page_title: 90 West Street
section_title: Critical reception
hierarchical_section_title: 90 West Street / Critical reception
caption_attribution_description: The Ground Zero Area
context_page_description: 90 West Street is a 23-story residential building in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It is located on a plot bounded by West Street to the west, Cedar Street and the World Trade Center to the north, 130 Cedar Street to the east, and Albany Street to the south.
  The building was designed by Cass Gilbert, with Gunvald Aus and Burt Harrison as structural engineers, and John Peirce as general contractor. It was erected for the West Street Improvement Corporation, led by transportation magnate Howard Carroll. The Gothic styling and ornamentation of 90 West Street served to emphasize its height. The design combined elements of the three-section "classical column" arrangement of 19th-century buildings with the "romantic tower" of Gilbert's later structures such as the Woolworth Building. Its waterfront site necessitated the installation of pilings deep into the ground. Other features included a terracotta facade with granite at the two-story base, as well as terracotta fireproofing inside the building.
  90 West Street was built in 1905–1907 as an office building called the West Street Building.
context_section_description: Upon its opening, the West Street Building was lauded by other architects and artists. The architectural critic Montgomery Schuyler, in a 1919 Scribner's Magazine article, noted that the West Street Building was uncommon in that it was praised by both the public and by architectural critics. John Merven Carrère, a partner in the architectural firm Carrère and Hastings, said to Gilbert that "I think it is the most successful building of its class." Edwin Blashfield, a painter, wrote a letter to Gilbert to tell him "what a splendid impression your West Street Building makes on one, as one comes up the harbor on the way back from the other side of the Atlantic."
  Architectural critics approved of the building's design as well. An anonymous writer for the Architectural Record, possibly Schuyler, said that he appreciated the upper stories, as well as the design of the vertical piers and the Gothic ornamentation. Another writer for the Architectural Record stated in 1909 that the structure was "an aesthetic and technical triumph" and "the work of a master mind." In 1912, a writer for the Architectural Review said that the use of ornament and the expression of the building's design "account for the excellence of effect of the West Street Building." An unnamed critic in Architecture magazine praised 90 West Street and the Liberty Tower for the use of "a high sloping roof to complete the structure", saying that "this is a more desirable termination than a plain flat deck". Further, The New York Times praised the use of multicolored ornamentation on 90 West Street's facade.
  Praise for the West Street Building continued even through later years, such as a 1934 article which called the structure among the city's "most satisfying buildings." Ada Louise Huxtable, speaking about a proposed Lower Manhattan development district in 1970, said that the area "contains a few gems of substance such as Cass Gilbert's Beaux-Arts Brady Building on West Street." Herbert Muschamp wrote in 1998 that, after the much taller World Trade Center was completed in the 1970s, "Contemporary critics evidently found it painful to praise Gilbert's West Street Building" but that the "wedding cake top" of the mansard roof "looks edible". The National Park Service, in its 2007 historic-designation report, stated that in addition to 90 West Street's importance as one of the first skyscrapers to consistently use of Gothic detailing, the structure "acquired additional historical importance as a witness to and survivor of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001."
caption: Top of the building
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