Chapter 14 The 2000s

Many New Yorkers might have thought that by 2000, Forty-second Street had been built up as completely as it was likely to be, at least west of Eighth Avenue. The parking lots and industrial installations west of Ninth Avenue seemed eternal, and local people seldom thought about the motel at 515 West or took the sightseeing boat around Manhattan that departed from the cheerful terminal near the westernmost bus stop on Forty-second Street. But almost suddenly, changes occurred on the far west end of the street and by 2006, transformation was widespread. Even if most New Yorkers had no reason to visit Forty-second Street west of Eighth Avenue, there had in fact been new buildings, starting from the first years of the decade and a few even earlier, as we have seen.

To be sure, some New Yorkers and tourists had already ventured to Theater Row, where the companies and marquees changed names often but where most of the theater buildings remained occupied. Additional theaters came and went, either located in remodeled tenements such as the Nat Horne Musical Theater at 440 West, or swallowed by new construction, as at 420 West where a replacement theater was built on the premises. In 2000, the All-Stars youth theater program bought the ground floor and basement of the Armory, with architect Douglas Blader replacing the Actors’ Studio Free Theater and dance rehearsal studios which had operated in the building for the preceding few years. Many New Yorkers were still unfamiliar with the small theaters, though, and just patronized presentations in the larger older ones around Times Square. (https://streeteasy.com/building/the-armory accessed 8 19 2021)

Although widespread knowledge about improvements at the west end lagged behind actuality, the actuality steadily became more noticeable even if some of it still wasn’t good. The Carter Hotel (Chap.8 Fig.1) declined from its brief period of housing business people, and earned its title as the dirtiest hotel in America on the Trip Advisor website from 2004 to 2008. The rankings stopped but the Bed Bug registry continued to note the Carter’s condition. It had a small rival in the four-story brick Elk Hotel at 360 West, described politely as an hourly hotel. Its narrow rooms, filthy unpainted walls, and late art nouveau wooden headboards were last refreshed in the mid-1920s when the hotel opened.

But in 2007, the City inaugurated a subway extension of the 7 line along west Forty-second Street that then turned south to Hudson Yards. Cost considerations at the time eliminated a proposed station at Tenth Avenue that will cost far more in the future. Admirable survivors nearby included Kaufman’s Army and Navy surplus store (Chap. 2 Fig. 22), and the small restaurant that Louis Gritsipis refused to sell to the JD Carlisle Group, the original developers of the Atelier condominium, even when a fellow Greek-born American, architect Costas Kondylis. entreated him to do so. (Chap.10 Fig. 3a, 3b). The architectural firm of Swanke Hayden Connell renovated the Candler Building in 2002-3, after which the lowest floors were embellished by a large marquee for an enormous McDonald’s restaurant designed by Charles Morris Mount. The Hilton Times Square, designed in the preceding decade, opened close by. Across the street, the Regal cinema, part of the Westin E-walk complex, was constructed in 2001-03, soon after the Westin Hotel’s completion.

(For the Consulate: NYT 3 9 2005, p. E1; also https://www.nysun:“A Lapidus Gem—With Revisions,” accessed 1 25 2020. For the Elk: :https://untappedcities.com/2018/07/12/the-gritty-history-of-the-elk-hotel-one-of-times-squares-last-pay-by-hour-hotels/ accessed 8 14 2021. For Louis Grisipis: http://www.nysonglines.com/42st.htm; accessed 1 24 2021. Stern et al., New York 2000, p. 713; by then, Mass Mutual Life Insurance Company owned the building and Lehrer McGovern Bovis was general contractor for the renovation. For the Carter: NYT 1 2 2014, p. A17; also www.tripadvisor.com, s.v. Carter Hotel. For the Hilton Times Square under renovation by PBDW and the Getty Group in winter 2024-25 see hospitalitydesign.com/news/hotels-resorts/hilton-new-york-times-square-renovation/, also http://www.brianclarke.co.uk/work/works/item/284/5 accessed 8 29 2020.)

Early in the decade, there were other kinds of conservative holdouts. Not all builders and architects had fully computerized their operations. Charles V. Bagli, a real estate specialist at the New York Times, wrote about reluctant builders who had not embraced computer programs to create a digital trail for information such as drawings, schedules, and contracts that people would request in the future. Objections to computerizing had to do with cost, unfamiliarity with the tools, and a conservative love of paper and pencil, ink, or even obsolete manual typewriters. But by the end of the decade, just about every office had adopted digital tools

Some companies still refused to adopt open plan designs--a trend that had begun by the late 1970s although not universally embraced. Lawyers in particular were said to be reluctant to give up private offices where security, confidentiality, and silence could help their work. Nevertheless, the increasing use of personal telephones and laptop computers made the idea of flexible workspaces appealing to a good many businesses. Company officers may have hoped to avoid placing employees in cubicles and hoped to foster connection among staff members. Perhaps they hoped to save money by renting less square footage. This mixed response to design innovation meant that while extensive renovations took place in many office buildings, other interiors on Forty-second Street and elsewhere remained the same above ever-changing lobbies, improved elevators--the parts that clients see and use--and changing retail tenants

Another type of conservatism had to do with a phrase heard widely at the time: “Not in my backyard,” or NIMBY for short. It often had to do with protecting amenities such as views or sunlight or excluding low-income housing from a wealthier neighborhood. When the United Nations devised plans to expand to part of the bleak 1.3-acre playground at the East River, players of roller hockey and other citizens protested. Much of the objection had to do with opposition to the international organization’s increasing presence in the formerly residential neighborhood. It had led to a rise in rents owing to more competition for apartments. Some people did not want Congress to allocate taxpayers’ money for the UN, although the United States government was already behind in its required payments. They might have admitted that the UN buildings needed to replace decayed pipes and pumps, or that the organization needed to expand its library, or provide meeting rooms for the increased membership, but those were someone else’s problems to solve. A popular dog run would not be altered anyway. In the end, the playground survived, and the UN deferred improvement for several years.

Despite these fluctuating activities, the decade overall was marked by progress rather than hesitancy, and there was plenty of optimism until a global financial crisis occurred in 2008. (Jayne Merkel, “Times Square On the Record,” Oculus 62. #10. Summer. 2000, pp. 6-7). The ensuing recession had serious repercussions for the real estate industry. Companies disappeared, shrank, rented less space, and sublet some of their space. There were fewer tourists in the hotels and fewer patrons in restaurants, theaters, night spots, and bars. But while recovery was not immediate, it was not protracted.

Progress before early 2008 had meant building new office skyscrapers and expensive apartment houses and closing obsolete buildings that produced little revenue either for the owners or the city tax office. The decade saw a growing understanding of the environmental effects of building, and while that did not lead to immediate remedial action everywhere, it became a consideration for any builder who wanted a reputation as a good citizen. The immediately optimistic action had to do with substituting apartment houses for the parking lots and old buildings west of Eighth Avenue--usually tenements that often charged only controlled rents. This was optimistic largely for developers and tenants capable of paying high rents; it was a hardship for the people displaced from inexpensive apartments.

Since 1984, the developer Larry Silverstein had had his eye on the south side of Eleventh to Twelfth Avenue as a potential site for development. At first, he was uncertain about what to build but he understood that apartments would appeal to staff in the new office buildings that were sure to rise someday around Times Square. His understanding mirrored that of Fred F. French who had understood the relationship in the 1920s between Tudor City apartments at the opposite end of the street and Grand Central Terminal. In order to build anything at the far west end, Mr. Silverstein had to wait for rezoning in 1989 to permit residential use at a desirable scale, then survive a two-year lawsuit that protested the rezoning, and endure the unrealized threat of an enlarged convention center extending to Forty-second Street. To solve the last problem, he had received assurance that he could build on the air rights over the enlarged convention building but by the end of its planning, the Javits Convention Center ended farther south. Once that was certain, by 1999 the developer began to build apartments at what he named One River Place. He used a twenty-year tax abatement from the City; in return, he would provide a fifth of the units to New Yorkers earning maximum incomes of about $25,500 to $47,700--depending upon family size--under section 421a in the City’s Real Property Tax Law. He followed the rules of the Housing Finance Agency, the city’s Housing Development Corporation, and its Department of Housing Preservation and Development, using tax-exempt financing achieved through the issuance of housing bonds. Further financing came from his company, an investing consortium, and the Bank of New York. The area had housed gas plants, however. and had to be cleaned.

(West 42nd Street Manufactured Gas Plant Site, history report prepared for Consolidated Edison Co. Liverpool, site Number C231051NY, Parsons, 2002; see also Arnold F. Fleming and Fleming Lee Shue, Final Engineering Report: 605/615 West 42d Street Site, New York, NY. NYSDEC #C231051, New York, Fleming Lee Shue, 2010.) Under section 421-a, developments between Fourteenth and Ninety-sixth Streets had to offer a fifth of the units for a defined period to people who earned up to half the local Area Median Income, the amount depending upon the size of the family.)

The units in One River Place contain market rate, moderate- and low-income units under Section 421-a rules, and also corporate apartments. To attract renters to this unfamiliar area, the developer and architect provided studios, and one-and-two-bedroom units that are large by current standards. As of 2021, the reduced-rate apartments were available to local residents earning up to 130% of the area’s median income, a figure that had risen by then to between $38,743 and $108,680. (The median annual salary for a public elementary school teacher in January 2023 was about $65,830) Market rate two-bedroom apartments in One River Place were advertised by the landlord in March 2023 at $79,680 per year. The provision for lower rent was obviously essential, but it was not low enough for the average teacher who had expenses in addition to rent. In some areas, the Average Median Income is very high, and citizens may wonder if the boundaries are drawn to make the reduced rents high, too.

The city’s Housing Finance Agency allowed developers using the 421-a program to borrow money at low rates and pay taxes on the assessed value of the land when it was empty, not---as usual---when a valuable building had been erected. The Federal Government provided income tax credits. A city agency accepted applications and evaluated them according to formal criteria. The program faced criticism for allowing builders at first to move the cheaper 20% units to distant neighborhoods, but as of a decade before One River Place went up, the distribution of the lower-rent apartments had to be within and throughout the building seeking the tax benefits, with the elevators open to all tenants equally and segregated entrances forbidden.

(See https://www.osc.state.ny.us/files/audits/2018-02/sga-2017-15s83.pdf, accessed 8 25 2021. New York State Office of the State Comptroller, The 80/20 Housing Program, report, 2015; https://www1.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/tax-incentives-421-a.page accessed 8 27 2021, New York City Housing Preservation & Development description of the program. NYT 9 4 2010, pp. RE1, RE8. https://yoreevo.com/blog/nyc-tax-abatements offers a clear basic account of the 421-a benefits. Accessed 8 14 2021. For Kondylis, see Peter Slatin, “Block buster,” Grid 2 #1, Jan. 2020 pp. 70-72 and his obituary, NYT 8 25 2018, p. B6. See also interview with Larry Silverstein by Michael Stoler, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24acUJGJgUI accessed 11 20 2021.)

