The old Waldorf Astoria.

Designed by Henry Hardenbergh who gave us The Plaza and The Dakota, the Waldorf Astoria sat on 34th Street and 5th Avenue. It was a fantasy of a building, like a chateau in the Loire Valey, like a castle on a hill in Bavaria, like a Russian Orthodox temple in Odessa. Hardenbergh used elements of Beaux-arts ornamentation, Ottoman onion domes, and gothic length to give us this eye candy that was obsolete in thirty-six years. Astounding. The wealth moved uptown, leaving the Waldorf Astoria in the dust, the same dust that would give rise to the Empire State Building that sits on the site today.