The building was designed in a Neo-Renaissance style by Bruce Price with a later expansion by Herman Lee Meader.

Its articulation consists of three horizontal sections similar to the components of a column, namely a base, shaft, and capital, making the American Surety Building one of the earliest New York City skyscrapers to feature such a layout.

Between 1920 and 1922, an annex was built to designs by Meader, increasing the floor area and adding two stories to the building.

[1] Entrances to the New York City Subway's Wall Street station, served by the 4 and ​5 trains, are adjacent to the building.

[15] Price said that he wanted to "design a monumental structure", and as such he intended the facade to resemble "a campanile with four pilaster faces, the seven flutes represented by seven rows of windows".

[15] The original gilded parapet and the sculptures were removed in the 1920–1922 expansion, and a cornice with anthemia was installed atop the two-story penthouse.

Sooysmith was among the first builders to use pneumatic caissons for foundations, having used them in other projects such as the Manhattan Life Insurance Building.

The floors themselves were made of brick arches, concrete and ash aggregate, and steel joints, covered with a marble finish.

[5] The southern brick wall was 4 feet (1.2 m) thick to prevent fire from spreading to the Schermerhorn Building to the south.

[16][25] At the time of the building's construction, the thickness of a curtain wall was limited to 32 inches (810 mm), imposing a force of 80,000 pounds per foot (120,000 kg/m) on the foundation.

If the walls had been load-bearing, then they would have needed to be 84 inches (2,100 mm) thick, imposing a force of 150,000 pounds per foot (220,000 kg/m) on the foundation.

[27] When the building was expanded in 1920, a two-story penthouse was added, with 6,500 square feet (600 m2) of restaurant space on each floor.

[31] There was previously a banking room at street level, which contained a gold-leaf ceiling supported by four marble pillars.

According to architectural writer Kenneth Gibbs, these buildings allowed each individual company to instill "not only its name but also a favorable impression of its operations" in the general public.

[33][36] In the second half of the century, many firms in the Financial District were developing structures north of the neighborhood's traditional center of commerce at Wall Street.

[37] The American Surety Company was one of the insurance firms located within the Financial District, having been established in 1881 at 160 Broadway.

[39] The same year, the company announced that it wanted to build a 15-to-20-story headquarters tower, to be built on their lot measuring 100 by 85 feet (30 by 26 m).

[40][41] Price's design called for a relatively simple building with a flat roof, and took inspiration from his previous commission for 280 Broadway.

[5][44] The campanile, as well as the progressively recessed windows, had been inspired by a failed plan for a structure opposite City Hall, which would have housed the New York Sun.

[45] The foundation work took eight to nine months, representing about forty percent of the total time allocated for the building's construction.

[11][28] The work included a new L-shaped annex that widened the building by 40 feet (12 m), the width of four bays, on both Pine Street and Broadway.

The entrance portico on Broadway was shifted to the center of the facade; two figures on the 14th and 15th floors were removed; and a two-story penthouse was added.

[11][13][28] The New York Herald reported in July 1921 that the company had picked a leasing agent for the annex,[55] and the work was completed the next year.

[32] Real estate investor Irving Brodsky bought the building in 1962,[3] just after the American Surety Company merged with Transamerica Corporation.

In addition, the ground-floor banking and commercial spaces were reconfigured into an open arcade, with the colonnade shielding a glass wall behind it.

[63][64] During the early 1990s, the Bank of Tokyo vacated 150,000 square feet (14,000 m2) of space it occupied at 100 Broadway, moving to 1251 Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan.

[69][70] TD Ameritrade occupied the remaining retail space in 2013,[71] and Northwood Investors bought the building the same year for $150 million.

[9] Architecture critic Russell Sturgis praised the ground-floor colonnade in 1899 as "a masterly adaptation of the loveliest forms of antiquity" reinforced by the pilasters on Pine Street and Broadway.

[13][76] Architecture critic Montgomery Schuyler said in 1913 that the building design was one of the first to use "the column analogy" that became popular at the beginning of the 20th century.

[13][77] After the 1975 modernization project, critic Ada Louise Huxtable called 100 Broadway "one of those sleeper landmarks (undesignated) of which New York has so many more than anyone realizes—an outstandingly fine early skyscraper".