POSTWAR PARK AVENUE
1950s - 2000
The first wave of postwar office construction began on Park Avenue in 1947 with the completion of the 22-story 445 Park on the southeast corner of 57th Street, a Modernist mid-rise by the architects Kahn & Jacobs. In the following decade, New York experienced a boom in office buildings that paralleled the skyscraper frenzy of the late Twenties. By 1957, as Jane Jacobs detailed in her Architectural Forum article, "New York's Office Boom," Manhattan had already raised 64 new office towers, had another 20 under construction, and had more than 30 more announced.
Until 1961, when the city's zoning law changed to limit the maximum Floor Area, rather than prescribe a 3-D "envelope," most of the new high-rises were speculative projects and conformed to the space-maximizing, setback formula of the 1916 zoning law. A few architectural firms – especially Emery Roth & Sons and Kahn and Jacobs – dominated the market.
Notably, though, during these same years, the corporate headquarters for Lever House, the Seagram Building, and Union Carbide proposed an alternative model. All three expressed Modernism’s penchant for presenting the building as a simple form, free-standing and surrounded by open space. Unlike all the previous structures of Terminal City, these towers did not rise up from the edge of their lot, but were set back in a plaza or turned perpendicular to Park Avenue, breaking the continuity of the street wall that for more than three decades had defined Park Avenue. Their examples influenced the changes effected in the new 1961 zoning law.
CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS
“The chief sponsors of the new office buildings were (and are) conservative commercial corporations whose names read like a preferred listing of ‘Who’s Who in American Industry.’ The staples of our civilization – soap, whisky and chemicals – have identified themselves with advanced architectural design and their monuments march up the avenue in a proud parade.”
This comment by New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, of course, referred to the iconic corporate headquarters of Lever House, Seagram, and Union Carbide – pictured in the photographs at the front of the case. Their sleek, glass-curtain wall design – by SOM, Mies van der Rohe, and SOM, respectively – set the standard for International Style Modernism for a generation.
All three exhibited Modernism’s penchant for presenting the building as a simple form, free-standing and surrounded by open space. Unlike all the previous structures of Terminal City, these towers did not rise up from the edge of their lot but were set back in a plaza or turned perpendicular to Park Avenue, breaking the continuity of the street wall that for more than three decades had defined Park Avenue.
The gatefold photograph by LOOK’s Frank Bauman is a panorama of the changing Manhattan skyline. It looks west toward Park Avenue and beyond from a high vantage point on Lexington Avenue just north of 53rd St. Starting at left: The new Seagram Building, is seen through a steel skeleton on a site being cleared for the proposed Astor Plaza at 345 Park Ave. Beyond, on Fifth Avenue, is the new aluminum-faced Tishman Building; Lever House on Park Avenue.
LOOK Magazine, February 18, 1958.
PAN AM BUILDING
“The chief sponsors of the new office buildings were (and are) conservative commercial corporations whose names read like a preferred listing of ‘Who’s Who in American Industry.’ The staples of our civilization – soap, whisky and chemicals – have identified themselves with advanced architectural design and their monuments march up the avenue in a proud parade.”
This comment by New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, of course, referred to the iconic corporate headquarters of Lever House, Seagram, and Union Carbide – pictured in the photographs at the front of the case. Their sleek, glass-curtain wall design – by SOM, Mies van der Rohe, and SOM, respectively – set the standard for International Style Modernism for a generation.
All three exhibited Modernism’s penchant for presenting the building as a simple form, free-standing and surrounded by open space. Unlike all the previous structures of Terminal City, these towers did not rise up from the edge of their lot but were set back in a plaza or turned perpendicular to Park Avenue, breaking the continuity of the street wall that for more than three decades had defined Park Avenue.
The gatefold photograph by LOOK’s Frank Bauman is a panorama of the changing Manhattan skyline. It looks west toward Park Avenue and beyond from a high vantage point on Lexington Avenue just north of 53rd St. Starting at left: The new Seagram Building, is seen through a steel skeleton on a site being cleared for the proposed Astor Plaza at 345 Park Ave. Beyond, on Fifth Avenue, is the new aluminum-faced Tishman Building; Lever House on Park Avenue.
LOOK Magazine, February 18, 1958.
A PORTRAIT OF POSTWAR PARK AVE.
The aerial panorama above and enlarged on the adjacent wall is a stunning summary of the postwar development of Park Avenue by the mid-1970s. At the top of the image, looking south, the New York Central and Pan Am buildings close the Park Avenue vista. Beyond are the Chrysler Building, Empire State, and way downtown, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
This vertiginous view, from high in the air directly above 50th Street, was captured by the photojournalist Howard Sochurek (1924-1994). It shows every block built on and a mix of prewar and postwar buildings. The sweep of this sky view makes clear that the scale of postwar modernist towers was growing steadily taller.
The first postwar wave of construction, which began in the late 1940s and continued through the early 1960s, followed the mandates of the 1916 zoning law. The three buildings at the center of the photo – 300, 320, and 350 Park Avenue, all designed by Emery Roth & Sons – used a stacked, setback massing and rose to about 300 to 425 feet tall. During these same years Lever House, the Seagram Building, and Union Carbide proposed the shear slab tower set in a plaza as an alternate model to what the zoning law required. Their examples influenced the massing changes in the new 1961 code.
In 1963, the Union Carbide headquarters and the just-completed Pan Am Building were the tallest structures in the district at 52 and 59 stories, but by the late Sixties, 40 to 50 stories were standard. Prominent in the Sochurek photo are 277, 299, and 345 Park Avenue, built from 1963 to 1969. Although shorter than Union Carbide and Pan Am, these mid-Sixties buildings rose higher than the earlier setbacks and represented the new popularity of the slab formula.
Aerial photograph of Park Avenue, reproduced from the original negative image, by Howard Sochurek, c. 1975. Howard Sochurek photographic archive, camh-dob-040405, The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin. Courtesy of the Howard Sochurek Estate