Brill Building


The Brill Building is an office building located at 1619 Broadway on 49th Street in the New York City borough of Manhattan, just north of Times Square and further uptown from the historic musical Tin Pan Alley neighborhood. It was built in 1931 as the Alan E. Lefcourt Building, after the son of its builder Abraham E. Lefcourt, and designed by Victor Bark Jr. The building is 11 stories and has approximately of rentable area.
The Brill Building is famous for housing music industry offices and studios where some of the most popular American songs were written. It is considered to have been the center of the American music industry that dominated the pop charts in the early 1960s. The "Brill" name comes from a haberdasher who operated a store at street level and subsequently bought the building. The Brill Building was purchased by 1619 Broadway Realty LLC in June 2013 and underwent renovation during the 2010s. A CVS Pharmacy opened on the first two floors of the building in 2019.

Big band era

Before World War II, the Brill Building became a center of activity for the popular music industry, especially music publishing and songwriting. Scores of music publishers had offices in the Brill Building. Once songs had been published, the publishers sent song pluggers to the popular bands and radio stations. These song pluggers would sing and/or play the song for the band leaders to encourage bands to play their music.
During the ASCAP strike of 1941, many of the composers, authors and publishers turned to pseudonyms in order to have their songs played on the air.
Brill Building songs were constantly at the top of Billboard's Hit Parade and played by the leading bands of the day:
Publishers included:
The Brill Building's name has been widely adopted as a shorthand term for a broad and influential stream of American popular music which enjoyed great commercial success in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. Many significant American and international publishing companies, music agencies, and record labels were based in New York, and although these ventures were naturally spread across many locations, the Brill Building was regarded as probably the most prestigious address in New York for music business professionals. The term "Brill Building Sound" is somewhat inaccurate, however, since much of the music so categorized actually emanated from other locations — music historian Ken Emerson nominated buildings at 1650 Broadway and 1697 Broadway as other significant bases of activity in this field.
By 1962, the Brill Building contained 165 music businesses. A musician could find a publisher and printer, cut a demo, promote the record and cut a deal with radio promoters, all within this one building. The creative culture of the independent music companies in the Brill Building and the nearby 1650 Broadway came to define the influential "Brill Building Sound" and the style of popular songwriting and recording created by its writers and producers.
Carole King described the atmosphere at the "Brill Building" publishing houses of the period:
The Brill Building approach—which can be extended to other publishers not based in the actual Brill Building—was one way that professionals in the music business took control of things in the time after rock and roll's first wave. In the Brill Building practice, there were no more unpredictable or rebellious singers; in fact, a specific singer in most cases could be easily replaced with another. These songs were written to order by pros who could custom fit the music and lyrics to the targeted teen audience. In a number of important ways, the Brill Building approach was a return to the way business had been done in the years before rock and roll, since it returned power to the publishers and record labels and made the performing artists themselves much less central to the music's production.

Writers

Many of the best works in this diverse category were written by a loosely affiliated group of songwriter-producer teams—mostly duos—that enjoyed immense success and who collectively wrote some of the biggest hits of the period. Many in this group were close friends and/or married couples, as well as creative and business associates—and both individually and as duos, they often worked together and with other writers in a wide variety of combinations. Some recorded and had hits with their own music.
Other musicians who were headquartered in The Brill Building:
Among the hundreds of hits written by this group are "Yakety Yak", "Save the Last Dance for Me", "The Look of Love", "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do", "Devil in Disguise", "The Loco-Motion", "Supernatural Thing", "We Gotta Get Out of This Place", and "River Deep, Mountain High".

Musicians

The following is a partial list of studio musicians who contributed to the Brill Building sound:
Many of these writers came to prominence while under contract to Aldon Music, a publishing company founded in 1958 by industry veteran Al Nevins, and aspiring music entrepreneur Don Kirshner. Aldon was not initially located in the Brill Building, but rather, a block away at 1650 Broadway.
A number of Brill Building writers worked at 1650 Broadway, and the building continued to house record labels throughout the decades.
Toni Wine explains:

Businesses at 1619 Broadway (Brill Building) and 1650 Broadway

1619 Broadway

Roosevelt Music

In popular culture

The 1996 film Grace of My Heart is in part a fictionalized account of the life in the Brill Building. Illeana Douglas plays a songwriter loosely based on Carole King. Similarly, Broadway musical depicts King's early career, including her songwriting at 1650 Broadway.
In Sweet Smell of Success, J.J. Hunsecker and his sister Susie live on one of the upper floors of the Brill Building. The title of the 2014 New Pornographers power pop album Brill Bruisers is a reference to the 60's-era Brill Building studio sound. In the HBO series Vinyl, the fictitious record label American Century is headquartered in the Brill Building.
Jack Dempsey's Broadway Restaurant was located in Brill Building's first floor on Broadway.
Features in several episodes of the Broadway themed NBC musical drama Smash.

Renovations and current use

In 2017, musician Jimmy Buffett's hospitality company considered the building for a Margaritaville restaurant. It had investigated taking across the ground floor, second floor and the 11-floor roof. The deal fell through when CVS Pharmacy leased some of that space instead. The CVS opened in 2019.