ManhattanSkyscrapers

ManhattanSkyscrapers

R E V I S E D A N D E X PA N D E D E D I T I O N

Eric P. NashP H OTO G R A P H S B Y Norman McGrath

I N T R O D U C T I O N B Y Carol Willis

P R I N C E T O N A R C H I T E C T U R A L P R E S S N E W Y O R K

P U B L I S H E D B Y

Princeton Architectural Press37 East 7th StreetNew York, NY 10003

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No part of this book may be used or reproduced in anymanner without written permission from the publisher,except in the context of reviews.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges all of the individualsand organizations that provided photographs for this publi-cation. Every effort has been made to contact the owners ofcopyright for the photographs herein. Any omissions will becorrected in subsequent printings.

F I R S T E D I T I O N

D E S I G N E R : Sara E. StemenP R O J E C T E D I T O R : Beth HarrisonP H O T O R E S E A R C H E R S : Eugenia Bell and Beth Harrison

R E V I S E D A N D U P D AT E D E D I T I O N

P R O J E C T E D I T O R : Clare JacobsonA S S I S TA N T S : John McGill, Lauren Nelson, and Dorothy Ball

S P E C I A L T H A N K S T O :

Nettie Aljian, Nicola Bednarek, Janet Behning, Penny (YuenPik) Chu, Russell Fernandez, Jan Haux, Clare Jacobson,John King, Mark Lamster, Nancy Eklund Later, Linda Lee,Katharine Myers, Jane Sheinman, Scott Tennent, JenniferThompson, Paul G. Wagner, Joe Weston, and Deb Wood ofPrinceton Architectural Press

—Kevin Lippert, Publisher

L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S

C ATA L O G I N G - I N - P U B L I C AT I O N D ATA

Nash, Eric Peter.Manhattan skyscrapers / Eric P. Nash ; photographs by

Norman McGrath ; introduction by Carol Willis.—Rev. andexpanded ed.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references.ISBN 1-56898-545-2 (alk. paper)1. Skyscrapers—New York (State)—New York. 2. Architec-ture—New York (State)—New York—20th century. 3. Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)—Buildings, structures, etc. I. McGrath, Norman. II. Title.NA6232.N37 2005720'.483'097471—dc22

2005002264

Para Rebecca, rosa rara, perla preciosa, hija hermosa de la luna

Hearst Magazine Building

(originally International Magazine Building)

Chanin Building

One Fifth Avenue

Helmsley Building

(originally New York Central Building)

Fuller Building

Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower

(now Republic National Bank)

Downtown Athletic Club

Daily News Building

40 Wall Street

(originally the Bank of

Manhattan Company Building)

Chrysler Building

San Remo Apartments (originally San Remo Hotel)

Riverside Church

120 Wall Street

500 Fifth Avenue

Empire State Building

Waldorf-Astoria Hotel

McGraw-Hill Building

General Electric Building

(originally RCA Victor Building)

City Bank Farmers Trust Company Building

Cities Service Building (now 70 Pine Street)

Acknowledgments

Introduction by Carol Willis

American Tract Society Building

Bayard-Condict Building

Park Row Building

Flatiron Building

West Street Building (now 90 West Street)

Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower

Bankers Trust Company Building

(originally 14 Wall Street)

Woolworth Building

Municipal Building

Candler Building

Equitable Building

Bush Tower

Shelton Towers Hotel

(now Marriott East Side Hotel)

American Radiator Building

Ritz Tower

Paramount Building

Barclay-Vesey Building

Fred F. French Building

Beekman Tower (originally Panhellenic Tower)

Tudor City

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Trump Tower

IBM Building

AT&T Building (now Sony Building)

Marriott Marquis Hotel

Lipstick Building

425 Lexington Avenue

Worldwide Plaza

1585 Broadway

(originally Solomon Equities Building)

Bertelsmann Building (originally 1540 Broadway)

