Landmarks Preservation Commission March 13, 2007; Designation List 388 LP-2217 23 PARK PLACE BUILDING, 23 Park Place (aka 20 Murray Street), Borough of Manhattan. Built 1856-57, Samuel Adams Warner, architect. Landmark Site: Borough of Manhattan, Tax Map Block 124, Lot 10. On January 16, 2007, the Landmarks Preservation Commission held a public hearing on the proposed designation as a Landmark of the 23 Park Place Building and the proposed designation of the related Landmark Site (Item No. 2). The hearing had been duly advertised in accordance with the provision of the law. Four people spoke in favor of designation, including representatives of Community Board 1, the Historic Districts Council, the Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society of America and the Municipal Arts Society. At the hearing a letter in opposition to designation from the owner of 23 Park Place was submitted on his behalf. Letters in support of designation from Councilmember Alan Gerson and Robert A. M. Stern, architect, were read into the record. The building had been previously heard by the Commission on December 12, 1989, April 3, 1990 and July 10, 1990 (LP-1761). Summary Built in 1856-57 for the dry goods firm Lathrop, Ludington & Co. by the architect Samuel Adams Warner, the five-story party-wall building at 23 and 25 Park Place extends through the block to 20 and 22 Murray Street. It is a handsome example of the mid-nineteenth century double store-and-loft buildings that are found in the Tribeca area of Manhattan. Seven bays wide on Park Place and five bays wide on Murray Street, the five-story structure has similarly articulated unified facades influenced by the Italian Renaissance palazzo style prevalent in commercial architecture of the time. The upper stories are faced in stone and united by molded sill courses at the second and fifth floors and molded stringcourse at the fourth floor with alternating panels and roundels and embellished with a hierarchy of classically-inspired window treatments. Ornamentation includes the second floor’s aediculated surrounds with alternating bracketed triangular and segmental pediments adapted from the Farnese Palace in Rome, the third floor’s elegant bracketed projecting lintels, the fourth floor’s projecting lintels and the fifth floor’s finely carved eared moldings surrounding round-arched windows. Both facades are topped by continuous stone cornices ornamented with dentils, modillions and a frieze of alternating panels and roundels. On Park Place the cornice terminates in scrolled brackets with rosettes. Portions of the original cast-iron storefronts with fluted Corinthian columns and pilasters that were manufactured by Daniel D. Badger and documented in his 1865 catalog are still visible at 23 Park Place and 20 Murray Street. Since the late 1860s, the two buildings have been home to a variety of businesses such as dry goods, manufacturing and publishing firms, associations and restaurants. Only from 1921 until early 1930 were they again occupied by a single tenant when the New York Daily News leased both buildings for its operations.

DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Development of Southern Tribeca and Park Place1 Prior to the arrival of European fur traders and the Dutch West India Company, Manhattan and much of the modern-day tri-state area was populated by bands of Lenape Indians. The Lenape traveled from one encampment to another with the seasons. Fishing camps were occupied in the summer, inland camps used during the fall and winter to harvest crops and hunt. The main trail ran the length of Manhattan from the Battery to Inwood following the course of Broadway adjacent to present day City Hall Park before veering east toward the area now known as Foley Square then north with major branches leading to habitations in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side. In 1626 Dutch West India Company Director Peter Minuit “purchased” the island from the Lenape for sixty guilders worth of trade goods.2 Throughout most

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