Hat Tip

100 East 53rd Street rises in the shadow of Mies’s classic New York skyscraper, but doesn’t shrink back from it.

- Jesse Dorris

In the days before the luxury mishmashes of the High Line and Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s West Side, the closest thing the city had to a Starchitect Row could be found on (or near) East 53rd Street between Sixth Avenue and the East River. There rose a promenade of classics: Eero Saarinen’s Black Rock, MoMA’s Goodwin/Stone home, SOM’s Lever House, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, Hugh Stubbins’s Citigroup Center, and Philip Johnson’s Lipstick Building.

RFR Holding’s Aby Rosen, whose portfolio includes the Seagram and Lever, wants to return midtown to its 20th-century prime with a pearly, lithesome, 63-story tower at 100 East 53rd Street, a trim plot of land adjacent to Mies’s sleek dark triumph.

“When you put yourself next to the Seagram,” says Rosen, “you better show up and do something really spectacular.” Who more than Norman Foster? “He’s one of the better architects in the world. He doesn’t get intimidated.”