Metropolitan Life North Building

Metropolitan Life North Building
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General information
Location	11-25 Madison Avenue, Manhattan, New York 10010
Coordinates
Construction started	1928
Completed	1950
Height
Roof	137.5 m (451 ft)
Technical details
Floor count	30

The Metropolitan Life North Building, now known as Eleven Madison, is a 30-story art deco skyscraper on Madison Square Park in Manhattan, New York City, at 11-25 Madison Avenue. The building is bordered by East 24th Street, Madison Avenue, East 25th Street and Park Avenue South, and is connected by an elevated walkway to the Met Life Tower just south of it. The building replaced the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, which was designed by Stanford White of McKim, Mead and White, and had been completed only 13 years before. As part of the Metropolitan Life Home Office Complex, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 19, 1996.

History

File:MetLife Tower & North Building from W 24th St crop.jpg

The North Building and the Met Life Tower as seen from West 24th Street off of Fifth Avenue, with Madison Square Park in the foreground

The North Building was designed in the 1920s by Harvey Wiley Corbett and Dan Everett Waid as a 100-story skyscraper that would have been the tallest building in the world. However, due to the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and onset of the Great Depression, the construction was halted at floor 29 in 1933. Metropolitan Life had originally planned to have a 100-story tower, and the existing building was constructed to be strong enough to support extra floors. Still, when construction was completed on the 25-story "base" in 1950, there were no plans to build the extra stories. The original plans were to include an entrance to the 23rd Street subway station, but the entrance was ultimately built one block south, on 23rd Street, with an entrance through the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower at One Madison Avenue.

The building, which has 2,200,000 square feet (200,000 m²) of space, was constructed in three stages, and was finally completed in 1950. It is finished on the outside with Alabama limestone and marble detailing, and marble in the lobbies. The building features four vaulted corner entrances, and its bulk is mitigated by numerous setbacks and its polygonal shape. The building contains 30 elevators, enough to serve the originally-planned 100 floors.

From 1994-1997, the building, which has served time as Met Life's records warehouse, had its interior redesigned by Haines Lundberg Waehler and the exterior renovated, all at the cost of $300 million. It is now owned by the Sapir Organization and primarily occupied by Credit Suisse, with the Chef Daniel Humm and Will Guidara restaurant Eleven Madison Park occupying street-level retail space on Madison Avenue. In 2016 or in the future, Sony America plans to move into the building, after their lease expires at 550 Madison Avenue, which was acquired by Cherit Group.

In popular culture

• The 1981 thriller Eyewitness used the building's lobby as the place where William Hurt's character was employed as a janitor, and where the brutal murder that begins the film takes place. Other scenes from the film were shot there as well.
• Director Martin Scorsese used the building as the location for Griffin Dunne's office in the 1985 film After Hours.
• Woody Allen's 1986 Radio Days utilized the North Building for the building where the offices of a broadcasting network were located.
• Slick Rick's 1998 album The Great Adventures of Slick Rick features a photo of the building on its cover.
• In the 2011 film The Adjustment Bureau, the building's lobby is used as a setting for some scenes.

See also

• Metropolitan Life Insurance Company
• Madison Square Presbyterian Church (disambiguation)

External links

• in-Arch.net: The Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. Building and Annex
• Original building design at Skyscraper Page
• Design of finished building at Skyscraper Page