90 West Street or West Street Building is a building in Lower Manhattan designed by architect Cass Gilbert and structural engineer Gunvald Aus for the West Street Improvement Corporation. When completed in 1907, the building's Gothic styling and ornamentation served to emphasize its 23-story height, and foreshadowed Gilbert's later work on the Woolworth Building. Originally built as an office building, the main tenant was the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad and the top floor was occupied by Garret's Restaurant, which advertised itself as the "world's highest restaurant".
Located on West Street, between Cedar and Albany Streets, just south of the World Trade Center site, the building had a view to the Hudson River before Battery Park City was built on fill across West Street.
In 1998, the building's exterior was designated an architectural landmark by the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission. In 2006, it received a National Preservation Honor Award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Restoration of the lobby revealed some of Gilbert's original terra cotta work that had been covered over during an earlier modernization project. During this restoration, the copper roof was replaced and replacement gargoyles were added. The building was converted into apartments and reopened on March 7, 2005.
On November 26, 2007, a mammoth sewer pipe burst open into the bottom floors of 90 West from the World Trade Center construction site, damaging dozens of luxury cars and causing a two week evacuation of the building's residents.
Read more about 90 West Street: September 11, 2001 Attacks
Famous quotes containing the words west and/or street:
“It was in and about the Martinmas time,
When the green leaves were afalling,
That Sir John Graeme, in the West Country,
Fell in love with Barbara Allan.”
—Unknown. Bonny Barbara Allan (l. 1–4)
“Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very barroom of the mind’s inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us,—the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts’ shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)