The Skyscraper Where Sea Captains’ Orders Were Once Howled from Windows
Community Board 1 (CB1) is pushing back against a proposal by real estate developer Moinian Group to alter the historic facade of a landmarked building at 17 Battery Place, which has played a colorful role in Lower Manhattan history.
The Whitehall Building (as 17 Battery Place is known) was designed by architect Henry Hardenbergh (who is also remembered for the Plaza Hotel and the Dakota apartments), and completed in 1904. For his theme, Hardenbergh chose the Renaissance Revival style, which he articulated with rusticated blocks of limestone, granite, brick, and terracotta cladding.
Hardenbergh’s client was an industrial chemist named Robert Augustus Chesebrough who had made his first fortune in the 1850s by creating a process for extracting kerosene (for use as lamp fuel) from the oil of sperm whales. But as whales were hunted to near-extinction and prospectors began pulling petroleum out of the ground, his business model was rendered irrelevant. Visiting the Pennsylvania oil fields that were threatening to bankrupt him, Chesebrough noticed a sticky goo accumulating on the drilling equipment. Rig workers, who called this residue “rod wax,” told him that it was a nuisance and a waste product. But one driller mentioned that the gelatinous glop did have a single beneficial use— it soothed and speeded the healing of cuts and burns.
From this, Chesebrough created a new product, which he named by combining the German word for water (“wasser”) with the Greek work for oil (“elaion”). This portmanteau resulted in the brand name “Vaseline,” under which flag the inventor sold not only a skin cream, but also a broad range of soaps, lotions, cleansers, and deodorants. By 1881, he had sold his company (and its patents on “petroleum jelly”) to John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil conglomerate, becoming astonishingly wealthy in the process.
Chesebrough decided to put his new lucre to work by investing in New York real estate, assembling a patchwork of small plots in the vicinity of West Street, Battery Place, and Washington Street. Once cleared and combined, these became the site of the Whitehall Building, which was named for the 1600s home of colonial governor Peter Stuyvesant—once located nearby at what is now Pearl and Whitehall Streets.
In the years between the World Wars, towing companies kept offices in the Whitehall Building and mounted telescopes at the windows, so they could monitor ships entering and leaving the harbor. (In the days before two-way radios were widely in use, dispatchers would convey instructions to tug captains waiting at the docks below by bellowing into giant megaphones, also mounted at the windows.) But as New York’s waterfront declined, many legacy office buildings were converted to apartment towers, and this was the case for the 17 Battery Place, which was declared a legally protected landmark in 2000.
At issue now is the Moinian Group’s desire to alter the facade of the retail spaces on the ground floor of the Whitehall Building, near Washington Street. At its November meeting, CB1 enacted a resolution criticizing this proposal for having no verifiable relationship to the original 1904 design of the facade, for not matching the existing storefronts elsewhere on the Battery Place side of the building, and for incorporating too much glass. For these reasons, the resolution concludes, “the proposed storefront is inappropriate for the ground floor of such an important historic landmark building,” and recommends that the City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, which has final say, reject the proposal.