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Posted Jun 7, 2016, 10:37 AM
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Join Date: Sep 2013
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Some excerpts from an article about the building's history:
http://www.6sqft.com/great-game-chan...1980s-midtown/
Quote:
When this full-block, mixed-use development project was conceived in the mid-1980s the area in and around Times Square was one of the city’s worst. It was riddled with crime and pornography and was run-down, especially along Eighth Avenue. The proposition to add a building that was the scale of the full-block One Worldwide Plaza development, therefore, was not only surprising, but shocking and downright unthinkable.
The legendary Madison Square Garden designed by Thomas W. Lamb had occupied its site from 1925 to 1966....When it moved south next to the “new” Penn Station 16 blocks to the south, this site became the city’s largest parking lot and it took about a decade and a half for it to find a new life. The site was finally developed and completed in 1989 by a syndicate headed by William Zeckendorf Jr. that included Arthur Cohen and Worldwide Realty partners Frank Stanton and Victor Elmaleh.
In their wonderful book, “New York 2000, Architecture and Urbanism Between the Bicentennial and the Millennium,” Robert A. M. Stern, David Fishman and Jacob Tilove provide the following commentary:
“The neighborhood was marginal at best, squalid even, but in 1984 William Zeckendorf Jr. acquired the site and, in January 1985, chose Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with design principal David Childs leading the team, to plan for the development of what would be the first office building of any importance to be built west of Eighth Avenue since the completion of Raymond Hood’s McGraw-Hill building in 1931. The building would also be the first significant project for Childs since his move to New York after 13 years of practice in SOM’s Washington office.
“Though the four-acre site, one of the largest undeveloped properties in single ownership in midtown, had been used as a parking lot since 1967, it had for some time been slated for redevelopment as the future headquarters of the Gulf & Western Corporation, which owned the land. Gulf & Western had, from time to time, indicated its intention to combine an office building with residential and retail uses, and the Skidmore firm had prepared studies.
“In November 1985, Zeckendorf’s plans were announced at a press conference in City Hall, calling for a forty-five story, 1.5-million-square-foot office tower on Eighth Avenue, a thirty-eight-story apartment tower containing 268 condominiums to the west and seven six- and seven-story residential buildings housing 286 units filling the western end of the block on Fiftieth and Fifty-first Streets and Ninth Avenue. In addition to a landscaped mid-block park, the complex would include, underground, a six-screen movie theater, a 35,000-square-foot health club, and a 450-car garage....."
....David Childs chose as his historical model the great gilded pyramid roof of the full-block New York Life Insurance Building that Cass Gilbert had designed in 1928 to replace the first Madison Square Garden at the northeast corner of Madison Square Park.
....His design, however, placed the very bulky tower at the east end of the block at Eighth Avenue. A smaller and much slimmer tower, designed by Frank Williams, was placed in the center of the block just to the west of a large through-block plaza. West of the mid-block tower were low-rise wings that were more in keeping with the rest of the Clinton neighborhood fronting on Ninth Avenue.
....The pioneering project was successful in garnering many major prestigious office tenants because of the high quality of its design, its closeness to Rockefeller Center and its relatively low rents at the time of the development. And so important was this project to the future of West Midtown that it was the subject of a book and a five-part PBS television special when it was completed.
....It had an extremely impressive roster of move-in tenants: Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, the third largest advertising company in the world that relocated from Madison Avenue; Cravath, Swaine & Moore, “the white shoe-est of all white-shoe law firms,” as Paul Goldberger put in an article in The New York Times, January 21, 1990, abandoning “the solid precincts of Wall Street not for Rockefeller Center but for Eighth Avenue? Eighth Avenue – the scourge of midtown Manhattan, that tawdry street of pornographic movies and the Port Authority Bus Terminal?”
....To twist their arms to get such tenants to consider the move, the developers offered hefty financial inducements in terms of lower rents and equity in the project. Surprisingly, though, they did not offer the name of the building.
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Madison Square Garden that stood on the site from the 1920's until 1968 when it was replaced by the current one:
source
source
The New York Life Building that was built in 1928 on the original Madison Square Garden site, and whose roof would would serve as an inspiration for Child's design:
source
Last edited by shadowbat2; Jun 7, 2016 at 10:50 AM.
Reason: added pics
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