Beekman Tower
The Beekman Tower, also known as the Panhellenic Tower, is a 26-story Art Deco skyscraper situated at the corner of First Avenue and East 49th Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The building was constructed between 1927 and 1928 and was designed by John Mead Howells.
This article is about the Midtown Manhattan tower. For the Lower Manhattan tower, see 8 Spruce Street.Beekman Tower Hotel
The Panhellenic, Panhellenic Tower
1-7 Mitchell Place
Turtle Bay, Manhattan, New York, US
1927
1928
RESIDE Worldwide
287 feet (87 m)
26
February 13, 1998[2]
1972
The Beekman Tower had been built for the Panhellenic Association's New York chapter as a club and hotel for women in college sororities.[3] However, due to a lack of patronage, it was opened up to non-sorority women and men by the mid-1930s. It was later converted into a hotel and then corporate apartments.
The Beekman Tower contains a design with numerous setbacks, chamfers at its corners, and a massing that abuts onto the boundaries of its lot. Its sculptural ornamentation was designed by Rene Paul Chambellan in the Art Deco style with Gothic influences. In 1998, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission made the building an official city landmark.
Critical reception[edit]
The Beekman Tower was widely lauded upon its completion, even receiving international recognition when several French architecture publications reported on the structure.[5] The New Yorker stated that the Beekman Tower was "a glorious building on a glorious site and a marvellous example of modernists not gone berserk",[37][38] while The New York Times said that the building was "an outstanding example of American skyscraper architecture".[38][39] In 1929, the year after the building opened, the First Avenue Association gave the building an "outstanding architectural merit" award.[40]
Later criticism was mixed. Robert A. M. Stern wrote in 1987 that the building "marked an advance" from the American Radiator Building and Tribune Tower.[6] Christopher Gray of The New York Times wrote in 1991 that before the headquarters of the United Nations was built, the structure was "an out-of-place landmark".[21] The Beekman Tower's design was the inspiration for several other structures such as the Reynolds Building in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.[41]