99 John Street

Insurance Company of North America Building
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
{{{designated_other1_name}}} #06101.013168
Location	99 John St., New York, New York
Coordinates	40°42′30″N 74°00′23″W Fatal error: The format of the coordinate could not be determined. Parsing failed.
Area	less than one acre
Built	1932 (1932)
Architect	Shreve, Lamb & Harmon
Architectural style	Art Deco
NRHP reference #	99001425
{{{DESIGNATED_OTHER1_ABBR}}} #	06101.013168
Significant dates
Added to NRHP	November 30, 1999
Designated {{{DESIGNATED_OTHER1_ABBR}}}	September 22, 1999

The Insurance Company of North America Building is a residential building at 99 John Street in the Financial District of Manhattan in New York City, New York, United States. It was designed by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon in the Art Deco style and completed in 1932. It rises 28 stories high, with a height of 338 feet (103 m).

Site

The Insurance Company of North America Building is located at 99 John Street in the Financial District of Manhattan in New York City, New York, United States. It has an L-shaped floor plan on an irregular site, which adjoins John Street to the southwest, Cliff Street to the southeast, and Gold Street to the northwest. The site has an area of 29,668 feet (9,043 m), with a frontage of 154.5 feet (47.1 m) on John Street. It is directly south of the Excelsior Power Company Building, which is located across Gold Street.

Architecture

The building was designed in the Art Deco style by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon. The primary massing is 28 stories high, with a height of 338 feet (103 m). There is also a shorter four-story annex on Gold Street, dating from no later than the 1940s. The main building and its annex are designed in the same style, with minimal ornamentation. The historian Anthony Robins described the building as "the last of its kind before the complete victory of the International Style"; at the time, Art Deco architecture in New York City was beginning to decline in popularity.

Exterior

The facade contains dark gray granite, storefront windows, and limestone panels at ground level, and there is a limestone band running horizontally above. The exterior includes a main entrance at John Street, with a granite architrave and double doors. There are also chamfered corners at John Street's intersections with Gold and Cliff streets, where entrances lead to commercial spaces at ground level. The chamfered entrance at Cliff Street has a wheelchair-accessible door with limestone pillars on either side and a grille above; the chamfered entrance on Gold Street has a glass-and-steel double door.

Above ground level, the massing includes five setbacks tapering to a two-story penthouse. The upper stories have vertical limestone piers with aluminum (originally steel) sash windows between them. Chrome-nickel strips (sometimes described as polished chrome steel) extend the building's height. A party wall to the north was shared with a seven-story building, since demolished.

Interior

The building was constructed as a steel frame structure, and it retains many of its original major interior spaces. The building's foundation was constructed on a floating mat. It uses mechanical ventilation on the lowest twelve floors. As built, the structure was cited in The New York Times as having 335,000 square feet (31,100 m²) of usable floor area. Other sources in the 1990s cited the building as having about 460,000 square feet (43,000 m²) or 510,000 square feet (47,000 m²).

The main John Street entrance lead to a vestibule with terrazzo floors, and grilles on the walls. There is a cruciform lobby beyond that, which has polished marble wall panels with chrome-nickel details; linear white and black terrazzo flooring; and stainless steel fixtures. The lobby originally had several Edward Trumbull murals, which were removed by previous tenants in the 1970s. The rest of the first floor had commercial spaces, which have since been modified extensively. The cellar contains an elongated hexagonal room) and maritime-themed Art Deco plaster moldings and grilles.

On each floor, the building originally contained separate elevator banks for local and express elevators to the west and east, respectively. These were connected by lobbies with mail chutes. The lobbies had terrazzo floors, marble wainscoting, and coved ceilings made of plaster. While the local lobbies and some of the mail chute lobbies on the lower floors were removed in the 1990s, the express elevator lobbies have been preserved. The open plan office spaces on these floors have been modified extensively. Since 1999, the building has contained about 442 apartments. The residences range from studio apartments to four-bedroom units; the largest apartment spans 2,100 square feet (200 m²) across three floors.

History

The building was constructed two years after Shreve, Lamb & Harmon built the Empire State Building. Plans were filed in January 1932, and work began that April. It took 22 workdays to build the steel frame. Originally the Insurance Company of North America occupied the ground floor and many of the upper levels as well.

David Werner owned 99 John Street for some time in the 1990s; it was one of several properties he acquired during that decade, along with 275 Madison Avenue and 400 Madison Avenue.

In 1996, Rockrose Development purchased 99 John Street; at the time, it was fully occupied. The company began converting the building into a residential structure, one of several office-to-residential conversions in the neighborhood, encouraged by municipal tax incentives. Rockrose's president K. Thomas Elghanayan said that, had 99 John Street remained an office structure, it would have been classified as Class B office space. The development received a $67.5 million loan (equivalent to $ million in 2018) from PNC Bank. The conversion also included a garage and retail space, some of which was leased to a Korean-American supermarket operated by the Youn family. The renovation was completed in 1999, being Rockrose's third office-to-residential conversion in the Financial District.

See also

• National Register of Historic Places listings in Manhattan below 14th Street
• Art Deco architecture of New York City

Sources

• National Register of Historic Places Inventory/Nomination: Insurance Company of North America Building (PDF) (Report). National Park Service. 1999. Retrieved July 7, 2026. With accompanying pictures

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