Architect Costas Kondylis & Associates designed the building. He was, as we have seen, a prolific designer of apartment houses for tenants able to pay for premises often described as luxury

(Fig. 1. One River Place, view from Hudson riverside. Costas Kondylis, 2001. Photo: author, 2023)

even if not built to the spatial standards of luxury known before the Second World War. The higher building is half of a six-lobed polygon in plan. The lower one’s plan is a pair of polygons separated by a curve. Faced in red brick and glass, the high-rises stand back from the building line to permit a driveway entrance and open space with garden features and a playground. The lower part of the taller building extends toward the Hudson River, creating a surface for athletic facilities. The building’s amenities include tennis courts, a swimming pool, a children’s playroom, a library, a spa and a lounge, a fitness center, a basketball court, and areas rentable for parties and receptions. The kitchens were fitted with ‘state of the art’ appliances, but the management offered free continental breakfast to tenants who didn’t want to make their own and who may also have wanted to meet compatible neighbors.

The building attracted many tenants but some of them found the city’s bus service across Forty-second Street to be unreliable and infrequent, so the management instituted a shuttle service in the morning and late afternoon to deliver and pick up tenants. Had there been a subway station for the 7 line trains at Tenth Avenue and Forty-first Street, as initially proposed, the shuttle might not have been necessary, but the subway line extension west of Times Square was conceived too late: in 2005, built after 2007, and opened only in 2015.

(https://housingconnect.nyc.gov/PublicWeb/details/2074 gives amounts considered middle-income. Rent includes gas, heat, water but not electricity. NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development. https://patch.com/new-york/ midtown-nyc/47-affordable-hells-kitchen-apartments-hit-housing-lottery accessed 8 14 2021; NYT 2 5 2007, p. E3. https://housingconnect.nyc.gov/PublicWeb/details/2074 accessed 8 14 2021. https://ds2.cityrealty.com/img/6cb449d6caf65a465b2ce8c6ffcbd740a211243d+90+60+0+60 accessed 8 14 2021)

In 2007, before the financial crisis that began in late 2008, the Silverstein company followed its construction of One River Place with two sixty-story rental buildings soaring above a six-story base. Opened in 2009, these are called Silver Towers at River Place, 600-620 West, at the east end of the block.

(Fig. 2. Silver Towers. Costas Kondylis. 2009. Photo: Author, 2023)

On the southeast part of the site is a twelve-story building for people earning about 80% of median local income under the inclusionary housing provision; real estate journalist Carter Horsley reported that there were 317 “affordable” apartments among a total of 1276, related to the 421-a program. Once again, the Kondylis firm showed its talents as space planners. Rosenwasser Grossman were consulting engineers, as they had been at other apartment buildings nearby. Gotham Construction Company was the general contractor.

The buildings are connected to the Silverstein company’s One River Place at the west by parklike space with landscaping by Thomas Balsley and --created in the next decade-- a delightful children’s jungle gym designed by Tom Otterness in the shape of a stretched-out giant.

(Fig. 3. Tom Otterness, “Playground” 2007(jungle gym giant). Installed 2023. Photo: Author 2023)

Balsley placed it in the shade so that it would not heat excessively and thus deter children from using it. Among its charms are two slides formed by the giant’s legs, and a third one formed by an arm. The gardens contain trees, a mist fountain, and seating around the lawns, but some tenants take their pets to the dog park located on Forty-first Street.

(Fig. 4. Silver Towers, outdoor space. Photo: Author 2023)

The towers themselves boast various amenities more common in even more luxurious condominiums, including ceiling heights higher than those required by the building code, and floor-to-ceiling windows forming glass curtain walls instead of the neighbor’s brick. These provisions made the towers competitive with other new apartment buildings that by 2009 had appeared west of Eighth Avenue. The Silver Towers offer a mix of studios and one- and two-bedroom apartments. Floors two through seven in one tower are meant for corporate tenants. The six-story base is made of cast stone, glass, and metal, with wide horizontal windows; glass extends above. Entrances on Forty-second and Forty-first Streets designed by James Carpenter Design Associates were meant to provide a calm and art-embellished atmosphere at some remove from the 40,000 square feet of retail space.

(https://www.wtc.com/media/news/silverstein-properties-builds-second-residential-high-rise-on-west-42nd-street, accessed 8 3 2021. Jason Sheftell, “Silverstein Properties Launches Manhattan’s Tallest Rental,” Daily News, May 1, 2009, p. 2; NYT 6 27 1999, p. RE1; https://archive.is/20120711190725/http://ny1.com/1-all-boroughs-news-content/ny1_living/real_estate/ 90915/silver-towers-brings-condo-luxuries-to-renters/ accessed 8 15 2021)

The Moinian Group of developers acquired the site at 635 West where a police department horse stable and a Mack truck garage had been located. In 2004, the new owners engaged Costas Kondylis to design a condominium building called the Atelier, and its apartments.

(Fig.5. Atelier, (at left) Costas Kondylis, 2005. Photo: Author, August 2025. Sky apartments at right; see below)

It opened in 2007. Here, the prolific architect collaborated with Rosenwasser/Grossman as structural engineers, and Cosentini Associates for mechanical and electrical engineering. It is a sleek tower with forty-six stories and between 469 and 481 units, depending upon the date when some were combined. A tall lobby is used as an art gallery, indirectly alluding to the building’s name.

(Fig. 6. Atelier, seen from the west. The “Corbusian” element is at the base. Photo: Author, 2023).

The design with thin supports below a floor with a long ribbon window and a usable roof over this part of the tower was perhaps meant to reflect the fame of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. The tower design in blue-tinted glass at the corners and a grid of windows in white settings toward the center is interrupted after every seventh story by alternative window designs and extensions of the horizontals, known as grippers, that divide the floors and turn the corners, creating divisions that may have been inspired by Walter Gropius’s design in 1922 for the Chicago Tribune Tower, These special floors, alternating between the left and right sides, break up what might otherwise be an uninteresting composition. Like its fellows in the area, the Atelier offers amenities designed to lure people to the west end of the street, including a roof deck, swimming pool, and tennis court. An event space called Espace occupied premises at 635 West, part of the lowest portion of the apartment house. As at One River Place across the street, tenants enjoy exceptional views of the Hudson, at least from the units above the adjacent Chinese Consulate.

The Atelier was the building for which Costas Kondylis tried to obtain the neighboring site at 647 West from the owner of a small restaurant. Construction of the Atelier caused the owner’s crockery to break, created cracks in the walls and floors, damaged the roof, and caused the building to lean. The restaurateur had to settle his claims for $225,000 after the developers, contractors, and subcontractors all managed to deny responsibility. (NYT 11 26 2013, p. A23)

Less glamorous, but also less expensive, is the nineteen-story red and tan brick-faced reinforced concrete apartment house with seventy-two units for the elderly at 517-521 West. A product of the Atlantic Development Group, it was completed in 2006 for renters with incomes at specified limits. In design, it is just a box, but aesthetic delights require time and money which are two enemies of low rent. H. Thomas O’Hara was the architect--his firm is known as HTO--and MEP provided the engineering.

(https://affordablehousingonline.com/housing-search/New-York/New-York-City/521-West-42nd-Street-Apartments/10036512 accessed 1 28 22; https://therealdeal.com/new-research/topics/property/521-west-42nd-street/ accessed 1 28 2022).

(Fig. 7. Housing at 517-521 West with limited rent. HTO Architects. 2006. Photo: Author, August 2025

It is easy to overlook 534 West because it is one unit wide and only nine stories tall, a condominium building that was a sober addition to the street. A parking lot at its west side, associated with a wing of a bus depot on Forty-first Street but used for FedEx vehicles, makes the condominium seem orphaned. Developed by Shao Lin and designed by Brian R. Boyle, it was at first named Deuce as if to suggest something racy and cool about living west of Seventh Avenue on Forty-second Street. But people looking for one-bedroom-1 ½ -bath units without windows along the east and west sides did not find it cool to pay high prices for the six floor-through apartments or the two-story uppermost apartment. The roof terrace with views of the river tempted no one at first, and in any case, the view was soon blocked by taller buildings toward the west. Nor did the promise of VIP membership at a nearby fitness center prove to be a permanent or sufficient attraction.

(Fig. 8. 534 West, view to the east. Brian R. Boyle, 2009. Photo: Author, 2023)

The building remained empty for at least a year, until the Elliman real estate agency dropped the prices. Perhaps buyers were tempted by the greater privacy in a small building, or the ten-foot-high ceilings, or an elevator with a key that allowed for an immediate entry to each apartment. Perhaps they liked the expensive kitchen equipment, or the refrigerated wine storage, or prices that dropped below a million dollars. In 2011, the firm engaged a handsome young interior designer, Nick Olsen, to make videos showing his suggestions for apartment decoration. The building was occupied, albeit with changing owners, but eventually emptied and as of 2024-25 it was a decayed empty shell offered for sale by the Corcoran Group.

(NYT 5 13 2012, pp. RE1. RE8; https://ny.curbed.com/2011/5/6/10468308/the-deuce-is-loose-42nd-street-condo-returns-with-a-new-name by Joey Arak, accessed 9 6 2021; https://ny.curbed.com/2010/1/13/10523694/midtowns-deuce-dropped-from-the-market-after-chops 1 13 2010, accessed 9 6 2021)

Among the other buildings erected in the same decade, the sixty-three story block-long MiMA built west of Ninth Avenue from 2007 to 2010 at 450 West, is noteworthy for its size and the varied types of accommodations within it.

(Fig. 9. MiMA. Arquitectonica, Ismael Leyva, the Rockwell Group. 2010. Photo: Author 2023)

The catchy name refers to its location in the middle of Manhattan, although the precise location of the middle is open to dispute. The building is the product of the Related Companies, working with Arquitectonica and for the interior design, the Rockwell Group; the Tishman company handled the construction. Arquitectonica collaborated here with the firm of Ismael Leyva, architect of many efficiently designed apartment houses in New York City.

For a building in which most space is devoted to apartments, the design architects toned down the exuberance seen at their Westin Hotel at Eighth Avenue. The building is lively enough, however, engaging attention with alternating horizontal planes of glass and beige stone held on metal-clad columns at the base, trees growing on a setback at the top of the base, and then a tall tower faced entirely in reflective glass. A room-sized protrusion faces Forty-second Street, and a lower slab extends the building along Forty-first Street.

MiMA offers varied accommodations. It was initially planned for four hundred dwelling units but offers five hundred within the same exterior. The Tenth Avenue front gives entry to a branch of the Yotel chain of compact hotel rooms, catering to young adult travelers. One of its most attractive features is a large outdoor terrace; another is a fitness room. Nearby on Forty-second Street at 577 Ninth Avenue around the corner, the Pod hotel opened later, with similarly compact rooms, a less elaborate outdoor terrace, but a so-called Polynesian style lounge featuring colorful decoration and decorated cocktails. Both Yotel and Pod receive enthusiastic ratings on hotel reservation websites. Their own sites feature primarily young adults.

Rental apartments fill MiMA’s principal floors, including an especially luxurious section in the top thirteen floors, called the tower, with its own elevator access. The latter area was planned for condominium ownership but at first, the Related Companies marketed it as rentals when that market was strong. By 2017, however, foreign investors planned to convert them back to condominiums. This part of the building had two or three bedrooms in about half the units, with studios and one-bedroom apartments in the rest.

