Page 152 - (DK Eyewitness) Travel Guide - New York City

150  NE W Y ORK CIT Y AREA B Y AREA

The building’s rooftop heliport
was abandoned in 1977 after a
freak accident showered debris
onto the surrounding streets.
In 1981 the building was sold to
the Metro politan Life organi-
zation, and then on to Tishman
Speyer Properties.

2 Grand Central
Terminal
Stonework detail on the Chanin Building
See pp152–3.
4 Chanin Building
3 Bowery Savings 122 E 42nd St. Map 9 A1. q 42nd St-
Bank Building Grand Central. Open office hours.
Once the headquarters of
110 E 42nd St. Map 9 A1. q 42nd St- Irwin S. Chanin, one of New
Grand Central. Open by appt only. York’s leading real estate
Cipriani Tel (646) 723-0826.
developers, the 56-story tower
was the first skyscraper in the
Many consider this 1923 building Grand Central area, a harbinger
the best work of bank of things to come.
Lobby of the MetLife Building architects York & It was designed by
Sawyer, who chose the Sloan & Robertson
1 MetLife Building style of a Romanesque in 1929 and is one of
basilica for the offices of the best examples of
200 Park Ave. Map 13 A5. q 42nd St-
Grand Central. Open office hours. the venerable Bowery the Art Deco period.
 0 Savings Bank (now part A wide bronze band,
of Capital One Bank). patterned with birds
Once, the sculptures atop the An arched entry leads and fish, runs the full
Grand Central Terminal stood into the vast banking Facade of the Bowery length of the facade;
out against the sky. Then this room, with a high- Savings Bank Building the terracotta base
colossus, formerly called the Pan beamed ceiling, marble is decorated with a
Am Building and designed in mosaic floors, and marble luxuriant tangle of stylized
the Modernist style by Walter columns that support the stone leaves and flowers. Inside,
Gropius, Emery Roth and Sons, arches that soar overhead. Radio City’s sculptor René
and Pietro Belluschi, rose up in Between the columns are Cham bellan worked on the
1963 to block the Park Avenue unpolished mosaic panels of reliefs and the bronze grilles,
view. It dwarfed the terminal marble from France and Italy. The elevator doors, mailboxes,
and aroused universal dislike. building, now an event space, is clocks, and pattern of waves
At the time it was the largest also home to Cipriani restaurant, in the floor. The vestibule reliefs
commercial building in the whose opulent decor lures high chart the career of Chanin, who
world, and the dismay over its rollers for celebratory dinners. was a self-made man.
scale helped thwart a later plan
to build a tower over the
terminal itself.
It is ironic that the New York
skies were blocked by Pan Am,
a company that had opened
up the skies as a means of
travel for millions of people.
When the company began
in 1927, Charles Lindbergh,
fresh from his solo trans-
atlantic flight, was one of
their pilots and an adviser on
new routes. By 1936, Pan Am
managed to introduce the first
trans-Pacific passenger route,
and in 1947 they introduced the
first round-the-world route. Carved detail in the former banking hall of the Bowery Savings Bank

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