Empire, State & Building by Kiel Moe
Actar, 2017
Hardcover, 264 pages

Exactly four weeks ago, news broke that JPMorgan Chase would be tearing down its 52-story headquarters at 270 Park Avenue in order to accommodate its 15,000 employees in a new 70-story tower on the same site providing an additional 1 million square feet of floor area. If all goes to plan for the bank, the act would enter the history books as the largest purposeful building demolition. Given that the building was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill for Union Carbide and completed in 1961, the demolition would also mean the building's useful life lasted less than 60 years ? a long time for buildings in general but hardly long enough for one totaling 1.5 million square feet. Arguments against the tower's demolition have focused on the role of SOM senior designer Natalie de Blois, the quality of its design and the mystery as to what would replace it, and the wastefulness of tearing down a building with so much embodied energy. This last point is relevant to the book here, which examines the life a nearby Midtown site now home to the Empire State Building.
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The spread above illustrates the roughly 220 years of building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, from a farmhouse in the early 1800s, to mansions and townhouses later that century, to the famous Waldorf-Astoria Hotel at the turn of the century, and to finally the Empire State Building. The ups and downs o...