American Stock Exchange Building

The American Stock Exchange Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed in 1920 by Starrett & van Vleck, and built between 1920 and 1921 in New York, NY.

American Stock Exchange 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 American Stock Exchange Building is also known, or has been known as, New York Curb Exchange Building, 86 Trinity Place, or 123 Greenwich Street.

Its precise street address is 86 Trinity Place, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The American Stock Exchange Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of New York and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Art Deco style. Because of that, the American Stock Exchange Building was officially declared as a national landmark on June 26^th 2012, and was included in the National Register of Historic Places on June 2^nd 1978, as well as in the New York Register of Historic Places on June 23^rd 1980.

The building underwent a major restoration between 1929 and 1931. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Starrett & van Vleck.

Starrett & van Vleck 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 Thompson-Starrett Co as the Main Contractor.

The American Stock Exchange Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The American Stock Exchange Building was completed in 1921. These were the early days of the Art Deco movement, when the style hadn't yet reached its maturity, and there fore it is more likely to to still have traces of the Classical or Gothic Revival periods which preceded Art-Deco.

Starrett & van Vleck took a risk by designing a building that was ahead of its time, and which other architects sure took inspiration from as the Art Deco movement evolved.

The American Stock Exchange 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 gray bricks on the Greenwich St facade, while limestone with a granite base was used for the Trinity Place facade. The facade decorations are made of terracotta.

Other materials found at the American Stock Exchange Building include, glass, used in the entrance doors panels, metal , found in de decorative windows grilles and doors frames, and marble , marble plates is seen on the walls baseboards.