1 East 60th Street, The Metropolitan Club
A spectacular 1893 extravaganza by McKim, Mead & White, the Metropolitan Club is chiefly the work of the firm’s leading partner Stanford White and may be his most flamboyant New York City design, especially when compared to Charles McKim’s University Club at 54th and Fifth. McKim’s building is a highly ornate but sober monument to… Continue reading
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
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
730 Fifth Avenue, The Crown Building
A spectacular design by Warren & Wetmore, architects of Grand Central Terminal, the Crown Building at 730 Fifth Avenue and West 57th Street is a neo-Baroque delight. The ornate tower, brilliantly illuminated at night, is visible the length of Fifth Avenue from the north and serves as a distinctive gateway to Midtown from the Central… Continue reading