Type Office Completed 1963 Roof 808 ft (246 m) Floors 59 Architectural style International Style | Construction started 1960 Opening March 7, 1963 Height 246 m Opened 7 March 1963 | |
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Location 200 Park Avenue
Manhattan, New York 10166
U.S. Address 200 Park Ave, New York, NY 10166, USA Architects Walter Gropius, Emery Roth, Pietro Belluschi Owners Tishman Speyer, Irvine Company Similar New York Life Building, Chrysler Building, Helmsley Building, Metropolitan Life Tower, Grand Central Terminal | ||
The MetLife Building is a 59-story skyscraper at 200 Park Avenue at East 45th Street above Grand Central Terminal in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Built in 1960–63 as the Pan Am Building, the then-headquarters of Pan American World Airways, it was designed by Emery Roth & Sons, Pietro Belluschi and Walter Gropius in the International style. The world's largest commercial office space by square footage at its opening, it remains one of the 100 tallest buildings in the United States.
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History
In September 1960, Pan Am founder Juan Trippe signed a 25-year, $115,500,000 lease with the building's developer, Erwin Wolfson, allowing the airline to occupy 613,000 square feet (56,900 m2), or about 15 floors, plus a new main ticket office at 45th Street and Vanderbilt Avenue.
When it opened on March 7, 1963, the Pan Am Building (as it was known at the time) was the largest commercial office space in the world by square footage. It was initially an unpopular sight due to its lack of proportion and huge scale—it dwarfed the New York Central Building to the north and Grand Central Terminal to the south. The building was surpassed in size by the World Trade Center in 1970–71 as well as 55 Water Street in 1972.
The last tall tower erected in New York City before laws were enacted preventing corporate logos and names on the tops of buildings, it bore 15-foot-tall (5 m) "Pan Am" displays on its north and south faces and 25-foot-tall (8 m) globe logos east and west.
Pan Am originally occupied 15 floors of the building. It remained Pan Am's headquarters even after Metropolitan Life Insurance Company bought the building in 1981. By 1991, Pan Am's presence had dwindled to four floors; during that year Pan Am moved its headquarters to Miami. Shortly afterwards, the airline ceased operations. On Thursday September 3, 1992, MetLife announced that it would remove Pan Am signage from the building. Robert G. Schwartz, the chairman, chief executive, and president of MetLife, said that the company decided to remove the Pan Am sign since Pan Am ceased operations. At the time MetLife was headquartered in the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower.
In 2005, MetLife sold the building for $1.72 billion, the record price at the time for an office building in the U.S. The buyer was a joint venture of Tishman Speyer Properties, the New York City Employees' Retirement System, and the New York City Teachers' Retirement System.
In 2015, it was revealed that billionaire Donald Bren, the owner of the Newport Beach, California-based Irvine Company, held a 97.3 percent ownership stake in the building. While Tishman Speyer remains the managing partner of the property, the company's stake in the MetLife Building has been reduced to less than 3 percent.
Helicopter service
New York Airways flew Vertol 107s helicopters from the rooftop helipad to Pan Am's terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport from December 21, 1965, to February 18, 1968, when the service ceased due to inadequate passenger loads. For a short part of that time, they also offered service to Teterboro Airport.
Service to JFK resumed in early 1977 using Sikorsky S-61s. On May 16, 1977, about one minute after an S-61L landed and its 20 passengers disembarked, the right front landing gear collapsed, causing the aircraft to topple onto its side with the rotors still turning. One of the five 20-foot (6 m) blades broke off and flew into a crowd of passengers waiting to board. Three men were killed instantly and another died later in a hospital. The blade sailed over the side of the building and killed a female pedestrian on the corner of Madison Avenue and 43rd Street. Two other people were seriously injured. Helicopter service was quickly suspended, and has never resumed.
Suicide of Eli M. Black
The building was the site of the suicide of Eli M. Black on February 3, 1975. The CEO of United Brands Company (now Chiquita Brands International) used his briefcase to shatter an external window and then jumped out of the 44th-story window to his death on Park Avenue.
Architecture
The building remains one of the city's most recognizable skyscrapers. Designed in the International style by Emery Roth & Sons with the assistance of Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi, the Pan Am Building is purely commercial, with large floors, simple massing, and an absence of ornamentation inside and out. It has been popular with tenants, not least because of its location next to Grand Central Terminal. It is current opinion that the architecture of the building has been inspired by the Pirelli Tower, built in 1956 in Milan, Italy, which has been a model also for the Alpha Tower in Birmingham (UK) and other similar buildings in Switzerland and Spain.
In 1987, a poll conducted by the lifestyle periodical New York indicated that the tower was the building that New Yorkers would most like to see demolished. Perhaps contributing to the hatred of the building is the fact that it is so visible. Situated behind Grand Central Terminal outside of the grid, the building, which would have otherwise been tucked away into the city, is left totally exposed and contrasted with the other buildings around it, most notably the New York Central Building (today the Helmsley Building). The MetLife Building also partially obstructs the view of the Chrysler Building from the Top Of The Rock.
The Sky Club had been located on the 56th floor of the building. Aircraft pioneer and Pan Am founder Juan Trippe used this club.
Tenants
In addition to being the official headquarters of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, the MetLife Building houses a number of other major firms, including the headquarters of Dreyfus Corporation, Knight Vinke, the wealth and investment management division of Barclays, the largest office of Greenberg Traurig, DNB, CB Richard Ellis, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Hunton & Williams, Computer Sciences Corporation, Winston & Strawn, Paul Hastings, and Lend Lease Corporation on Level 9. In addition the building serves as the U.S. Headquarters for Mitsui & Co. (USA) Inc, the American subsidiary of Japan's largest trading company, BNP Paribas Investment Partners and its American subsidiary Fischer, Francis, Trees and Watts.
NOAA Weather Radio Station KWO35, a NOAA transmitter station, is located atop the building.