Assembling A Campus

…in postcard form! The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company decided in 1892 to move uptown, to Madison Square. The new company headquarters was a building at the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and 23rd Street. Business was good, and expansion was necessary, and over the following 35 years the company assembled a group of buildings that covered the entire block between 23rd and 24th Streets, Madison and Park Avenue South, and then the next block to the north between 24th and 25th Streets. Two postcards show some of that progress.

First, 1905:

The original building is at the corner facing us, and ended with the second balcony on the 23rd Street (right) facade. Everything to the right of that, further east and ending at Park Avenue South (then Fourth Avenue), is a later extension. That portion of the complex is still there today, but with the facade very much altered.

Next, 1911:

Met Life bought and demolished the Madison Square Presbyterian Church and constructed a tower that was briefly the tallest ordinary building in the world. The tower is still there, with its facade somewhat simplified. Behind the tower on 24th Street, Met Life had already built another extension, in the form of a free-standing building about the same height as the 23rd Street buildings, so, including the tower, they had them most of the block. The high-rise building visible to the left of the tower, on the north side of 24th Street, was yet another annex building. The building with the dome was the new (1906) Madison Square Presbyterian which Met Life bought in 1919 and replaced with yet another another annex. Then in 1928, Met life demolished the entire north block to build a much bigger building…but I don’t have a postcard for that.