The 32-story building, designed by Emery Roth & Sons and constructed from 1958 to 1959, contains offices for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).

The original tenants were largely financial firms, while the Produce Exchange owned the land under the building and occupied some lower floors.

[2] The Whitehall Street station of the New York City Subway, serving the 1​, R​, and ​W trains, contains entrances directly outside 2 Broadway.

[5] Much of the site was previously occupied by the ten-story New York Produce Exchange headquarters, erected between 1881 and 1884 to designs by George B.

The building was designed so it occupied the maximum volume and massing allowed under zoning regulations at the time.

Gray horizontal bars alternately ran atop the bottom or top of each spandrel, resulting in a staggered pattern.

[20] This made 2 Broadway the second largest skyscraper in the Financial District at the time of its completion, behind One Chase Manhattan Plaza (now 28 Liberty Street).

[24] The entrance concourse at Broad Street, measuring 100 by 20 feet (30.5 by 6.1 m), was planted with flowers, shrubs, and trees when the building was completed.

[25] Other features of the lobby included a gray marble panel on the wall, embedded with a fossilized coral reef estimated to be 360 million years old.

[26] In October 1953, the Produce Exchange leased the site of its headquarters to developers Jack D. Weiler and Benjamin H. Swig for up to 100 years.

[3][4][29] In the original design by William Lescaze, the first and second stories would have occupied the whole lot, with a ground-level arcade, a two-story lobby, and a tenants' garage with 300 spots.

[31][33] The Charles F. Noyes Company, which was funding the project, announced that August that Lescaze and Kahn & Jacobs had revised the plans.

[37][38] The final designs provided for a 32-story tower, the largest skyscraper to be developed in Lower Manhattan after World War II.

[8] Half of the planned 1,300,000 square feet (120,000 m2) of office space was rented by July 1957, even though the Produce Exchange Building was still being demolished.

[63] Later that year, PERT's trustees proposed and approved a plan to sell off its ownership in 2 Broadway, its only large asset, to O&Y for $26 million.

[70] O&Y, struggling to pay $60 million of property taxes, attempted to persuade the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development to lease about 500,000 square feet (46,000 m2).

[69] Around the same time, the MTA rented space at 2 Broadway, moving some of its operations from its former headquarters at 370 Jay Street in Downtown Brooklyn.

[70][74] The buyer was Tamir Sapir, a Soviet immigrant and cab driver turned real-estate investor, who acquired the building through his firm, ZAR Realty, that October.

[81] The MTA signed a 49-year lease for the entire building in July 1998, with two 15-year renewal options, the day after it sold the New York Coliseum.

[19] The MTA had initially named Sapir as the developer of its office space, offering to pay him $7 million in bonuses.

[85] The refurbishment encountered delays in part due to a high demand for skilled construction workers citywide.

[87][88][d] Part of the budget increase was attributed to corruption by several parties involved in the renovation,[87] including Contini, who was subsequently indicted for embezzling several million dollars.

[89] The cost of routine work rose ten times from normal levels, and the law firm which the MTA hired to negotiate the building's lease sent the agency invoices for $8 million in legal fees.

[91][92] The renovation was only about two-thirds complete at that time,[90][93][94] leading one reporter to write, "2 Broadway stands as a monument to what's wrong with the MTA and how it handles the public's money.

[12][14] Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in 1986 that, in comparison to the design for the Produce Exchange, "The successor at 2 Broadway, a legitimate descendant if one considers only the engineering drawings, looks as if it could be demolished with a can opener.

"[102] After SOM renovated the facade, the AIA Guide to New York City wrote that the exterior was a "sleek glass and elegant metal" cladding on what had been a "banal" structure.

[9] 2 Broadway was shown in the American comedy-drama film The Apartment (1960), produced and directed by Billy Wilder, as the building in which the characters played by stars Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, and Fred MacMurray work.