135 William Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 135 William Street by Carter Horsley

This 16-story building was erected in 1904 and was designed by Bruce Price.

It was renovated in 2002 and contains 30 rental apartments.

In their fine book, "New York 1900, Metropolitan Architecture and Urbanism, 1890-1915," Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins provided the following commentary about Mr. Price:

"A few of the corner buildings were treated as though they were freestanding towers engaged at their base by the wall of the street. Bruce Price first established the strategy in 1890 with a rather naive proposal for the New York Sun Building, a project intended not for a corner site but a mid-block one opposite City Hall. Price based the design on the campanile in the Piazzo San Marco, paying no attention to the problem of the adjoining buildings and vividly expressing the confusion between the physical facts of tall buildings as they were then understood and the desire to exploit for commercial purposes the symbolic possibilities naturally associated with buildings of great height. In 1894 Price won the competition for the American Surety Building at 100 Broadway, on the corner of Pine Street, and continued the same line of development, even going so far as to place the windows on each successive floor progressively further back in the masonry wall to suggest the entasis of the Sun project.

"In this design, Mr. Price eliminated the unpractical features of his first study, and lost some of its picturesqueness in consequence," Swales wrote in the Architecture Review....Although the top of the American Surety Building had façades on all four sides that clearly distinguished it from the typical corner building, Price's static elevations were perhaps the first example of the standard tripartite division taken up in two-sided corner buildings...."

The authors also noted that the 1909 design of the Metropolitan Life Insurance tower at 24th Street and Madison Avenue by Napoleon Le Brun & Sons recalled "Price's Sun Building project..., a fact which Pierre Le Brun rather naively tried to deny by pointing to its jolt in scale and the punctuation of its surface with innumerable windows which considerably modified the original form."

Mr. Price, who died in 1903, also designed the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City and the Banff Springs Hotel in Alberta.

This building will have a new entrance to the 2 and 3 subway lines when the Fulton Street Transit Center is completed.

For several years, Pace University used this building, which originally was an office building, as a dormitory.