Residents enjoy amenities that are meant to justify the high rents. The housing towers built in the last two decades all have fitness centers, and most have children’s playrooms and outdoor terraces or rooftop lounges. Several offer free breakfasts or free coffee, as MiMA does in a sixth-floor lounge. Of course, the lobbies have round-the-clock staff. Some of the new residential towers have swimming pools, though not all of them are heated, as MiMA’s is. In addition to a screening room and a basketball court known in other buildings, this one has a volleyball court and a golf simulator. Among the many features were an outdoor theater and a tech center with a coffee bar. For all the people living in the company of pets, a branch of the Dog City animal-care company provided grooming, training, day care, boarding, and medical services. Some of these facilities were added after the building opened to lure tenants.

Luxurious appliances, cabinetry, wood flooring, and marble-coated bathrooms led to high rents charged to market-rate tenants. But this building also offers units to people of lower income. These tenants are not people living in dire poverty, given the high income of many people in the designated area. The market-rate tenants may not know---especially if they come from abroad--- that some of their neighbors benefit from the arrangement known at One River Place, Silver Towers, and other housing nearby: the result of 421-a provisions. The lower-rent tenants are carefully vetted by the city government and the building management, and are dispersed throughout the building, not segregated by floor or type of unit.

More important than luxurious kitchen countertops are the provisions that gave the building a LEED gold rating. According to Vidari consultants, storm water collected from the roof irrigates plants and is used in a cooling tower. Faucets in both residential and commercial spaces emit a low flow and reduce the use of potable water. Fluorescent and LED lighting, occupancy sensors in hotel and administrative rooms, and other means of reducing energy and water use are part of the energy conservation program.

(Roslyn Lo, “MiMA Rental Heaven in middle of Manhattan,” Real Estate Weekly Feb. 9, 2012, https://rew-online.com/mima-rental-heaven-in-middle-of-manhattan/ and idem, Introducing MiMA, Manhattan’s Newest Big Personality,” ibid., April 6, 2011; https://rew-online.com/manhattans-newest-big-personality/ accessed 3 14 2022; http://www.urbanedgeny.com/property/mima/167137 accessed 3 14 2022; John Tishman, Building Tall: My Life and the Invention of Construction Management, Ann Arbor, U of Michigan Press, 2011; NYT 4 3 2011, p. RE8; details gleaned from real estate marketing sites such as streeteasy.com, apartments.com, cityrealty.com, nynesting.com, and ratings sites such as yelp.com, or apartmentratings.com. et al.).

While One River Place was going up, another rental apartment building rose at 420 West, between Ninth and Dyer Avenues.

(Fig. 10. Theatre Tower, 420 West, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, 2002. Photo: Author, 2025.)

The building is a tower on a low base that runs along Ninth Avenue. It opened in 2001, providing over 200 units of one-to-three bedrooms within its forty-one stories, and like its earlier and later neighbors, it offered amenities to entice people to the west end of the street. The building height benefited from zoning provisions that allowed the adjacent Playwrights Horizons theater at 416 West to sell some of its air rights, and from the developers’ pledge to reconstruct five theaters nearby which were finished in 2002. Its proximity to the Eighth Avenue subway was a selling point for Daniel Brodsky, the developer (with Quinlan & Field) and later manager and marketer. So was the presence of the theater; this had been the site of the Harlem Children’s Theater, among others, before the redevelopment occurred. Hugh Hardy, the architectural star of the remodeled Seventh-to-Eighth-Avenue block, was chosen as the exterior design architect for this forty-story tower on a low base. He worked with SLCE, the apartment space specialists, who designed larger closets than some of the developers’ rivals did. Rosenwasser/Goldman provided engineering services.

(https://www.cityrealty.com/nyc/midtown-west/420-west-42nd-street/review/17301accessed 8 16 2021; NYT 3 18 2017, p. A 21 and obituary notices on that date, p. B8; https://www.apartmentratings.com/ny/new-york/420-west-42nd-street _212245000010036/#ratingsReviews accessed 8 15 2020).

For the exterior, Hardy produced a striking design of alternating thick bands of dark purplish blue and creamy pale bricks. Five dark brick stripes alternate with pale ones near the base of the tower, and then the dark and pale bricks successively shrink in number and height until one final dark band terminates two pale stories. A one-story setback marks the final floor beneath a concealed water tank and mechanisms on the roof.

Were it not for the striped design that earned the nicknames of Zebra or Oreo, the apartment house would have had a monotonous succession of rectangular windows although some are bay and corner windows—the last feature always appealing to renters and buyers. The building is also able to advertise a roof deck, a fitness center, a laundry room, and parking. Some of the amenities were added in the 20-teens to complete with those in nearby buildings. A few units have balconies. Tenants liked the location, which is convenient to transportation and a food market, but some were aware of the noise from traffic emerging from the Lincoln Tunnel via Dyer Avenue.

On the ground floor, Hardy also designed the Little Shubert theater, named for the theater-owning family. It has 499 seats to evade requirements for larger premises and was intended for experimental productions or tryouts that usually attract limited audiences. Over the entrance door, Hardy sprinkled small dark tiles on the lighter surface, evoking confetti at New Year’s Eve in Times Square. (Stern et al., New York 2000, p.729) He designed five other small theaters in a five-story building that included rehearsal and studio spaces entered through a common lobby. As at the nearby MiMA building, the Sky apartment tower, River Place, and elsewhere, some units in the housing tower were available through a lottery to people earning up to 130 percent of the area’s median income. Thanks to the new buildings, that median income is high.

The adjacent Playwrights Horizons underwent alteration by architect Mitchell Kurtz, a specialist in arts and public buildings. He added a façade framed in yellow stone, emphasizing tall horizontal bands of window glass that diminish in height toward the top. Inside are two small theaters, offices, and rehearsal areas-- spaces also used in a training program for undergraduates at New York University. During part of the pandemic after 2020, the show windows displayed what the organization called disruptive art, including work by Jilly Ballistic, “New York City’s most well-known and unknown street and subway artist.” (https://www.playwrightshorizons.org/shows/trailers/note-adam-greenfield/ accessed 1 28 2022.)

The three-hundred block between Eighth and Ninth Avenues on West Forty-second Street saw several apartment towers rise in the first half of the decade. The building called One, opened in 2002, is at 360 West Forty-third Street, with a tower portion on Forty-second. It was named perhaps for its ten-story northern wing to make people forget that the taller twenty-three story wing on Forty-second was on a street associated with vice. It was given the name Presidential, although that seems to have been rarely used. Developer Brodsky approved a tower clad in tan brick and incorporated remodeled low red brick row houses at the corner of Ninth Avenue. The tower has a west-facing curve. Red accents on the windows and at the floor slab covers add some interest to the exterior. Renters of the 256 units enjoy a fitness center, laundry, bicycle storage, an outdoor terrace, and a garage. Architects Buck/Cane, no longer active after 2002, collaborated with SLCE in designing the building that went up in the former firm’s final year. (Stern et al., New York 2000, p.730 for this and the Ivy Tower. NYT on development in the area 5 12 2002, p. RE1)

Fig.11. One, 360 West 43^rd Street, 42^nd Street façade with older buildings incorporated. Buck/Cane, 2002. Photos: Author, 2023)

The Ivy Tower at 343-349 West, with another entrance at 350 West Forty-third Street, is less noticeable to passers-by but residents know that it has a garden and patio between the taller forty-five floor section on Forty-second Street and a lower wing on Forty-third. Tall as it is, at street level it is aesthetically overshadowed by the neighboring Holy Cross church and the McGraw-Hill Building and the Orion apartment house across Forty-second Steet. Working with structural engineers Rosenwasser /Grossman, architects SLCE produced rental and four commercial units between 2001 and 2003. The reinforced concrete building, clad in brick and metal-framed glass, offered studios and one-and-two-bedroom apartments with features that were expected in high-rent residences: granite countertops in the kitchen, dishwashers, microwaves, laundries, a fitness center, a roof deck, and conference rooms, a garage, and storage areas. The architects and interior designers for the lounge, lobby, and service units provided spaces of mundane aesthetic appeal, but proximity to the subway and the patio, garden, and some private terraces provided some compensation. The management made the welcome point that some units are wheelchair accessible.

A more glamorous apartment house---a condominium rather than a rental---- rose between 2004 and 2006 across the street at 350 West. This one was more convincing as a luxurious place to live, as it was the first curtain wall high-rise condominium on Forty-second Street. The Orion, at 350 West, was the product of the Extell Corporation, and Cetra/Ruddy architects who understand the relationship between businesses’ requirements and attractive aesthetics.

(Fig.12. Orion, Cetra/Ruddy, 2006 Photo: Courtesy Cetra/Ruddy.)

Part of the brief given to the designers in 2003 was evidently to provide a visible and handsome glass tower, because a condominium must appeal to discerning buyers who might at first have shied away from West Forty-second Street. While a rental building may be a nearly universal idea of temporary residence, a condominium implies a longer stay and greater financial interest. Popular opinion in a neighborhood may favor condominiums over rentals because buying rather than renting requires a larger immediate commitment of money and effort; buying connotes wealth and stability. Some nearby residents were therefore glad to see a tall condominium in their neighborhood, presaging more prestige and higher value in the entire area.

The building’s towering presence was made possible by the transfer of air rights from the adjacent United States Post Office that separates the Orion from the McGraw-Hill Building. Vocal opponents of tall glass buildings criticized the Orion for cutting off the view of the green landmark from the west, although most people see it from the east. A postal official promised to take account of landmarks if future air rights sales occurred. For owners of the new apartments made possible by the air rights transfer, the most exciting element was a thrilling view from high above the street

The sixty-story blue glass tower contains 550 apartments on fifty-eight residential floors. One-bedroom apartments range in size from 615 to 1070 square feet on a typical floor. Centrally-placed amenities interrupt the dwellings at the 29^th and 30^th floors; these are also mechanical floors embellished with a portico and plants. The mechanical/amenities floors divide the elevation into a lower, broader part with horizontal bands separating the floors and an upper one in which the elevations alternate between those that continue the horizontal divisions of the base and others that have almost square windows. The lowest levels of the building are faced with panels in a range of blue-related tones that reach the height of older buildings on the block as if to recall their memory.

(Fig. 13. Orion, lobby and cladding of lower floors. Photo: Courtesy Cetra/Ruddy)

A Canadian curtain wall manufacturer, Sota Glazing, developed a cladding system that was thinner and cheaper than a traditional brick wall. It was faster to install because the construction system avoided a separate step for installing anchors for the glass on the building’s exterior. This allowed the builders to produce the interiors more quickly and offer other advantages that saved work and money.

Apart from the views that owners enjoy from floor-to-ceiling windows and three outdoor terraces, residents can meet their neighbors at the breakfast café---a facility offered at several of the post-2000 buildings on West Forty-second Street. At the Orion, residents at the coffee bar are not using their Italian kitchen appliances but are enjoying Starbucks coffee, cereals, and baked goods that someone else prepares. After breakfast, perhaps some residents visit the conference room in the business center. Later, they may receive advice from trainers at the fitness center or from “nutritional lifestyle counselors” and a doctor. They enjoy a pool and sauna, and the Jacuzzi has room for twenty-five people. A screening room is another perquisite increasingly common in luxurious residences, as are the “personal concierge,” and a garage. There are ample opportunities for socializing with acquaintances made at breakfast or in the amenity areas,

Since a condominium proclaims at the lobby level a tenant’s idea of a suitable home, the architects paid more attention to the entrance experience than a rental building might require, although competition has led all the owners on Forty-second Street to commission lobby designs meant to appeal to the desired type of tenant. To keep up with current tastes, the lobby designs are often updated after a few years. The Orion’s lobby was designed as an eighteen-foot-high space lined with rosewood and metal panels. The architects provided an angled wall of Pompeian stone, a material made from quartz and bound with resin to create surfaces that are easy to clean and hard to damage.

