The Barclay Vesey Telephone Building was one of the first skyscrapers built on downtown's gritty westside - a working waterfront dominated by piers, warehouses, and small-scale industry. The building housed offices and communications machinery for the New York Telephone Company. This dual function explains the building's unusual massiveness, as the machines housed on the interior did not require natural light. At ground level, the builders provided generous public arcades as well as a fantastically decorated lobby.

Architect Ralph Walker's complex sculptural accents play off of the skyscraper's somber brick bulk. These accents on the building's exterior and in the lobby feature stylized shallow-relief trees, flora, and fauna. The Barclay Vesey Telephone Building was one of the first major skyscrapers of the "setback style," the ziggurat-like form suggested by the city's 1916 zoning law. It was also a masterpiece of Art Deco design by the architect. The famed French architect and theorist, Le Corbusier, used the Barclay Vesey Telephone Building as the frontispiece for the English language edition of his polemic, Towards a Modern Architecture. For him, it represented the functionality and power of American building in the late 1920's.