666 Fifth Avenue

Updated on Oct 09, 2024

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Completed 1957 Floor count 41 Floors 39 Floor area 14 ha Architecture firm Carson and Lundin		Roof 483 ft (147 m) Height 147 m Opened 1957 Owner Kushner Properties

Location 666 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, New York 10103 Developer Tishman Realty and Construction Similar Waldorf Astoria New York, William K Vanderbilt House, Citibank Building, Rockefeller Center, 277 Park Avenue

666 Fifth Avenue is a 41-story office building on Fifth Avenue between 52nd and 53rd Streets in Midtown Manhattan, New York City.

Map of 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10019, USA

666 fifth avenue wmv

Ownership and history

The Tishman family via Tishman Realty and Construction built the 1,500,000-square-foot (140,000 m²) tower in 1957. It was designed by Carson & Lundin and the building was called the Tishman Building. One of its most famous exterior features was the prominent 666 address emblazoned on the top of the building. The other distinctive exterior features are embossed aluminum panels. The original design included lobby sculptures by Isamu Noguchi including the "Landscape of the Cloud" which consists of sinuously cut thin railings in the ceiling to create a cloud effect. The cloud is also carried into a ceiling to floor waterfall. The penthouse was occupied by the Top of the Six's restaurant, operated by Stouffer's. For many years the building had a distinctive feature of a T-shaped atrium walk-through open to the sidewalks on 52nd Street, 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue with glass storefronts inside the walk-through. This included a bookstore and another area used for years by Alitalia Airlines. The entrance to 666 Fifth Avenue was inside this walk-through.

Tishman Realty dissolved in 1976 and the building was sold for $80 million (about $520 million in real value). In the late 1990s, Japanese firms bought both Rockefeller Center and 666 Fifth Avenue. The new owner of 666 Fifth was Sumitomo Realty & Development Company. Major changes included replacing the Top of the Six's restaurant with the Grand Havana Room, a cigar bar private club.

The newly reconstituted Tishman Speyer Properties bought the building for $518 million in 2000 (about $790 million real value). At about the same time Tishman also bought Rockefeller Center. Shortly after the purchase, Tishman enclosed the atrium walk-through and added a third tenant, Hickey Freeman. The enclosure cut off the Fifth Avenue entrance. Access is now via 52nd or 53rd Street. In 2002 the 666 address on the side of the building was replaced with a Citigroup logo. Citigroup is now the building's largest tenant. The 2006 sale was the third blockbuster deal involving Tishman in two years. In 2005 Tishman bought the MetLife Building for $1.72 billion (about $2.2 billion real value), setting the previous record. A month before the 666 sale, Tishman bought Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village for $5.4 billion, which was the biggest real estate deal in US history.

In December 2006, Tishman Speyer, along with the German investment firm TMW, announced the sale of the building to the Kushner Properties for $1.8 billion (about $2.2 billion real value), at the time the highest price ever paid for an individual building in Manhattan. This was an unconventional price for such a short building; at 483 ft (147 m), 666 Fifth is not even among top 100 tallest buildings in New York City, but its price was mainly because of its location on Fifth Avenue across from Rockefeller Center. Kushner sold the retail condominium portion of 666 Fifth to a Stanley Chera-led group for $525 million in 2008 (about $610 million real value).

Tenants

Brooks Brothers and the NBA Store became the initial ground-floor tenants. Brooks Brothers moved out in 2009, as well as Hickey Freeman in May of that year. The NBA Store closed in February 2011.

The new Hollister Co. Epic New York flagship moved in during 2010, and Uniqlo occupies 90,000 square feet (8,400 m²) on the ground, second, and third floors. The Hollister flagship opened in the later part of 2010 and features a live video feed from Huntington Beach, California displayed on 179 flat-screen TVs outside the store along with wave pools. Polished gray columns were placed in the lobby near the elevators and changes were made to the subway entrance at the base of the building; the building is directly above the Fifth Avenue / 53rd Street station, which is served by the E M trains.

The building has also become an attractive location for law firms, hosting the New York offices of Vinson & Elkins, Norton Rose Fulbright, and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe.

In addition to law firms, 666 Fifth Avenue houses the hedge fund Atlantic Investment Management, the hedge fund Millennium Management, LLC, the private equity firm AEA Investors, and the investment bank William Blair & Company.

The headquarters for DC Comics was located at 666 Fifth Avenue before moving to 1700 Broadway in the 1990s.

In popular culture

In film

The construction of the building can be seen in Shirley Clarke's film Skyscraper (1960).

The "evil capitalist bulldog" lives in that symbolic building in the final animated part, "The Millionaire", of the Soviet film Big Fuse (1963).

A full frontal view at night time can be seen in How to Murder Your Wife (1965).

A high POV shot from behind St. Patrick's Cathedral looking at the intersection of 52nd Street and Fifth Avenue appears in the film Godspell (1973).

The roof of the building can be seen (fittingly) in John Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977).

The opening lunch scene for the movie The Wolf of Wall Street was filmed in the former Top of the Six's restaurant.

In music

The building is referenced in Allan Sherman's song "If I Were a Tishman".

The building is referenced in the title of Paul Whiteman's album, The Night I Played 666 Fifth Avenue. A caricaturized drawing of the front of the building is featured on the cover along with a caricature of Whiteman.

In print

This building is featured in the novel Good Omens (1990), with the Top of the Six's restaurant as the headquarters for Famine.

This building is noted in Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp (1964) as being kitsch, but not camp, because of an absence of love going into its production.

References

666 Fifth Avenue Wikipedia

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