712 Fifth Avenue

World Financial Center

Four Seasons Hotel

LVMH Building

Times Square Buildings

Trump World Tower

Austrian Cultural Forum

Westin New York at Times Square

Time Warner Building

Bloomberg Tower

Freedom Tower

Bibliography

Glossary

Credits

One Wall Street

(originally Irving Trust Company Building)

Metropolitan Life Insurance Company,

North Building

Rockefeller Center

100 Park Avenue

United Nations Secretariat

Lever House

Seagram Building

Time & Life Building

Union Carbide Building

(now Chase Manhattan Bank)

Chase Manhattan Plaza

Pan Am Building (now Met Life Building)

CBS Building

Silver Towers (originally University Plaza)

Marine Midland Bank Building (now 140 Broadway)

General Motors Building

One Astor Plaza

XYZ Buildings: Exxon, McGraw-Hill,

and Celanese Buildings

W. R. Grace Building

1 and 2 World Trade Center

One Liberty Plaza (originally U.S. Steel Building)

1 and 2 UN Plaza

Citicorp Center

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A b o o k , like a skyscraper, is puttogether by many unseen hands.Thanks to my editors and drafts-men, Beth Harrison at Princeton

Architectural Press and Julie Iovine at the NewYork Times, for their sharp minds and pencils,and general grace under pressure. My publisher,Kevin Lippert, provided the site to build upon.Norman McGrath created the framework ofcolor photographs by which this sheath of texthangs. Eugenia Bell laid the foundation withintrepid archival photo research. Like a mastermason, the design director Sara Stemen put thepieces in place. Sylvie Ball did the finish carpen-try with several supplemental photographs, andthe architectural historian John Kriskiewiczhelped get the customers in the door with hisinsightful introduction. Carol Willis, the direc-tor of the Skyscraper Museum, deliriously trans-formed my view of the city when I learned inher class at the New School for Social Researchthat the Empire State Building’s crown wasdesigned as a mooring mast for zeppelins. Andthanks to my sister, Laura, who has been as trueas a surveyor’s level in helping me set my sights.

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Acknowledgments

Wow! New York, just like I pictured it . . . skyscrapers and everything!

—Stevie Wonder

...when I try to imagine a faultless love

Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur

Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

—W. H. Auden

In the first half of the history of the NewYork skyscraper, steel frames were clad in stone,brick, or terra cotta and offered the illusion ofmonumental mass. In the second half, from the1940s through today, the aesthetic has beenprincipally transparent planes and volumes, acurtain wall that reveals the structural systemand the space within. Advances in technology,including high-strength steel, bolted and weldedskeletons, curtain-wall systems, air-conditioning,and fluorescent lights, made these innovationspossible, and the triumph of International Stylemodernism made the glass box ubiquitous.McGrath has a special empathy for the mod-ernist towers, shooting them for the most parteither face-on or slightly angled to define theirprecise prismatic volumes. From the paragons ofthe style—Lever House, Seagram Building, andBlack Rock (CBS Building), to the interchange-able tower-in-the-plaza slabs of Sixth Avenueand other like-minded monoliths—Nash andMcGrath give Manhattan modernism duerespect. Likewise, the buildings of the lastdecades of the century, which range from theslick surface of the Lipstick Building, the pun-ning postmodern AT&T (Sony) Building, andthe collaged façades of 4 Times Square, to thefolded-glass envelopes of 1 and 2 UN Plaza andthe faceted LVMH Building, are presented withflair, flash, and cool.

Still, Manhattan Skyscrapers has an every-day quality, in the best sense of the word.McGrath’s photographs generally portray hissubjects in full daylight (not the dramatic rakinglight of dawn or sunset or other types of atmos-pherics), and the towers are embedded in thecity, as they are in life. These are the buildings,from masterpieces to mundane, that NewYorkers see around them every day. Nash’sentries are minihistories that are sensitive, infor-mative, and fun to read: they make the buildingsapproachable.

One thing we have learned from 9/11 isthat the everyday architecture we take forgranted is really something to treasure. The TwinTowers were giants the likes of which we will notsee again. But contrary to the questions posed byso many journalists and writers in the monthsafter the tragedy, it is clear that New York isgoing to keep building towers. ManhattanSkyscrapers will surely have another new edition.

