55 Liberty St., New York, New York. County/parish: New York.
Added to the National Register of Historic Places September 15, 1983. NRIS 83001734.
1 contributing building.
The Liberty Tower, formerly the Sinclair Oil Building, is a 33-story residential building in the Financial District of Manhattan in New York City. It is at 55 Liberty Street at the northwest corner with Nassau Street. It was built in 1909–10 as a commercial office building and was designed by Henry Ives Cobb in a Gothic Revival style.
The site is adjacent to the New York Chamber of Commerce Building, while the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Building is to the east, across Nassau Street. Upon its completion, Liberty Tower was said to be the world's tallest building with such a small footprint, having a floor area ratio of 30 to 1. The building's articulation consists of three horizontal sections similar to the components of a column, namely a base, shaft, and capital. The limestone building is covered in white architectural terracotta with elaborate ornament.
When the building opened in 1910, one of its first commercial tenants was the law office of future U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Shortly after World War I, the entire building was bought by Sinclair Oil. In 1979, architect Joseph Pell Lombardi converted the building from commercial use into residential apartments and renamed it the "Liberty Tower", in one of the first such conversions in Manhattan south of Canal Street. The building was designated a city landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1982 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) in 1983. It is also a contributing property to the Wall Street Historic District, an NRHP district created in 2007.
(read more...)National Park Service documentation: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/75319692