Chamber of Commerce Building (New York City)


The Chamber of Commerce Building is located on 65 Liberty Street between Nassau Street and Broadway in the Financial District in Manhattan, New York City. The building's architect was James Barnes Baker who designed the building with a Beaux-Arts style. The building is about four stories tall built with Vermont marble and includes a terrace and a mansard roof. The first floor of the building contains the Great Hall where the walls of the hall are filled with portraits of important individuals from American history. Some of the portraits include John Cruger, the first president of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, Alexander Hamilton, Ulysses S. Grant and many others.
The building was designated a New York City landmark in 1966, and a National Historic Landmark in 1977.
Original and reprographic architectural drawings for this building are held in the Department of Drawings & Archives at Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University

History

New York's Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1768, and was the first organization of its type in North America. Its inaugural meeting consisted of twenty merchants at the Fraunces Tavern, and it was granted a formal charter by King George III of Great Britain. The chamber met in a variety of locations, none that it owned, until 1884, when a dedicated building was constructed on this site.
This building's construction in 1902 was funded by wealthy members of the organization. Funders included luminaries such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and J. Pierpont Morgan.
Since its construction, the building had gone through several renovations. The first renovation was in 1903 where sculptors Daniel Chester French and Philip Martiny sculpted statues of John Jay, Alexander Hamilton and DeWitt Clinton on the pillars at the front of the building. The next renovation was in 1921 when architects Helmle and Corbett remodeled the interior of the building and built a new floor resulting in changes to the mansard roof. The final renovation occurred between the years 1990 to 1991 by Haines Lundber Weahler after the International Commercial Bank of China bought the building. The new owner wanted to renovate the building as years of pollution and rain had caused irreversible damages to the building. The building as of 2016, does not have the three pillars of the three men anymore as the sculptures were too damaged to be fixed.