MetLife Building
MetLife Building
General information
Type	Office
Location	New York, New York, USA
Coordinates	40°45′12″N 73°58′36″W / 40.75333°N 73.97667°W / 40.75333; -73.97667Coordinates: 40°45′12″N 73°58′36″W / 40.75333°N 73.97667°W / 40.75333; -73.97667
Construction started	1958
Completed	1962
Opening	March 7, 1963
Height
Roof	808 ft (246 m)
Technical details
Floor count	59
Floor area	3,140,000 sq ft (292,000 m2)
Elevators	23
Design and construction
Owner	Tishman Speyer
Architect	Emery Roth & Sons & The Architects' Collaborative
Structural engineer	The Office of James Ruderman
References
[1][2]

The MetLife Building, originally called the Pan Am Building, is a skyscraper located at 200 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. It is a recognizable part of the Manhattan skyline and one of the fifty tallest buildings in the United States.

History[link]

When it opened on March 7, 1963 the Pan Am Building (as it was known at the time) was the largest commercial office space in the world.^[3] It faced huge initial unpopularity, being described as an "ugly behemoth", due to its lack of proportion and huge scale—it dwarfed the New York Central Building to the north and the Grand Central Terminal to the south.^{[citation needed]}

The last tall tower erected in New York City before laws were enacted preventing corporate logos and names on the tops of buildings,^[4] it bore 15' tall "Pan Am" displays on its north and south faces and 25' tall globe logos east and west.

Pan Am originally had 15 floors. It remained Pan Am's headquarters even after Metropolitan Life Insurance Company bought the building in 1981. By 1991 Pan Am's presence had dwindled to four floors; during that year Pan Am moved its headquarters to Miami. Shortly afterwards the airline ceased operations. On Thursday September 3, 1992, MetLife announced that it would remove Pan Am signage from the building. Robert G. Schwartz, the chairman, chief executive, and president of MetLife, said that the company decided to remove the Pan Am sign since Pan Am ceased operations. At the time MetLife was headquartered in the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower.^[5]

In 2005, MetLife sold the building for $1.72 billion, the record price at the time for an office building in the U.S. The buyer was a joint venture of Tishman Speyer Properties, the New York City Employees' Retirement System, and the New York City Teachers' Retirement System.^[6]

Helicopter service[link]

The building previously had helicopter service to Pan Am's terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport, a 7-to-10-minute flight from the rooftop helipad. The New York Airways Vertol 107 flights lasted from December 21, 1965, to February 18, 1968; S-61 flights operated for a few months in 1977, ending after an accident atop the building killed five people.^[7][8]

On May 16, 1977, about one minute after a Sikorsky S-61L landed and its 20 passengers disembarked, the right front landing gear collapsed, causing the aircraft to topple onto its side with the rotors still turning. One of the five 20-foot blades broke off and flew into a crowd of passengers waiting to board. Three men, including film director Michael Findlay, were killed instantly and another man died later in a hospital.^[9] The blade sailed over the side of the building and killed a pedestrian on the corner of Madison Avenue and 43rd Street. Two other people were seriously injured.^[10][11]

Suicide[link]

An incident occurred with the suicide of Eli M. Black (the father of Leon Black) on February 3, 1975. The CEO of United Brands Company (now Chiquita Brands International) used his briefcase to shatter an external window and then jumped out of the forty-fourth story window to his death on Park Avenue.

Architecture[link]

Designed by Emery Roth & Sons with the assistance of Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi, the Pan Am Building is an example of an International style skyscraper. It is purely commercial in design with large floors, simple massing, and an absence of ornamentation inside or out. It has been popular with tenants, not least because of its location next to Grand Central Terminal.

In 1987, the lifestyle periodical New York revealed in a poll that MetLife—then Pan Am—was the building that New Yorkers would most like to see demolished. Perhaps contributing to the hatred of the building is the fact that it is so visible. Situated behind Grand Central Terminal outside of the grid, the building, which would have otherwise been tucked away into the city, is left totally exposed and contrasted with the other buildings around it, most notably the New York Central Building, which is now called the Helmsley Building. Today the building is one of the most recognizable skyscrapers in the City.

• 

  The MetLife Building as seen from the Empire State Building

• 

  Building profile, looking east up 44th Street.

• 

  MetLife Building with Grand Central Terminal in the foreground.

• 

  A view of the MetLife Building and Grand Central Terminal when the building was known as the Pan Am Building

Popular culture[link]

As an iconic New York landmark, the building has been seen in a few films such as Coogan's Bluff, The French Connection, Armageddon, Catch Me If You Can, Godzilla, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The building is seen in the video game Grand Theft Auto IV as a parody called the GetaLife Building, and in the game Crysis 2, in which it is hit by alien artillery fire and collapses onto Grand Central Terminal. The building is also seen in the movie Knowing, where it is destroyed along with the rest of New York City, and in the movie Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009), where Megatron orders Starscream to launch a full-scale attack on the planet. It was shown as it appeared in the sixties with the Pan Am logo on ABC television series of the said brand title. In The Avengers, the building is deconstructed to make way for Stark Tower.

Tenants[link]

In addition to being the official headquarters of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, the MetLife Building houses a number of other major firms, including the headquarters of Dreyfus Corporation and Barclays Wealth Americas, the largest office of Greenberg Traurig, and the New York offices of Mishcon de Reya, DnB NOR, CB Richard Ellis, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Hunton & Williams, Computer Sciences Corporation, Winston & Strawn & Lend Lease Corporation on Level 9. In addition the building serves as the U.S. Headquarters for Mitsui & Co. (USA) Inc, the American subsidiary of Japan's largest trading company.

The building's most famous "residents" are a pair of peregrine falcons nicknamed "Lois and Clark" after two of the main characters in the Superman film series, which nest there and feed on pigeons.

See also[link]

New York City portal

• Buildings and architecture of New York City
• Tallest buildings in New York City

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: MetLife Building

• Official page
• in-Arch.net: The Pan Am/MetLife Building
• Picture with old logo and helicopter
• The Midtown Book
• The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream by Meredith L. Clausen (MIT Press catalog entry)
• NTSB accident report of the helicopter accident in 1977