United States Rubber Company Building ARCHITECT: Carrère and Hastings DATE: 1911-12 STYLE: Beaux-Arts

This elegant, Beaux-Arts style, twenty-story office building was constructed in 1911-12 for the United States Rubber Company at a time when the automobile was beginning to exert a powerful influence on American society.

Located on Broadway, along the section known as “Automobile Row,” the U.S. Rubber Company Building was one of the most prominent and important of the many automobile-related structures concentrated here. The design features a distinctive rounded corner and vertically-grouped windows with metal spandrels and thin, continuous piers.

In this building, as in their other works, Carrere and Hastings used their training at the French Ecole des Beaux-Arts to create an impressive design for a tall building where the skeleton construction is expressed by the thin stone veneer which is obviously non-weight-bearing. The two lowest floors of this building were remodeled in 1959 for a bank.