The De Vinne Press Building is a commercial building and former printing plant at 393–399 Lafayette Street, at the corner of Fourth Street, in the NoHo neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, New York. The building was designed by the firm of Babb, Cook & Willard in the Romanesque Revival style. It is a New York City designated landmark and is on the National Register of Historic Places.
The De Vinne Press Building is seven stories high, excluding the raised basement. The facade is made of brick and terracotta, with decorations concentrated on the southern and western elevations, which face Fourth Street and Lafayette Street, respectively. Each facade includes segmental arches and round-arched windows, as well as horizontal belt courses. Inside, the building has a mostly rectangular floor plan. The interiors were designed in a utilitarian style and were intended to accommodate the weight of printing presses. The load-bearing walls are made of brick, and the structure also contains cast-iron columns encased in brick piers.
The building was built in 1885–1886 by Theodore Low De Vinne, a typographer and printer who led the De Vinne Press. He originally owned a 25 percent stake in the property, while the remaining share was owned by Roswell Smith, the founder of the Century Company. The structure expanded east between 1891 and 1892. The press closed in 1922, and De Vinne's heirs sold their interest to Smith's estate in 1929. The building was sold in 1938 to the Walter Peek Paper Corporation, which sold it in the early 1980s to Edwin Fisher. The ground floor has been occupied by Astor Wines and Spirits since 2006, while the upper floors were gradually renovated and converted to offices.
Site The De Vinne Press Building is at 393–399 Lafayette Street, on the northeast corner with Fourth Street, in the NoHo neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. The rectangular land lot measures , with a frontage of on Lafayette Street and on Fourth Street. To the east on the same block are the Merchant's House Museum, as well as a public park named Manuel Plaza and the Samuel Tredwell Skidmore House at 37 East Fourth Street. The Astor Library Building (now the Public Theater) and Astor Place Tower are also on the same block to the north. Other nearby buildings include the Firehouse of Engine Company No. 33 one block south; 357 Bowery one block east; and the Schermerhorn Building one block south.
The building's site was historically part of the estate of German-American businessman John Jacob Astor, who acquired the land in 1803 between present-day Astor Place and Great Jones Street. Astor subsequently built his mansion and horse stable nearby. In the 1830s, the wealthiest New Yorkers started to relocate northward from the present-day Financial District of Manhattan, and settled along Lafayette Place (now Lafayette Street). At the time, the area surrounding Lafayette Place was still mostly undeveloped. Residential development in the area peaked at that time before moving northward in the 1840s and 1850s. The surrounding area became a printing hub after the American Civil War, and there were over 20 publishers nearby by the 1880s. Partly due to the presence of the Astor Library, bookbinding and publishing firms such as The De Vinne Press and J.J. Little & Co. settled around Lafayette Place.
Architecture The De Vinne Press Building was designed in the Romanesque Revival style by the firm Babb, Cook & Willard;, p.64 the primary designer was likely Walter Cook, a partner in the firm. An addition to the building was completed in 1892. The structure consists of seven stories, excluding the raised basement; if the basement is counted, the building is eight stories tall. The architectural writer Henry-Russell Hitchcock compared the structure's design with that of the Marshall Field's Wholesale Store in Chicago. The De Vinne Press Building's design inspired that of another structure in Manhattan: the Tarrant Building, constructed in 1892 at 278–282 Greenwich Street.
Facade The De Vinne Press Building is one of several journalism-related buildings in New York City that were designed in a Rundbogenstil–inspired style, with arches and brick walls. The facade is made of brick and terracotta, with decorations concentrated on the southern and western elevations, facing the street. Both elevations include a mix of segmental arches and round-arched windows, which are interspersed through the facade. Due to the arrangement of the arches, the facade's appearance resembles the design of an old Roman aqueduct. The steel-and-glass windows are recessed deeply into the facade, and elaborate terracotta decorations are used sparingly. Belt courses run horizontally across the facade. The building's gable roof has a shallow slope and is supported by iron trusses, similar to other warehouse buildings of the time.
Lafayette Street
The Lafayette Street elevation to the west is seven bays wide. Both ends of the facade are ornamented with quoins. On the first through third stories, the three center bays each feature a triple-height archway. The central archway has an arched doorway to its second story, as well as spandrel panels with interlacing patterns. Roundels above the central archway at the third story bear the initials of the building's developer, Theodore Low De Vinne, and the building's year of completion, 1885. The decorations of the main entrance archway were intended to give the building a "domestic scale"; at the time of the building's completion, most of the surrounding structures were low-rise houses. The two outermost bays on either side feature two single-height arched windows on each of the first through third stories. The outermost windows on the first and second floors are segmental arches, while those on the third floor are round arches.
