Нью-Йорк қаласының 9 Уэст 57-ші көшесінің бұрышқы үйі

Office skyscraper in Manhattan, New York

The Solow Building, also known as 9 West 57th Street, is a skyscraper in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. Completed in 1974 and designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, it is west of Fifth Avenue between 57th and 58th Streets, overlooking the Plaza Hotel and Central Park. The building measures 689 feet (210 m) tall with 50 stories. 9 West 57th Street was developed by Sheldon Solow, who named the building after himself and continued to manage and own the building until his death in 2020. The Solow Building's north and south facades curve inward from ground level to the 18th floor, where the tower rises upward to the 50th story. The north and south walls are made of gray tinted glass, while the west and east facades are clad in travertine. The design was largely criticized upon the building's completion, with many architectural critics regarding the building as a disruptive presence on the skyline. There is a travertine plaza at ground level, with a red sculpture of the digit "9" on the 57th Street side. The first floor contains a private art collection and the basement includes the Brasserie 8 1/2 restaurant. The building contains about of rentable space. Solow acquired the building's site in the 1960s from numerous owners, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, which had originally planned its own skyscraper at the site. Construction of the Solow Building commenced in 1969, and Avon Products took up a third of the space, becoming the major tenant. Since opening, the Solow Building's office stories have been occupied for some of the highest rates in the city, being rented largely to law and financial firms. The lower stories were less successful; the basement was unused until 2000, when Brasserie 8 1/2 opened there. During his lifetime, Solow was obstinate about several aspects of the building's operation, and he was involved in several lawsuits against tenants.

The Solow Building is at 9 West 57th Street in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, just south of Central Park, between Fifth Avenue to the east and Sixth Avenue to the west. It contains frontage on 57th Street to the south and 58th Street to the north. The Solow Building's site covers It measures 268 feet (82 m) along 57th Street, with a depth of 200.83 feet (61 m) between 57th and 58th Streets. The southern part of the site was occupied by the Pace Gallery, which operated there from 1963 to 1968. On the northern part of the site was a 14 story building at 4 West 58th Street, containing the Paris Theater. The Solow Building also replaced a six story loft building on 26 West 58th Street that had housed the office of modernist architect Paul Rudolph. The Solow Building, as well as the Squibb Building at 40 West 57th Street, were among the first high rise office developments to be built on West 57th Street following the 1961 Zoning Resolution.

9 West 57th Street was designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) and developed by Sheldon Solow. It was built by the Diesel Construction Company. When constructed, the building was also referred to as "9 West" and "Tower 9". although some sources cite the building as having 49 stories. Weidlinger Associates was the structural engineer and Code Consultants Inc. was the code consultant. The building is distinguished by curved facades on its northern and southern elevations, which taper at higher stories. 9 West 57th Street was the first major structure in New York City to be developed with a sloped facade.

The north and south facades curve inward from ground level to the 18th floor, where it rises upward to the 50th story. The building is 64 feet (20 m) narrower at the 18th floor than at ground level. The massing is similar to the W. R. Grace Building, completed around the same time; the initial, rejected design of the Solow Building was used for the Grace Building. The sloped design came from an early concept in which the elevators were placed outside the main structural core, though this idea was not feasible. One author compared the curves to the face of a ski slope. Custom rails were installed on the facade for the window washing scaffolds. The western and eastern facades are clad in tan bands of travertine limestone. On either side is a narrow window opening spanning several stories. The building's structural steel bracing crosses diagonally in front of these windows. and extends the width of the block from 57th to 58th Streets. The sculpture weighs and measures about 10 feet (3 m) high by 5 feet (2 m) wide. The sculpture was installed because Solow thought the plaza as designed was excessively large, The idea for the sculpture had come after Chermayeff had joked that the facade could be a "launching pad" for the "9". He ultimately agreed to install the sculpture on the sidewalk, initially paying the city $1,000 annually in rent. The 58th Street side of the plaza contains Moonbird, a sculpture by Joan Miró. The sculpture, originally commissioned in 1966, is 14 feet (4 m) tall and made of bronze. Solow installed Moonbird in 1994, saying that "it is one of my very favorite sculptures"; he already had a print of the same work. Before Moonbird was installed, the 58th Street side of the plaza had a 12 feet (4 m) "mobile" by Alexander Calder. Solow removed the mobile after realizing the work could fall onto pedestrians in the wind.

