MetLife Building

The MetLife Building is a skyscraper located at 200 Park Avenue at East 45th Street above Grand Central Terminal in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, was built in 1958-63 as the Pan Am Building, the headquarters of Pan American World Airways. It was designed by Emery Roth & Sons, Pietro Belluschi and Walter Gropius in the International style, and is one of the fifty tallest buildings in the United States.

History

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. 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.

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

Helicopter service

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; Sikorsky S-61 flights operated for a few months in 1977, ending after an accident atop the building killed five people.
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. 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.

Architecture

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, with an absence of ornamentation inside and 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.