(Fig.14. Orion. Lobby. Photo: Courtesy Cetra/Ruddy)

A sixty-story building that must appeal to potential purchasers requires expert engineering, obtained from WSP Cantor Seinuk for the reinforced concrete structure and for other aspects, Cosentini Associates and Langan Engineering, with Bovis Lend Lease as the main contractor. These are all firms well known and active in New York City. Reinforced concrete was then and still is the structural material of choice for apartment buildings. The Ornamental Metal Institute of New York noted that installers put up prefabricated panels “around each floor rather than by elevation, allowing installers to complete the job two floors at a time.” (https://ominy.org/?s=Orion accessed 2 12 2022) Cetra/Ruddy, who have become increasingly prominent since the Orion opened, laid out the apartments for various types of potential purchasers. The buyer of a 1070-square-foot one-bedroom unit would likely be living in it more often and longer than the buyer of a 615-square-foot one-bedroom pied-à-terre. Parents and a child, perhaps two, would be comfortable in a two-bedroom-two-bath apartment with 1349 square feet.

The project manager for the Orion reported that by July of 2005, after four months of sales and seven price increases, four hundred of the units, or almost seventy-three percent were sold or in contract. There were month-long waits to inspect the 551 apartments. Asking fees rose quickly from $900 per square foot to $1,025 and sometimes as much as $1300 per square foot in the units near the top although there was the prospect of higher taxes in the future. This situation existed despite the ongoing presence of the decayed Elk Hotel as the building’s western neighbor.

The importance of the Orion was not related to its abundant amenities or to the elegant engineering of a sixty-story curtain wall. Those things promoted its financial reward. The broader point is that the city benefited from the condominium’s success, as it added to other developers’ confidence about building west of Eighth Avenue.

(NYT 4 29 2007 pp. H1, H8; 11 13 2011, pp. RE1, RE8. https://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/slogging-to-sparkle-on-far-west-42nd-street/ accessed 2 11 2017; C.W. Lee, “Orion, Metals in Construction, Spring, 2007, pp 33-35. Plans, sections, photographs courtesy of Cetra/Ruddy). Many photographs of this and nearby buildings are available on their website. See also Wikipedia s.v. Orion.

Farther east, activity continued around Times Square. The empty sites had not been filled by 2000, and a full restoration of the area’s vitality depended upon filling them. By the end of the decade, the goal had been reached. (NYT 12 4 2010, pp. A1, A18) Only a few empty lots and low-rise buildings survived on West Forty-second Street after 2010, and most had short future life spans. A temporary charming idea to improve the area’s reputation was the installation of a piano by a charity called Sing for Hope at Times Square and Forty-second Street in 2010, with other locations for pianos elsewhere. (NYT 6 22 2010, p. A23) A piano still exists at the Port Authority bus terminal, available for members of the public to play.

From 1999 onward, the Times Square subway station received wider corridors, better signs, (briefly) public toilets with attendants, an escalator from the mezzanine to the street, and, at last, provisions for passengers with disabilities. The main entrance still has the bright sign by FXCollaborative, installed in 1998, a later customer service office, and works of art, some of them commissioned well before the renovations began. Among the artworks are the mural by Roy Lichtenstein (1994) that brightens the way from the BMT to the IRT lines, and the glass mosaic

(Fig. 15. Roy Lichtenstein, mural at the Times Square subway station, l994, Photo: Author, 2025)

by Jacob Lawrence above a staircase (installed 2001) which was the last work he completed before his death in 2000.

(Fig. 16. Jacob Lawrence mosaic in the mezzanine at the Times Square subway station, 2000. Photo: Author, 2025)

Another mosaic is by Jane Dickson, depicting New Year’s Eve revelers (2007). She had a studio in Times Square for about twenty-five years and had earlier been a designer and animator on the computer billboard at the former Times tower.

Improvement of the shuttle area had to wait until the next decade, however, because developers could not or would not pay for all the necessary changes to the transit hub. The City and its agencies would be responsible for the improvements.

(For subway art, see https://www.nycsubway.org/perl/artwork accessed 9 18 2021; for Dickson: http://www.timessquareshowrevisited.com/accounts/jane-dickson.html accessed 9 18 2021. The stations along Forty-second Street have other works of art: the Sixth Avenue Bryant Park station: by Lynn Saville (2006), Saul Leiter (2007) , Jane Ingram Allen (1994), W.P. Snyder (n.d.), Samm Kunce (2002), Travis Ruse (2010) and Nick Cave in the tunnel to Seventh Avenue (2022). At Grand Central: by Dan Sinclair (1990), Jim Hodges (2020), Christopher Sproat (2000), Jackie Ferrara (1997), Ellen Driscoll (1998). At Times Square: Jack Beal (1999), Max Neuhaus (2002), Toby Buonagurio (2005), Nick Cave (2021), Blackford/Fisher (2003). At 8th Avenue by Lisa Dinhofer (2003), Norman B. Colp (1991).)

The Hilton Times Square opened its doors in 2000, or rather, below its glass-walled upper portions it opened the remodeled doors of the former Empire Theater. The AMC Megaplex and Madame Tussaud’s occupied the hotel’s lower floors. MG was the architect for Tussaud’s and Ripley’s Believe It or Not. (Chap.13, Fig.2) (Adams & Ockman, in Casabella, op. cit., p. 26.)

On the southeast corner of Eighth Avenue, facing the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a parking lot survived. The investor Paul Milstein had kept it after a dispute with his brother, to whom he paid $5 million for his interest in the site, and $111 million for other considerations. (NYT 5 24 2000, p. B1 inter alia) In 2006, he sold the site for well over $300 million to the developer Steven J. Pozycki of SJP Properties, who partnered with a fund operated by the Prudential Financial arm of Prudential Real Estate Investors. The developer faced considerable risk in proposing a forty-story office building when he was not well known in the city. Moreover, there was no anchor tenant before construction commenced. By the time the building opened, however, tenants had realized the advantage of having immediate access to the subway. They could feel more confident about moving into new buildings in an area that was becoming ever more a hub of white-collar work.

The investors employed FX Fowle to create the design of what was named Eleven Times Square..

(Fig.17. Eleven Times Square. FX Fowle, 2011. Photo: Author, August 2025)

(Fig. 18. Eleven Times Square closer view of low element at corner. Photo: Author, August 2025)

Eleven Times Square offered surfaces for the bright signs encouraged in the neighborhood at the time. Bruce Fowle and Robert Fox had dissolved their long-time partnership, and while Fowle remained active in his new firm’s projects, Dan Kaplan is credited with the design and its supervision. Bruce Fowle remembers that there were about seven different full designs proposed before one was chosen. Kaplan created the final design in 2006, and building began in 2007. The recession of 2008 may have interfered with its progress, as the building opened only in 2011. The structural engineers were Thornton Tomasetti, collaborating with other engineers including Cosentini Associates and Langan Engineering, employing Permasteelisa Group for the curtain wall façade.

The builders erected the concrete core in 2007-08, just over six hundred feet high, before the steel frame went up--an unusual procedure. The core could not be built in the center with the same lateral and torsional stiffness, so a side core was placed at the joint of the L-shaped site. The core contains extra-wide stairwells to avoid crowding--perhaps in memory of the World Trade Center towers--and also the utility risers, elevators, and the telecommunications rooms for each floor; this placement avoids having vibrations from the machinery reach the offices. The core’s design reduces the number of view-obstructing columns in the interior. Cantilevers posed potential problems, for which steel floor framing provided a remedy. It reduces the building’s weight, in turn reducing a cantilever’s potential torsion and lateral drift. Tension uplift under the concrete core is countered by a system of rock anchors there. A feeling of spaciousness comes also from floor-to-ceiling windows, unusual at the time in commercial office buildings.

Eleven Times Square is 601 feet tall to the tip, and 530 feet tall for the inhabited floors. There are forty of the latter, all but two used for offices, and a cellar; providing space below that would have required excavation into schist bedrock. Dan Kaplan described the design as a collage, with sections that differ from each other and a tower facing Forty-second Street that becomes wider as it rises. He then described “an outwardly-sloped glass-clad ‘crystal’…that juts out thirty feet…[that] lets people inside seem to float over 8^th Avenue.” He referred to the base as a six-story ribbon wrapping the corner. It has emphatic horizontal lines that recall the curved corner design of the former Rialto theater but in larger, smoother size. Above these elements is a south-facing forty-story tower.

Breaking up the building into juxtaposed parts of different appearance reduces the whole building’s apparent bulk. This may have been a motive also at the visually fragmented Westin hotel and E-walk complex across the street.

Glass-faced office buildings in Manhattan need aggressive cooling in warm months, so reducing solar gain was an important goal at Eleven Times Square; the south-facing sides have projecting sunscreens and more reflective glass. The north side has transparent glass that provides softer light than the differentiated light on other sides. The entire curtain wall is a spectrally selective low-iron, low-emissivity glass, allowing ninety percent of the interior spaces to be naturally lit. Differing surface treatments respond to the needs for heating and cooling. Highly reflective roof materials and an energy-efficient mechanical system reduce the building’s energy consumption, a concern also of the Vidaris company that did the glazing. Rainwater collection recharges the cooling towers. The heating, ventilating and air-conditioning systems are highly efficient, too. Air filtration, water-saving fixtures, reflective paving ---all this and more won the highest LEED rating, and praise and citations from the Energy Star program.

Although the building is not at Times Square proper, some elements relate it to the lively intersection’s skyscrapers. Kaplan described the ‘crystal’ as inflecting inward “to highlight views to the McGraw-Hill and Candler Buildings” although few people are likely to recognize this gesture. The west front “is carved to reveal the New York Times headquarters” immediately to the south, which FX Fowle had co-designed with Renzo Piano. High up above the curved corner is a large LED cube. Each of its three screens, twenty-six feet square, projected whatever Digital Kitchen, a design firm, programmed for it. The building’s lobby has an attractive kinetic sculpture of metal leaves suspended over the pathway to the reception desk; the artist, Tim Prentice, was active initially as an architect. The lobby itself features hammered white marble imported from Italy, as well as surfaces covered in wood, burnished silver leaf, and sandblasted mirror. For its design and its ecological measures, the high-rise earned a place among the Best Tall Buildings of 2011, chosen by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH). Some of the amenities were added in the 20-teens to complete with those in nearby buildings.

