How One NYC Building Became America’s Pop Music Hit Factory

In the history of popular music, a handful of physical locations have left an indelible mark, serving as creative incubators, artist launchpads or cultural flashpoints. Think Abbey Road Studios in London. Or Motown’s Hitsville U.S.A. in Detroit. But few sites have produced the sheer number of classic pop hits as an 11-story edifice in New York City known as the Brill Building did in the late 1950s and early 1960s. 

In the decades after it first opened in the early 1930s, the Brill Building, named for the men’s haberdashery that originally occupied the ground floor, became a vertically integrated hive of hit-making. By the early 1960s, the structure at 1619 Broadway and 49th Street housed more than 160 tenants hailing from the music industry, including publishing companies, booking agents, vocal coaches, publicity agents, talent agents, radio promoters and performers. Writers and singers could lay down freshly minted songs in the building's basement recording studio and then walk upstairs to play them for tastemakers focused on the fast-growing teen market. In 2010, when the building was designated a historic landmark, The New York Times called it an “Art Deco sweatshop of smash hits.” 

In cramped rooms with little more than an upright piano, songwriting teams like Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, and Burt Bacharach and Hal David—along with individuals like Neil Sedaka, George Clinton, Paul Simon and Neil Diamond—churned out song after memorable, well-crafted song. Collectively, they penned hundreds of titles and scores of hits. Notable chart-toppers included “Jailhouse Rock” (recorded by Elvis Presley and spending seven weeks at #1), “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (the first song by a girl group—the Shirelles—to top the Billboard Hot 100) and the Dixie Cups’ “Chapel of Love” (which knocked the Beatles’ “Love Me Do” out of the #1 spot.) 

But Brill tunes did more than dominate the airwaves and soda-shop jukeboxes of their day. Many have enjoyed long and successful afterlives: New generations have recorded them. "American Idol" hopefuls have sung them. Oldies radio has played them endlessly, while commercial and movie soundtracks regularly reference them as toe-tapping cultural touchstones.

Most Brill songwriters were young, working-class Jewish strivers from Brooklyn, raised in families that sang along to their radios with Tin Pan Alley hits written by popular music predecessors such as Cole Porter and Irving Berlin. Brill writers of the 1950s and ’60s succeeded in melding that earlier generation’s craft with the rough energy of rock ‘n’ roll, the electricity of rhythm and blues and the Latin rhythms surging in New York streets.

“Expressing the optimism and outrage of the early civil rights movement, [the Brill Building catalog] amalgamated black, white and Latino sounds before multiculturalism became a concept…and integrated audiences before America desegregated its schools," wrote Ken Emerson in his 2005 book Always Magic in the Air: the Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era.

What came to be called the "Brill Building sound” featured soaring harmonies, hooky melodies and simple, repetitive lyrics that people could hum and sing even decades after first hearing them. (Think "Stand by Me," "I Say a Little Prayer" or “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.”) Released on labels like Aldon Music—based across the street at 1650 Broadway and co-owned by Don Kirshner, who came to be known as "the man with the golden ear"—many Brill era songs were made famous by Black recording artists such as Aretha Franklin, the Drifters and Dionne Warwick. The tunes proved especially well suited for girl groups like the Ronettes and the Chiffons. (Interestingly, the Brill's songwriting roster included an unprecedented number of women, including King, Cynthia Weil, best known for hits like "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" and "On Broadway"), and Ellie Greenwich, whose more than 25 gold and platinum song credits include "Da Doo Ron Ron" and "Leader of the Pack.")

The (mostly) white Brill writers took inspiration from Black musicians and wrote music equally popular with both races. Chief among them: Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber, big fans of blues and boogie woogie who started their partnership in the early 1950s—pre-Brill—writing for rhythm-and-blues stars like Amos Milburn and Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton. The Brill also hosted a handful of Black writers. Future Parliament Funkadelic front man George Clinton, for one, wrote songs for the Jackson 5 and the Supremes, among others. And Otis Blackwell, whose catalog of more than 1,000 songs have sold nearly 200 million records, wrote hits for mostly white artists like Elvis ("All Shook Up," "Don't Be Cruel"), Jerry Lee Lewis ("Great Balls of Fire") and Peggy Lee ("Fever").

“The Brill Building represents this moment where whites and Blacks are listening to very much the same music for a very short amount of time,” Jason King, then a professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University, told public radio program The World. “It’s a kind of golden moment in the early 1960s of a biracial pop culture.”

These young composers huddled over their sheet music in tiny rooms throughout the building. As Carole King recalled in Simon Frith’s book The Sociology of Rock, the rooms could accommodate a small team of writers, a piano and “maybe a chair for the lyricist if you were lucky.” 

Several writers in those musical cubbies graduated to becoming star performers themselves. King started her career alongside her then-husband Goffin, penning more than two dozen hit songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100, like “The Loco-Motion” for Little Eva in 1962 and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” for Aretha Franklin in 1967. She went on to become one of the most popular singer-songwriters of the next decade, with her 1971 Tapestry album earning four Grammy Awards. Likewise, Diamond made his name as a Brill-based songwriter with hits like “I’m a Believer,” a gold record for the Monkees in 1966, before becoming a sensation recording songs like 1969’s “Sweet Caroline.” 

By the late 1960s, the Brill Building’s music-industry dominance began to wane. The British Invasion and the rise of the Beatles, as well as the emergence of folk singers like Bob Dylan, placed a premium on topical relevance and self-expression over assembly-line pop ditties. What’s more, the Brill business model took a hit with the ascendance of singer-songwriters who authored their own material and thus didn’t have to share royalties with other writers. 

Another blow came when the music industry’s center of gravity shifted westward to Los Angeles. In addition, Black musicians and promoters began to establish their own publishing companies such as Detroit’s Motown Records, lessening many performers’ reliance on the largely white lyricists and composers at 1619 Broadway for material.

The Brill's songwriting has hardly been forgotten. Carole King's role in that fertile creative hub received renewed attention from both Alison Anders’ 1996 film Grace of My Heart and 2013's "Beautiful: The Carole King Musical." Hit songwriter Ben Folds has cited Brill alum Neil Sedaka as an influence, even writing a song titled "Nothing Manly About Walking Around Singing Neil Sedaka." And when the supergroup the New Pornographers released its 2014 album Brill Bruisers, titled for the pop-music sweatshop, they celebrated with a sweaty concert on the building’s ground floor. 

A few years later, a group of New York-based music industry executives organized a songwriting camp, hoping to draw attention back to the Big Apple as a creative center from hubs like Los Angeles and Nashville. The name of their initiative? “Back to Brill.” The fact that the building where these writers labored at their upright pianos should remain such a powerful symbol decades later—in an era of digital recording studios and music streaming services—testifies to the enduring power of those young songwriters’ creations.