Its construction came at the end of a decade of extensive redevelopment which transformed service-oriented West 43rd Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues into a locus of prestigious hotels and club buildings. Its largely intact, stately facade is the result of professional developments in the New York Fire Department during the nineteenth century. The graceful proportions and Renaissance-inspired vocabulary of the exterior are derived, for the most part, from the Beaux-Arts architecture of the influential 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.