On your right is a slender Art Deco tower with a dark granite-and-marble base, white-brick upper stories stepping back in tiers, and sharp corner windows wrapping the edge.
Before this tower announced itself in nineteen thirty, this address belonged to Mary Mason Jones, one of the commanding hostesses of New York society and a model for Edith Wharton’s Mrs. Manson Mingott. Her father bought this land in eighteen twenty-five for fifteen hundred dollars, roughly fifty thousand dollars today, when upper Fifth Avenue still looked like a gamble.
Jones turned that gamble into Marble Row, a line of marble townhouses that signaled where New York’s social elite was headed. She reportedly sketched the first ideas for her own French chateau-style house herself before passing them to an architect. Largely confined to her home, she sat by a ground-floor window and watched fashionable New York migrate north toward her doorstep. That image matters here, because this polished commercial corner stands on ground first shaped by a woman the skyline mostly forgot.
Then developer Abe Adelson arrived with a very Manhattan solution: remove the mansions, add a tower. In May of nineteen twenty-nine, he filed plans for a building that would cost two million dollars, about thirty-six million today. He hired Albert Buchman and Ely Jacques Kahn, and Kahn answered with something unusually disciplined for Fifth Avenue: a bronze-and-marble entrance below, a pale white-brick shaft above, and upper floors that step back as they rise. Those step-backs are called setbacks, and they give the tower its tidy wedding-cake silhouette without any actual frosting.
Adelson also pushed a clever idea. This was reportedly the first skyscraper in New York to use corner windows, which let in more light and opened wider views toward Central Park. He even leased the smaller lot next door to protect that northern exposure. In Manhattan, preserving a view is a contact sport.
If you want a cleaner look at the whole composition, glance at the image on your screen. You can really see the dark, weighty base giving way to that glowing white upper mass. Critics noticed the restraint. Lewis Mumford admired its sincerity, and Kahn loved it so much that he later dressed as the building at a Beaux-Arts costume ball, wearing a white suit and a tiered headpiece that copied the crown. Architects, like buildings, occasionally enjoy a dramatic entrance.
The tower opened on the first of May, nineteen thirty, named for E-R Squibb and Sons, the pharmaceutical company that took twelve floors. Then came another kind of prestige: F-A-O Schwarz moved into the lower levels in nineteen thirty-one and stayed until nineteen eighty-six, followed by Bergdorf Goodman’s men’s store in nineteen ninety. So this address moved from society mansions, to medicine, to toys, to tailored luxury. New York rarely erases a place completely; it just gives it better lighting and much higher rent.
Inside, out of sight from the sidewalk, the lobby still keeps a few rewards: rose marble, a ceiling mural of Manhattan by Arthur Covey, and bronze elevator doors by Vally Wieselthier, an Austrian artist whose work slipped quietly into one of the city’s grand retail corridors.
When you’re ready, head north to the open space of Grand Army Plaza. After all this carefully managed elegance, the street opens up, and the story gets bigger there.
