The Brooklyn Tower

Contents

1. White marble at the base
2. Dark metal above
3. Bronze and what it does
4. Facets and light
5. The hall inside
6. Height, measured and named
7. Recognition

The Brooklyn Tower is the Downtown Brooklyn building by Michael Stern’s JDS Development Group that stands as Brooklyn’s first supertall, rising from the landmark Dime Savings Bank, and CNN Style’s coverage records that SHoP Architects designed it.¹ From the sidewalk the building reads as a meeting of two materials. At the base stands a white marble neoclassical bank front put up in 1908; behind and above it rises a tower that CNN described as wrapped in fluted black stainless steel, bronze and glass.¹

This entry describes the building through those materials: what each one is, why the pairing was made, and how metals of this kind are known to behave once they meet a city’s air and water. The layout of the plan has its own entry, The Brooklyn Tower Plan Around the Dime, and so does the digging next to the bank, Excavating Beside the Dime Savings Bank.

White marble at the base

The Historic Districts Council’s summary of the designation traces the bank to 1906 through 1908, when Mowbray and Uffinger raised a marble temple on an irregular plot, and to 1931 and 1932, when Halsey, McCormack and Helmer, a firm known for its bank commissions, greatly expanded it.⁶ Its front is a colonnade of Ionic columns under a high dome, with carved allegories of industry and progress.⁶ The institution itself dates from 1859 and has always had its head office downtown.⁶ The city protected the exterior and the interior together, and CBS New York reported an architectural historian’s account of the bank as a working institution that helped the borough grow.²

In Global Design News, SHoP described a palette that runs from marble to bronze, picked to echo the bank’s City Beautiful detail without imitating it.⁵ In 2021 Michael Stern told CNN that the task was to join a landmark and a contemporary tower with respect and with design integrity.¹

Figure

Bank and tower, material by material

	The bank at the base	The tower above
Facade	white marble	fluted black stainless steel, bronze and glass
Style	neoclassical, early twentieth century	contemporary
Geometry	star and hexagon patterns from the original work	a hexagon instead of the usual rectangle
Use as reported in 2021	hall restored for retail, amenities on the roof	residences

Dark metal above

Accounts of the cladding agree on its family of materials and differ on the list. CNN’s report at the topping out described fluted black stainless steel and bronze with glass.¹ New York YIMBY’s construction visit recorded dark floor to ceiling glass set in stainless steel and aluminum.⁴ The design description SHoP gave Global Design News named bronze, stainless steel and stone.⁵ Read together, they describe a dark metal envelope with bronze in it, set against the pale stone below.

Stainless steel has a practical reputation among the people who keep New York’s facades. The Cooperator’s survey of exterior metalwork quotes restorers who call it the easier metal to care for: it does not oxidize, it is stronger than bronze, and a scratch that stops short of a gouge can be sent out and regrained until it looks new.⁸ A metal of that kind holds its color with modest attention.

Bronze and what it does

Bronze is copper mixed with other metals. American architects took it up for banks, libraries, stores and universities in the late nineteenth century because it was tough and took casting well; its surface can stay dull, be buffed bright or carry gold leaf.⁸ Left bare, it does not keep the color it had on the day it was installed. Country Life describes how copper, brass and bronze form a patina as their surfaces oxidize, a film that can run from turquoise to green and keep developing for centuries.⁹

The specialists quoted by The Cooperator put the same behavior in maintenance terms. Unprotected bronze oxidizes fast, so it wants a clear protective coat, and on handrails, doors and other touched parts that coat is best taken off and put back yearly; copper and bronze near the water around Manhattan oxidize faster still.⁸ A bronze element is therefore a standing commitment rather than a finish. On any building that sets bronze beside stainless steel, the two metals drift apart in color unless someone keeps them together.

Figure

How architectural metals age in the city

1. 01
   Bare bronzeoxidizes quickly unless it carries lacquer or a sealant
2. 02
   Kept bronzecoating stripped and renewed about once a year where hands touch it
3. 03
   Stainless steeldoes not oxidize, and a scratch short of a gouge can be regrained
4. 04
   Copper near waterbrownish within about five years, green within about ten

Facets and light

Gregg Pasquarelli of SHoP told CNN that the architects took the idea from the way the original bank designers handled the site’s awkward shape, with six sided stars as well as hexagons, and that interlocking hexagons would keep any view of the tower from feeling like a view of its back.¹ A faceted skin meets the light differently on every face. SHoP’s text for Global Design News adds that the facade detailing was drawn so that two neighboring faces, seen at an angle, read as a single surface, a leaner nod to Rockefeller Center and the Chrysler Building.⁵

The hall inside

At the topping out ceremony, New York YIMBY’s reporter found the banking hall’s columns and ceilings lit in color and noted that the interiors had largely been saved and were still being restored.⁴ CNN reported that the interior was being restored for retail use and that the bank’s roof would carry residential amenities, including a pool around the dome.¹ The design statement SHoP gave Global Design News placed the old hall at the entrance to the shops and within a new passage for people walking through the block between Flatbush Avenue and Fulton Street.⁵

The new interiors went to other hands. New York YIMBY credited Gachot Studios with the residential interiors, Woods Bagot with the amenity interiors and HMWhite with the landscape.⁴

Figure

The bank at the base in four dates

the savings bank is founded in downtown Brooklyn

1859

Mowbray and Uffinger build the domed temple front

1906 to 1908

the bank expands under Halsey, McCormack and Helmer

1931 to 1932

exterior and interior designated as landmarks

1994

Height, measured and named

Supertall is a defined category. The B1M’s explainer on skyscraper categories puts the threshold past 300 meters, which is 984 feet, twice the 150 meter entry line for a skyscraper.¹⁰ Connect CRE reported the topping out by JDS and SHoP and described it as the third large mixed use project the two had built together in New York, after 111 West 57th Street and The American Copper Buildings.³ CBS New York reported that Downtown Brooklyn residents were invited to sign the final beam before it went up.²

The categories carry conditions beyond height. To count as a skyscraper at all, a structure has to stand on its own without guy cables, and habitable floors have to fill at least half of its height, which is why observation and broadcast towers fall outside the list however tall they are.¹⁰ Above the supertall band sits a smaller megatall class, for buildings past 600 meters.¹⁰ The labels are a measuring convention, and they say nothing about quality; they record where a building sits on a scale kept and revised by the body that ranks towers.

Recognition

Each year the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat hands out prizes for tall work. As Elevator World described the 2024 cycle, the council begins by naming Award of Excellence winners across more than twenty categories, whose teams then present to live juries at its conference before overall winners are chosen.⁷ The categories range across tall buildings, innovation, urban habitat, repositioning, and equity, diversity and inclusion, so that a single cycle judges engineering, city making and the reuse of older towers side by side.⁷ In that cycle The Brooklyn Tower was named overall winner of the Best Tall Building, 300 meters and above award.

Fifty years on, the appearance of this facade will depend less on its height than on its metals. Stainless steel keeps its color with little help. Bronze keeps its color only with care, and otherwise darkens toward the patina already seen on older bronze across the city.⁸ The marble of the bank has stood in the weather since 1908.⁶ The pairing was designed as a contrast between old stone and new metal, and the years will keep adjusting that contrast in ways that upkeep, more than design, will settle.