(NYT 10 22 2002, p. B3 on Milstein plans; http://2015.ctbuh.org/tours/technical-tours/eleven-times-square-tour/ report by Tansri Muliani accessed 7 5 2021; Best Tall Buildings 2011 CTBUH International Award Winning Projects ed. Antony Wood, New York & London, 2012, pp. 28-31; information from Bruce Fowle, May 2018; OFFICE BUILDINGS Midtown Manhattan, Fall 2006, p. 331; Douglas Martin, obituary for Paul Milstein, NYT 8 10 2010, p. A 23; https://www.chinaconstruction.us/project/times-square-office-building/ accessed 8 22 2021; https://www.cosentini.com/index.php/portfolio-articles/24-commercial-office/241-11-times-square accessed 8 22 2021; Wall Street Journal, Feb. 8 2012 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203315804577209492690722260 accessed 8 1 2021; Interview with Daniel Kaplan, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/times-squares-newest-skys_b_780667 accessed 8 22 2021 Jacob Slevin for the Huffpost; https://observer.com/2008/10/11-times-squares-concrete-core-all-set/ accessed 8 22 2021; https://www.energystar.gov/buildings/resources_topic/commercial_new_construction/project_list/11-times-square accessed 8 22 2021

Five Times Square, 590 Seventh Avenue at the southwest corner of Forty-second Street, was at first called the Ernst & Young building for its major tenant, a financial firm.

(Fig.19. 5 Times Square. Kohn Pedesen Fox, 2002. Photo: Author, August 2025)

It was the project of Boston Properties and built to the design of Kohn Pedersen Fox, in collaboration with engineering firms Thornton Tomasetti and Jaros Baum & Bolles. The main tenant’s name filled a large vertical sign that protruded from one side of the tower. Begun in 1999, the building was completed in 2002, with forty floors amounting to 575 feet with two basement levels. Angular planes and a sharp point on the reflective glass facades reveal the architect’s desire to evoke Broadway’s diagonal interruption of the rectilinear street grid; zoning requirements also played a role in the form. The asymmetry also relieves the monotony of a glass-walled building with thirty-seven stories. As with buildings of these years by William Pedersen or created under his supervision, there is considerable elegance in the design.

Despite the potential for strange interior spaces, the thirty-eight office floors are in fact nearly rectangular with some cross elements and slight protrusions that do not affect working conditions; they simply add variety to the interiors. Variety outside comes from the huge, illuminated advertising signs that were part of the project for reinvigorating the area, and from retail shops at street level.

Technical problems related to the proximity of the subway tunnels were solved by supporting some of the foundations on caissons. The exterior, largely glazed, had to be especially wind-resistant on the north and south, requiring columns there to be more closely placed. The interior columns are more widely separated, and allow for flexible spaces, advertised as “virtually column-free floor plates.” The building won gold and platinum awards from the New York Association of Consulting Engineers.

(http://wirednewyork.com/skyscrapers/5-times-square/ retrieved 8 16 2021; Stern et al., New York 2000, p.720; Wikipedia s.v. 5 Times Square accessed last on 11/27/2021 with further references and history to 2020. For the engineering, see Tony D. Canale, James L. Kaufman, George J. Tamaro, “A Tale of Two Towers: The Foundations,” Civil Engineering Magazine 74 #6, June 2004, pp.38, 40-45; Aine M. Brazil and Eli Gottlieb, “A Tale of Two Towers: The Structures,” ibid., pp. 39, 46-49, 79)

Nearby to the east, Skidmore Owings & Merrill were the architects of Seven Times Square, at 1459 Broadway, alias Times Square Tower. Principal David Childs is credited with masterminding the design of the forty-nine-story building erected for Boston Properties; among his colleagues on the project was T. J. Gottesdiener. Thornton Tomasetti again collaborated, providing structural engineering. The developer received incentives from the City estimated at $236 million over twenty years, at least in early negotiations. The original main tenant was to have been the accountancy firm of Arthur Andersen but that company was damaged in a scandal related to the fraudulent Enron Corporation.

(Fig.20. 7 Times Square. Skidmore Owings & Merrill/ David Childs. 2004. Photo: Author 2025)

The building occupies the trapezoidal site just south of the Times Tower where the half-sized Concorde had been mounted above a restaurant that replaced the Heidelberg Building. (Chap. 13 Fig.5) The new skyscraper used some of the foundations of the earlier building because the active subway precluded complete replacement. The Turner Construction company erected Seven Times Square between 2001 and 2003; the tower opened for occupation in 2004. As it rises above subway lines and had to include all the facilities that the client required, this building could be realized only by experienced designers, engineers, and builders.

The columns are spaced widely, thanks to the diagonal braces on the perimeter that lead the eye upward. The span of the braces differs on individual sides. More diagonals and angles as well as added thin planes and protruding horizontals animate the exterior. Short horizontal shelves on the north side can hold a digital clock. Under it, colorful signs on a rectangular screen cover the lowest four floors, two of which contain mechanical installations; the lobby is located on the fifth floor. As the building is taller than those nearest it, Seven Times Square rivals the prominence of the Times Tower.

The building is clad in a grid of tinted glass that makes the building distinctive in its immediate vicinity. Some faces of the building have bolder horizontal lines denoting each floor while other sides give an impression of smooth ascent. The silhouettes are animated by zigzags--the diagonals and angles mentioned above-- at various levels. At the top, mechanical installations sheathed in gray are revealed by V-shaped terminations of the glass walls. A vertical fin on the east side rises above the rest of the top, adding variety to the skyline-- which is by now more than adequately animated.

(Eli B. Gottlieb, “Times Square Tower, New York, NY, USA,” Structural Engineering International 15 #1, 2005, pp. 8-11; see also preceding note with articles in Civil Engineering Magazine for structural information.)

On the south block toward Sixth Avenue, the Dalloul family and their Allied Properties company that owned the Bush tower bought the building immediately to the west, where earlier the Knickerbocker Hotel annex had been. The owners intended to demolish it in favor of a new glass-walled building using air rights from nearby buildings. That new building, designed by the Gruzen Samton architectural firm in 2003-04, was scheduled for completion in 2006. The architects proposed a twenty-three-story tower 75- feet wide, clad in gray glass and aluminum-- a subtle tone that would not upstage the Bush Building. It would be coordinated with the Bush tower so that tenants could break through the buildings’ walls to combine spaces inside, even though there was a six-inch gap between them to conform to the city’s earthquake code. The Landmarks Preservation Commissioners persuaded the architects to reduce the building’s projection near the top, to complement the Bush building’s recessed summit. But the project was never built because in 2006, the Istithmar development company of Dubai, which then owned the Knickerbocker Hotel to the west, bought 136-40 West for a hotel/condominium. Before the Hilton Garden Inn went up there in 2013-14, its site was almost empty except for two forlorn six-story structures from which anything of value had been removed. The concrete-framed hotel, with blue-tinted glass on the walls, is a more conspicuous replacement at 404 feet high, designed by Peter F. Poon Architects.

(Fig. 21. Hilton Garden Inn, partly covered by pink sign. Peter F. Poon Architects, 2014. Photo: Author 2025)

(http://michaelminn.net/newyork/urban-renewal/midtown/140-west-42nd/2009-04-05_17-11-45.jpg for images after 2008, photographs of the site in 2008, accessed 8 9 2021; interview with Peter Samton, FAIA, 2018; NYT 4 21 2002, p. H7)

East of the Bush Tower, starting in 2004, there was intense activity all the way to the Sixth Avenue corner. The telephone company, then known as Verizon, sold eighty percent of its building at 1095 Avenue of the Americas in 2005 for $505 million but remained on seven floors ---sixth through twelfth---including the switching station built in 1974. The new proprietors, Equity Office Properties Trust, expected to spend $260 million to create a two-story lobby, provide retail accommodation, do extensive remodeling, and re-clad the entire building despite the differences in the use and dimensions of the interior floors. The goal was to create a first-class office building from a tower full of telephone equipment. This would also increase the value of the sites on the block. The value was presumably enhanced later by renaming the building as 3 Bryant Park and later, the Salesforce Building.

At first, the efforts were less than ideally successful. By 2007, the Blackstone Group had taken over the Equity company, in a highly leveraged deal, but the building needed more tenants and was in financial difficulty. A news article of February 2006, however, had promised positive change. Lenders were extending the loans, hoping for future rent increases. This move proved wise in the long run, just as Verizon’s own patience had allowed it to outlast the drug dealers and decay in Bryant Park.

(Fig. 22. Salesforce Building, 1095 Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas), ex Verizon Building, alias 3 Bryant Park. MdeAS and Cosentini, 2007. Photo: Author, August 16, 2025)

The architectural firm of Moed de Armas, headed by Leon Moed and Raoul de Armas, alumni of Skidmore Owings and Merrill, collaborated with the Gensler group and Cosentini Associates to remodel the building. By this time, the two founding architects had added Dan Shannon’s name to that of their firm, where he is now the principal and was a major participant in this project. The architects had to create entirely different interiors on the Verizon floors and the office floors but had to cover them in a harmonious way. The equipment floors, for instance, would need weather walls to protect the switches, but the office floors could just have normal glass walls. The building had six different floor heights, of twelve feet or more, with some of the tall ones on levels six through twelve for the Verizon equipment. In a lecture delivered at the Skyscraper Museum, Mr. Shannon described the varied heights of the tallest floors, from just over seventeen feet to about eighteen, creating irregularities that differed from the regular succession of equal-height floors and repetitious windows in normal office buildings.

To provide unified, consistent covering for all the differing floors, the architects and engineers collaborated with the specialist firm of Israel Berger & Associates--later joined with another firm, becoming Vidaris-- and created new cladding for the entire building. Instead of the black, white-striped surface for the telephone company, the building now appears as a green glazed prism subtly divided into rectangular sections. They intended the color to complement the green leaves of Bryant Park. As always, the consultants had, as they point out, to consider the “condition of the existing mechanical system, logistics during construction of an occupied building [in this case, occupied by telephone installations, and] the fire-rating requirements.” The system adopted was a double-glazed one that increased thermal efficiency. The skin uses less energy than the preceding dark glass did, and every office floor admits good light and permits clear views. Tishman’s construction division and its colleagues had to remove some precast stone from the exterior while protecting telephone service. Altogether, this was an exceptionally complicated technically sophisticated remodeling of a specialist building.

The lobby during the telephone company years was described as “cavernous and unwelcoming,” so it needed alteration for a welcoming office building. Gensler worked with the supervising architects to divide part of it by creating a lounge area near the elevator bank. LesliFe Jabs of the Gensler firm described the modification as “softening” of spaces that in the past had evoked mausolea with security provisions. Real estate experts agree that a well-designed lobby attracts desirable tenants. In this case, the lobby space is connected to an open plaza at the west, which was required by the zoning regulations. Verizon had installed trees, a waterfall, and benches there, conforming to zoning regulations.

Of course, there would be new elevators. Old-fashioned radiator units would disappear from the windows. The public plaza would be remodeled. The firm of Abel Bainnson Butz took care of that.

(Fig. 23. Plaza beside 1095 Sixth Avenue, Abel Bainnson Butz, Photo: Author, August 2025)

The views from the windows were so greatly enhanced that the rental executives hoped that the vista over Bryant Park would make the lower floors desirable even if they did not command higher rents. If lower-floor tenants want vistas from high up, they can visit a sky lobby on the twenty-third floor where views and coffee service are on offer. Below that level is a mechanical floor, with another at the top of the building.

The former surface leaked, so it was important that the new one be less permeable. The Cosentini firm produced a new surface system that uses less energy while keeping the existing machinery. It required new coils, fans, and other components, but in the overall construction it was possible to keep the existing chillers, pipes, cables and other equipment. The building was an exceptionally complicated one to remodel but the work satisfied its tenants and owners. By the time Blackstone sold it at the start of 2015 to Ivanhoé Cambridge allied with Callahan Capital Properties, it cost the buyers $2.2 billion, described as record-setting and the “second highest price ever paid for a single U.S office building.”

