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 1960â€"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.
History
View From MetLife Building Roof, Manhattan, NYC - Here's a slightly shaky video from the roof of the MetLife Building at 200 Park Avenue, NYC. It's not usually open to the public and you get a great view of the Chrysler Building and downtown...
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 (56,900Â 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 scaleâ€"it dwarfed the New York Central Building to the north and Grand Central Terminal to the south and blocked the views of upper and lower Park Ave. The building was surpassed in size by the World Trade Center in 1970â€"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 (4.6Â m) "Pan Am" displays on its north and south faces and 25-foot-tall (7.6Â 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, Californiaâ€"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.
In 2017, the light source for the "MetLife" sign at the top of the building was changed from neon to LED in order to conserve energy.
Helicopter service
New York Airways flew Vertol 107 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 (6.1Â 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. The architecture of the building may have 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. The building is highly visible. Situated behind Grand Central Terminal outside of the grid, the building, which would have otherwise been tucked away into the city, is left exposed and is a contrast 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, DXC Technology, Merrill Lynch, Korn Ferry, 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 National Weather Service radio station, is located atop the building.
In popular culture
- As a Manhattan landmark, it has been seen in films such as Only When I Larf, Coogan's Bluff, Grand Slam, The French Connection, Armageddon, Catch Me If You Can, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
- The building, still under construction, is glimpsed briefly in the 1962 Italian film Mafioso.
- In the 1970 film musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, the building is host to Yves Montand singing the first verse of "Come Back to Me" from its roof.
- On the ABC television series Pan Am, the building was shown with the original company logo.
- The building is compared to a tombstone in Joni Mitchell's song "Harry's House".
- Several pivotal sections of the young adult novel So You Want to Be a Wizard by Diane Duane occur in, atop, or directly adjacent to the Pan Am building (with the name adjusted in the later edition when the timeframe changed).
- The building is shown briefly in the 1986 film Highlander and the 1990 film Quick Change and Gremlins 2, with the Pan Am logo.
- The building also appears partially destroyed in the 1998 Godzilla film, with Godzilla creating a hole after going through the building.
- In the Life After People episode "Toxic Revenge", the building collapses after 150 years after the extinction of humans due to corrosion and being weakened from explosions caused by a buildup of methane. Its collapse also destroys the insides of Grand Central Terminal.
- It is featured in the 2008 video game Grand Theft Auto IV where it is located in Liberty City as the "GetaLife" Building. The building also appears in Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, but only the bottom floors are rendered due to the game's top-down angle.
- The building appears in the 2009 movie Knowing, where it is destroyed along with the rest of New York City.
- In the 2012 film The Avengers, a majority of the building is deconstructed to accommodate Stark Tower. After the events of the film, Stark Tower is remodeled into Avengers Tower, briefly appearing in Iron Man 3 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier before fully appearing in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Spider-Man: Homecoming has the Avengers paraphernalia being moved from the building to the team's new base in upstate New York. The building can be seen again in the teaser trailers for Daredevil and Jessica Jones.
- The film clip for Vampire Weekend's song "Ya Hey" was filmed on the rooftop.
- In the 2017 film: "Kingsman: The Golden Circle" the building appears as the Statesmen whiskey New York Branch building
Gallery
See also
- Buildings and architecture of New York City
- Tallest buildings in New York City
References
- Clausen, Meredith (2005). The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ISBNÂ 9780262033244. OCLCÂ 803843211.Â
Notes
External links
- Official page
- in-Arch.net: The Pan Am/MetLife Building
- The Midtown Book
- The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream by Meredith L. Clausen (MIT Press catalog entry)
- NTSB accident report of the helicopter accident in 1977
