Manhattan". The beam of light, designed by Howard Brandston, was known as Icon. Features 17 State Street's office stories are supported by aluminum columns, which rise above ground level. The building's main lobby is a glass rotunda measuring across. The rotunda leads to a pair of rectangular elevator lobbies, which contain walls with "X"-shaped trusses. The ceilings of the elevator cabs contain translucent panels, while the walls of these elevators are clad with gray enamel. A second set of elevators serves all stories above the 22nd floor. At night, the walls of the lobby were illuminated. Next to the lobby was a public exhibition space called "New York Unearthed", which was operated by the South Street Seaport Museum and displayed artifacts that had been excavated in Lower Manhattan. It opened in 1990 and was closed to the public around 2005. Artifacts were also displayed in a hole that had been excavated into the pavement. The New York Times cites the building as having a total floor area of . The Times cites each of the building's stories as containing about of office space, while building owner RFR Holding cites each story as containing . Each story is high. According to Goldberger, the offices were designed to a particularly high quality. The office stories contained full-height windows with small radiators beneath each window, and the restrooms included backlit mirrors above stainless-steel sinks. There were two restrooms on each story, which were restricted to that story's tenants. Due to the relatively small size of the building, these office stories were largely marketed toward small tenants. When the building opened, Melvyn Kaufman wanted to lease the space to foreign companies. History Construction The William Kaufman Organization and JMB Realty jointly developed the building as a speculative development, without any primary tenant at the time of construction. Work on the building began in 1985. Workers were demolishing the Seamen's Church Institute headquarters on the site that September. Melvyn Kaufman said that the old building was "absolutely unusable for anything but exactly what it was designed for"; the old building was so small that he could touch the ceilings. After the Seamen's Church Institute had been demolished, workers started excavating the site in February 1986. Work was temporarily halted in April 1986 after a staff member of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) determined that the site might contain artifacts relating to the