replaced with a show window. The ground floor and basement of 256 Broadway was leased in 1964 by women's shop Plymouth Shops, Inc. Sapolsky & Slobodien installed air conditioning and replaced the windows between 1963 and 1969. A subsequent renovation was undertaken by Ira Greenburg in 1984, and the following October, 253 Broadway Associates bought the combined building. In 1988, the New York City Board of Estimate approved a plan for the government of New York City to rent and later buy the Home Life Building for $26 million. The Home Life Building was split vertically into two condominiums in 1989. The basement through second floor was owned by 253 Broadway Associates and used as retail space, while the upper floors were owned by the New York City government and used as offices; parts of the third floor were jointly owned. Among the agencies that had taken space in the city-owned portion of the building were the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the Mayor's Fund to Advance New York City. In 1991, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) designated the building as a landmark. The LPC started renovating six floors in the Home Life Building in 2016, intending to move its offices there the next year. However, the renovation's expected completion date was subsequently delayed to 2021, and the renovation cost increased from $29 million to $62 million. The city government announced in 2017 that it would renovate the Home Life Building with an estimated budget of $18.5 million. Critical reception When the buildings were completed in 1894, a writer for the Real Estate Record and Guide stated that they "war violently with one another, and the pity is, the strife is one [that] time can not mitigate". The writer concluded that "either would be better were the other away". Later critics did not view the different designs as conflicting. Architectural writers Sarah Landau and Carl W. Condit stated in 1996 that "it is hard to understand what seemed in 1894 so egregious", with the "only jarring discordance" being the glass blocks on 253 Broadway. In 2011, architectural critic Christopher Gray wrote in The New York Times that Postal Telegraph's "precise gray brick" building and Home Life's marble structure "almost civic in character" contrasted with each other. According to Gray, 253 Broadway initially received heavy criticism from architectural critics, even though "to 21st-century