The 'Magical Experience' of a Planned Art Gallery in Historic Tribeca Space

Interior rendering of a section of the Clock Tower Building's banking hall, as proposed by the Jack Shainman Gallery. Rendering: Gloria Vega Martin via the Jack Shainman Gallery

Tribeca has seen many art galleries move into the neighborhood over the past three years, but it’s seen nothing like this. 

The banking hall and executive offices of the historic 1897 former New York Life Insurance Building at 108 Leonard Street—aka the Clock Tower Building—is on its way to becoming the 20,000-square-foot home of the Chelsea-based Jack Shainman Gallery [1]. The move came closer to reality on Tuesday with an enthusiastic reception from the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), which for nearly three hours scrutinized the excruciatingly complex plans for turning the landmark-protected interior spaces into one of the city’s largest galleries.

Although the commissioners called for a number of changes to the proposed alterations to those spaces, and took no vote, they lauded Shainman’s approach to transforming the sprawling, landmark-protected site into a gallery, a space where today, as the owner put it, “there’s not one wall in the whole place to hang a painting.”

“There is something exciting about the juxtaposition of the contemporary art with the historic architecture,” said LPC Chair Sarah Carroll. “So this use, while we’ll have to work through the aspects of the actual installations, has the opportunity to be a very magical experience.”

Based on comments from the commissioners, the plans need “tweaks,” Carroll noted, including changes to the height, placement and finishes of display panels that are close to architectural features. “Hopefully we’ll be able to see you back very soon with some of those refinements,” she said, “and send you on your way.”

For his part, Shainman said he and artist Carlos Vega, his spouse and partner on the project, were “blown away” when they first saw the space, even in a condition he described as “a wreck.” “We’d never seen anything like it,” he told the commission, adding, “It took us two-and-a half years to get to this point. I can’t say it wasn’t frustrating and I can’t say we didn’t walk away at one point. But the learning that Carlos and I got from this experience is amazing.”

In an email to the Trib, Shainman added: “The Hall had been neglected for quite some time. I don’t think we could have anticipated just how much would be needed to be done—even very basic things like there was never air conditioning or heat, and all of this infrastructure had to be done in the least intrusive way possible.” 

With an address of 46 Lafayette St., the gallery will primarily show works in the Beaux Arts banking hall, with its marble walls and nearly three-story-high ornate ceiling, and in a suite of former executive offices, originally slated to become apartments. The gallery’s work stations will be located on the mezzanine overlooking the hall. A “mini-gallery” is planned for the corner of Broadway and Catherine Street. “The importance of that space is to act as an anchor,” said Erin Rulli, the architecture preservation consultant from Higgins Quasebarth & Partners who presented the proposal to the commission. “It’s a way of bringing people down to the main entrance.”

The block-long, once grand head­quarters of the New York Life In­surance Co. [2], enlarged by McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1897, was taken over by the city for office space in 1967. Over the years the building had fallen into disrepair, sometimes dangerously so. For years a sidewalk bridge had obscured the ground floors of the Broadway and Leonard Street sides of the building, serving as protection against the risk of falling chunks of facade. The Peebles Group and Elad Group bought the building from the city in 2014 and converted it to residential condominiums. But the historic banking hall, first envisioned by the developer as a large restaurant or catering hall, remained on the market for years until Shainman bought it for $18.2 million.

“There is going to be an experience of the architecture here that is very different than any other use would provide,” Rulli said.

The proposed gallery conversion received strong support from Community Board 1. Bruce Ehrmann, a member of the board’s Landmarks and Preservation Committee and its longtime former chair, recalled the loss of the building’s Clocktower Gallery [3] when the building was sold. “We lost an interior that was supposed to be open to the public and now we’re getting 20,000 square feet of landmark space back for the neighborhood,” he told the CB1 committee when the project came before it last month. “Open to the public and owned by a great gallery.”

Sarah Bartlett, a longtime Tribeca resident who now lives in the Clock Tower Building, testified to the “delight” she has heard from other residents that “a prominent gallery owner known for being highly principled and responsible has agreed to become a commercial anchor of our building.”

Lucy Levine, speaking for the Historic Districts Council, took issue, as some commissioners had, with hiding landmark features with display panels. The gallery should, she testified, “make use of the building’s vast interior space using free-standing displays that are oriented towards the space’s interior, not shoved up against its landmark walls, or affixed to its landmark surfaces.”

The building’s historic four-faced tower clock has almost never simultaneously shown the correct time since the LPC allowed the tower, itself an interior landmark, to be privatized by the developer. (Preservationists won their battle against that decision in two lower courts, but lost it at the Court of Appeals [4]). Jeremy Woodoff, representing the preservation group Save America’s Clocks, used the occasion of the hearing to remind the commission of the developer’s unkept promise to keep the clocks running accurately, and he called for the commission to delay granting approval of the gallery proposal until there are regular inspections of the clock and tower interior—and the clocks maintain the correct time. “This is a cautionary tale about the need to keep preservation and the public interest in the forefront,” Woodoff concluded.

(In response, LPC General Counsel Mark Silberman said the commission has inspected the clock “a number of times” and found its condition unchanged. “We have passed on all the complaints to the owners about the clock faces not working, and we will continue to do so,” he said.)

Richard Mosse’s wide-screen video “Broken Spectre [5],” about the destruction of the Amazon rain forest, is now continuously being shown in the banking hall and open to the public from Tuesday through Saturday. After it closes on March 16, Shainman said, he hopes to start the buildout of the gallery, with a projected official opening show, by Nick Cave, in the fall.

“We encourage people to come into this beautiful space, open not only for the contemporary art,” he said. “Even if they aren’t interested in that, they can come in and see the architecture. We don’t really care.”