768 Fifth Avenue, The Plaza Hotel

Perhaps the most famous of all New York’s hotels, The Plaza Hotel is the masterwork of architect Henry J. Hardenburgh, whose other well-known designs include what is certainly the city’s best-known apartment building, Central Park West’s majestic Dakota.  Erected in 1900-1902 some fifteen years after the Dakota, The Plaza’s design swaps out the older building’s… Continue reading

767 Fifth Avenue, The Apple Store

High-tech purity or corporate nihilism?  The glossy cube of the Apple Store takes reductivist branding to an extreme, and may be the city’s utmost example of architecture-as-commercial- packaging. Whether the result is a stunning icon of design or the complete negation of architecture is open to argument. The structure shares the 767 Fifth Avenue address… Continue reading

767 Fifth Avenue, The General Motors Building

Replacing the Savoy Plaza Hotel by McKim, Mead & White, the General Motors Building has long been seen as an intruder in the Plaza District, despite contributing a generous public plaza that increases the open space at Grand Army Plaza by nearly a third.  Designed by Edward Durell Stone in his signature mix of luxurious… Continue reading

Grand Army Plaza

Grand Army Plaza is an open space carved partially out of the southeastern-most corner of Central Park and stretching from 58th Street to 60th Street and bisected by 59th Street.  Designed by Carrere & Hastings and completed in 1916, the park gives its name to both the Plaza District and the renowned Plaza Hotel that… Continue reading

754 Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman

Designed to echo the now-vanished Marble Row erected some 60 years earlier by the powerful society widow Mary Mason Jones, what is now known as Bergdorf Goodman at 754 Fifth Avenue was in fact erected as a row of single shops merged into one architectural statement by Kahn & Jacobs. Finish in 1928 the building… Continue reading