400 Madison Avenue
400 Madison Avenue is a 22-story office building in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. It is along Madison Avenue's western sidewalk between 47th and 48th Streets, near Grand Central Terminal. 400 Madison Avenue was designed by H. Craig Severance with Neo-Gothic architectural detailing.
The building was erected within "Terminal City", a collection of buildings located above Grand Central's underground tracks, and as such, occupies the real-estate air rights above these tracks. 400 Madison Avenue's lot is relatively narrow, being about long and less than wide, but contains a "veneer" of offices along its three primary facades and a small office core at the center. The building contains several setbacks to comply with the 1916 Zoning Resolution. The cream-colored terracotta facade was meant to reflect light.
The building was constructed from 1927 to 1928 by the George A. Fuller Company. Despite being relatively narrow, the building attracted businessmen who sought small, imposing offices. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated 400 Madison Avenue as an official landmark in 2016.
Site
400 Madison Avenue is in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. It is bounded by Madison Avenue to the east, 48th Street to the north, and 47th Street to the south. The land lot covers with a frontage of on Madison Avenue and on 47th and 48th Streets. Nearby buildings include the old New York Mercantile Library to the west, Tower 49 to the north, 270 Park Avenue to the east, and 383 Madison Avenue to the southeast.The completion of the underground Grand Central Terminal in 1913 resulted in the rapid development of Terminal City, the area around Grand Central, as well as a corresponding increase in real-estate prices. Among these were office buildings such as the Chanin Building, Bowery Savings Bank Building, and New York Central Building, as well as hotels like the Biltmore, Commodore, Waldorf Astoria, and Summit. By 1920, the area had become what The New York Times called "a great civic centre". Irwin Chanin, who had developed the Chanin Building, believed the area around Grand Central Terminal had potential for growth because of the construction of hotels and apartment buildings at Tudor City, Sutton Place, and Lexington and Park Avenues. Before 400 Madison Avenue's development, the building's site was occupied by the Ritz Chambers and Carlton Chambers, a pair of apartment houses immediately north of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.
Architecture
The building was designed by H. Craig Severance and erected by the George A. Fuller Company. It consists of 22 stories, including the attic. The building measures tall to its roof. The building's 15th, 17th, and 20th stories contain setbacks to comply with the 1916 Zoning Resolution. The land lot is within a "2X" zoning district, allowing the first setback to be above ground. Unlike similar structures on small lots, such as the Fred F. French Building, 400 Madison Avenue is symmetrical.George Shepard Chappell, writing in The New Yorker under the pseudonym "T-Square", lambasted 400 Madison Avenue's shape as "distressingly pretentious" with "entirely unnecessary" detailing on the facade. However, the design was praised in Architecture and Building magazine as "a distinct ornament" to Madison Avenue, with an "exceedingly interesting block front".
Facade
The design of 400 Madison Avenue was meant to contain a French motif, but in practice, the design emphasis was on the vertical piers of the facade. The exterior is made of cream-colored architectural terracotta with Neo-Gothic decorative details. William LaZinsk, an architect for Severance's company, explained that cream terracotta was used because it was able to both absorb and reflect sunlight. According to LaZinsk, cream terracotta could be used to form highlights and shadows that "vary with the changing position of the sun", even as these details maintained the same general effect throughout the day. The three facades are relatively similar in design, with most ornamentation on the lowest and highest stories. The lowest five stories contain large windows, while the other stories contain smaller windows.At the base, there are eleven bays on Madison Avenue. The third and ninth bays from south to north are narrow, corresponding to one window on the upper stories, while the other bays are wide, corresponding to two windows. On both 47th and 48th Streets, there are three bays: a narrow bay flanked by two wider ones. The primary facade at Madison Avenue contains a ground story clad with pink granite, as well as eight storefronts and two additional windows. This facade originally contained a large entrance portal, which was removed before 1983. The side facade on 47th Street had another arched entrance, which became a store window sometime after 1940. The storefront openings are separated by vertical pilasters and contain decorative features such as chevrons, quatrefoils, colonettes, and finials.
The second through fourth stories on all sides are square-headed on the second and third stories and segmentally arched on the fourth story. On Madison Avenue, the narrow bays are flanked by triple-story engaged columns, which are topped by foliated capitals. At the fifth story, the center seven bays on Madison Avenue are topped by a thick band with Gothic motifs connected by tabernacles with crockets. The side facades, and outer bays on Madison Avenue, are topped by bands that resemble colonettes.
