This they did, masterfully navigating the era’s strict building regulations. On completion, critic C. Matlack Price commended their success, comparing the building to “great Babylonian buildings, with terraces and gardens flaunting themselves hundreds of feet in the air”. Topped by a copper-clad tower, the new Heckscher Building as it was named, rose from a podium-like base with a Neo-Classical façade and French Renaissance detailing.
Above the building’s crown-like finial – its eponymous feature in later years – perched a 12-foot gold-plated weathervane in the form of a rooster which stood as a beacon of progress until its removal in 1942 to serve a higher calling: It was melted down to support the war effort.