Citicorp Center

The Citigroup Center is at 601 Lexington Avenue in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, New York, U.S. It takes up the majority of a city block bounded by Lexington Avenue to the west, 54th Street to the north, Third Avenue to the east, and 53rd Street to the south. The land lot covers 70,572 square feet (6,556.4 m) with a frontage of 200 feet (61 m) on Lexington Avenue and a west–east length of 325 feet (99 m). The building shares the block with 880 Third Avenue, an 18-story structure at 53rd Street and Third Avenue. Other nearby buildings include 599 Lexington Avenue to the south, 100 East 53rd Street and the Seagram Building to the southwest, 399 Park Avenue to the west, the Central Synagogue to the northwest, and the Lipstick Building to the east. The New York City Subway's Lexington Avenue/51st Street station is directly underneath the building.

Thirty-one parcels were acquired and cleared to make way for the development. The 54th Street frontage was largely occupied by brownstone houses. Some of the other lots contained commercial spaces, ranging from small shops to the upscale Cafe Chauveron. The site also included the Medical Chambers on 54th Street, which was owned by a cooperative of doctors. St. Peter's Evangelical Lutheran Church occupied the corner of Lexington Avenue and 54th Street; its sanctuary was rebuilt when the Citigroup Center was developed.

Custom street furniture—including newsstands, flagpoles, and streetlight pylons—was designed for the sidewalks around the Citigroup Center. New Jersey–based company Designetics designed pylons with a cruciform cross-section and street lamps at the top. Seven lighting pylons are placed along the streets that surround the block. Three custom pylons—at the northwest, northeast, and southwest corners of the block—include pedestrian and vehicular traffic lights. The pylons were initially designed with a "glossy black finish" that contrasted with the tower's aluminum facade; by 2016, they had been painted gray. The New Yorker described the pylons in 2017 as "sculptural towers worthy of Brancusi".

First National City Bank (later Citibank) was founded in 1812 and, for over a century, had its headquarters in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. The company was headquartered at 52 Wall Street until 1908, when it moved to 55 Wall Street. After National City Bank and the Farmers' Loan and Trust Company merged in 1929, the new company, City Bank Farmers Trust, moved into a new structure at 20 Exchange Place, which was completed in 1931, and opened a Midtown office at 399 Park Avenue, one block west of the present Citigroup Center, in 1961.

On the northwestern corner of the future Citigroup Center site was St. Peter's Lutheran Church, which had been founded in 1862 as a German-speaking congregation. The St. Peter's congregation occupied a building at Lexington Avenue and 46th Street from 1871 to 1902, when it was demolished for the construction of Grand Central Terminal. This prompted the congregation to move to a Gothic building designed by John G. Michel and P. Brandner, which was completed in 1905. The congregation, which at its peak had a membership of over one thousand, had decreased to below 300 by the 1960s, prompting the congregation to consider relocating to near the United Nations headquarters.

Lots on the St. Peter's block were acquired secretively starting in 1968 and continued for five and a half years. The acquisition was headed by brokers Donald Schnabel and Charles McArthur of Julien J. Studley Inc. The brokers believed that a large, contiguous land lot would be worth more than the sum of each lot's individual worth, though the firm had not yet secured a client for which it was purchasing the lots. St. Peter's Church's membership was increasing again by then, and members of the congregation were loath to part with their property. A Studley broker formed a company called Lexman, which then approached what had become First National City Bank to determine their interest in acquiring the St. Peter's block, one block east of their headquarters at the time. Lexman gradually acquired the other lots on the block.

The brokerage firm again negotiated with St. Peter's congregation in late 1969 after some lots had been acquired. John White, president of consulting firm James D. Landauer Associates, proposed that the new structure on the site be a condominium development; i.e. …

The Citigroup Center consists of three structures: the office tower, the annex, and a sanctuary for St. Peter's Church at the base of the office tower. The tower was designed by architect Hugh Stubbins, along with associate architects Emery Roth & Sons, for the First National City Bank (later Citibank). Of the other principals at Hugh A. Stubbins & Associates, architect Peter Woytuk was most involved in the design, while project manager W. Easley Hammer oversaw the construction. In addition, Edward Larrabee Barnes was the consulting architect, and LeMessurier Associates and James Ruderman were the structural engineers. The general contractor was the HRH Construction Corporation (which was acquired by the Starrett Housing Corporation during the building's construction), and the steel contractor was Bethlehem Steel. Numerous contractors supplied other material for the building.

The Citigroup Center tower rises 59 stories high, with its roof about 915 feet (279 m) above ground level. Since it is raised 13 stories above ground, the tower has 46 usable stories. At the time of completion, Citicorp Center was the seventh-tallest or eighth-tallest building in the world, as well as the city's fifth-tallest building. In addition to the primary 59-story tower, there is an annex at 159 East 53rd Street with six or seven stories. It extends east to Third Avenue and includes part of the building's shopping concourse. On 54th Street is a loading dock that serves the tower, annex, and church.

The tower and its annex have similarly-designed facades. The facade is made of anodized aluminum and reflective glass panels. Each facade segment measures 12 by 9 feet (3.7 by 2.7 m) and consists of both glass panes and aluminum plates. To conserve energy, each window is double-glazed; the inner pane is coated with chrome plating. The windows on each floor are separated by flush aluminum spandrels. The spandrels were manufactured by Flour City Architectural Metals, a firm based in Glen Cove, New York. The aluminum is silver-colored, like that on the Pepsi-Cola Building and One Chase Manhattan Plaza, because Stubbins thought a dark color would not allow observers to "see the shade and shadow". The facade is fitted with 2 inches (51 mm) of insulation, double the amount of insulation considered normal at the time of construction. …

As one of three office buildings approved in Manhattan during 1974, Citicorp Center received much media attention during its construction. After the design was announced, the architectural writer Ada Louise Huxtable criticized the design in The New York Times, saying that the tower "has neither romanticism nor structural rationalism but, instead, appears to have been painstakingly invented with a tortured logic through a series of pragmatic and esthetic compromises". As the building was being completed, Huxtable took a less harsh tone, saying that it contained a "clear desire for design quality" despite the drawbacks of the form and roof. A writer for the New York Daily News described the building as being a typical New York City office structure that would only attract notice if it were built elsewhere. A New York magazine writer, Suzanne Stephens, stated that the building was simply a modified version of a 1950s skyscraper, considering the rooftop and base to be wasteful with space.

After the building's completion, it had mixed reception. The architectural critic Paul Goldberger wrote for The New York Times that the roof was unusual and that the building had a reflective facade and a varied form, but that the overall design was not particularly innovative. Another architectural critic, Jack Egan, similarly wrote for The Washington Post that the building had distinctive design features but did not appeal to either nostalgia or novel innovation. Huxtable regarded the plaza as an architectural success but observed in January 1978 that very few people used it. August Heckscher II, a former New York City parks commissioner, described the interior as "an amenity in which we can all rejoice". Nevertheless, Heckscher believed the atrium's silver cladding and light fixtures to be unwelcoming and suggestive of the indoors, and Stephens said that the benefits of the atrium did not transcend class boundaries.

Other critics described Citicorp Center in a largely positive light. The historian and writer John Tauranac described the tower as the "most dramatic new skyscraper" in New York City since the completion of 30 Rockefeller Plaza several decades prior. The architect and writer Robert A. M. …