The top 20 floors at the 42-story tower at 1450 Broadway, one of the premier office buildings in the Garment Center, will be converted to residential condominium apartments.
The white-brick building is on the southeast corner at 41st Street and is one block west of Bryant Park and one block south of Times Square.
It was erected as the Continental Building in 1931 and designed by Ely Jacques Kahn.
In their great book, "New York 1930, Architecture and Urbanism Between The Two World Wars," (Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1987), Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins devote a chapter to "Three Modern Masters" of architecture: Ely Jacques Kahn, Ralph Walker and Raymond Hood.
"Of the three architects," they wrote, "Ely Jacques Kahn was in some senses the most extreme representative of the new pragmatism. Hood and Walker designed corporate monuments, and Walker, whatever his birthright, modeled his public persona on the gentlemen-architects of the previous generation. The task Kahn set himself was to rescue the industrial loft building and the common, speculative office building from the aristocratic indifference of the Composite Era?.In Kahn's mind New York could never hope to achieve the decorum of Paris. New York was a commercial city, and the mundane office building - its very fabric - an aesthetic problem to be solved in and of itself."
"Where domestic work resists, grimly, the elimination of faked 'quaintness,' Kahn wrote in 1929, 'and where likewise the monumental building disdainly avoids variation from precedent, the industrial structure sails merrily into experiment,'" the authors continued.
Kahn designed more than 30 buildings between 1924 and 1931, the authors noted, adding that "Kahn's buildings were neither civic nor corporate monuments, but machines to make money?.By the end of the 1920s, the shortage of available land and the increasing concentration of the garment industry resulted in the construction of higher lofts than ever?.An even more vivid example of the vicious cycle of rising land costs and increasing density was the Continental Building, the closest Kahn came to realizing a skyscraper."
The building occupied a 76-by-173-foot lot and the "seventeen-story base framed a shallow light court above the fifth floor," they wrote, adding that "The setbacks above were developed as tiled terraces opening off the office floors. A rectangular tower rose from the back of the lot at the twenty-sixth floor; at the top it was transformed into a square mass wearing an octagonal crow. The glistening white elevations of marble, terra-cotta and glazed brick extended the vision of a city of pearly towers first stated by the Candler Building on Forty-second Street and more eloquently developed by Raymond Hood in the Daily News Building."
Kahn's other important New York City buildings include the Squibb Building on the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue at 58th Street, 2 Park Avenue and the Bricken Casino Building at 1410 Broadway at 39th Street.
In 1937, Ayn Rand worked as a typist without pay in Kahn's office to research her novel The Fountainhead.
The building was acquired by The Moinian Group last year for about $124 million from a partnership of Murray Hill Properties and ING Realty Partners that had acquired it in 2001 from Orix Realy Estate Equities for $94.4 million.
The building's facade, lobby and elevators were renovated in 2003 and the building presently contains 382,000 square feet of office/showroom space and 20,000 square feet of retail space.
Michael Shvo is handing the marketing of the condominium apartments.
The 24th to 26th floors of the tower have 6,911 to 7,214 square feet; the 27th to the 40th floors have 3.623 square feet and the 41st and 42nd floors have 2,202 to 3,106 square feet.
The white-brick building is on the southeast corner at 41st Street and is one block west of Bryant Park and one block south of Times Square.
It was erected as the Continental Building in 1931 and designed by Ely Jacques Kahn.
In their great book, "New York 1930, Architecture and Urbanism Between The Two World Wars," (Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1987), Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins devote a chapter to "Three Modern Masters" of architecture: Ely Jacques Kahn, Ralph Walker and Raymond Hood.
"Of the three architects," they wrote, "Ely Jacques Kahn was in some senses the most extreme representative of the new pragmatism. Hood and Walker designed corporate monuments, and Walker, whatever his birthright, modeled his public persona on the gentlemen-architects of the previous generation. The task Kahn set himself was to rescue the industrial loft building and the common, speculative office building from the aristocratic indifference of the Composite Era?.In Kahn's mind New York could never hope to achieve the decorum of Paris. New York was a commercial city, and the mundane office building - its very fabric - an aesthetic problem to be solved in and of itself."
"Where domestic work resists, grimly, the elimination of faked 'quaintness,' Kahn wrote in 1929, 'and where likewise the monumental building disdainly avoids variation from precedent, the industrial structure sails merrily into experiment,'" the authors continued.
Kahn designed more than 30 buildings between 1924 and 1931, the authors noted, adding that "Kahn's buildings were neither civic nor corporate monuments, but machines to make money?.By the end of the 1920s, the shortage of available land and the increasing concentration of the garment industry resulted in the construction of higher lofts than ever?.An even more vivid example of the vicious cycle of rising land costs and increasing density was the Continental Building, the closest Kahn came to realizing a skyscraper."
The building occupied a 76-by-173-foot lot and the "seventeen-story base framed a shallow light court above the fifth floor," they wrote, adding that "The setbacks above were developed as tiled terraces opening off the office floors. A rectangular tower rose from the back of the lot at the twenty-sixth floor; at the top it was transformed into a square mass wearing an octagonal crow. The glistening white elevations of marble, terra-cotta and glazed brick extended the vision of a city of pearly towers first stated by the Candler Building on Forty-second Street and more eloquently developed by Raymond Hood in the Daily News Building."
Kahn's other important New York City buildings include the Squibb Building on the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue at 58th Street, 2 Park Avenue and the Bricken Casino Building at 1410 Broadway at 39th Street.
In 1937, Ayn Rand worked as a typist without pay in Kahn's office to research her novel The Fountainhead.
The building was acquired by The Moinian Group last year for about $124 million from a partnership of Murray Hill Properties and ING Realty Partners that had acquired it in 2001 from Orix Realy Estate Equities for $94.4 million.
The building's facade, lobby and elevators were renovated in 2003 and the building presently contains 382,000 square feet of office/showroom space and 20,000 square feet of retail space.
Michael Shvo is handing the marketing of the condominium apartments.
The 24th to 26th floors of the tower have 6,911 to 7,214 square feet; the 27th to the 40th floors have 3.623 square feet and the 41st and 42nd floors have 2,202 to 3,106 square feet.
Architecture Critic
Carter Horsley
Since 1997, Carter B. Horsley has been the editorial director of CityRealty. He began his journalistic career at The New York Times in 1961 where he spent 26 years as a reporter specializing in real estate & architectural news. In 1987, he became the architecture critic and real estate editor of The New York Post.
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