Part of the building’s appeal to tenants has to do with the management, described by a young business intern there as exceptional, allowing not so much as one scratch on an elevator. The manager in 2016, William Vazquez, offered a comprehensive idea of the way any large building is supervised, contrasting aspects of his work before and after the financial crisis of 2008.

Before the slump, many buildings had more employees under the building manager’s direction, as high profits supported added personnel. A first-class building like this one would have had a comptroller and a chief engineer, too, which it lacked later. An accounting manager is a valued colleague although Mr. Vazquez, too, has had training in finance. In 2016, he supervised a large cohort of specialists, but fewer in number than there were before the crisis--- thirteen engineers, two electricians, four administrators, thirty-nine janitors, and thirty-two security guards. On his own direct staff were an accountant, a construction manager, a project manager, a property manager, a tenant services coordinator, and brokers.

Tenants after 2008 expected especially quick responses from the manager and his chief assistant. Careful tenant relations became even more essential. Using an empty floor for events ranging from free massages to ice-cream socials might help retain tenants---easier to do than finding new ones. As a consequence of the Covid pandemic, competition for office tenants demanded every form of occupant care. Good staff relations are also essential, as is assuring the proper welcome to tenants and visitors. Ideally, the lobby reception personnel are trained in speech, dress, and courtesy. In addition to the in-house staff, a manager must also deal with unions and work with them as a team. 1095 Sixth Avenue is a union shop with a collective bargaining agreement. In his role as Registered Property Manager and mentor, an expert professional like this one arranges regular meetings with staff, and merit bonuses for those who excel. The manager has also to have close and cordial relations with vendors. Meticulous management is especially important in first-class buildings, with duties that may at times extend into nights and weekends.

Apart from the occasional special event on a vacant floor, a manager needs regular close contact with tenants. He must meet with new ones almost immediately, to explain matters related to engineering, security, janitorial procedures, and elevators, to make sure that things are working well. He will also meet with those who supply necessary materials and services to ascertain whether things are correct from their viewpoint. He must understand different business cultures, from what he described as the suit-and-tie type to the ping-pong-table-and-yoga-mat small company. And because any well-run building must safeguard its excellent LEED rating, that is part of his job, too. The point of all this effort is to retain existing tenants and to attract new ones. It seemed clear that Mr. Vazquez was instrumental in the success of the building. A broker discovers, introduces, and persuades a potential tenant; the manager sustains the tenant.

(NYT 2 22 2006, p.C6; 6 9 2010, p. B4; 10 9 2008, p. A34; 11 29 2006, p.C9; link above to Skyscraper Museum lecture by Dan Shannon. Interview with Mr. Vazquez, 2020).

In 2001, Crain’s New York Business reported that over many years, Seymour Durst, his son Douglas, and nephew Jonathan had acquired about ninety percent of the sites that his family needed to build a skyscraper. The Dursts were determined to erect one that would reach from their 4 Times Square eastward to the Sixth Avenue corner. During the next few years, while the family managed to acquire the rest of the land they needed, the area’s safety improved greatly. The Dursts’ tower, called One Bryant Park, is a companion to the other new high-rises west of Sixth Avenue that added expensive and expansive buildings.

(Fig.24. One Bryant Park, south and east faces. Fig.25. South face to east corner. Photos: Author, August 2025)

The site assembly required substantial payments to Richard Maidman, nephew of Irving, who had sold the Remington building at 113 West. A few raised eyebrows responded to Richard Maidman’s statement that he had finally sold the Remington Building to the Durst interests because rebuilding New York was important after the World Trade Center calamity. Cynics may have thought that a $13 million payment for the decrepit office building was the real inducement, given that Richard Maidman had no success in turning it into a hotel. Some years earlier, a deal between the Dursts and former partial site co-owners, the Bernstein companies, had foundered over the latter’s connections to the Philippine dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, but at last a deal for $46 million was made with a group including Joseph Bernstein and members of the Rafi Nasser family. Commentators at the time could not remember a more expensive land purchase.

Other parcels had been assembled earlier. Among them was the tiny former Pix Theatre at 121 West, built in 1939 to the design of Ely Jacques Kahn. The façade above the entrance had a pristine white square surface, bordered by a black frame, with a circle to identify PIX. But later, the façade identified an attraction called Peep-o-Rama, with coin-operated booths that showed pornographic videos. It finally closed in 2002. Then Douglas Durst’s daughter, Anita, operated a performance space called Chashama there and on adjacent lots until 2004 when the new building was prepared for construction. One Bryant Park bade farewell not just to the Pix and Remington Buildings, but also to a Mexican restaurant, a Tad’s Steaks grill, two loan and pawn companies--a miscellany of cheap food, cheap rents, high interest rates, and cheap thrills.

(For the site assembly, see NYT 2 18 1990, p. RE13. For Chashama, the peep show, and the Pix, see Ed Solero, http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/6496, 2006, accessed 9 19 2020)

The name tenant is the Bank of America, also an alternative name for the tower. The first renderings were published in 2003, demolition started in 2004, and the 55-story building was occupied in 2009. The architects were COOKFOX, a firm created in 2003 by Richard Cook and Robert Fox, the latter formerly a partner of Bruce Fowle’s. The architects, working with executive architect Adamson Associates designed fifty-four floors above ground and three below, with about 953 feet to the roof and a total height of 1200.01 feet, the additional elevation being an antenna. Severud Associates as structural engineers, Jaros, Baum & Bolles as mechanical engineers, and Israel Berger/Vidaris-- again the curtain wall consultant working with fabricator Permasteelisa-- were instrumental in this effort, as was Tishman Construction Company as the general contractor. Douglas Durst moved his office there in 2009. By June of 2010, the building was almost completed and ninety-eight percent occupied, with more tenants anticipated. Rents were as much as a third higher than others in the Durst portfolio, even though there had been a general slump in rents after the 2008 downturn.

One Bryant Park is physically imposing despite its light-colored exterior of white metal and low-iron glass (with some frits to prevent birds from crashing in, and others to catch light). It reaches the building line either at ground level or by means of a broad overhang with a bamboo ceiling like that of the lobby. The building entrance itself, like the entire tall lobby level, is encased in glass, although changes in depth, restaurants, the glass-enclosed subway entrance, the ornamental indoor garden that nods to nature, and the incorporation of a historic theater on Forty-third Street interrupt the impression of a pure glass tower. A glass and metal subway access kiosk occupies part of the sidewalk.

The building forms on the upper levels start within a rectangular prism and then shear off at the twenty-second floor to taper in breadth toward the top as if there were two towers, one of which is notched. That creates corner offices--signs that the occupants are important. The overall design harmonizes with that of other towers nearby that echo vertically the horizontal angles that Broadway forms with the avenues. This was not done for purely aesthetic reasons at One Bryant Park; air flow is halted by the building’s surface because the forms reduce air pressure against the building. The elevation moderates its emphatic verticality by revealing the separate floors inside. Floors 52 to 56 are mechanical floors. The spire, described as akin to a triangular vertical truss, can adjust its colored illumination. Cline Bettridge Bernstein Lighting Design executed the exterior and lobby lighting.

It is not primarily the form that drew praise and public attention, nor was it the presence of the expensive restaurants that moved in. Much, justifiably, was made of its status as the first commercial LEED Platinum skyscraper, reflecting the ongoing ambition of the architects and developer to bow to the earth’s needs. The concrete used requires less cement than usual and contains slag from blast furnaces-- material that would otherwise pollute the environment. Some building materials had been previously recycled, and other materials can be in the future. The insulated low-iron, slightly fritted glass provides natural daylight while it moderates solar heat gain and loss. The ceramic frits in the glass reflect heat away from the interiors but do not disturb the views from the floor-to-ceiling office windows. The interior air is purified as it enters and is cleaned to some degree as it leaves, adjusting the monitored carbon dioxide content in offices and improving the neighborhood air in that way. A system for storing rainwater allows its reuse, and gray water is recycled. Various provisions for assuring energy-efficient building systems and individual tenant controls add to its environmental standing. A thermal tank in the basement for producing and storing ice helps to cool the building when staff is making maximal use of energy. On the seventh-floor setback, a large natural gas-turbine co-generation plant allows the building to draw only thirty-five percent of its power from the city’s grid. This feature uses heat from the process of combustion to run the heat and cooling systems and ventilation mechanisms. Even the rooftops are ‘green’ and beehives were set up among plants. There are other ecologically sound provisions as well.

Some details cited by the architects are less evident to visitors or users, who may not care that door handles are made of white oak, or who may find no spiritual enrichment from walking on Jerusalem stone paving. Even certain types of carpet added environmental credits. Nevertheless, these and other sustainable elements show the designers’ and client’s interest in environmentally responsible materials and actions, and office tenants may be glad to learn these facts.

Not every element that contributed to the LEED rating was within the building. Proximity to Bryant Park was part of its credits, as was the new subway entrance, although failure to build one would have disgraced the owner and probably reduced the zoning allowance. The “garden room” added credits although its vertical bushes lack imagination. Greater width for the adjacent sidewalks is always welcome; that added more credits.

The LEED rating is not affected by the activities of the tenants; the rating precedes occupancy. The building when occupied is not ‘green’, and probably few buildings are. People and their work machines generate more greenhouse gases and use more energy per square foot here than other tall towers do—indeed, twice as much energy per square foot as the masonry-clad, smaller-windowed Empire State Building where there are fewer tenants. The trading stations use more energy than anything else because some servers run day and night. Tenants other than people who trade internationally in money use less energy, so if the bank moves out in the future, energy use is likely to be reduced here, although transferred to wherever the bank moves. LEED does not assess the energy use in the production of building materials, trucking to the site, polishing the materials, and other matters that affect the ‘green’ aspects of construction. Nor would it be sensible now to change from using natural gas to using electricity in this building, where the existing equipment is built to last for another generation. New rules passed by the City in 2019, known as Local Law 97 create more stringent standards that required changes from 2024 onward. But the rules are not retrospective.

Despite the problems created by current ways of doing business or the limits of the LEED program, builders and architects who mitigate environmental problems are commendable models for others. Taking measures to improve the environment is preferable to doing building as usual. In this case, however, the boasting rights are threatened by a city rule that will limit emissions from buildings, whether caused by the owner or not.

