The Brill Building

The Brill Building at 1619 Broadway, on the corner of 49th Street in Midtown Manhattan, was the institutional centre of American popular songwriting from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s — a ten-storey office building in which publishers, producers, arrangers, and songwriters worked in adjacent offices, pitching songs to each other and to the record labels whose representatives came to Tin Pan Alley to find material. Paul Simon worked in the building as a young songwriter before Simon and Garfunkel's breakthrough, writing and pitching material alongside contemporaries including Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Neil Sedaka, and Barry Mann.

The Brill Building method — teams of professional songwriters producing material to order for particular artists or labels, working in small rooms with a piano and a deadline — was the dominant model of American pop production in the pre-Beatles era, and the building's concentrated creative environment produced an extraordinary proportion of the hit records of the period. The system trained songwriters to be prolific, economical, and commercial, and those lessons persisted even for writers like Simon who eventually moved well beyond it. The ability to write a song that worked — melodically, emotionally, commercially — was a Brill Building skill that Simon carried into everything he subsequently made.

The Brill Building at 1619 Broadway has been designated a National Historic Landmark. It continues to house music industry tenants and remains an active office building in the Times Square area. The address is one of the most significant in American popular music history — not for any single song or artist but for the institutional model of songwriting it represented, and for the remarkable concentration of talent that model attracted into a single building on a Midtown block.