The sixth through 14th stories are similar in design to each other. On all sides, the windows on each of the sixth through 14th stories are generally separated vertically by slightly projecting piers and horizontally by recessed spandrel panels. The exception is the outermost eight windows on Madison Avenue, which have projecting Gothic-tracery spandrel panels separating the windows on the 12th and 13th stories. Above the 14th story, there are slightly projecting pavilions on the Madison Avenue facade, which contain stylized motifs. The 14th and 16th floors have various stylized motifs in the center bays and less ornate decorative elements in the outer bays. There are recessed panels separating the windows horizontally on the 17th through 20th floors. The 21st story is topped by a "crown" with Gothic tracery.
Features
400 Madison Avenue contains about of interior area. Because of the narrow lot area, all offices were lit by windows along any of the three street frontages and there were no interior light courts. The elevators and corridors were clustered at the rear or western section of the building. As the 1916 Zoning Resolution typically mandated that buildings' upper stories had to be smaller than the lower stories, the presence of more elevator shafts reduced the amount of usable space in a building. At 400 Madison Avenue, four elevator shafts were deemed sufficient to serve all the interior space. According to Architecture and Building magazine, the building was planned with six elevator shafts; the remaining two would have been used if a never-completed annex to the west had been developed. However, this never occurred and the two additional elevator shafts were used as storage space on each floor.The edges of the building are designed with a "thin veneer" of offices. This meant all office space was within or of a window. At the time, real estate developers believed that "first quality space" should be amply illuminated by natural light; such space could not be any more than of a window since office space at a greater depth would lose significant value. The narrow shape was described by a contemporary New York Herald Tribune article as "an unusual structure both in appearance and as a real estate renting proposition". According to a Severance employee, the windows' surface area was 58 percent of the floor area. Each floor contains an average of.
The ground floor contained nine storefronts. There was also a main entrance lobby, flanked on either side by marble stairs that rose to the mezzanine. The second floor and mezzanine were both intended for the use of a financial institution, such as a bank.
History
Planning and construction
The banker George L. Ohrstrom founded the 400 Madison Avenue Corporation in 1928 to erect a building at that address in New York City. In September 1928, the 400 Madison Avenue Corporation proposed to build a 20-story office building on Madison Avenue between 47th and 48th Streets. At the time, there were two leaseholds held by Egmont Estates, each measuring on Madison Avenue and a little less than on either side street. These leases, for the Ritz Chambers and Carlton Chambers apartment houses, did not expire until the 2010s. E. A. Johnson, the 400 Madison Avenue Corporation's vice president, said that Madison Avenue was seeing commercial growth. He cited a mid-1929 survey that found that, during a ten-hour period in a typical weekday, over 600,000 people passed on Madison Avenue between 42nd and 50th Streets.In October 1928, G. L. Ohrstrom & Co. Inc., along with two other companies associated with the project, issued $1.9 million in first mortgage bonds, to be due in twenty years. The same month, H. Craig Severance Inc. filed plans for an office building on the site, to cost $1.25 million. The building was intended specifically for small office tenants, and the Charles F. Noyes Company was hired in January 1929 to rent out the space. 400 Madison Avenue contained less than a sixth of the nearby Chrysler Building's floor space, and the developers believed there was a market for firms, professionals, and businesspersons who wanted "small but impressive offices", such as financial firms in Lower Manhattan that desired a Midtown branch office. Most of the other office buildings in the area were intended for large tenants, while small tenants were relegated to "second rate" structures or be "practically submerged" by major tenants in the larger structures.
By August 1929, the building was nearly complete, and advertisements in newspapers such as The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune were touting the building's small well-lit space and central site. One such advertisement, geared toward lawyers, praised the proximity to "many of America's most prominent business houses", as well as to the area's shops, hotels, and apartments. Another advertisement, intended for financial firms, said: "You will be proud to receive your clients in such an environment at this address of dominating prestige." In other promotional materials, the building's house number, 400, was used to evoke the upper class. At 400 Madison Avenue's opening, the Times characterized the building as being one of several buildings that comprised the "Grand Canyon of midtown business".