On the fourth floor are 13 segmentally arched windows, with one window in each of the four outer bays and three in each of the three inner bays. The three center bays contain triple-height round-arched window openings on the fifth through seventh floors, which are flanked by two single-height arched windows on each story. The triple-height windows are recessed deeply into the facade. The outermost windows on the fifth floor are segmental arches, while the outer windows on the sixth and seventh floors are round-arched. A belt course separates the eighth story from the floors below, and there are 13 round-arched windows on the eighth floor. A bronze cornice and a gable runs atop the eighth floor. When the building was finished, the bent iron beams of the cornice formed a gutter.
Fourth Street The Fourth Street elevation to the south is eleven bays wide. Because of the eastward annex, the Fourth Street elevation is no longer symmetrical. The original facade, which comprises the westernmost six bays, is similar in design to the Lafayette Street elevation, though with a different window arrangement.
In the four center bays of the original facade (now the second through fifth bays from the west), there are double-height segmental arches on the first and second floors, which are flanked by smaller arched openings in the first and sixth bays. On the third story, there are large segmental arches in the original facade's four central bays, while the outer bays have smaller windows. The fourth story of the original facade is divided into ten segmentally-arched windows, with two windows in each of the center bays and one window in each outer bay. On the fifth and sixth stories, the original center bays feature double-height round-arched window openings. The original outer bays each have one segmental-arched window on the fifth story and one round-arched window on the sixth story. On the seventh and eighth floors, the four center bays comprise a row of eight round arches, which are flanked by a single round arch in either of the outer bays.
The seventh bay from the west is flanked by quoins, visually separating the original building to the west and the annex to the east. Within this bay, the first story contains an entrance; the second and third stories have a double-height round arch; and the fourth story has a segmental arch. The upper stories of the seventh bay are recessed and consist of two double-height, round-arched window openings. The four-bay-wide annex to the east is decorated with a wrought-iron fire escape. In contrast to the rest of the building, the annex is topped by a terracotta cornice.
Interior The building has a mostly rectangular floor plan. The original building measures wide on Lafayette Street and wide on Fourth Street. The annex to the east measures wide on Fourth Street, narrowing to wide at the rear; the annex measures deep from front to rear. Because the De Vinne printing plant used paper and flammable materials extensively, the building was constructed with very few flammable materials, aside from wooden window frames. The load-bearing walls are made of brick, except for the interior light court, which has a curtain wall made of rolled-iron girders. The interiors are also supported by wrought-iron interior beams, which was typical for the period. The cast-iron columns inside the building are encased in brick and topped by angled brick capitals.
The interiors were designed in a utilitarian style, as the building was intended solely to function as a printing factory. The floor slabs were designed to support the weight of the printing presses, and they were originally covered in asphalt to absorb vibrations from the presses. The heaviest presses were placed in the cellar. This story was known as the vault and contained storage space for paper and stereotypes, as well as the heating plant and a web press. The cellar vault was illuminated by patent lights on the sidewalk. The cellar space was tall, with floor dimensions of . By the 2000s, the cellar space had been converted into a wine cellar. The basement also has microturbines, which are capable of generating .
The first floor had presses for fine printing. The main entrance led to a vestibule on the second floor, which had a spiral staircase made of iron, in addition to offices and presses. Of the three floors above, two were used for storage and one was used for typesetting. There was an office on the third floor, as well as composing rooms and press rooms. The sixth floor had a electrotype foundry; the piers on the sixth floor were thick, supporting the heavy equipment above. The top two floors had a bindery. The seventh floor also included dry presses, and the eighth floor had a storage room and mailroom. There were two staircases, one for women and one for men, at opposite corners of the building.
History Theodore Low De Vinne—a typographer, printer, and cofounder of the printing-history organization Grolier Club—had the building constructed for his printing company, Theodore L. De Vinne & Co. The firm printed several American magazines, including The Century, the St. Nicholas Magazine, and Scribner's Monthly. De Vinne also wrote books such as The Invention of Printing, Correct Composition, and Title Pages. The printer Roswell Smith, founder of the Century Company, published several of De Vinne's publications, including Scribner's Monthly and The Century.
De Vinne Press printing plant