Vintage New York Skyscraper Postcard: Adams Building 1914
Geographic description:
This vintage New York skyscraper postcard depicts the Adams Building, a 32-story office tower standing at 61 Broadway, on the corner of Broadway and Trinity Place, in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. The caption printed in red lettering across the upper right corner, “Adams Building, New York,” confirms the identity of the structure shown. The illustration, rendered in the hand-colored style common among postcard publishers of the early twentieth century, presents the tower from street level, looking upward, which exaggerates its height against the noticeably lower buildings around it. The tower is defined by a pale facade, most likely architectural terra cotta, marked by regular bays of dark windows and topped with a projecting cornice. Two slightly different volumes are visible, corresponding to the building’s two street frontages, one facing Broadway and the other facing Trinity Place, a layout confirmed by documentary sources on the structure. At the base of the tower, the street scene shows streetcars, one yellow, one red and black, boxy automobiles typical of the early part of the century, along with pedestrians and a horse-drawn cart or two, a clear contrast with the vertical modernity of the skyscraper above. To the right of the composition, a slender Gothic spire is visible, most likely belonging to Trinity Church, a well-known landmark standing nearby at the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street; this identification remains a hypothesis, since the spire is not labeled on the card. In the foreground, low red-brick buildings with more modest facades illustrate the architectural contrast typical of this district, then undergoing rapid vertical transformation as office towers began to dominate the older streetscape.
Historical description:
The identity of the building itself is not in question: the printed caption “Adams Building, New York” refers to the Adams Express Building, erected at 61 Broadway for the Adams Express Company, a nineteenth-century parcel delivery and express-shipping firm. Construction began in 1912 and was completed in 1914, under architect Francis H. Kimball. The building rose 32 stories to a height of roughly 443 feet, making it, on completion, the seventh-tallest building in Manhattan, at a time when the city’s skyline was changing rapidly year after year. Its structure rests on a steel frame and a pneumatic caisson foundation, while the facade is faced in architectural terra cotta across more than a million square feet, a technical and aesthetic choice common for tall office buildings of this type. Stylistically, the facade combines, according to period descriptions, a design inspired by Florentine palazzos on the lower floors with a plainer, more restrained treatment above, a signature found in other Kimball-designed buildings from the same period in New York. Since construction only finished in 1914, this postcard cannot predate that year. No reverse side is available for this particular card, which rules out any analysis of a postmark, stamp, or handwritten message that would otherwise help narrow the date with certainty; that element remains undetermined for now. The street-level details — streetcars and automobiles with boxy, upright bodywork appearing side by side, and the absence of the streamlined vehicle styling typical of the 1930s — point toward a probable date in the mid-to-late 1910s, a range offered strictly as a hypothesis, consistent with other known examples of this same view, some of which carry postmarks from the mid-1920s, suggesting the image was printed and distributed over a span of several years. On this site, the card falls under the secondary category reserved for non-French postcards, alongside other American views in the collection. Further verification through a specialist in New York postcard history or a search of New York municipal archives could help pin down the publisher and the exact printing date of this card.
