Jim Henderson
The plaza and sunken garden at One Chase Manhattan Plaza, which opened in 1961. Today the building is called 28 Liberty or Fosun Plaza.
refreshing departure from the narrow cavernous streets of the Financial District. It was designed by sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who created a circular sunken rock garden in the center. Ada Louise Huxtable, famed architecture critic writing for The New York Times, commented,“ These are ambitious structures of character and quality … they aspire to the dual role of company trademark and work of art.” Indeed, the opening of One Chase Manhattan Plaza ushered in a new era of downtown development that included the World Trade Center, Battery Park City, South Street Seaport and other corporate towers.
Citicorp Center
Leaving the Financial District in 1961, First National City Bank planned to consolidate its employees in midtown and transform into Citibank. SOM also designed and built their new headquarters at 399 Park Avenue, a modern rectangular 41-story office tower that blended in with neighbors like the Seagram Building and helped to establish a new business corridor on Park Avenue. The move was successful and by the 1970s, Citibank needed to expand. They began to acquire nearly all land between Lexington Avenue,
Third Avenue, East 53rd and East 54th Streets. This included an old church building belonging to the parish of St. Peter’ s Church, which bargained to sell its land in exchange for a new church at the same location to be built by Citibank.
Citicorp Center( the official name for the complex at the time) was designed by Hugh Stubbins & Associates and was dedicated on October 12, 1977. The sleek, bright new tower forever altered New York’ s skyline with its sloping, angled roof. The architects also created a spectacle at street level by propping the building up on four centrally located stilts. Confining the tower’ s footprint to four 24-foot columns allowed a rebuilt St. Peters Church to remain on its original corner and, according to Architectural Record,“ the design permitted the construction of the 9,000 square foot sunken plaza located 12 feet below the street level and interconnected with a new subway station.”
These amenities were a welcome departure from the sterile corporate building style of the time that would often force pre-existing small businesses to close. These publicfacing inclusions, along with preserving St. Peter’ s Church, were developed by the Urban Design Group and The Mayor’ s Office of Midtown Planning, both started by then mayor John V. Lindsay. Developers were encouraged to build significant usable public space in exchange for permission to build higher towers with more floors.
The Citicorp Center is also noted for its innovative, but concealed, steel chevron support system, and it is the first tall building to employ a tuned mass damper( TMD). The TMD is a giant hanging weight at the top of the building used to counteract the forces of wind and lessen the building’ s sway during storms.
No mention of Citicorp / Citigroup Center, now called 601 Lexington Avenue, is complete without discussing the structural crisis that followed immediately after the building opened. The story went untold for nearly 20 years until“ The Fifty-Nine- Story Crisis,” by Joseph Morgenstern, was published in The New Yorker in May 1995.
A student who was writing a paper about the building contacted structural engineer William LeMessurier. After the student questioned the building’ s ability to withstand strong winds approaching from an angle, rather than straight on, LeMessurier went back over his calculations and determined a large enough storm could indeed topple the building. While doing this, he learned that to save money, the contractor substituted bolts
www. MoAF. org | Winter 2026 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 35