Look to your right, and you will spot a towering, tiered skyscraper featuring a dark stone base framed by large geometric window grilles, rising into a striking white brick tower with stepped setbacks. Long before this Art Deco beauty stood here, this corner belonged to a formidable New York socialite named Mary Mason Jones. Her father bought this plot in eighteen twenty-five for just fifteen hundred dollars, which is roughly forty-five thousand dollars today. At the time, people thought he was crazy to buy land so far north. But Mary, who inspired the grand matriarch in Edith Wharton's classic novel The Age of Innocence, had the last laugh. She built a massive marble mansion right here and quite literally sat by her window, watching as the city's elite slowly moved uptown to be her neighbors.
Fast forward to nineteen thirty, when developer Abe Adelson and architect Ely Jacques Kahn built the four hundred thirty-five foot skyscraper you see now, originally called the Squibb Building. Adelson was a forward thinker. Pull up your screen for a second to see what I mean. This exterior view of seven forty-five Fifth Avenue highlights its iconic corner windows, a pioneering architectural choice in New York City skyscrapers intended to maximize light and provide Central Park views. Adelson even leased the lot next door just to make sure no one would ever build high enough to block his northern exposure. Talk about protecting your investment.
Kahn, the architect, loved his design so much that at a nineteen thirty-one architectural costume ball, he actually dressed up as the building. Picture this grown man in a white suit with a massive, tiered headpiece mimicking the building's top setbacks, standing next to another guy dressed as the Chrysler Building.
Over the decades, the tenant list inside these walls has been wildly entertaining. You had the famous toy store F-A-O Schwarz operating here for over fifty years. Following World War Two, the New York Yankees ran their executive business offices in the building. In nineteen forty-five, a young Yogi Berra walked into those offices while on weekend liberty from the Navy. The Yankees' president took one look at his short, stocky frame and openly lamented that he had just turned down a fifty thousand dollar offer from the rival New York Giants to take Berra off his hands. Obviously, Yogi went on to prove him very wrong.
Down on the ground floor, you also had Reuben's Restaurant, a legendary deli that moved in during nineteen thirty-five. It became a massive hub for the theater and film crowd. This was the very place where socialites and celebrities would chow down at midnight, helping to cement the fame of the classic Reuben sandwich we all know and love.
It is quite a legacy for one piece of real estate, going from Gilded Age mansions to skyscraper costumes, baseball legends, and pastrami. Take one last look at those iconic corner windows, and when you are set, let us keep moving.
