[7][8][9] When it opened in the 1950s Lewis Mumford praised it for its design, and architect Robert A. M. Stern in the 1990s considered it a historic building and potential landmark.

In 2012, New York University (NYU) reached an agreement with the MTA to take over the building and renovate and restore it to become part of its Brooklyn Campus.

The 13-story building was designed by architects William Haugaard and Andrew J. Thomas in the post-World War II modernist style.

[4][5] The building was originally designed prior to World War II, and was envisioned in the Art Deco style.

[15] A loading dock for the building and the entrance to its basement parking facilities is located at the north end of Pearl Street.

[18] The outer facade of the building consists of white limestone, five inches thick, with over 1,000 identical square and uniformly-arranged casement windows.

[7][16][17] Until 2015, one of the walls of the south arcade featured a 15-foot granite relief commemorating the transportation employees who fought in World War II.

[19][21][22] The memorial has since been moved to the nearby New York City Transit Authority headquarters, two blocks south at Livingston and Smith Streets.

[19][30][31] The upper mechanical floors housed the telephone exchange for the BOT and later the Transit Authority, the largest in the city at the time of its construction.

[15] Rented facilities included a bank (occupied by Citibank) and restaurant at ground level, which have since closed.

Across from the building to the east is One MetroTech Center, while the campus of the New York University Tandon School of Engineering is just north across the Myrtle Avenue Promenade.

It was sold to a realty company involved in the building's construction by the New York City Board of Estimate at the cost of $365,000.

[11] The original design was altered, including changes to the outer facade and the addition of the arcades at both ends of the structure.

[42][28][41] On May 8, 1952, the subway entrances between the building's arcades and the Jay Street IND station, including the four escalators, were completed.

Not a cathedral of commerce, not a temple of advertising, not a palace of municipal power: just a group of offices arranged for the efficient dispatch of administration.

[12][48][55] The original futuristic design plan for the renovation was submitted to the applied sciences competition held by mayor Michael Bloomberg and the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the same competition that led to the establishment of the Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island.

The original NYU design for 370 Jay Street included a "high-tech, high-performance" outer facade of glass and steel using recycled materials to improve temperature insulation, along with other energy efficient features.

[59][60][61] As part of the NYU renovation, the MTA relocated the World War II memorial to 130 Livingston Street in June 2015, and held a re-dedication ceremony in August 2015.