Marine Midland Building

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The Marine Midland Building (also HSBC Bank Building) is a 52-story office building located at 140 Broadway in Manhattan's financial district. The building, completed in 1967, is 688 ft (209.7 m) tall and is known for the distinctive sculpture at its entrance, Isamu Noguchi's Cube. Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the man who designed the building, had at first proposed for there to be a monolith type sculpture, but it was estimated to be too expensive.

The building is approximately 677 feet high, measuring approximately 1,170,000 rentable square feet (111,000 square meters).

The building was built by a consortium headed by Harry Helmsley and Marine Midland Bank received naming rights as part of its lease agreement which initially covered the two basement and first 20 floors. Controlling interest in Marine Midland was purchased by HSBC in 1980 and they secured 100% ownership in the 1987; the name of the bank was changed to HSBC Bank USA in 1998. Today the building is known by both names, but is more often referred to by its older name to distinguish it from the other HSBC Buildings.

A bombing occurred on the 8th floor on August 20, 1969, injuring 20 people. The bomb, which police estimated to be the equivalent of 25 sticks of dynamite, was placed in a hallway just off the elevators sometime during the evening and it exploded at around 10:30PM. The injured were on the night shift in the bank's stock bookkeeping department and were working on the other side of the corridor wall. Fortunately, the inside of this wall was lined with floor-to-ceiling automated file units that weighed 3 tons each and which absorbed most of the blast. Without them, the 20 injuries would all have been fatalities. The blast moved the file units about a foot, blew out all the windows on that side of the building and opened a 5-foot hole in the reinforced concrete floor. The bomber, Sam Melville, was convicted of this and seven other 1969 Manhattan bombings and sentenced to 18 years in prison. His sentence was cut short when he was killed by a state sharpshooter during the Attica Prison riots in September 1971.^[1]

The primary tenant of the building is currently Brown Brothers Harriman, leasing some 430,000 ft² (40,000 m²) in 2003. BBH moved to the site from their trademark location at 63 Wall Street, filling a vacancy left after HSBC moved their primary New York offices out of the building, to the HSBC building at 452 5th Ave.