The architecture of New York exhibits great contrasts, including styles as diverse as the quaint old Dutch houses, and skyscrapers of twenty-five and thirty stories.
At the extreme south end of the island is the Custom House, a large quadrangular granite building, in the French Renaissance style, which occupies the site of Fort Amsterdam. The facade toward Bowling Green is adorned with colossal groups of Europe, Asia, Africa, and [609] America, and with twelve heroic figures representing the great sea-powers.
In Whitehall Street, opposite the Custom House, is the Produce Exchange, a huge brick and terra cotta structure in the Italian Renaissance style, containing numerous offices and a large hall. The tower, two hundred and twenty-five feet high, commands a fine view of the city and harbor.
Broadway begins at the Bowling Green, extending hence all the way to Yonkers, a distance of nineteen miles. Up to Thirty-third Street, Broadway is the scene of a most busy and varied traffic, which reaches its culminating point in the lower part of the street during business-hours. This part of the street is almost entirely occupied by wholesale houses, insurance offices, banks, and the like; but farther up are numerous fine shops. Broadway is no longer the broadest street in New York, but it is still the most important. The number of immensely tall office buildings with which it is now lined give it a curiously canyon-like appearance.
No. 1 Broadway, to the left, is the Washington Building, which is adjoined by the Bowling Green Building (sixteen stories), designed by English architects. Other conspicuous business buildings in the lower part of Broadway are the large Welles and Standard Oil Co. Buildings, Nos. 18, 26, the 42 Broadway Building, twenty stories, and Aldrich Court, on the site of the first habitation of white men on Manhattan Island. At Nos. 64-68 is the Manhattan Life Insurance Co., the tower of which is three hundred and sixty feet high. To the left, at the corner of Rector Street, is the imposing Empire Building, twenty stories, the hall of which forms a busy thoroughfare between Broadway and the Rector Street “L” station.
FAR-FAMED BROADWAY AT NIGHT
Wall Street diverging from Broadway to the right, at this point, is the great financial street of New York, the financial barometer of the country. On this street stands the United States Sub-Treasury, a marble structure with a Doric portico, occupying the site of the old Federal Hall, in which the first United States Congress assembled, and Washington was inaugurated as President; the Drexel Building, a white marble structure in the Renaissance style, occupied by J. Pierpont [610] Morgan & Co.; the National City Bank, largest in the country, occupying the old Custom House.
Trinity Church, on the west side of Broadway, is a handsome Gothic edifice of brown stone, with a spire two hundred and eighty-five feet high. The present building dates from 1839-1846, but occupies the site of a church of 1696. The church owns property to the value of at least twenty million dollars used in the support of several subsidiary churches and numerous charities.
Just above Trinity Church are the enormous Trinity and United States Realty buildings, two dignified structures, the former with an admirable facade in a modified Gothic style, and nearly opposite are the Union Trust Co. and the twenty-three story building of the American Surety Co., the latter containing the United States Weather Bureau (“Old Probabilities”). On the same side, between Pine Street and Cedar Street, is the office of the Equitable Life Insurance Co.