Much like the photo from Monday, this April 1959 photo by Angelo Rizzuto could be either demolition or construction. The steel frame on the left is on the site of 350 Park Avenue, between 51st and 52nd Streets on the west side of Park Avenue. The ornate masonry box just north of it is the Racquet & Tennis Club, and beyond that is the Lever House, the first glass-walled office building on Park Avenue.
The current 350 Park, possibly to be demolished in the near future, has a setback at the tenth floor on its front facade, which is right about where the steel ends here. The old building was fourteen stories, I think, without setbacks. So there’s nothing in that topic that pushes this one way or the other.
It would be exceedingly odd to build just the first two bays of a building without the rest behind, but odd things have happened, and continue to do so. The portion of the new building that would be further west, to the left, is much taller than the old building, and so new foundations and steel had to be installed through the railroad structures hidden below the street. That could lead to the front being built before the rear, I guess.
This is about two years before completion of the new building, which seems like a long time if it’s construction, but things get delayed. It’s about right if it’s demolition.
Ultimately, I come back to the same issue that settled Monday’s example for me: that steel is awfully blotchy to be new, but the mottling is to be expected if it had been embedded in masonry for some forty years.
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