(https://inhabitat.com/photos-worlds-greenest-skyscraper-nycs-one-bryant-park/4880766163_4bedacca3f_o/ accessed 9 11 2021; https://cookfox.com/projects/one-bryant-park/ accessed 9 11 2021; https://siny.org/project/one_bryant_park/ accessed 9 11 2021; /waldron.com/projects/project/one-bryant-park/ accessed 9 11 2021; https://www.durst.org/properties/one-bryant-park; https://skyscraper.org/programs/one-bryant-park-cookfox-go-platinum/ accessed 9 11 2021 For the principal contractors, see http://skyscrapercenter.com accessed 3 11 2019; for the energy problems, see Sam Roudman,, “Bank of America’s Toxic Tower,” New Republic 11 28, 2013, pp. B1, B7; https://www.bdcnetwork.com/leed-platinum-office-tower-faces-millions-fines-due-new-yorks-local-law-97 accessed 4 8 2022; http://www.newrepublic.com/node/113942/print. NYT 6 2 2010, p. RE12; see also 2 9 2010, pp. A1, A23; 10 9 2008, p. A34; 6 27 2001, pp. B1, B12; 3 16 1999, pp. B1 B6. Charles V. Bagli was the principal chronicler for the Times; John Hill Guide to Contemporary New York City Architecture, New York, W.W. Norton, 2011, pp 114-115; Aaron Seward, articles in Architects Newspaper https://www.archpaper.com/2008/11/stepping-up/ for 11 19 2008 and https://www.archpaper.com/2011/02/lighting-one-bryant-park/r 2 2 2011; NYT 12 19 2003, p. B3.Christian Farrar, “One Bryant Park,” Term paper, New York University, spring 2017; http://www.durst.org.properties/en-bryant-park, https://therealdeal.com/new-research/topics/property-bryant-park accessed 3 25 2021. Serge Appel of the COOKFOX firm is credited with leading the architectural enterprise. For environmental limits, see Justin Davidson, https://www.curbed.com/2022/02/green-building-claims-carbon-neutral-environment.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_ medium=email&utm_campaign=Curbed%20-%20February%203%2C%202022&utm_term=Subscription%20List%20-%20Curbed#comments accessed 2 3 2022. For the city rule about emissions: Devin Leonard, “The Green Building That’s Flunking New York’s Climate Law,” Bloomberg Green 3 14 2022. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-03-14/the-green-skyscraper-challenging-nyc-s-emissions-law?cmpid=BBD031422_CITYLAB&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=220314&utm_campaign=citylabdaily accessed 3 16 2022)

The major architectural event at the New York Public Library during this decade was the handsome new construction in the South Court. Davis Brody Bond, by then headed by Lewis Davis and J. Max Bond, were well known for handsome middle-income apartments, work at the Osaka World’s Fair of 1970, American embassies, university buildings, and many other commissions. They had already improved the Rose Reading Room and had converted the earlier lending library room into the Bartos Forum. For the South Court project, the firm designed a delicate, ingenious, and well-functioning building-within-a-building. Work on it proceeded efficiently from 1999 to 2002, carried out by the Sciame construction company.

The Public Library had originally two large courtyards to provide light and ventilation to the interior rooms. In the south court, horse-drawn wagons could be unloaded in the early days, as there was an entrance to it from Fortieth Street. A marble fountain embellished the center, allowing horses to drink from troughs, but horse-drawn vehicles gradually fell out of use. For several decades, the courtyard was used for receptions, readings, entertainments, a staff lunch area, and eventually, parking.

When in the 1990s, the trustees perceived the need for dedicated spaces for public instruction, for an auditorium set up purposely for lectures and audio-visual presentations, for staff spaces of various kinds, and for teaching computer skills, they designated the south court as the location of a new building set within the original one. Lighting, ventilation, and air-conditioning methods made light and air from the court no longer necessary in the perimeter rooms. This solution kept the new facilities inside the main building. convenient for staff and users and in conformance with rules governing landmarks.

A new structure could have filled the court, but the architects were subtler than that. They built the new building almost free of the court’s walls, attaching the two constructions only where contact was essential. The new building was created with glass walls, so that, separated as it is from the Library’s massive structure, it managed to look unobtrusive and insubstantial while being solid and capacious. A lunch counter and gift shop were installed in 2022.

(Fig.25. New York Public Library, South Court, Davis Brody Bond, 2002. Sections..Photo: Davis Brody Bond.)

Fig.26. South court interior. Photo: Davis Brody Bond 2002)

The architects provided a staff lounge at the skylit top to create private space away from the library’s users. The public enjoys classes and events in the intermediate floors of what is called the Celeste Bartos Education Center. One hundred eighty-six people can attend presentations in the auditorium on the lowest level. Elevators take them there, or the able-bodied may use a staircase. At this lowest level, the surrounding walls are made of the stones that formed the reservoir’s boundaries in 1842. Above the stones, the marble walls of the library line the courtyard. It was necessary to excavate two stories below the initial ground because the new structure could not rise over the library’s rooftop, as the building is an official city landmark and its exterior must be preserved as it was.

(https://architizer.com/projects/new-york-public-library-center-for-the-humanities/)accessed 12 12 2022

In 2005, the Map Division underwent an extensive restoration and was named for donors Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal of Jordan; the division was relocated in the 2020s. But these were all interior changes. By 2007, the library trustees realized that the exterior was in poor condition. People remarked in 2004 that there were black streaks on the exterior marble, and that the façade’s statues were damaged by pollution and moisture. The New York Times reported that particles of rubber from passing tires had mixed with the marble surface, creating gypsum that crumbles. The Library engaged the firm of Wiss Janney Elstner, specialists in conservation, engineering and restorative architecture, to devise a procedure for cleaning. There was no chance of the marble eroding entirely, as it is at least three feet thick, but it needed help. WJE marshalled its engineers, architects, and material scientists to survey the building, identifying over seven thousand instances of stone deterioration. They tested various techniques for restoration and over three years applied laser cleaners or removable poultices to make the building handsome for its centennial celebrations in 2011. During the restoration process, the Library trustees proposed to remodel the interior and pay for it in part by closing the Mid-Manhattan and Donnell branches, but at the time, that scheme was unknown to the general public. What the public did notice and protest was the sale of famous works of art to finance book purchases. The trustees and officials replied that the building was a library, not an art gallery.

Three years later, however, the Library published grand plans to remove books from the stacks, and the stacks themselves, to allow for a huge circulating library, replacing the dominance of the on-site research collection for which the library had been established. The trustees planned a café and information center in the main entrance hall, and wi-fi throughout the building. When financier and Library trustee Stephen A. Schwarzman offered a gift of $100 million to start a donation campaign, the library offered to rename the building for him. The consequences of this proposal only became clear in the next decade. (NYT 3 11 2008, pp. A1, A14)

Located diagonally opposite the library, another work on Forty-second Street by Kohn Pedersen Fox rose at 505 Fifth Avenue, the number given to an office and retail building with the alternative name of One East 42^nd Street. It replaced a taxpayer that sold jewelry, crafts, and souvenirs to tourists on the former site of the Ward/Morton house, and an eighteen-story office building of 1906 with Fifth Avenue frontage that had been altered more than once. The partner in charge at the architectural firm was Paul Katz, working with Douglas Hocking as design principal.

(Fig.27. 505 Fifth Avenue. KPF (Paul Katz, Douglas Hocking) ,2006. Photo: Author 2023)

The original entrepreneur was Mitchell B Rutter, a real estate advisor with Essex Capital Partners to Touko America, a subsidiary of a development company in Tokyo that was willing to pay well for a Fifth Avenue address. The economic slump in the USA after 1987 and a recession in Japan were among the reasons for the sale of the property to an intermediary and its eventual transfer to KippStawski, property investors and developers. Having bought development rights from adjacent properties, Axel Stawski had the architects add a twenty-seventh story to the building. It was constructed with cast-in-place concrete rather than steel, a safety provision that the architects were glad to publicize when the memory of the World Trade Center tragedy was vivid. The hardened concrete structure also allows for thinner floor plates and a reduced number of columns. Consequently, the architects were able to add two more floors and avoid the use of perimeter columns so that tenants could have uninterrupted views. The metal-sheathed core placed at the side makes uninterrupted spaces possible, and the glass curtain wall admits abundant light. The wall on Forty-second Street is flat, but there are angular projections on the Fifth Avenue face. The entrance lobby features a forced perspective LED light box, called “Plain Dress 2006” by the artist James Turrell. The lights change gradually during the day. The radiant difference of this lobby from the nearby decorative ones of the 1920s nearby prompts a comparison of two vastly different but appealing modes.

The project engineering required some special arrangements, but the engineers and builders were experienced---Pavarini McGovern Construction as the general contractor, Rosenwasser/Grossman engineers for the structure, Gordon H. Smith Corp. as façade consultants with executants Benson Global, and Langan Engineering and Environmental Services for its specialties. Building was made more difficult by the City’s Department of Transportation which forbade cranes or hoists outside the building’s property line, so the machinery had to be located within the building’s perimeter. A subway tunnel just about twenty feet away required shoring and bracing during construction. The eighteen-story building was found to have a party wall with the building to its north, necessitating tie rods to secure the neighbor’s wall. Cantilevered elements on the Fifth Avenue side required stabilizing in view of the shrinkage of concrete over time; it was also necessary to stabilize their places in the curtain wall. Problems of assuring proper electricity during construction were solved with the help of the utility company, Consolidated Edison. The building received a LEED Gold certification

It is a modest addition to Fifth Avenue, an example of its time in using cantilevers and projections to enliven the ubiquitous glass curtain walls that denoted modernity. Projections and cantilevers were typical of the last years of the previous decade and the first few years of the new millennium. In fact, even more unusual shapes had been proposed for the Touko company’s version of the building. This reflects a design trend not seen elsewhere on Forty-second Street except in the pyramidal structures designed by Philip Johnson and his new professional partner, Alan Ritchie, between the two Chrysler Buildings.

(https://stobuildinggroup.com/projects/505-fifth-avenue-new-york-ny/ accessed 8 17 2021. https://www.designbuild-network.com/projects/505/1. For the Turrell installation, see Edward Keegan, “Light Box”, Architect: The Journal of the American Institute of Architects, posted on 10 7 2007, accessed 8 15 2021 https://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/lighting/light-box_o accessed 8 17 2021; Stern et al., NewYork 2000 pp 568-69)

A small change occurred across Forty-second Street at number 12. A long-established tobacconist, Nat Sherman, was denied the renewal of his lease at 500 Fifth Avenue; its owner preferred a larger and trendier retailer. In 2007, Charles McCarry designed an interior for a new low building east of Fifth Avenue that was meant to evoke the smoke-filled leather-armchair atmosphere of a British gentlemen’s club of long ago.

In the first years of the new century it was still thinkable to display a clock flanked by images of two clothed men in feather headdresses---relics of the days when wooden ‘cigar store Indians’ identified a tobacconist’s shop. A wooden example stood outside the building for a while. When the City enacted rules against smoking in retail establishments, the shop petitioned for an exemption, as it planned a lounge for tobacco aficionados, but while that had some success, the owners sold the business to Altria in January 2017. By mid-2020, during the pandemic, the shop closed but not only because of the virus; Altria was more focused on cigarettes than on the cigars that were Sherman’s specialty. As a sign of a new generation, the building later catered to cannabis smokers.

(https://www.cigaraficionado.com/article/nat-sherman-international-closing 8 3, 2020 by David Savona; https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-citys-90-year-old-famed-tobacco-shop-to-shut-its-doors-11597185892 Aug. 11, 2020 by Charles Passy; https://halfwheel.com/six-thoughts-goodbye-to-nat-sherman/379654/ 8 4, 2020 by Charlie Minato with an extensive business analysis all accessed 9 1 2020)

On the same block at the corner of Madison Avenue, the old Carbide Building yielded to 300 Madison.

