677 Fifth Avenue

The former New York flagship of Fendi, 677 Fifth Avenue’s remarkable Cor-Ten steel façade was the result of a virtuoso reimagining of the original 1920s building by architect Peter Marino.  It has just last year been replaced by Microsoft with a five-story digital display more befitting Times Square than Midtown.  Original details from the 1920s… Continue reading

673 Fifth Avenue & 675 Fifth Avenue

A Beaux Arts Commercial building reworked extensively in the 1980s, 673 Fifth Avenue is perhaps most notable for its eye-catching interior staircase…and given the current spate of renovation, it is impossible to say for how much longer. Next door to the north, 675 Fifth Avenue’s limestone façade was designed by Henry Allan Jacobs in 1920… Continue reading

640 Fifth Avenue

640 Fifth Avenue was designed for the magazine giant Crowell-Colliers and was finished in 1949 to plans by Leonard Schultze & Associates in a Rockefeller Center Moderne mode much in keeping with the Center itself.  Never anybody’s favorite building, 640 Fifth Avenue is further compromised by a jarring addition in 2004 by Kohn Pederson Fox… Continue reading

591 Fifth Avenue

The shiny shopping mall at 591 Fifth Avenue stands on the site of the fabulously wealthy Goelet Family’s mansion.  A rather gloomy looking brownstone affair, the Goelet House outlasted most of its neighboring mansions and was inhabited by the family until the death of the last male heir in 1941; the Goelets’ Newport house, Ochre Court,… Continue reading

590 Fifth Avenue

At 590 Fifth Avenue a generic glass box tops a generic PoMo box. Location, location, location!