Spared Demolition, an 1889 Building Gets a Second Life

To create a modern subway interchange in Lower Manhattan, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority first had to contend with an exquisite antique, one that stood eight stories tall.

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times The Corbin Building.

Ten years ago, the dilapidated Corbin Building, completed in 1889 at Broadway and John Street, seemed destined for demolition. It was in the way of the authority’s planned Fulton Street Transit Center, intended to impose order on the chaotic convergence of subway lines at Fulton Street, thereby helping downtown recover from the 2001 attack.

Today, the facade of the Corbin Building is an ornament in Lower Manhattan. Cleaned and restored, it sits like a ruddy little gem in the Broadway canyon, richly decorated with terra-cotta flora and fauna, belted by alternating bands of varied sandstone, capped at either end by pyramidal peaks. Monumental arches march down John Street like an aqueduct, enlivened by carmine-colored cast-iron window bays.

Inside, it turns out, the architectural delights continue. The centerpiece of the building is a broad semicircular stairwell down which daylight streams even on dark days. Tiny copper-plated cast-iron squirrels (or snails), hundreds of them, look as if they’re poised to hop (or crawl) all the way to the top of the elaborate balustrade. Some floors have wood paneling, others have marble wainscoting. There are fireplaces throughout, though they no longer work.

And much of the ground floor will serve an entrance to the Fulton Center (the pared-down name for the subway interchange), which is to open to the public next year. The restoration project accounted for $67.4 million of the $1.4 billion transit center budget.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority The Corbin Building is at the center of the diagram, showing how many subway lines converge at Fulton Street. The Fulton Building is the main transit hall of the new center, opening next year.

What stepped between the wrecking crews and the Corbin Building a decade ago were preservationists. They persuaded the authority that the old building, designed by Francis Hatch Kimball, was worth saving and would add value to the Fulton Center. It helped their cause that the Corbin Building basement offered a direct path between the transit center and an underground passageway known as the Dey Street Concourse, which runs all the way to the World Trade Center.

As the project emerged, 31,000 square feet of usable commercial space was created in the Corbin Building. There is a large corner storefront. The upper floors may be used for retail or offices. Under certain conditions, the building could also be transformed into a hotel and the rooftop could be opened for commercial use.

The space is being offered under a master lease to private developers, along with 30,000 square feet of commercial space in the abutting transit hall, a striking new structure at Broadway and Fulton Street. A request for proposals was issued last year, and the authority is negotiating with finalists now.

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times Michael Horodniceanu, president of the capital construction division of the M.T.A., and a salvaged parapet.

“We expect to generate enough revenue to maintain the whole complex,” said Michael Horodniceanu, the president of the authority’s capital construction division. Because that dollar amount is part of the negotiation, he declined to disclose it.

“It would be interesting if we could get a bank as the anchor tenant,” Dr. Horodniceanu said, given that the original occupant of the ground floor was the Corbin Banking Company, one of many pies in which the financier Austin Corbin had his fingers. In 1880, Corbin acquired the ailing Long Island Rail Road and built it up. “Under his wise management,” The New York Times wrote in his obituary on June 5, 1896, “the development of Long Island was very rapid.”

Rejuvenating the Corbin Building required much more than dusting off sconces. A secondary stairway was required for emergency exiting. There was no place to fit it within the existing building, so a small annex was constructed to contain it.

To install escalators that would move passengers between the Fulton Center and the Dey Street passageway, the Corbin Building had to be structurally underpinned. On such a tight lot, as little as 20 feet wide, mechanical excavators could not be used. The pits for the new foundation work were dug by hand â€" with picks, shovels and buckets. The building was rigged with motion sensors and other monitors to ensure that it did not begin to lean.

The foundations went so deep that workers unearthed a stone-lined well. In the well and around it, they found a clay pipe with an eagle carved on the bowl, a case for a pair of pince-nez glasses, two ledger books from the 1880s with handwritten accounts of stock trades in railroad companies, a 1915 invoice from the Jeweler’s Circular Publishing Company, and newspapers from 1889 with torn-from-today’s-headlines articles like: “A New Madison Square Garden.”

An unsolved mystery involves a pair of initials that appear in decorations around the building. The first pair, “AC,” is easy. The second is more cryptic. If it’s “MC,” it may stand for Macklot & Corbin, Austin Corbin’s first firm. If it’s “MG,” however, authority officials are stumped, though Dr. Horodniceanu has his own whimsical theory: My Girlfriend.

That might explain all the fireplaces.

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times The central stairwell of the Corbin Building was meticulously restored.