The corner building that is 80 West Broadway will start demolition sometime this month — a new condo will sprout there, replacing the 19th Century brick buildings and some distinctive neighborhood history.

(More on this, but the new building is being designed by Cookfox architects; a good reference there is the Google building across from Pier 40. The developers secured air rights from the L-shaped building that is 88 West Broadway, so that the new building will cantilever over that and over 72 Warren, coming close to touch 90 West Broadway.)

I only learned recently that historic preservationists attempted this spring to extend the Tribeca West Historic District down the block in an attempt to preserve several beauties: 1 Hudson Street, 90 West Broadway and 80 West Broadway (aka 68-72 Warren Street) — see the red outline in the map below. But their request was denied in May by the city’s Landmarks Commission “due to a lack of consistent historic character, integrity, and cohesion with nearby designated blocks.”

Frampton Tolbert, the executive director of the citywide non-profit the Historic Districts Council, noted in his letter to the commission that the buildings offer a microcosm of the neighborhood’s “passenger/freight railroad hub, to its contributions to commerce and trade through the development of its store and loft buildings, to its exemplars of pioneering building technology through the construction of speculative office towers (aka “tall office buildings”) that anticipated the skyscrapers to come; most notably, at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century.”

Here’s a little visual tour, and below, details of the buildings from the Historic District Council’s request for evaluation for the extension:

68 WARREN STREET (aka 80-86 West Broadway)
Sixty-eight Warren Street was most likely designed as part of a four-building complex that included nos. 66-70, as well as 86 West Broadway (originally, 58-60 College Place). According to the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, a new building permit was filed in the fall of 1869 for the construction of two five-story stores at nos. 66 and 68 Warren Street with a design by Charles Mettam.16 However, corresponding map and visual data suggests that all four buildings were built at the same time, based on the materials, typology, style, and connections between them. The buildings referenced in the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide were commissioned by George Welsh and built by Van Dolsen & Matt.

GERKEN BUILDING & IRVING NATIONAL BANK BUILDING
For its late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century “tall office buildings”, the Gerken Building and the Irving National Bank Building, which together with the historic towers in the Tribeca West Historic District represented a distinct building type reflecting a wave of interest in speculative office development in Tribeca West during this period of time, as personified by Frederick Gerken, the developer of these two buildings within the proposed district extension.