270 Park Avenue, a late-1950s skyscraper, is currently being demolished. The picture above shows the south side of the building at street level. Those two sentences are just about the only thing that I can say that are undisputed fact, as everything else on this topic is either politically and architecturally fraught or is speculation on my part.
Park Avenue requires a bit of explanation. It was created as Fourth Avenue, and from 1872 onwards, the midtown portion of it was a mess. The first and second Grand Central rail stations (Grand Central Depot and Grand Central Station) effectively blocked it off at 42nd Street and most of the avenue in the 40s streets was tangled up with the station yard. The third and current station, Grand Central Terminal, was built to accommodate electric trains only, and the yard was lowered below grade so that the New York Central Railroad could sell the air-rights above as new-found newly-pleasant real estate. It was developed as a residential neighborhood with apartments houses, founded on the bedrock below the tracks and supported by columns that extended upwards between the tracks and platforms, facing a wide avenue with park medians. The streets in the area are all the roof of the train yard, and it’s quite easy to pick out the expansion joints set into the pavement that are visible proof that the ground there isn’t really the ground. After World War II, all but one of the apartment houses were replaced by taller office buildings, also supported by steel columns through the rail layer down to rock.
The first of the new office buildings in the Grand Central air-rights/train-yard area was 270 Park Avenue, AKA the Union Carbide Buidling. This is a modernist icon – what some people might call a glass box – that is not landmarked but is arguably of landmark importance and quality. It will be replaced by a larger building with more modern services. Meanwhile, it has taken the title of the tallest-ever voluntarily demolished building away from the old Singer Building on lower Broadway.
Because demolishing a 52-story building solely by hand is impractically slow, a crane is being used to lower material to the ground. Because the ground here isn’t the ground, the crane can’t sit on the street. The picture above shows a temporary platform made of large steel beams supported off the frame of the building itself, and serving as the base for the (white-painted) tower of the crane.
So, we’ve got a skyscraper that is a landmark but not a Landmark, being demolished to be replaced by a larger skyscraper, a surrounding streetscape that hides where the ground actually is and was built as part of a speculative real estate development, a crane starting in midair because that’s stronger than the ground, and the ghosts of two previous incarnations of the neighborhood that came and went in fifty years. If I was looking for a way to summarize Midtown, I couldn’t do better than that.
