Inside the Chamber > A Home for the Chamber - II
After a hundred and forty years as tenants, Bohemians, vagabonds, the Chamber of Commerce was ready to construct a headquarters that could serve as a monument to its own accomplishments. As the Architectural Record noted, size was not the problem - there had to be room for a few offices, wall space to display the portraits, and a great hall for meetings - these demands did not require a skyscraper or a large lot. What mattered was prestige. “It was important … that the building, although not large, should be large enough to avoid insignificance, and to impress the popular imagination. It could not well be planned and built in a niggardly or even a very modest spirit.
In November 1901, the Chamber president dumped mortar from a silver, ivory-handled, trowel onto the southwest edge of a building lot at the corner of Liberty Street and Liberty Place. Workmen hurriedly ensconced a cornerstone, which was filled with artifacts, including coins, commemorative medals, newspaper articles, the last speech given by William McKinley before his assassination, and a history of the Chamber of Commerce.
“I now declare the stone laid," the Chamber's president said, "and with this act let us consecrate ourselves anew to make the future of our organization all that is honorable in commerce and business, and at the same time by good citizenship to help make the city in which we dwell better and purer.”
Almost exactly one year later, in November 1902, the building opened with a ceremony featuring mayors, admirals, ambassadors, governors, princes, postmasters, Pierponts, and two U.S. Presidents (Roosevelt and Cleveland). Sustained applause reverberated in the new Great Hall - 90 feet long, 60 feet wide, 30 feet high - as the dignitaries gathered beneath more than a hundred portraits, bathed in natural illumination from the enormous skylight.
The building had been estimated to cost $1.5 million. Dressed with the inevitable marbles and granites, festooned with columns, statuary, and reliefs, its design was described by some as "classical," by others as "French." Nothing could be more typical of a Beaux Arts temple to finance.
But, if the ornamentation was conventional, the chamber itself was idiosyncratic, out of step, out of place. At a time when architects were building higher and higher, it was short and squab. "The low building that has been erected," an otherwise positive review noted, "contrasts curiously with its towering neighbors." It stood out from the rest of the financial district in other ways, as "the only building in that section not devoted to business of one kind or another."
The new chamber was neither bank nor office, neither social club nor museum. And this indeterminacy affected the architecture. "Comments on the building as a whole are not always favorable," a reporter for the Times wrote, "many criticising the front as at once heavy and illogical, the latter chiefly because the six big columns of the façade practically support nothing but a false front which obscures the windows on the top floor, and have no structural purpose." The building's diminutitve stature in the canyons of Lower Manhattan posed another problem. "The position of this structure, low down among the skyscrapers, does not warrant one in believing that any part of the edifice will have much light to waste."
As the years passed, the building's limitations became increasingly apparent. After only a few decades, the three heroic statues along the front facade - of John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and DeWitt Clinton - began to disintegrate. Unable to withstand the polluted air, the Vermont marble had turned into a powdery substance "like sugar." Posing a danger to pedestrians, they were removed.
In 1980, the Chamber left its chambers and became a renter again - leasing office space at 200 Madison Avenue. For a decade, the Great Hall stood empty until it was purchased for $5.7 million by the International Commercial Bank of China.