CREDITS

The Skyscraper Museum would like to thank the many individuals, firms, and institutions who aided our
research, answered queries, and helped with models, drawings, and photography in the exhibition.


First and foremost, we thank the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the LPC agency and staff for their work through the decades. In recent years, the LPC digital mapping team has created online public resources that were invaluable to our research and visualization of the geography of skyscraper Landmarks.

We also acknowledge the unbelievably useful collective effort of Wikipedia editors and contributors in publishing a list of all Manhattan Individual Landmarks organized by area (in logical divisions we adopted), that can also be reordered by designation date. We used this tool to filter the buildings that we considered “skyscrapers.”

We are grateful to the New York Preservation Archive Project (NYPAP) for their oral histories with past Chairs of the LPC, and we urge them to complete their list of interviewees. Among devoted preservationists, we thank our friend Andrew S. Dolkart for his work on the early history of the slow designation of skyscrapers. For a lecture he gave at the Museum in 2015, he documented the impact of the Marcel Breuer design for a destructive slab tower above Grand Central Terminal that precipitated both the litigation against and the validation of the Landmark Law. A long excerpt of his talk is included in the exhibition.

For the donation of a rich archive of paper ephemera on commercial buildings in Manhattan that will be a continuing resource for study, we thank Robert F. R. (Bob) Ballard and Lucinda Ballard.

The preservation architects of several of our featured buildings curated the presentation of their projects. We thank Beyer Blinder Belle for their work and their installation display on the Empire State Building: Frank Prial, Myla Conanan, Chris King, Laura Varacchi, and Carl Yost. The firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) designed Lever House in the early 1950s, and they have been retained by subsequent owners to oversee renovations over the decades. We thank them for their continuing work and for the presentation in our Lever House case: Frank Mahan, Amy Garlock, and Ximena de Villafranca. We are grateful to Snøhetta, the architects for the renovation of the original AT&T Building by Philip Johnson, for explaining their project, including the extraordinary new POPS plaza, and for lending their model.

Building owners are, of course, careful stewards of their Landmarks, so we thank Olayan, especially Erik Horvat and Beth Wolfowitz for their work on the “reinvented” AT&T/ Sony Building, now 550 Madison. As always, Roy Suskin, the building manager and Quasimodo of the Woolworth Building, has been a jovial contributor.

Reprographics: Special thanks to Chris Estéban of A. Estéban & Company. Installation: Dieter Kuhn


Curation and Content
Carol Willis, Founding Director

Online exhibition
Leonardo Tamargo, José Hernández

The Skyscraper Museum Team
Coordination: Daniel J Borrero; Video: Nina Marqueti; Research and support: Daniel Berlinsky, Isabel Canalejo, Dora Hauache, Stephanie Montalti, Xueyan Rong, Alana De Voe, Kennedy Winslow

 

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