Barclay-Vesey Building

The Barclay-Vesey Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed in 1923 by Ralph Walker and built between 1923 and 1927 in New York, NY.

Barclay-Vesey 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 Barclay-Vesey Building is also known, or has been known as, New York Telephone Company Building, 100 Barclay , or Verizon Building.

Its precise street address is 140 West Street, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The Barclay-Vesey 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 Barclay-Vesey Building was officially declared as a national landmark on July 1^st 1991, and was included in the National Register of Historic Places on April 30^th 2009.

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 2005 and 2013.

Ralph Walker was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

Ralph Walker was in charge of the architectural design, however, architecture is a complex discipline, which usually involves 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 New York Telephone Company as the Main Developer.

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

The Barclay-Vesey Building was completed in 1927, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Barclay-Vesey 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.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features ornamental limestone blocks combined with gray, gold and beige bricks cover the facades. Carved limestone is used to cladd the two-level entrance doors. The entrance is also adorned with bronze engravings depicting bells, the symbol of the Bell Telephon Co. and stone sills and window sorroundings feature intricate cast stone ornamentation.

Other materials found at the Barclay-Vesey Building include, veined marble, used to highlight details of the hall walls, travertine, used on the walls and floors of the lobby, bronze engravings, seen in the decoration of the lobby, friezes on the walls, doors and frames of the elevators, and hammered iron, used in doors, elevators and bars.