Beekman Tower Building

The Beekman Tower Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed in 1922 by Jonh Mead Howells, and built between 1927 and 1928 in New York, NY.

Beekman Tower 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:

• Beekman Tower between 1928 and 1934.
• Beekman Tower Hotel between 1964 and 2013.
• The Beekman Tower, Trademark Collection by Windham from 2018 until this day.

Its precise street address is 1-7 Mitchell Place, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The Beekman Tower 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 Beekman Tower Building was officially declared as a national landmark on February 3^rd 1998.

The building has been restored 5 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1929, 1940, 1960, 1964 and 1991.

Jonh Mead Howells was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design. But there was also one other architect involved, as far as we know. We are talking about Donn Barber.

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 here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Beekman Tower Building a reality:

• Panhellenic Association's New York as the Main Developer
• Rene Paul Chambellan as the collaborating Artist

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

The Beekman Tower Building was completed in 1928, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Beekman Tower 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 brown bricks, stone, and concrete cladding the facade, with some stone moldings casted into the design of the pilasters.

Another material found at the Beekman Tower Building is spot floodlights, were used to highlight the volume of the facades.