A Generational Change

A view of Park Avenue by Angelo Rizzuto from June 1959 looking south. The big tower on the left is the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, with St. Bart’s in front of it; the ornate tower that seemingly ends the avenue is the New York Central Building, not yet sold by the railroad and renamed.

There are three big new buildings under construction here, all on the west side of Park. I’m pretty sure that the tall steel frame is the Union Carbide Building, completed in 1960 and demolished 2019-2020 for a new super-tall. The foundation work further from us is 320 Park Avenue, completed in 1961, and renovated in 1994 because it was “obsolete”. The foundation work nearer to us is 350 Park, also completed in 1961, and possibly soon to be demolished for a supertall.

What makes this story weirder, or depending on your views, more poignant, is that the apartment houses and hotels that were demolished for these projects were less than 40 years old and not in any way functionally obsolete. On the left (east) side of Park you can see some similar buildings that would be demolished within ten years of this photo.

Prior to the Grand Central electrification (starting shortly after 1900) this stretch of Fourth Avenue – not yet renamed – was a hellscape of coal smoke from locomotives and noise from trains. With the completion of the new Grand Central terminal in 1910, the trains were entirely underground. This opened up the air-rights lots on both sides of Park (and, further south toward the station, as far east as Lexington Avenue and as far west as Vanderbilt Avenue) for construction, and the apartments and hotels were built. The growth of midtown Manhattan as first an alternate central business district and then as the primary business district, taking over from the financial district in lower Manhattan, was spurred in part by the transformation of what had been Grand Central’s polluted yard and approach into useable land. (The new subway system, the uptown branch of the Hudson & Manhattan tube (now the PATH train), and the construction of Penn Station also contributed greatly.) That made the Park Avenue residential buildings prime for redevelopment as office space. And the not-great architectural and mechanical standards of the 1950s and 60s have made the first generation of office buildings, seen here under construction, prime for redevelopment. So these lots have gone from tenements and low-level industrial use prior to 1910, to high-end apartments and hotels after 1920, to high-end office space by 1965, to new high-end office space now. Four generations in just over 100 years is fast even by New York real-estate standards.