Cunard’s presence in New York dates back to 1848, but it wasn’t until 1921 that the company opened its glamorous Cunard Building at 25 Broadway in lower Manhattan, a Western counterpart to its famous Liverpool headquarters. Here’s a link to a New York Times report published on the day before the structure opened. It’s an interesting read.
As the story notes, the building was lavishly decorated and featured a variety of tenants, most related to Cunard and/or the shipping industry. The building also included two luxurious apartments: one for the use of Cunard’s managing director and the other for some guy named Rockefeller.
As the liner market declined, Cunard left its namesake building and New York. The company is now based in Miami, which has become the world’s busiest passenger ship port.
In the 1970s, the US Postal Service leased the Cunard Building’s lobby space for a branch post office, and packages and stamps are now exchanged in the Great Hall where people once bought passage on liners such as Mauretania, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth. If you ever visit the facility, be sure to check the walls for the many nautical-themed images, including Cunard’s routes.
Incidentally, despite a slumping commercial real estate market, the Cunard Building gained a major new tenant earlier this month. According to The Wall Street Journal, the American Thoracic Society, a medical association dedicated to fighting respiratory disease, has leased 25,000 square feet of the building’s 600,000-square-foot space.
The new tenant seems appropriate to me. After all, haven’t we all heard that a sea voyage is supposed to good for the lungs?
