Midtown Marvel
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Auden once said that poems are never finished, only abandoned. This elicits the question, when exactly is a building complete? More specifically, when is it ripe for a review like the one you are about to read? Does the moment arrive when all the scaffolding comes down, when all the tenants have moved in, when the ribbon is cut even though half the place remains a hard-hat zone? Buildings, uniquely among cultural artifacts, can malinger for years, sometimes even centuries, in this state of indeterminacy.
The question is relevant to One Beacon Court, also known as the Bloomberg Building and 731 Lexington Avenue, which rises over the vanquished and unwept-for ghosts of the old Alexander’s at 59th Street. Designed by Rafael Pelli of Cesar Pelli and Associates, it isn’t exactly finished (note the massive scaffolding along the southern end) but already it seems alive with commerce and office workers, who ply their trades to the tintinabulation of jackhammers and the hoarse cries of the foremen.
What convinced me that the building was ready for review was the pleasant surprise of coming upon it one night last week as I walked from Park over to Lexington on 59th. Instead of the anticipated construction sight, I found a new H &M store, a brilliantly illuminated glass hive teeming with merchandise and avid customers. Returning in daylight, I noticed that most of the building was in fact fully operational. When seen from the north looking south, it even appears to be completed.
One Beacon Court forms an interesting parallel to Time Warner Center, which opened earlier this year at Columbus Circle. Along the re-ignited axis of Central Park South, these two new structures, different though they are, serve as antipodal points in the same process of reclaiming New York from its postwar malaise. Both replaced repellent, windowless white boxes, the Coliseum and Alexander’s, that represented the most appalling and unimaginative functionalism of the 1950s and 1960s. And in both cases, the new building, whatever its faults, is infinitely preferable to what it replaced.
Like Time Warner Center, the Bloomberg building is a multipurpose complex, with offices, retail spaces, and residences. It occupies a whole block – from Lexington to Third. As a concession for its soaring, white tower, the Third Avenue half of the complex is only around six stories high, thus respecting (unnecessarily) the many low-lying row-houses in the neighborhood.
From afar, the most evident fact of the new building is that the tower, which rises through 53 fastidiously rectilinear floors, is modulated by subtle and irregular shifts in surface planes, and terminates in a translucent lantern that looks quite handsome at night. Especially at street level, up through the six stories that constitute the base on which the tower is set back, the rigorous sequence of mullioned windows is greatly enhanced by clear glass and shimmering metal pylons that articulate the corners.
The punchline, the riposte to the insistent right angles that proliferate across the breadth and height of the facade, is a midblock walkthrough, known as Beacon Court, through which a massive conic section dizzily whirls and waltzes. Especially when seen from the south side, this space – which is open to the sky – represents one of the most powerful and unexpected surprises in the city’s streetscape. It disrupts all the dismal patterns and entrenched expectations of Midtown and will become, I predict, a minor landmark and destination.
I am less certain of the function it will serve, other than to contain the entrances to the various parts of the building, as well as a restaurant with outdoor seating. It is too modest in scope, however, to become a destination like the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center, which Cesar Pelli and Associates designed as well. Still it is one of the most beguiling architectural events in Midtown in more than a generation.
Surely there are weaknesses to this new complex. The canopied entrance on Lexington is surprisingly feeble and unimaginative compared to the boldness of the rest of the structure. The interior into which it admits you (and which was not designed by Cesar Pelli and Associates) is impressively spare, but the workmanship and the marble facing of the walls seem a little shoddy. Far better is the sumptuous lobby of the residential section, entered through Beacon Court.
The Third Avenue half, which contains offices and retail, is marred by the huge machinery that runs the entire complex. Pelli has sought to make the best of a bad thing by covering it in a finely striated box superimposed over the six-story eastern half of the building, but the result is decidedly clumsy. (Similar striations, concealing machinery, occur in the tower – where, even if less intrusive, they constitute a textural distraction.)
The best thing about the eastern half of the complex is the new Bank of America and the Wachovia Bank on the north and south corners respectively. Designed by the banks’ inhouse firms, they expertly exploit the potential of the huge glazed spaces of their interiors. Whether we need two more banks occupying two more street corners of Midtown is a very different question.
Even if One Beacon Court is not a complete success, it is far better than the usual Midtown fare. More importantly, perhaps, it is a real building, a building that has been truly designed, a building that, for better or worse, one can examine and assess as a work of art.