9 West 57th Street is structurally supported by columns above the public plaza, creating the appearance of an arcade. Storefronts on either side were originally planned. The retail space, covering , Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates then designed the Brasserie 8 1/2 restaurant in the space, which opened in 2000. The basement also has a parking garage. The lobby was designed to extend the entire block between 57th and 58th Streets, with glass walls on either side. Because Solow wanted to maintain an "exclusive aura", he banned tenants from using phones in the lobby. even to tenants.

The second floor was designed with a 26 feet (8 m) ceiling, although a mezzanine above the second floor was erected during the Solow Building's construction. Designed by Bernard M. Deschler for the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, the mezzanine was installed because Morgan Guaranty wanted to keep its investment managers and research specialists near each other. The mezzanine hangs from the ceiling using metal alloy bars. The second floor and mezzanine is still marketed as a trading floor as of 2021. The typical upper story has a rectangular layout around a service core in the center, which contains the building's elevators and stairs. The church had also acquired a site at 11 West 57th Street. hiring several brokers to avoid raising suspicion that he was assembling a large lot. Solow ended up acquiring 17 parcels,Efn|Including the LDS lot, he acquired 9–21 West 57th Street, as well as 10–26 and 36–40 West 58th Street. By the end of that year, the building was increased to 47 stories and The LDS Church withdrew from the project due to a dispute over mortgage. In doing so, Avon abruptly canceled plans to relocate to Rockefeller Center, even though rent at the Solow Building was higher than that at Rockefeller Center, and even though Solow did not plan to allow Avon to formally name the building after itself. By that April, Avon had increased its space to across 25 floors. A corrugated sign was erected in front of the construction site. It was designed so it read "Solow Building Company" from one angle and "9 W 57" from another. and two electricians died after falling down an elevator shaft. The building topped out in June 1971. Anne Healy designed a pair of seven story tall arrowheads for the topping out event.

Though 9 West 57th Street was completed when large numbers of companies were leaving New York City, Solow was not worried about the trend. Avon's offices had opened in August 1972 on the 9th to 34th floors. Other original tenants included the U. S. Shoe Corporation on the 40th floor; the National Shipping and Trading Corporation and the Lionel Corporation on the 41st floor; Sony Corporation of America on the 42nd and 43rd floors; and Chanel on the 44th floor. In its early years, the building attracted tenants such as Elf Aquitaine, the Commercial Bank of Australia, and Deutsche Bank. By the late 1980s, the Solow Building, along with the General Motors Building and the Seagram Building, charged some of the city's highest rents. In spite of the fact that architects considered neither the General Motors Building nor the Solow Building to be architecturally distinguished, their proximity to Central Park allowed their respective owners to charge high rents. By contrast, aside from banking tenants, the commercial space at the ground level and basements sat largely empty through to the end of the 20th century. The below ground space had been meant for antique and art dealers and a restaurant. One factor in the commercial space's lack of tenants was the fact that the ground level storefronts were placed too far behind the street. which opened a ground floor banking space in 1979, about five years after the building was finished. The building's of underground retail space had not seen a single tenant a decade later. The late 1990s saw several high profile departures, including those of Sony and J. P. Morgan & Co. Avon reportedly tried to buy 9 West 57th Street, but after Solow was unwilling to sell, Avon moved out at the end of its lease in 1997. Most of Avon's old space was occupied by Nationsbanc Montgomery Securities, which had been acquired by NationsBank and then merged with BankAmerica Corporation, parent company of Bank of America. Nationsbanc Montgomery had in 9 West 57th Street by December 1998, more than any other tenant in the building. Concurrently, Solow had hired Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer to redesign the unused retail space in the basement. Two of the escalators were removed to make way for the entrance to the Brasserie 8 1/2 restaurant.

