The St. Paul Building was an early skyscraper at 220 Broadway, at the southeast corner with Ann Street, in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City.

The facade, cantilevered from the superstructure, contained several sets of double-height Ionic-style colonnades, as well as a group of three caryatids designed by Karl Bitter.

The rear (eastern) portion of the building was 22 floors tall and set back by 20 feet (6.1 m) from the lot line on Ann Street.

[11] Instead of carrying the foundation of the St. Paul Building down to the underlying rock, as with the city's other skyscrapers, the builders only excavated to the layer of sand 31.5 feet (9.6 m) deep, where the subbasement floor was to be located.

[12][13][14] Test loads of up to 13,000 pounds per square foot (620 kPa) were placed on the sand and left to sink 9 to 13 inches (230 to 330 mm), after which the ground was deemed stable.

[3][11][13] This was covered with a 12-inch (300 mm) layer of concrete, spread out over the entire area of the base to evenly distribute the building's weight.

[11][12][14] Installed above the concrete layer were pairs of steel bases that supported either grillage or short columns carrying the cantilever girders to shore up the party walls shared with other buildings.

[11][12][13] The foundation did not use piles, as in the nearby Park Row Building and 150 Nassau Street, because the sand was already highly compacted.

[3] The original plans called for hydraulic jack screws to be installed at the bottom of the columns, which could raise the entire building's 15,000-short-ton (13,000-long-ton; 14,000 t) weight.

[2][15] The masonry and windows in each of the bays were supported by parallel columns and perpendicular I-beams, which in turn were cantilevered at the ends of the girders underneath the floors.

[2][4] The superstructure's steel beams were painted with a special mixture three times before installation: twice at the shops where they were made, and once more at the building site.

[9] The New York City Fire Department demonstrated the strength of the standpipe in an 1899 test where the pipe burst after four minutes of operation.

[25][26] During the early 20th century, notable tenants at the St. Paul Building included The Outlook magazine,[27] where Theodore Roosevelt was an associate editor after he served as U.S.

[8][31] AT&T's Western Electric division outgrew the AT&T headquarters at 195 Broadway, immediately to the southwest, in the 1950s, having made significant profits during the Cold War.

[32] In 1957, Western Electric started planning its own structure diagonally across Broadway and Fulton Street, at the site of the St. Paul Building.

[44] Elmer Taflinger, described as the "grand old man of Indiana art", had presented a plan to move the sculptures and part of the St. Paul Building's lower facade to Holliday Park.

Before Indianapolis won the sculptures, Taflinger had proposed moving them to Indiana University Medical Center or to a bridge over the White River.

[45] After sitting in boxes for two years,[46] the sculptures were installed in Holliday Park in 1960, atop columns made specifically to house them, as part of a grouping called The Ruins.

[9] One critic characterized it as having "perhaps the least attractive design of all New York's skyscrapers",[1][9][48] second only to the Shoe & Leather Bank Building at Broadway and Chambers Street.

[48] The Real Estate Record and Guide stated in 1897 that "in execution it has the look of arbitrariness and caprice which is always unfortunate in a work of architecture, and which is, perhaps, especially injurious in a tall building".

[49] Another critic for the Real Estate Record and Guide, writing in 1898, characterized the St. Paul and Park Row Buildings as "two domineering structures [that] swear at each other".

[52] Post himself was opposed to skyscrapers of over 300 feet (91 m), even including the St. Paul Building, due to his concerns that wind and fire could overcome such tall structures.