The building was designed by the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill firm, and architect Raul de Armas.

It is constructed in a "layer-cake" or "ziggurat" design with yellow stone, black marble, and polished chrome.

At its north end were two concession stands built into the southern entrance stairs to the Metro-North station.

Throughout the plaza were several obelisk-like pillars, some of which were combined with canopies and glass bricks to form bus shelters.

[6][29] In the 1840s, what is now the intersection of Fordham Road and Webster Avenue was a rural junction in the town of West Farms, characterized by farmland and cottages with a few small businesses.

[1][2][31][32] Powell, who started the boarding school, was the founder of the St. Peter's Church, Chapel and Cemetery Complex in then-Westchester County (now Westchester Square, Bronx).

[6][32][38] In 1899 and 1902 respectively, the Bronx Zoo and the New York Botanical Garden were opened on the former eastern grounds of St. John's College.

[40] Because of these developments, the area's population exploded, and Fordham Road evolved into a major commercial district by the early 1900s.

[45] In 1912, the city municipal engineers released plans to construct a plaza between Third and Park Avenues south of Fordham Road.

[46] In September 1916, the Francis Rogers & Sons Department Store purchased the block on Fordham Road and Webster Avenue, then occupied by twenty two-story stores and office buildings,[47] to build what would become 400 East Fordham Road.

The project would also include a parking garage, a car dealership, and a scaled-down version of the planned central post office.

[65][67] The project had been proposed in part to stave off blight and economic downturn in the area due to the 1970s fiscal crisis, which had led city officials to try to prevent Fordham University from relocating out of the borough and into Westchester County, in addition to declare Fordham Road the northern boundary of the South Bronx to reduce the stigma of Fordham being associated with the rundown South Bronx.

[70] In 1981, the Sears location on Webster Avenue opened within the former space of the Rogers Department Store branch.

[8][9][10] In October 1984, a groundbreaking ceremony was held for One Fordham Plaza, the successor to the mall project of the 1970s and the first new office complex in the borough in over 25 years.

The Skidmore, Owings & Merrill-designed structure was built on the 5.5-acre (2.2 ha) former Postal Service property that had been a vacant urban-renewal site for over a decade prior; the USPS was paid $1.4 million in 1983 to give up the plot and move to a smaller site one block south on East 188th Street,[71][60][14] which is now the Fordham Post Office.

Construction began in 1995, paving the plaza with cobblestone and adding the bus shelters and obelisk sculptures.

The new Fordham Place, however, brought several new outlets, including the borough's first Best Buy location, a Walgreens pharmacy, and a new smaller Sears store.

[5][23][84] The project received funding from the United States Department of Transportation, including $7.2 million from the TIGER grant program.

These include the Bx12 and Bx41 Select Bus Service routes that run along Fordham Road and Webster Avenue respectively.

[4][87][89][90] With the closure of the Third Avenue El in 1973,[66][91][92] the closest subway stop to the plaza is the Fordham Road station of the IND Concourse Line six blocks west, along the B and ​D trains.