[1]: 3  Earlier, the Van Cortlandt sugar house stood on the west end of the plot – a notorious British prison where American soldiers were held during the Revolutionary War.

It was a frame structure, said to be favored by the clerks and traveling salesmen in the dry goods trade, which centered in that neighborhood at the time.

Claflin, together with associates, replaced the sugar house and hotel with a new building, huge for its time,[5] occupying the entire strip: five neo-Romanesque stories of yellowish brick with terracotta trim, except the basement, which was cut brownstone.

[6]: 46  The basement was below Broadway but above Trinity Place, owing to the land slope, and was completely given over to the dry goods store of Claflin, Mellin & Company.

[5] When the building was finally emptied on April 30, 1903, a list of individuals and firms was published with their new addresses; it comprised more than 130 names, mostly lawyers and real estate businesses.

[12] In 1901 Harry S. Black, who had just taken over the George A. Fuller Company from his late father-in-law, established the United States Realty and Construction Company, a powerhouse development organization with some of the biggest names in New York real estate, including Robert Dowling, Henry Morgenthau, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Charles F. Hoffman.

It then acquired a large percentage of the George A. Fuller Company (general contractor for these commissions), and the well-established New York Realty Corporation, among other holdings.

The corporation was formed to combine three functions: to purchase real estate for investment and sale, to erect buildings through the George A. Fuller Company, and to raise capital to do both.

To attain maximum exposure to light for both skyscrapers with a minimum of interior offices, it was planned that the buildings would be erected on equal, full-block sites.

The seminal 1893–94 17-story Manhattan Life Insurance Building, by Kimball and his partner at the time, George Kramer Thompson, is credited with being the first skyscraper with a full iron and steel frame, set on pneumatic concrete caissons (although the front masonry wall was load-bearing).

These caissons were sunk through quicksand to bedrock, an average depth of 80 feet below the curb, and may have been the deepest foundations ever put down in New York to that time.

Not only did these two buildings set world records for rapidity of construction, but they were also considered to be the costliest business structures ever, together totaling $15 million, including land.

[1]: 5 For decades after 1907, of the four large facades only one was visible from a distance of more than 34 feet: the south side of the Trinity Building, lining the open churchyard.

[20]: 12 [21] The commission for the design of both was given to Francis H. Kimball, a devoted and prolific Gothic Revivalist who was an early advocate of Neo-Gothic style for office buildings.

[1]: 5 Both buildings have a direct connection to the Wall Street station of the New York City Subway's IRT Lexington Avenue Line.