Solow sought a $400 million loan for the building in February 2002, and Dresdner Bank gave him the loan that July. The Solow Building was still considered a desirable location into the 21st century, in part because of its Central Park views. When Solow refinanced the building in 2002, the building was 80 percent occupied and was estimated to earn $90 million a year in net operating income. The top floors of the building were being marketed at per year, while the average annual rent for "premium" Midtown office space was per year. Nearby buildings such as 712 Fifth Avenue, the Carnegie Hall Tower, the General Motors Building, and 888 Seventh Avenue also had high asking rates. Bank of America had taken space on the Solow Building's second floor and mezzanine, which had originally been designed as Morgan Guaranty's trading floor. Though the trading floor was able to fit 300 people, Solow had refused to make alterations to allow the bank to add 200 traders. After Bank of America moved to the Bank of America Tower in 2008, about half the building was empty for two years. This was a much higher vacancy rate than the citywide average, despite the building's luxury reputation and the ongoing Great Recession. The vacancies were in part because Solow asked much higher rates per square foot compared to nearby buildings, and he was obstinate in not charging lower rents. The same year, two tenants signed large leases, and Solow refinanced the building with a $625 million commercial mortgage backed security (CMBS) loan from Deutsche Bank. Within two years, rental rates at the Solow Building were among the highest in Manhattan. By 2016, the building was 64 percent occupied by 26 companies. The same year, Solow refinanced the building with a $1.2 billion mortgage from JPMorgan Chase. The loan was used to pay back the older CMBS loan from Deutsche Bank. A July 2016 appraisal valued the building at over $3.4 billion, making the property one of the most valuable office buildings in Manhattan. Solow finally decided on lowering rental rates for some vacant space in late 2017 after several large tenants such as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Providence Equity, and Silver Lake left the building. By 2018, the building had a 70 percent occupancy rate; Solow's son, Stefan Soloviev, attributed the increased occupancy rate to his own actions. Following Sheldon Solow's death in 2020, Soloviev reorganized his late father's firm, and the newly constituted Soloviev Group took over operation of 9 West 57th Street. Soloviev added two swimming pools, several conference rooms, and a fitness center. By mid 2023, the building was 90 percent occupied, amid a general decline in office building occupancy rates across New York City. The Real Deal attributed the building's high occupancy rate to its central location, as well as the fact that Soloviev was more involved with his tenants than his father had been.

Sheldon Solow filed over 200 lawsuits during his lifetime, including several involving the Solow Building. In that case, the judge ruled against Solow, finding that JPMorgan had indeed tried to restore its space but that Solow had "substantially interfered" with JPMorgan's ability to do so. Solow sued W. R. Grace Company in 1999 for spraying asbestos on the building in the early 1970s, despite marketing the asbestos as a safe product. In addition, Solow and Bank of America had multiple legal disputes during the 2000s. In one such dispute, Solow had planned to evict the bank if one of the bank's former brokers was convicted of securities fraud, under a law that was normally used for evicting drug dealers and prostitutes.

When the building's plans were announced, Progressive Architecture derided the proposal as a literal "block buster", saying that it "guarantees to obliterate the scale and the street activity" of the art and retail district on 57th Street. Ada Louise Huxtable wrote for the same newspaper: "One can only pity one half of the Hotel Plaza's guests facing that 58th Street black glass wall". Arthur Drexler, in a foreword to a book about SOM's work, wrote that the controversy over the Solow Building was largely "because it does not rise straight up from the street (as architects have taught everyone to expect)". The Fifth Avenue Association, which issued architectural awards to new buildings around Fifth Avenue in 1974, criticized the Solow Building as having "urban bad manners", even as it gave Chermayeff an award for his "9" sculpture and praised the building's design details. Some of the criticism was directed toward the curved form in general. Paul Goldberger said that the Solow and Grace buildings both failed to "make certain gestures toward what exists around them". Herbert Muschamp believed the traditional philosophy of form following function did not work for buildings like 9 West 57th Street, writing: "If this was honest architecture, as the modern movement had defined it, then perhaps it was time buildings learned how to tell pretty lies." Not everyone disliked the design of the Solow Building; it was regarded largely positively by the public, which expressed interest in 9 West 57th Street's unusual shape. Architect Wallace Harrison also expressed his support for sloped buildings like the Solow Building, saying that the slope "gives a smooth line that appears to give added height by disappearing perspective".