The Jefferson Market Branch, New York Public Library

Once known as the Jefferson Market Courthouse. A tall octagonal wooden fire lookout tower was the first building on the site, built circa 1833, located in the center of the merchants' sheds at the Jefferson Market that had been established at this site in 1832 and named for the late President. Court sessions were held in the Jefferson Assembly Rooms that rose above the market sheds. The wood tower and the market structures were torn down by the city to build a new courthouse, the adjacent Jefferson Market Prison building that stood on the corner of West 10th Street and Greenwich Avenue and new coordinated market housing (built in 1883). Of the carefully massed eclectic and picturesque group, only the former Courthouse now remains.

The commission for the new courthouse went to the firm of Vaux and Withers, but as Calvert Vaux was busy with the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the design fell to his partner, the English-born Frederick Clarke Withers. Withers came from the same background as Vaux, so it is not unusual this his High Victorian Gothic design was similar in some respects to the "Ruskinian Gothic" aesthetic of Vaux's early buildings, such as in its polychrome materials – red brick, black stone, white granite, yellow sandstone trim and variegated roof slates. Reasoning that a building with a clock tower was going to look like a church no matter what he did, Withers decided to add church-like touches with non-religious content, such as the tympanum which shows a scene from The Merchant of Venice instead of the usual scene of Christ sitting in judgment or other ecclesiastical subject matter. The building also features stained glass windows and a fountain decorated with birds and animals.

The courthouse was completed in 1877, and in 1885 a panel of American architects sponsored by American Architect and Building News voted it the fifth most beautiful building in America
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