There were several successive Equitable Buildings on this site as the powerful insurance company headquarters expanded over the last decades of the nineteenth century to fill the entire block framed by Broadway, Pine, Nassau, and Cedar Streets. The first Equitable Building, a seven-story building designed by Kendall & Gilman, was finished in 1870 and was innovative both in terms of its structure and technology. Said to be the first office building in New York to use a passenger elevator, the building exploited technology to render the upper floors as convenient, and even more desirable, than the lower floors. In addition, the building's use of metal structural columns represented a major step towards the construction techniques that would later develop into steel cage construction.
The building expanded in numerous construction campaigns, most notably George B. Post's extension of 1889 which more than doubled the building's Broadway frontage. It was a highly profitable investment that the Equitable Company was keen to optimize.
On January 9, 1912, the Equitable Building was almost completely destroyed by fire, despite its much-touted "fire-proof" construction. Chicago architect Ernest R. Graham's firm was retained the day after the fire to supervise the stabilization and demolition of the ruin, and later the redevelopment of the site with a much larger structure. The company had previously discussed plans for the building's redevelopment with Graham for three years before the fire.
The new Equitable Building was to represent once again the heights of modernity: ample and speedy elevator service, state-of-the-art heating and ventilation systems, fireproof construction, and fire- safety systems. At 38 stories, the Equitable Building was never the tallest, but it was the largest building in the world with 1,200,000 square feet of rentable office space. The massive size of this building galvanized the political forces necessary to enact the 1916 Zoning Resolution, which required high-rises to set-back at their upper levels. The main entrance to the building is on Broadway.