(Figs. 28 a and b, 300 Madison Avenue, details of exterior. Skidmore Owings & Merrill, 2003. Photos: Author, 2023)

Developer Harry Macklowe had assembled the land and asked Skidmore Owings & Merrill to design a building there. During a dispute with Credit Suisse First Boston, Macklowe relinquished the site, which was taken up by Brookfield Properties. The new owners requested a different design for the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, which was expected to be the principal tenant and co-owner. The bank did not move to all of its anticipated space, however, having reconsidered after the World Trade Center attack. The PricewaterhouseCoopers accounting and consulting firm then moved into about two-thirds of the building. The final site assemblage included the Carbide Building 310 Madison, two town houses, and air rights derived from three more houses, the Rogers Peet Building, and Grand Central Terminal. The pain of paying for these purchases was soothed by tax incentives from the city’s Industrial Development Agency. In exchange, the city saw some aesthetic improvements to the subway station entrance at the corner. Ground-breaking ceremonies in June of 2001 celebrated these arrangements.

The thirty-five story L-shaped building occupies a large lot, with less frontage on Forty-second than on Forty-first Street, with Madison Avenue frontage in between, where retail was required under the zoning rules. The elevation with setback floors includes layers of different sizes, the first eight having about 48,000 square feet to accommodate PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ three trading floors, offices, and a technology floor, and the next fifteen for offices having 29,000 square feet. Stone at the base and metal frames provide some variety there, as do the commercial spaces. Passers-by notice the large, bare two-story lobby where marble and granite contrast with the glass. Three large escalators bring office workers to the mezzanine and the reception desk near the elevator banks that are, uncharacteristically for SOM, boring and bare rather than elegantly austere.

(Fig. 29. 300 Madison Avenue, lobby for PWC company. Photo: Author 2024)

A welcome element for the occupants is a well in the lobby that provides natural light to basement levels where food and other services are located. Above the base, the design changes to express the similarity of the floors above; spandrels alternate with glass at each level to indicate the floors clearly. The exterior does not reveal the important alteration in the cladding after the calamity of September 11, 2001. From the tenth floor upward, the façade already existed. But to prevent flying glass in case of a future attack, and to make it possible for people to continue working, the Viracon company installed a laminated glass inboard ply on the lower nine floors and made other structural adjustments as well.

(NYT 9 9 2002, pp. A1, A14.)

As one sees from the repeated names of certain firms---SOM, KPF, Fox and Fowle and then their separate collaborators---engineers Gilsanz Murray Steficek, Jaros Baum & Bolles, Thornton Tomasetti, Rosenwasser/Grossman, Turner Construction Company and others---only certain firms were considered sufficiently expert to execute the requirements for this generation of huge buildings. In this case, Thornton Tomasetti, Gilsanz Murray Steficek, Jaros Baum & Bolles, and Turner Construction did the work. The Gilsanz firm expressed pride at having used an atypical steel of 65 kilopounds per square inch, achieving a lightweight structure that also satisfied the tenant’s safety concerns after the World Trade Center towers disaster. Turner was proud of its planning and coordination with the adjacent subways and various city agencies that led to the well-timed completion of the 38-story building. Camera surveillance around the building and in elevators, security film laminating glass on the first eight floors, and bollards near the garage entrance and loading dock were among further provisions for safety. Fireproofing, sprinklers, and large water tanks to replace any shortage in the city’s supply are other prudent provisions, not all unique to this building.

(https://www.gmsllp.com/portfolio/300-madison-avenue/ accessed 8 17 2021; NYT 7 21 2000, p. 24; also 1 20 2004, p..B2 about PricewaterhouseCoopers accountants and consultants moving to two thirds of the new building; also https://www.buildings.com/articles/36066/anatomy-building accessed 8 17 2021. https://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrFeJl_mhhl8_Q5.TYPxQt.;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzYEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Ny/RV=2/RE=1696140032/RO=10/RU=https%3a%2f%2fwww.newyorkitecture.com%2ftag%2fskidmore-owings-merrill%2f/RK=2/RS=7wsXACAsFYzf9Sgr9Rjy2oSQh9c- accessed 9 30 2023; https://www.buildings.com/industry-news/article/10194251/anatomy-of-a-building accessed 9 30 2023; https://www.newyorkitecture.com/300-madison-avenue/ accessed 8 17 2025).

At 110 East, the former Bowery Savings Bank was no longer in single ownership and was an example of a small but growing phenomenon: the office condominium. SL Green had an interest in part of the ground floor and thirteen upper floors. These holdings were sold in 2007 before the acute business downturn, fortunately for SL Green which took control of them again in 2011; two years later, the company acquired the garage condominium.

(https://www.globest.com/2021/12/06/sl-green-sells-stake-in-one-madison-other-non-core-assets-also-trade/?kw=SL%20Green%20Sells%20Stake%20in%20One%20Madison%3B%20Other%20Non-Core%20Assets%20Also%20Trade&et=editorial&bu=REM&cn=20211206&src=EMC-Email&pt=NewYork accessed 12 6 2021)

Farther east, the space between the two Chrysler buildings was remodeled with angular shards---pyramids covered in glass and framed with steel tubes.

(Fig. 30. “Trylons” Philip Johnson/Alan Ritchie, 2001. Photo: Author 2023. Chrysler Building at left, Kent Building at right.)

Startling in the streetscape, they were imagined at about the same moment, the very end of the 1990s, as 505 Fifth Avenue in its initial, more angular form. The project resulted from the sale of the Chrysler and Kent buildings in 1997 by the Japanese companies that had lent money to Jack Kent Cooke, the previous owner of the two office structures and the space between them. Tishman-Speyer and the Travelers Insurance group offered the winning bid, although Cooper Union still owns the land beneath. The idea was to demolish the low buildings, engage Beyer Blinder Belle to clean the tall skyscraper and the lobby mural, re-clad the eastern building in glass, and create a plan for retail uses. Industry sources thought the renovation would cost $100 million, beyond the roughly $200 million needed for the purchase. The new owners also proposed to remodel the Cloud Club but that didn’t happen.

. The architects, Philip Johnson and Alan Ritchie, with Adamson Associates as architects of record, covered the Kent, formerly Chrysler Building East, in a dark blue-green glass curtain wall to modernize its appearance and also add retail space, but more significant changes were less apparent. Demolition of the block’s low-rise buildings permitted an extension of the high-rise, so that the elevator bank was moved from one side to the center of an enlarged building. The mechanical systems were improved or replaced. All this added 130,000 square feet of valuable interior rentable space.

Johnson designed the “Trylons,”as the pyramidal structures are called. They occupy the space between the two office buildings where small buildings had stood. The name trylon comes from the pyramidal prism that was an emblem of the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. Few young people knew the word or its happy connotation-- or that during the Fair’s run, Johnson had consorted with his Nazi contacts in newly-invaded Poland.

The glass in its eighteen different shapes by Antamex International, the frame engineered by Severud Associates and fabricated by Mometal, and the overall construction by Turner Construction Company from plans by Johnson and Adamson Associates produced the result that opened in the spring of 2001. The complexity of producing the shards, one of which is as tall as a seven-story building, necessitated a full-scale test at a facility in Quebec. Then the framework was shipped to New York, reassembled, and filled in with 535 panes of glass.

(NYT 9 18 1997, pp. B1, B10; 5 9 2001, p. B7; 5 9 2001, p. B7; New New York, Architecture of a City, ed. Ian Luna, New York, Rizzoli 2003, pp. 194-195).

Johnson said that the Trylons were inspired by the pointed windows in the Chrysler Building’s spire, although the name referred to the emblem at the Fair. The idea of building in context was much spoken of at the time, so the reference to the neighboring skyscraper was an attempt to provide some link to the past. There was really none at all, since the Trylons look like nothing else and are primarily of glass with granite at the sides. They were meant to be showrooms, initially for Daimler Chrysler, but the automobile company suffered business reversals and remained in its existing offices. Eventually, a restaurant frequented by power brokers occupied the principal ground floor space, although its designers took no advantage of the soaring pyramidal framework, preferring to install beamed ceilings and Persian-style carpets, leather banquettes and other symbols of expensive masculine steakhouse décor. The investor Aby Rosen, with his firm RFR Holdings, had in 2019 bought the Chrysler Building and in 2024-5, despite being ousted by the landowner, Cooper Union, for non-payment of ground rents, proposed to demolish the trylons that occupy a site that he owned specifically. No project was published yet to replace the trylons.

(NYT 6 25 1998, p. I21. https://tjvnews.com/local/new-york/aby-rosen-looks-to-redevelop-the-trylons-leaving-the-chrysler-building-behind/ accessed 8 18 2025)

In 2006, Andrew Penson bought Grand Central Terminal for $61 per square foot. Air rights came with the Terminal building, and when developer SL Green was looking for a site to develop and bought the properties immediately west of the Terminal, Penson offered to sell 1.3 million square feet of the air rights for as much as $600 per square foot, countering the buyer’s offer of $400. Negotiations continued for eight years, at which point Mayor de Blasio’s administration rezoned part of Vanderbilt Avenue, allowing the new skyscraper to be erected without the purchase of air rights. (See chapter 15).

No significant changes were made to the older skyscrapers facing Grand Central Terminal, but in September 2000, a charity auction took place in the grand hall of the Bowery Savings Bank, then a party venue for the Cipriani catering company. The items offered for bidding were painted fiberglass cows—Moo York and other names--that had earlier been placed in various streets. New cows appeared in 2021 (NYT 9 29 2000, p. B3). The SL Green company also made some changes to the lobby and installed new elevator cabs, as approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Nearby, the Socony-Mobil building was proposed for landmarking against the owners’ not very strenuous objections.

Philip Morris moved a good part of its office staff out of its building in 2008. By then it had been renamed Altria. which concealed its connection to cigarettes. A unit of a British firm, Global Holdings, bought it, but Altria leased the fifth through eighth floors; the building later had other prominent tenants. The Chanin Building had to close for ten days after a steam pipe ruptured and exploded. Pfizer pharmaceutical company installed artist Brian Clark’s blue windows on its ground floor. All of his work there was dismantled in 2019 as the company prepared to move to a new site. Pfizer’s name became familiar to the broad public in 2021 when its scientists developed a vaccine against the Covid-19 virus. 200 East was remodeled to some degree in 2005 with sustainable windows, and was given a new lobby in 2010. Part of Tudor City earned landmark status, and some of its units became subject to rent stabilization regulations.

We see, then, that the pace of new building west of Sixth Avenue was brisk in this decade, the pace east of it less so, but by then there was little room for new activity there. To be sure, older shops and restaurants closed and new ones appeared, generally more elegant or at least more expensive than the ones they replaced. The eastern half of the street seemed fixed, apart from the small intrusion of Sherman’s tobacco shop and a larger intrusion, the Chrysler trylons. Once the prisms were in place, passers-by might well have considered the street fully built up, perhaps forever. A close observer might have noticed, though, that the Grand Hyatt Hotel was looking faded. Its huge lobby was still eerily impressive because architects Bentel & Bentel had redesigned the space in 2011. The giant heads by sculptor Jaume Plensa remained in the spacious, dark lobby. Even closer observers might have thought that the Ford Foundation building, a generation old, might be ready for refurbishing. There were a few sites left for development at the west end, too. With new plans and minor changes to older buildings, nearly all of the vacant lots were to be filled by the end of the next decade, one that was closed by the Covid-19 pandemic.