Work to prepare 270 Park Avenue for its demolition is continuing in Midtown East. Since YIMBY’s last update in late July, more scaffolding and netting have been installed on the lower section of the Modernist-style skyscraper. JPMorgan Chase is the developer of the project to tear down the 1.5-million-square-foot, 52-story tower and replace it with a 57-story supertall designed by Foster + Partners Architects, with Adamson Associates as the architect of record.
New photos from across the street and around the Midtown property show that state of progress on the project. Another major step in the demolition process is the installation of a construction crane on the southern elevation of the skyscraper. The steel base and support was previously spotted in our last update before the crane arrived and was assembled. This will aid in the lifting of heavy objects and structural materials from every floor until 270 Park Avenue reaches street level.
Looking down Park Avenue with 270 Park Avenue and One Vanderbilt. Photo by Michael Young
The lower floors of the main eastern elevation. Photo by Michael Young
Looking down at the construction crane and lower floors of 270 Park Avenue. Photo by Michael Young
The construction crane. Photo by Michael Young
Looking up the northern elevation. Photo by Michael Young
Meanwhile, almost the entire lower western section of the tower is covered in black netting and scaffolding. Workers can be seen carting dozens of filled dumpster bins along East 48th Street, containing various materials like ceiling tiles, metal studs, drywall, and other miscellaneous scrap pieces.
The northern corner of 270 Park Avenue with One Vanderbilt in the background. Photo by Michael Young
No renderings of the new skyscraper have been spotted yet, though building massing studies are the only visual depictions that give us an idea of how tall and massive this new supertall will eventually become.
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This sort of extreme waste for the vanity of the privileged elite precisely illustrates what is most wrong with our America culture.
Nothing like this must ever happen again.
Why do you have such a problem with successful people? Why the class envy? There is nothing “privileged elite” about a building owner wanting to replace it with another, taller structure that will suit his needs. And if it is “elite”, so what?
This building, the ‘Union Carbide’ building was one of the great examples of the genre..let us see if Foster can come up with a worthy successor..
To me, it was always a pale (and cheaper) pastiche of the Seagram building.
Did I read correctly??? Demolition a 52 story tower to be replaced by a 57 SUPERTALL tower??? 5 additional floors makes it supertall? or does everything have to be embellished with hyperbole.
A 707-foot tower is being replaced by a tower over 600 feet taller,designed for about three times as many employees.
I am surprised it makes economic sense to demolish such a tall building to replace it with another one of about the same size.
I might like to demolish my house to build a newer one in its place, but I won’t.
One with a modicum of common sense would undoubtedly question the gyration of such a move as it pertains to the size. I was certainly waiting to see in the following sentence a number much greater than 57. Additionally, I thought the word supertall was reserved for structures with a number way north of 57. but hey “when in Rome”
My understanding is that the agreed definition of supertall is that a building has to have a finished height of 1,000 ft. or more. By simple calculation, for 57 stories that would mean an average story height of around 17.5 ft. For luxury residential that wouldn’t be entirely out of court but isn’t this to be an office building?
The new tower will actually be over 1,300 feet tall…I have seen a figure of 70 stories for it before,perhaps the 57 excludes mechanical floors.
What a disgrace. Not only because of the Cities disregard for a historic building but also this is an environmental disaster to knock down a tall building that is environmentally sound is a waste of energy and the resources that made up the building. New York, you should be better than this!
“…The proposed 1,322-foot-tall development will yield 2,439,635 square feet, with 1,871,767 square feet designated for office space. The steel-based structure will also have two sub-cellar levels, a cellar and seven enclosed parking spaces.
This proposal is noticeably shorter than the original diagrams that called for a 1,566-foot, eight-inch height, which would have made it the tallest tower in the city by roof height. It’s also well below the 1,400-foot height that JPMorgan projected in its plan with the zoning text amendment late last year. In May, the New York City Council approved JPMorgan’s new headquarters as the first site to utilize the City’s East Midtown Rezoning, which included a $42 million contribution to the public realm improvement fund following an air rights purchase from Grand Central Terminal in 2018…”
Everybody is whining and crying over how they are tearing it down. Its not like there aren’t 14 other boring ass towers that look the exact same all over the city. Such an eyesore, Its literally a black square rectangle.
It’s a great pity that the exquisite stainless-steel façade, a rare feature on any building, will be lost.
Good riddance! The fewer of these urban renewal era steel and glass dark boxes, the better for the cityscape. I swear that architects and developers back in the 60s and 70s just copied one another and read off the same damned blueprints. Now if only they would demolish that ugly steel and glass box in lower Manhattan that replaced the beautifully ornate, historic 47 story Singer Building in the late 60s.