The Postcard
A postally unused Alma Series postcard that was published by Alfred Mainzer Inc. of Long Island City, N.Y. The card, which was printed in Spain, has a divided back on which is printed:
"Exotic Aerial View:
Midtown New York
Skyline".
The Metlife Building
In 1963 the Pan Am Building, just north of Grand Central Terminal, was to many critics one of the biggest and ugliest things on the Manhattan skyline. More recently, after workers cleaned and restored the white facade of what is now the MetLife Building, there are signs that a new generation is re-examining that decades-old verdict.
The 57-storey building's roots go back nearly seventy years to when the rail lines that used Grand Central faced a decline in traffic and were looking for ways to increase revenue.
According to ''New York 1960'' by Robert A. M. Stern, the railroads proposed in 1954 that an 80-storey building designed by I. M. Pei be built above Grand Central.
Later that year Fellheimer & Wagner designed a 50-storey building in a plan that would have demolished the terminal.
Fortunately neither project went ahead, and in 1958 the developer Erwin Wolfson proposed a 3-million-square-foot building to replace a five-storey office building behind the terminal, between Park and Vanderbilt Avenues and north to 46th. Street.
The architects Emery Roth and Sons gave it a simple exterior of aluminum and glass, and they designed the long axis of the rectangular, 57-storey tower to run from north to south.
Since the proposed building's shorter east-west axis was about the same width as the tower of the New York Central Building (now the Helmsley Building), which had been built in 1929 just to the north, the new building was designed to retain much of the silhouette of the earlier structure.
Concerned that the initial design was not of adequate quality, Wolfson brought in two high-profile modern architects, Walter Gropius, a founder of the Bauhaus in Germany, and Pietro Belluschi, designer of the Equitable Building in Portland, Oregon, and later the Juilliard School at the Lincoln Center.
They revised not just the building's skin but its placement, rotating its longer axis. The greater width now ran from east to west, blocking the view down Park Avenue.
The structure, now octagonal, was faced with 9,000 panels of precast concrete with quartz chips -- after partial curing, some of the cement was scrubbed out, to better expose the chips, yielding a slight sparkle to the eggshell-color finish.
Although Wolfson was reaching for architectural dignity, critics and citizens were beginning to compare the city's modern architecture with what had come before -- the controversy over the demolition of Penn Station was already under way.
In 1962 the writer Wolf von Eckhardt called the new Park Avenue structure -- it had been named the Pan Am Building because it housed the headquarters of Pan American World Airways:
"Conspicuous for its ugliness
and arrogant disregard for its
surroundings.''
The following year Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture critic of The New York Times, called it:
"Gigantically second rate. A $100m
building cannot really be called cheap,
but Pan Am is a colossal collection of
minimums.''
The way the new placement blocked the view past the old New York Central Building was also a sore point.
The criticism was not purely aesthetic, but also practical. There was concern that concentrating 24,000 more workers at a pressure point for Midtown transportation would choke the area.
The Pan Am Building (its official address is 200 Park Avenue) had some defenders. The editor of Architectural Record, Emerson Goble, said that adding office populations near transit points was wise, and that the escalators along the north side of Grand Central leading to the Pan Am Building would open the terminal up to the new office buildings erected on Park Avenue north of 46th. Street. In 1962 he wrote:
"The Pan Am Building is
planned for pedestrians."
Writing in the Italian journal L'Architettura, Gropius defended the giant modern silhouette as better balanced with the new office skyline on Park Avenue.
The Pan Am Building opened in 1963 with an elevator lobby reached by escalators -- the elevator pits had to clear the track area directly below.
A helicopter service to the roof realised a futuristic dream. In a 1966 article in The Architects' Journal, the architectural historian Reyner Banham said:
''There is no other way to come into
the island city of Manhattan.
From now on, it has to be helicopter
or nothing.''
The helicopter service was however discontinued in 1977 after an accident.
Although the Sky Club, a private restaurant on the top floor, was decorated in pure Colonial Williamsburg style, the Pan Am ticket office on Vanderbilt Avenue had curving, sculptured walls.
The Trattoria, an Italian restaurant on the ground floor, had a jet age feel. The new Pan Am Building seemed to embody the cosmopolitan age of world travel.
MetLife acquired the building in 1981, and in 1992 MetLife announced the replacement of the Pan Am logo with its own. Mr. Stern, the architect, known as a defender of modern buildings, asked The Times:
''Couldn't they just leave the sign
and take the building down?''
MetLife hired Building Conservation Associates to oversee the cleaning work. Ray Pepi, the president of Building Conservation, said that to reduce environmental damage, workers used self-contained cabs to ride up and down the façade. The workers directed low-pressure streams of mineral powder at the façade, removing the dirt, and the debris was sucked up by collection systems inside the cab.
Recent decades have seen a reversal of attitudes towards architecture of the 50's and 60's -- even buildings like the old Huntington Hartford museum on Columbus Circle have attracted preservation support, especially from younger people, who were not around when the buildings were new.
