The building that reaches back eight centuries.

I've noticed lately almost every time someone new to the city hits the corner of 48th and 8th, they look north, take out their phone, and take a picture. One forgets, living here, how startling some views are. Up the block?

It's a good building.

Worldwide Plaza is a 52-story tower rising far above its largely five-story neighbors in Hell's Kitchen. When it opened in 1989, it was, in fact, the tallest building west of 8th Avenue and the tallest one built west of 8th since the McGraw Hill green explosion of Art Deco style in 1931.

I simply call it the Number 2 Pencil Building. It's palette, shape and silhouette remind me of every standardized test I ever had to take. 

There was talk of building the tallest building in the world on that site, a block of a parking lot by the time the mean lean years of the mid-70s had rolled round. But a zoning law that gave developers tax incentives for including public spaces in their programs convinced the design team, particularly the chief architect, David Childs (Time Warner Center, One World Trade Center) of legendary Skidmore, Owens and Merrill, to split the building into three, in this, Mr. Childs' NYC debut. 

The first is the tower, One Worldwide Plaza, an office building whose large square footage per floor lured companies like Cravath, Swaine & Moore, the Japanese investment bank Nomura, and the international advertising agency of Ogilvy & Mather to what was then one of the worst neighborhoods in the city. 

The second building is a residential tower. It is separated from the office building by a breezy plaza where neighbors sit and relax under the gaze of a beautiful sculpture/fountain representing the four seasons. Underneath all of that, small movie theaters that, even better, have been converted into off-Broadway venues. 

At the 9th Avenue end of the block the project lands comfortably into its smaller surroundings with a series of townhome-like apartments and retail shops, all echoing the architectural fireworks in Tower One. 

To understand the building, its good to know a little history.

The first two Madison Square Gardens sat on the northeast corner of Madison Square Park. The first was unremarkable. The second was Stanford White's masterpiece, a Doge's Palace with a tower based on the Tower of Seville. It took a brave man to take on the design of that which would replace it, and that man was Cass Gilbert.

Gilbert, who designed the (old) Customs House, The Woolworth Building, and The US Supreme Courthouse, took as his inspiration for the new New York Life Insurance Building the Cathedral of Salisbury, home to the oldest clock in the world, the best of the four original copies of the Magna Carta, and, to this day, the tallest church spire in England. 

The John Constable painting of Salisbury Cathedral that, ironically, hangs in NYC at The Frick.









Gilbert modified this early English Gothic form and gave us modernist lines with the grace of Gothic elongation. And instead of a spire, he gave us pyramid of 25,000 tiles covered in 24-karat gold.





















The third Madison Square Garden sat on the block between 8th and 9th, between 49th and 50th. When it came down in 1968, the neighborhood, never good to begin with, began it's decline Into one of the foulest in America. (From 1969 to 1986, almost impossible to think of today, an entire block in midtown Manhattan was a parking lot.)(You'll never know what I went through to find this picture.) 

David Childs to the rescue. 

Replacing a Madison Square Garden had been done. So like a good artist, he bows in deference and passes on the torch. He gives us the massing of Gilbert's quasi-Gothic/Modern office building and adds a 'Salisbury tower' of his own, affectionally referred to as 'David's Diamond.' It's copper elements add cool green to the sky, it's 'skylight' at the top flashes, dazzling, at night. 

At the base, a wonderful surprise awaits. An oval arcade of shops with glass skybridges takes you around the entire periphery of the building, its drum-like shape belying the squareness of everything above. Mr. Childs quite literally fits a square peg into a round hole, and rather seamlessly for his efforts. Above you rises the warm earth tones of creamy, ochre-y oranges, in brick and precast concrete, and rich-feeling brown granites and marbles.

It falls dead center into the Postmodern, the affinity for square windows, its accessories, like the  oversized sconces, classic, but reeking of the 80's. It exudes strength through its extreme massing, but its sense of play in shape and color make it festive, like a drum majorette, leading the city out of its misery and into a new Golden Age. 

Yeah. It's worth a picture.