As we all know with our metropolis, the only thing constant is change. At the southwestern corner of Fifth Avenue and 48th Street, an 11-floor commercial building is readying to get a trendy new façade that will update its dour mid-century appearance into something more sleek and current. The re-cladding will be the building’s second since it was built as a Gilded Age queen at the dawn of the last century.
Designed in the then-popular Beaux Arts style by Carrere & Hastings (the same architects who produced our landmark central library branch further south on Fifth), 592 Fifth Avenue originally opened as the Black, Starr & Frost Building in 1911 and held the jewelry showroom of the Black, Starr & Frost company. The building replaced the Charles T. Cook home at a time when Fifth Avenue was transitioning from a millionaire's row of mansions into the more commercial stretch of today.
The Black, Starr & Frost Building; Image credit: The American Architect via Beyond the Gilded Age
The Black, Starr & Frost; Image credit: The American Architect via Beyond the Gilded Age
Fast-forward another 50-years and another overhaul is underway. Permits filed last year detail that the building’s owner and primary tenant, the United Overseas Bank (UOS) will demolish the austere façade and replace it with more glass, metal, vertical fins. Like many new “cutting edge”projects of today, the new skin will be organized in a seemingly unintelligible composition that only the architects will likely understand (looking at you, 2 Columbus Circle). The architects of record on permits are Yoshihara Mckee Architects and Tishman is managing construction according to signage. As of yesterday, scaffolding has been erected around the ground level, the first several floors are shrouded in netting and the nighttime rendering shown above was recently applied to its Fifth Avenue construction fence.
Recent Google street-view of 592 Fifth Avenue
Renovation underway; CityRealty
CityRealty
A half-century later, with modernism, clean exteriors and the International-style resolutely in style, several stories were added to the building and its exterior was replaced with a stone façade staccatoed by an array of elongated, tinted oval windows. The architects, Hausman & Rosenberg, articulated the ground-level with 3-window-bay-wide openings that vaguely resemble a classical colonnade, and is reminiscent of Edward Durrell Stone’s 2 Columbus Circle (“the lollipop building”).
Crown Retail Service is handling the retail leasing of its planned 4 retail levels that amass to 22,000 square feet. If this new re-clad proves to be as uninspiring as the last, perhaps during the building’s next overhaul - in say 2072, we’ll be in the midst of a Beaux Arts revival and the structure will be shrunken and restored to its original grandeur.
Additional rendering via Crown Retail Services
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