One New York Plaza
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One New York Plaza is an office building in New York City, built in 1969, and is located at at the intersection of South and Whitehall Streets (). It is the southernmost of all Manhattan skyscrapers.
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In 1959 the City of New York attempted to acquire through eminent domain the land under this developement as part of the Battery Park Urban Renewal Area. The plan involved consolidating several blocks into a "superblock" for public housing. When that plan fell through the city hoped to entice the New York Stock Exchange to relocate to the property. However the owner of the property - the firm of Atlas McGroth - successfully sued to retain their land, claiming they were more than willing to develop the site privately.
The building is 640 feet (195 meters) tall with 50 floors. The building was designed by William Lescaze & Assocs. and Kahn & Jacobs.
The facade was designed by Nevio Maggiora, consisting of a boxlike "beehive" pattern with the windows recessed within, made of aluminium-clad wall elements resembling a type of thermally actived elevator button popular at the time of construction.
Ironically enough on August of 1970, the building suffered a fire in which two people were killed and 35 injured. The deaths were caused after an occupied elevator was "summoned" to the burning floor when one of those thermally-activated call buttons - designed to react to a warm finger tapping it - reacted instead to the heat of the fire on that floor.
The building was renovated in 1994
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