28 Liberty Street (One Chase Manhattan Plaza): SOM Architecture, Suite SC301 Concourse & Manhatta Guide

1. David Rockefeller, Gordon Bunshaft & The 1961 Rebirth of Downtown

By the mid-1950s, Lower Manhattan's Financial District faced an existential crisis. For three decades following the completion of 1930s Art Deco spires like 70 Pine Street, 20 Exchange Place, and 99 John Street, not a single major corporate office tower had been constructed south of Fulton Street. Major banks and industrial corporations were fleeing the cramped, sunless 19th-century street canyons of Wall Street for the gleaming glass avenues of Midtown's Park Avenue.

Following the 1955 merger of the Chase National Bank and the Bank of the Manhattan Company (originally founded by Aaron Burr in 1799), Vice Chairman David Rockefeller made a bold urban bet: rather than abandon Lower Manhattan, Chase Manhattan would consolidate its scattered presence across nine downtown buildings into a single, visionary headquarters that would anchor the Financial District for the second half of the twentieth century.

Rockefeller commissioned Gordon Bunshaft, chief design partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), who had just revolutionized corporate modernism with the 1952 Lever House on Park Avenue. Completed in May 1961 as One Chase Manhattan Plaza (and rebranded in 2015 as 28 Liberty Street following Fosun International's $725 million acquisition), the 60-story, 813-foot rectangular slab rejected the ziggurat wedding-cake setbacks of the 1916 Zoning Resolution. Instead, by merging two full city blocks (closing Cedar Street between Nassau and William streets) and dedicating 70% of the 2.5-acre site to an open pedestrian plaza, SOM won municipal approval to rise straight up from the plaza floor as an uninterrupted prism of matte anodized aluminum and floor-to-ceiling clear glass—directly inspiring the landmark 1961 NYC Zoning Resolution that incentivized Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS) across Manhattan.

2. Structural Engineering: External Steel Columns & The 90-Foot Bedrock Vault

From a structural engineering standpoint, 28 Liberty Street represents a watershed moment in high-rise design. Working alongside structural engineers Weiskopf & Pickworth and SOM's own engineering division, Gordon Bunshaft eliminated all interior structural columns within the main working office zones. Instead, the tower's massive gravity and wind loads are carried by two parallel rows of twenty external steel columns projecting visibly outside the aluminum-and-glass curtain wall along the long north and south facades, paired with a massive central elevator and mechanical core.

This external-column framing produced unobstructed 45-foot clear spans between the central core and the perimeter glass—allowing Chase Manhattan to configure vast, flexible clerical and trading floors without a single pillar blocking sightlines. Cladding the structural steel in natural-finish anodized aluminum panels gave the 813-foot tower a shimmering silver verticality that contrasted dramatically with the dark rusticated limestone of the 1924 Federal Reserve Bank of New York (33 Liberty Street) directly across the street.

Even more impressive is what lies beneath the plaza. While waterfront towers further east near South Street rest atop colonial timber cribbing and marine silt—a geotechnical divide explored in our Manhattan Bedrock Depth & Landfill Study—excavators at 28 Liberty Street drove deep concrete slurry walls and steel sheet piling down 90 feet below street grade directly into solid Cambrian-Ordovician Manhattan Schist bedrock. Containing five full subterranean stories (`B1` through `B5`) covering the entire 2.5-acre footprint, the substructure housed the largest commercial bank vault in the world at the time of its completion: a 350-foot-long, 985-ton reinforced-concrete and steel fortress sealed by six 45-ton Mosler vault doors resting directly on bedrock at the water table.

3. Museum Without Walls: Isamu Noguchi’s Sunken Garden & Dubuffet’s Trees

David Rockefeller famously launched the modern corporate art collection at One Chase Manhattan Plaza, transforming the 2.5-acre travertine-and-granite terrace into an open-air museum of postwar sculpture. Two museum-grade masterpieces permanently anchor the plaza:

4. Inside 28 Liberty St Suite SC301: Alamo Drafthouse & The Underground Concourse

One of the most frequent navigational queries in the Financial District is: "Where is 28 Liberty St Suite SC301, New York, NY 10005?" Following the 2009 designation of One Chase Manhattan Plaza's exterior and plaza as a New York City Individual Landmark by the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), new owner Fosun International retained Woods Bagot and SHoP Architects (the same firm behind Pier 17 at the Seaport) to reimagine 200,000 square feet of formerly private underground bank operations levels into a vibrant subterranean retail and entertainment destination.

In the building's addressing nomenclature, "SC" stands for Sub-Concourse. Specifically, Suite SC301 (located three levels below the plaza deck on Sub-Concourse 3) houses the 40,000-square-foot Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Lower Manhattan. Featuring 14 dine-in stadium auditoriums equipped with 4K laser projection, Dolby Atmos sound, and in-seat food and craft beer service—alongside The Press Room, a cocktail bar and letterpress museum showcasing vintage movie posters from the 1930s through the 1970s—Suite SC301 transformed 28 Liberty Street into a 7-day-a-week nightlife hub for residents of nearby conversions like 66 John Street and 70 Pine Street.

5. Manhatta on the 60th Floor: 800-Foot Culinary Vantage Point

Crowning the 60th and top floor of 28 Liberty Street—the exact aerie that once housed David Rockefeller’s private executive dining room and art-filled partner lounges—is Manhatta, along with its sister private event space, the Bay Room, operated by Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group (USHG).

Designed by Woods Bagot to honor the mid-century optimism of Bunshaft's 1961 curtain wall, Manhatta wraps all four exposures of the 60th floor at an elevation of nearly 800 feet above sea level. Because 28 Liberty Street sits at the geographic center of the Financial District peninsula, diners and cocktail guests at the north-facing bar look directly down into the canyons of City Hall Park, the Gothic towers of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the East River waterfront piers (Pier 17 and 161 Maiden Lane), while southern and western sightlines frame the Statue of Liberty, Governors Island, and New York Harbor.