The Whitehall Building is named after the nearby estate of New Amsterdam colonial governor Peter Stuyvesant.

The original building was built as a speculative development in 1902–1904 for Robert A. and William H. Chesebrough, a real estate company.

The Whitehall Building is located near the southernmost point on Manhattan Island, closer to its western shore.

The surrounding neighborhood, the Financial District, was the first part of Manhattan to be developed as part of New Netherland and later New York City; its population growth led city officials to add land on Manhattan's shore by filling and land reclamation in the 18th and 19th centuries.

[2] As the North River shoreline was deeper and had a denser concentration of buildings than the East River shoreline on the east side of Manhattan Island, the land under the Whitehall Building was not filled until 1835, when debris from the Great Fire of New York was dumped there.

Designed by Clinton and Russell, it was the largest office building in New York City at the time of its completion.

[8][10][11] Both structures contain Renaissance Revival facades with colorful granite, brick, limestone, and architectural terracotta cladding,[6][12] which in turn was inspired from the sites' highly visible location at the southern tip of Manhattan Island.

The center bay on West Street contains four steps, leading to a window that replaced a former entrance.

[21] The basement of the annex, which contains the building's boiler room and electrical equipment, was dug by timber and steel caissons.

[8][13] The annex superstructure contains 71 main columns, 53 of which sit atop forty-five granite foundation piers.

[19] 2 Washington Street (also known as 17 Battery Place North or One Western Union International Plaza), was built in 1972[b] and measures 271 feet (83 m) with 22 floors.

[27][28] The structure was designed by Morris Lapidus in the International Style,[29] and unlike the other two sections, does not have official landmark protection.

[31] The Battery Place Realty Company, which would develop what would become the Whitehall Building, was led by Robert Chesebrough,[2] a chemist known for discovering Vaseline,[32] along with his son William A.

[21] The old cellars of the previous structures on the site were excavated, and three 8-hour shifts of 100 men each were employed to drive the caissons.

[11] The Battery Place Realty Company had expanded its land holdings by 1904, so that they owned 150 feet of the block frontage on West and Washington Streets.

[39] The Battery Place Realty Company started soliciting construction bids for an annex to the Whitehall Building in 1908.

[19] The annex was completed by late 1910,[11] excluding the section facing Washington Street, which was not constructed during that time.

[5][11] By 1911, rents at the original Whitehall Building and its annex averaged $1.70 per square foot ($18.3/m2), cheaper than comparable structures.

In the days before radio dispatching, a man high in the building would watch with a telescope for incoming ships, and then use a six-foot megaphone to shout instructions to the Moran tugboats docked at the Battery.

[53] Afterward, the Whitehall Improvement Corporation owned the building until 1950 when it was sold to the New York Life Insurance Company.

[56] By the 1970s, the Moran Towing Company had moved to the World Trade Center, while the McAllister Brothers, a rival firm, had occupied the Whitehall Building's 15th floor.

[59] The buyers, a group led by the banker Jeffrey A. Citron, Downtown Acquisitions Partners, hired Jones Lang Wootton the next year to resell the building[60] at an asking price of $60 million.

[64] SL Green ultimately bought part of the structures in 1997,[65] paying $58 million for 800,000 square feet (74,000 m2) of space.

[64] The group intended to convert the upper floors to 500 rental apartments with their main address at One West Street.

[64][67] The ground floor was to be used as a business center, while the residential structure would contain a parking lot, health club, and rooftop deck.

[68] SL Green sold the original building and its annex later that year to an affiliate of the Moinian Group.

[70][71] The residential conversion was nearly completed in 2001,[72] when developer Richard Bassuk arranged for Deutsche Bank to give Moinian a $208.5 million loan to finish the project.

To attract tenants after the September 11 attacks, Moinian used "clever tactics" such as furnished model apartments as well as large retailers at ground level.

As part of the reconstruction project, a 9,600-square-foot (890 m2) public plaza was erected outside the Whitehall Building, east of West Street.

[83][84] When originally built, the Whitehall Building was described as having "resembled a big chimney" and that it was the single most prominent structure for vessels docking on the East or North (Hudson) rivers.