The “preserve everything!” crowd is ready to strike a death blow to east Midtown. They’re trying to stop JPMorgan Chase from demolishing obsolete 270 Park Ave. and replacing it with a modern, larger and taller headquarters tower — essential to keeping the bank from fleeing the once-premier area, as many other firms have done.
The new skyscraper would have room for 15,000 employees compared to 3,500 in the current one. If the plan is stymied, the bank will be forced to leave — which would confirm that the 70 blocks between Grand Central Terminal and East 57th Street are finished as a world-class office district.
“It would be a serious body blow to east Midtown,” said former City Planning Commissioner Carl Weisbrod, who led the city’s struggle to rezone the area to let larger buildings suited to the digital age replace the out-of-date ones there now.
Put simply: East Midtown can’t afford another major corporate defection.
Problem is, the district — apart from the rising One Vanderbilt, redeveloped gems 390 Madison Ave. and 425 Park Ave., and a few others — has the city’s most antiquated office buildings, on average more than 70 years old.
The resulting corporate exodus to neighborhoods with more suitable buildings includes Pfizer, McKinsey & Co., Citigroup, Sony, L’Oreal, Hudson’s Bay Co., Wells Fargo, Major League Baseball, BlackRock, Boston Consulting Group and Point 72 Asset Management, plus law firms Reed, Smith and Jones, Day.
JPMorgan Chase would rather stay put. But since old zoning rules forbade replacing 270 Park Ave. with a structure even as large as the current one, the bank scoped out sites from the World Trade Center to Hudson Yards.
A five-year rezoning campaign under two different mayors finally yielded a blueprint that lets developers erect new buildings in exchange for paying the city for transit- and public-space improvements. Even Mayor de Blasio, the most business-hostile mayor in the city’s history, saw the need to prevent east Midtown from turning into a backwater.
JPMorgan Chase’s current digs have neither the beauty nor gravitas of the Seagram Building or Lever House, nearby International Style masterpieces that enjoy landmark status.
Yet architectural critics and activists want the Landmarks Preservation Commission to confer immortality on 270 Park Ave. — a 52-story, black metal-and-glass affair opened in 1960, when cutting-edge technology was the Xerox copying machine.
The Municipal Art Society, the New York Landmarks Conservancy and the Historic District Council embrace a curious argument articulated by New York Magazine critic Justin Davidson. He wrote that 270 Park Ave. was “in the vanguard of a movement with a dubious urban legacy.”
Translation? It helped pioneer a lousy style.
A second argument is that 270 Park Ave. was largely designed by a woman, Gordon Bunshaft’s associate Natalie de Blois. But the LPC — which happens to have a female chair, Meenakshi Sriinivasan — declined to designate 270 Park Ave. last year in an on-the-merits review of east Midtown that conferred landmark status on a dozen properties.
Even if the movement to landmark 270 Park Ave. falls short, it will egg on other malicious strategies. Lawsuits might challenge air-rights purchases needed to put up a taller successor or claim that JPMorgan Chase isn’t paying the city enough for public amenities.
Delay can kill a large project as surely as a hostile judge can. If the struggle drags on, no one could blame the bank for again looking elsewhere.
In fact, activists seem hell-bent on blocking anything new in east Midtown. They also demand landmark status for a few gloomy lower floors of 550 Madison Ave., the vacant former Sony tower, which the owners wish to replace with glass.
The floors aren’t even original to the 1984 building; major changes were made to them in the ’90s. That raises a fair question posed by CBRE tristate CEO Mary Ann Tighe, who represents 550 Madison’s owners: “Is ‘preservation’ just being used as a pretext to block development?”
It mustn’t happen at 270 Park Ave. The city must stick to its guns and let east Midtown have a 21st-century tower before it’s too late.