Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the 1963 building at Grand Central Terminal, see MetLife Building

Information
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower was the world's tallest building from 1909 to 1913.*
Preceded by	Singer Building
Surpassed by	Woolworth Building
Location	New York City, USA
Status	Complete
Constructed	1909 (base: 1893)
Height
Roof	700 feet (213 m)
Technical Details
Floor count	50
* Fully habitable, self-supported, from main entrance to rooftop; see world's tallest structures for other listings.

The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower (also Met Life Tower) at One Madison Avenue, New York City was the world's tallest building from 1909 to 1913, when it was surpassed by the Woolworth Building. As the address suggests, it is located at the southern end of Madison Avenue, directly across the street from Madison Square Park. The building is a National Historic Landmark and was first added to the National Register of Historic Places on February 6, 1978. Later, the entire complex of buildings was added to the National Register on January 19, 1996.

The Met Life Tower as it looks today.

The tower is a later addition to the original 11-story, full-block office building (the "East Wing") that was completed in 1893. The Campanile in Venice, Italy served as an inspiration when the building was commissioned by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in 1907, and served as world headquarters of the company until 2005. Napoleon LeBrun & Sons designed the 700 feet (213 m) tower with 52 floors, more than twice the height of its old world counterpart, and completed the building by 1909 with help from the Hedden Construction Company. The completion of the Woolworth Building in 1913 ended the Met Life Tower's reign as the tallest building in the world.

There are four clocks, one on each side of the tower. Each clock is 26.5 feet (8 m) in diameter with each number being four feet (1.2 m) tall. The minute hands each weigh half a ton. The original tower was sheathed in Tuckahoe marble, but during the 1964 renovation plain limestone was used to cover the tower and the East Wing, replacing the old Renaissance revival details with a streamlined, modern look. Much of the building's original ornamentation was removed.

A three-year exterior restoration project, which saw much of the building covered in scaffolding, ended in 2002 and added a new, computerized, multicolored nighttime lighting system much like that of the Empire State Building; the colors change to denote particular holidays or important events. The gilded cupola at the very top of the building serves as an "eternal light" which stays illuminated even after the rest of the lighting system has been turned off for the night.

In March of 2005, SL Green Realty Trust bought the tower in anticipation of converting it into apartments. The base would remain an office component, although its air rights could be bought to allow for the construction of another apartment building nearby.

[edit] North Building (11 Madison Avenue)

By the late 1920s, the 1909 Met Life Tower and the 1919 North Annex were becoming too small to house the continuously growing activities of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Looking to expand, the company considered building on a full block site between East 24th and East 25th Streets.

Columbia University-educated architect Harvey Wiley Corbett left his position on the Rockefeller Center design team in order to take up this project in 1928. The final design for the new building was proposed as a 100-story, telescoping tower. However, the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 caused the company to scrap plans for a giant skyscraper and instead built only a portion of the proposed tower. What stands of the North Building today is what was to be the 32-story base for the 100-story tower, built with the strucural strength and number of elevator shafts needed for a later completion. There have been proposals to add floors to this 32-floor base and to 'complete' the tower, but there are no current plans to do so.

The primary tenant of the North Building today is the investment banking arm of Credit Suisse.