Sk y s c r a p e r h i s t o r y changedon September 11, 2001. This book,first published in 1999, needs a newedition, if only to place the entry on

the World Trade Center in the past tense and toacknowledge that the title is tinged with tragedy.Academics debate perspectives through whichwe view the past, and in the late twentieth cen-tury the postmodern mindset argued the impos-sibility of a single truth or unshifting narrative.But the first year of the twenty-first centuryproved that there are some historical markersthat are definitive and indelible.

Exactly what has changed, though, is hardto pinpoint. “Our first skyscraper martyrs” is howcritic Paul Goldberger described the loss of thetwin towers and the emotional public response.New York’s shared sorrow over the structuresstands in striking contrast to sentiments in thelast years of the twentieth century, when therewas a clear animus in the city against tall build-ings. Preservationists and good-governmentgroups marshaled protests and lawsuits thatstymied towers such as the early Columbus Circleproject (now completed as the Time WarnerBuilding), and the Department of City Planningsought to curtail height by revising the zoningcode in an ultimately failed effort inelegantly, butaptly, named the Unified Bulk Proposal.

Post 9/11, there seems to have been a shiftin both popular and critical perception: soaringheight now seems to transcend the association ofprivate interests and investment and represent acollective identity. There is a new emotionalconnection to the skyline. The fervent desire tofill the void at Ground Zero with a monumentaltower has had overwhelming support, even if thedesign of the Freedom Tower has been contro-versial. Other bold tower proposals throughoutthe city by international celebrity architects havebeen eagerly embraced.

Lamenting lost landmarks is a tradition inwriting about New York, especially since the1960s, when the demolition of masterworkssuch as Pennsylvania Station spurred grassrootspolitical efforts to create the LandmarksPreservation Commission. Books like NathanSilver’s classic Lost New York (1967) mourned the disappearance of the nineteenth-centuryarchitecture of the city—from individual man-sions, to blocks of early row houses, to grand

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civic and commercial structures of two to tenstories. The Destruction of Lower Manhattan(1969), an album by photographer DannyLyons, captured the last remnants of down-town’s working waterfront at the moment ofmassive urban renewal, including the construc-tion of the new World Trade Center. In this storyline, skyscrapers were the ultimate villainsin a march of modernity that squashed humanscale and erased history.

It is a cliché that the essential characteristicof New York is continuous change. But a walkthrough the streets today—the dense urban fab-ric of lower Manhattan, the spine of Broadwayas it travels up the island, the corporate corridorof Park Avenue, still mixed with patrician co-opsand Art Deco hotels—shows how rich and rang-ing an archive of American architecture remainsin the city. In Manhattan Skyscrapers, we have ahappy survey of survivors.

Eric Nash and Norman McGrath haveselected a set of gems that span the 1890s to thepresent. From the early, eclectic American TractSociety Building and Louis H. Sullivan’s refinedBayard-Condict Building, to the Park RowBuilding, the turn-of-the-century title holder forworld’s tallest building, through the classicalmonumentality of the Flatiron Building,Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower,and Bankers Trust Company Building and theGothic spire of the Woolworth Building, we seethe highlights of the first, laissez-faire era of sky-scraper development, when no constraints tai-lored the foursquare form of these straight-upstructures.

The second era was distinctively shaped bythe setback formula of the 1916 zoning law,which produced the stepped-pyramid bases andslender tower shafts of the Art Deco stars of the1920s and early 1930s, including the Chanin,Chrysler, General Electric, and Empire Statebuildings. These Jazz Age greats have an impres-sive backup band in midtown that each get a riffhere. Downtown, a second scene hits the highnotes with the Wall Street cluster of 40 Wall,One Wall, and City Bank Farmers Trust andCities Service buildings. Clearly Nash’s favorites,the 1920s towers dominate the book in numberand personality, just as they seem to define NewYork in the mind’s eye of millions or in the top-ten lists of tourists.

IntroductionCAROL WILLIS

ManhattanSkyscrapers