![]() But one must wonder how the Seagram space, and Park Avenue itself, would have fared had adjoining parcels mimicked the Seagram design. Indeed, several blocks to the east, Mies van der Rohe’s 1958 Seagram Building, with its elegant plaza and duet of flanking fountains on Park Avenue between East 52nd and 53rd Streets, remains the city’s quintessential International Style masterpiece of “tower in the park” architecture as well as a strong element of urban design. The problem was not inherent in the idea that a dense urban core like midtown Manhattan would need breathing spaces. Unexpectedly, their collective presence ignited a firestorm of criticism over the 1961 Zoning Resolution’s legal embrace of the “tower in the park” concept. Each public space was built in the early 1970s as part of the Rockefeller Center development complex each was designed by the same architecture firm, Harrison and Abramovitz each was conceived and executed in contemplation of the other two and each boldly projected the view of New York City as a center of corporate power. From south to north are the approximately 20,000-square-foot space at 1211 Sixth Avenue (formerly the Celanese building), the approximately 37,000 square feet of space at the McGraw-Hill building, and this almost 30,000-square-foot plaza at what once was known as the Standard Oil and Exxon buildings. This plaza is the northernmost of three titanic privately owned public spaces that occupy a three-block stretch along the west side of Sixth Avenue from West 47th to 50th Streets, in front of skyscrapers built for corporate headquarters. ![]()
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