Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower

History and architecture

The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company tower, designed by Pierre L. LeBrun of Napoleon LeBrun & Sons, is a major and memorable evocation of the world-famous campanile in Venice's Saint Mark's Square (Plate 1). Built in 1907-09, the Metropolitan Life tower was for a time, the tallest building in the world. It is also the final and crowning work of a firm, father and sons, whose combined production spanned almost seventy years of American architecture.

The tower was extensively renovated (1960-64) by Lloyd Morgan & Eugene V. Meroni, Architects, successors to Leonard Schultze & Associates, who retained the tower's major features -- monumental clock faces, setback arcade, pyramidal spire, cupola, chime and lantern -- as well as its original entasis (Plate 2). The tower's site, opposite historic Madison Square Park at 24th Street, is one of the finest settings in the city. For the past eighty years the tower has been both a significant silhouette on the Manhattan skyline and a corporate symbol; the lantern at its top has been called "The light that never fails."

Madison Square Park - a brief history

Few buildings in New York enjoy the spacious and verdant setting Madison Square Park provides the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company home office complex and tower. The park itself had been included by the Street Commissioners in their 1811 Map of Manhattan nearly 180 years ago. Then the park was a reserve of almost 239 acres; it was not pared down to its present seven acres until 1844.1 Even as the park's size diminished, its historical significance increased; decades before the architecture of commerce came to dominate its borders, Madison Square possessed a rich civic, military, social and cultural history.

With the onset of the War of 1812, President James Madison mobilized troops and the site, a temporary home to upstate volunteers, became "Camp Madison," a likely source for the square's name. Today only commemorative monuments remain, echos of American military victories. The Fifth Avenue Hotel, a Republican Party stronghold, opened in 1858 and the park opposite became a pantheon of the party's most revered public servants from New York; with bronze statues of Secretary William H.

Seward, Senator Roscoe Conkling, and President Chester A. Arthur.2 To the east, Madison Avenue, insulated by the park, became a fashionable residential enclave. On the corner of 24th Street was the Madison Square Presbyterian Church (1854). From its pulpit the Reverend Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst marshaled the moral indignation that ended Boss Tweed's domination of municipal government.

In the 1880s and 1890s the Madison Square area became a theatrical center. Steele McKay built the Madison Square Theatre in 1880 and the Lyceum Theatre in 1885. In 1890 McKim, Mead & White's famous Madison Square Garden (demolished in 1924) opened at the northeast corner of Madison and East 26th Street on the site where P.T. Barnum formerly had his Monster Classical & Geological Hippodrome, and Gilmore's Garden had sheltered boxing demonstrations and the annual National Horseshow.

In the same year Joseph F. Knapp, the president of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, initiated the first of many property acquisitions the company would make on Madison Square when the houses on the Square's east side were purchased. With the exception of Dr. Parkhurst's church, the whole block front was demolished to build the company's new headquarters, an eleven-story office building faced with Tuckahoe marble, designed by Napoleon LeBrun & Sons.

Considered in retrospect, it was the entertainment industry's encroachment that prompted residents to move further uptown, but it was the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company's new and solid presence which re-stabilized Madison Square's eastern border. In 1896 the State of New York erected the marble courthouse for the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court (James Brown Lord, architect), a designated New York City Landmark, on the northeast corner of Madison and 25th Street.

Knapp's vision of the square prepared the site for the next chapter in its history, the growth of corporate giants.