Marine Midland Building

Coordinates: 40°42′31″N 74°00′36″W / 40.70861°N 74.01000°W

Marine Midland Building

The Marine Midland Building (also HSBC Bank Building) is a 51-story office building located at 140 Broadway between Cedar and Liberty streets 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 originally proposed a monolith type sculpture, but it was deemed to be too expensive. It is currently owned by Union Investment.[1]

The building is approximately 677 feet (206 m) 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 some time 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 (1.5 m) 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. He was killed by a state sharpshooter during the Attica Prison riots in September 1971.[2][3]

The primary tenant of the building as of 2010 is Brown Brothers Harriman, leasing some 430,000 ft² (40,000 m²) in 2003. BBH moved to the site from their trademark location at 59 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.

On June 25, 2013, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Marine Midland Building as a New York City Landmark, under the name "140 Broadway".[4]

See also

References

Notes

  1. ↑ Barr, Linda (2004-05-12). "Germans pay $465m for 140 Broadway". Real Estate Weekly. Retrieved 2011-10-30.
  2. ↑ Van Gelder, Lawrence (1969-08-21). "Blast Rips Bank in Financial Area". The New York Times. Retrieved 2011-10-30.
  3. ↑ Tomasson, obert E. (1971-09-15). "Melville, Attica Radical, Dead; Recently Wrote of Jail Terror". The New York Times. Retrieved 2007-09-08.
  4. ↑ Postal, Matthew A. "140 Broadway Designation Report" New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (June 25, 2013)

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