase in land value. At the time, the land was worth $625,000 (). The building was most likely named after Helen's father, millionaire tobacco merchant Eccles Gillender (1810–1877). According to media, Gillender Asinari had hurried to build the new tower prior to the anticipated enactment of new, stricter building codes, which led to the shortcomings of the building's design, even though the regulations did not come into effect until 1916. An alternative version presented by Joseph Korom attributes construction of the Gillender Building to Augustus Teophilus Gillender, principal partner in a law firm, but Gillender Asinari disputed this version, saying that "Mr. Augustus T. Gillender never has had, nor has he now, the slightest interest in the property."
The construction contract was awarded to the Charles T. Willis Company, while Hecla Iron Works, Atlas Cement Company, and the Okonite Company of Passaic were principal suppliers. The foundations were constructed in a month, with about one-third of that time devoted to shoring and underpinning adjacent walls; building and sinking caissons; and constructing the brick piers and sealing the air chambers with concrete. The first pier was ready for the grillage on August 17, 1896. The first column was set on September 3 and the last one in the tower was placed on November 16.
Advertised as fully fireproof and as the most modern tower on the market, the Gillender Building was occupied by financial firms through its short lifetime and was perceived as economically obsolete from the start. There were no notable incidents other than two lightning strikes in its spire in July 1897 and May 1900; the latter "sent splinters flying in every direction" without casualties.
Takeover.
In 1909, financial institutions began rapidly expanding their properties within the Financial District. The Bankers Trust Company joined the process after the Bank of Montreal, the Fourth National Bank, and the Germania Life Insurance Company acquired their properties on Wall and Nassau Streets. Bankers Trust, which was established in 1902, had been a tenant at the Gillender Building for six years and their choice of site was motivated by its location near the New York Stock Exchange. The company, with J. P. Morgan on the board, grew rapidly and intended to land itself permanently in the "vortex of America's financial life".
In July 1909, Bankers Trust signed a long-term lease agreement with the Sampson family, owners of the Stevens Building; the company preferred leasing over purchasing due to the high price of land on Wall Street. Located on the same block as the Gillender Building, the L-shaped, seven-story Stevens Building wrapped around it and possessed far longer facades on both Wall and Nassau Streets. Initially, the press reported that Bankers Trust planned to build a 16-story office building wrapping around the Gillender Building, with the two bottom floors outfitted to be "one of the finest banking rooms in the city". Later, it was disclosed that the trust had been negotiating purchase of the Gillender Building since April 1909; the deal would have consolidated enough land for a new tower, with a roughly square footprint measuring about .
The Manhattan Trust Company, a bank connected to Bankers Trust through common control by J. P. Morgan, acquired the Gillender Building from Helen Gillender Asinari in December 1909, paying approximately $1,500,000 for the property (), or . This was considered a record amount for land in New York City: the previous record was for 1 Wall Street at the corner with Broadway, the land under which had sold for . Negotiations had progressed since April 1909 and the sale was virtually closed in November. On January 2, 1910, the press reported that the Manhattan Trust had resold the building to Bankers Trust, which had completed land acquisition for its large corner property. By April 1910, the final cash price paid to Manhattan Trust was adjusted to $1,250,000; in exchange for the $250,000 difference, the Manhattan Trust retained long-term lease rights for the ground floor "and some other space in the building". Contemporaries agreed that the Manhattan Trust and Bankers Trust acted in accord and that the latter targeted the Gillender Building from the start. Bankers Trust absorbed Manhattan Trust Company in February 1912.
The press anticipated the upcoming demolition of the Gillender Building "as the first time when such a high-class office building representing