Lefcourt Building

The Lefcourt Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Frank Grad and Sons, and built between 1929 and 1930 in Newark, NJ.

Lefcourt Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• Federal Trust Bank Building.
• Raymond-Commerce Building.
• Eleven80 from 2006 until this day.

Its precise street address is 1180 Raymond Boulevard, Newark, NJ. You can also find it on the map here.

The Lefcourt Building and its neighbor at 744 Broad St., the National Newark Bank Building, were considered the 'Art Deco twins' of Newark and remained the tallest buildings in New Jersey until the late 1980s. However, they fell into disrepair during that decade and remained vacant for 20 years.

The building underwent a major restoration between 2004 and 2006. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Gruzen Samton Architects LLP.

Frank Grad and Sons was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was Cogswell Group as the Main Developer.

The Lefcourt Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Lefcourt Building was completed in 1930, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Lefcourt Building uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete slabs.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.

Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a five-story base adorned with terracotta panels and metallic spandrels featuring geometric motifs. Upon this base rises the rest of the building, with seven bays with two windows each on the wider facades and five on the narrower ones, all framed with cast iron. The facades, covered with mortar mixed with coarse aggregate, emphasize the joints.

The access happens through a four-part glass door with bronze frames, similar to the engraved fixture above it, culminating in a clock. The entire entrance is surrounded by polished black granite slabs.