NEW YORK | Metlife North Building | 1454+ FT | 100 FLOORS | NEVER COMPLETED
 

Fewer floors, but taller than the Empire State, It would have have wrested the icon status away from the ESB (but probably not completely - both would have been icons). It's got 30 elevators (enough for the 100 storey tower) even has its own subway station.

http://skyscraperpage.com/cities/?buildingID=8942
what was built:
http://skyscraperpage.com/cities/?buildingID=8325

http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/5...asbuiltcf4.jpg

They got to the 30th floor before construction stopped. The economy in 1933 wasn't good, so they just stopped. The building is suposed to be strong enough to support a continuation, so there's always a tiny bit of hope :tup:

I used to work in this building. It's the World HQ for Credit Suisse and is usually just referred to as 11 Madison.

The building is AMAZING inside, and HUGE. Even at its current stumpy height, it's nearly as large as the Empire State Building. If it were built to it's planned height (which is still possible), it would easily be the largest private office building on earth.

Another cool aspect of the building is the sublevels. There are four huge and grand (high ceilings, art deco ornamentation) sublevels. You really go deep into the earth at 11 Madison.

The building also has a very impressive lobby (one of the best in NY) and two world-class restaurants.

looks more like the 23rd

^
It has 28 utilized office floors (plus four below-ground office floors), but there is at least one additional floor above the top occupied floor.

I worked on the 14th floor.

This has always been my favorite 'never built'.

The tower looks amazing to bad it wasn't finished. :(

Someday man, someday...

I'm thinking the next two or three setbacks as hotel and the rest residential. Also, a public viewing platform up top, possibly. Either the exact outside look that it had in the plans, or make the windows grow slowly larger for every new setback.

50 office floors, 10 hotel 38 residental, 1 restaurant and 1 observation

there's no chance they sold away their air rights to build the black office building a block north is there?

^They did? Well, then it is pretty much a non-starter. There's always the possibility of changing the zoning, but I would even less hold my breath for that.

^Not sure - the black office tower seems a bit removed:

http://www.clevelandskyscrapers.com/...ayday08_28.jpg

The black one doesn't seem to have used up much of the air rights, the folks at 11 maddison could buy back what's left and while it wouldn't be as tall as it should have been, it'll come close.

It's so strange to think that the government could of helped ease the depression by giving many of these projects incentives. When you think about it, the ESB, Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate were all just Band Aid projects, all of the ones that fell through could have helped the country.

It would have been a very solid building dominating building.

As opposed to the ESB, this one coud have taken the antenna instead making it even taller.

This is the coolest building there ever was and ever will be.

Why couldn't they have built this one!!!

I dont see why people are just so crazy about this building, yes it nice, but it pales in comparison to the ESB, theres hardly any detail. Had it been completed the Midtown skyline wouldnt be as centered and balanced as it is, the ESB totally dominates the area, located right in the center of the skyline (when looking north or south) had Metlife been built it would have just, blah.

WOW! looking at the building from this perspective, it's just crazy how massive this building would have been, had it been completed.

Well that does look like a rough sketch, so it's not really known what it would really look like if it actually got built, unless of course there are some far more detailed renders out there.

Hope Cleveland doesn't mind my using this pic to roughly show what the building would have looked like. Would have made a nice sister to the ESB.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3442/...80cc2b68_o.jpg

Wow! i never knew that building was supposed to be taller. Even though its short now its still a very beautiful building. Ive always liked it. It would have been amazing if it were completed but its still a semi iconic building.

What it may have looked like at night from ESB....
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3356/...36025d18_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3499/...9b1e2890_o.jpg

Base photo by RFCGraphics: www.rfcgraphics.com

It looks nice and all, but the empire state building still blows it out of the water.

^I disagree. MetLifeNorth has it all: graceful yet complex lines, individually framed windows, beautiful white limestone facade, art deco engravings, marble domes, incredible lobby, visual strength, attractive terraces... it's the Rolls Royce of skyscrapers. Had it been built to full height, it would easily be as beloved as the ESB... probably moreso.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3088/...g?v=1220760850
http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~history/am...tlifenorth.jpg

Can't They... just... FINISH IT??!! please please please :)

This building is so beautiful.

They could. Will they however? Probably not. :(

[optimism]Actually, if tons of office space was needed and the developer creating it wasn't a egotistical maniac (i.e. he didn't care if the building was designed 80 years ago, and was fine finishing someone else's work) I think it's actually pretty possible that it could be finished.

Foundation work and the stuff at ground level is what takes up the most time, and after that everything goes pretty quickly. So having a nice little stub to work on would probably be a dream for most developers.

Also, there are no open lots left in Manhattan so demolition or building on top of something is the only option now. And think: What's cheaper, destroying an old building, reworking the foundations, and starting at basement level one? Or simply starting on the 30th floor?

So all of you NewYorkoArtDeco-philes shouldn't get your hopes too down in the gutters.

Who knows what'll happen? :fingerscrossed:[/optimism]

^^and we've seen that some developers are willing to faithfully reproduce older designs. Wasn't 15 CPW modeled on an older building?

Also take into account that the developer could dramatically change the design, making it no match the base, such as in the case of the proposed building next to the MetLife tower. :tup:

And she joins the party...
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3476/...1d3a510e_b.jpg
Pre-altered Photo by RFCGraphics.com

The foundation was built to take the weight 110 floors, so :fingerscrossed:

This would be an interesting building to add a modern tower to the top of it... like Norman Foster's tower at the old Hearst Building.

Would have been epic...

:slob: :slob: :slob: :slob: :slob:

I love this tower. Too bad it was never completed.:(

A more fitting mountain for King Kong to climb...

Hmm... I don't really like this tower for some reason.

^ Could it be that it completely engulfs the Metlife tower looking southwest? Now as far as height is concerned, I would go on a limb and say that I think the original proposal may have been a little too tall. Maybe shave off 150 ft and it would look absolutely perfect.

In terms of some comparing it to ESB...are you actually serious? Then again, ESB's my favorite skyscraper in the world, simply because it's so beautiful and legendary...

Well now that you mention it, I really don't like that it blocks off views of the MetLife Tower. I really love MetLife and it would've been a shame to see it dwarfed by this giant!

But besides blocking off other buildings, this thing is just too large. The way the setbacks were arranged was completely random and just makes this building look like a giant cliff. It's not as graceful and well organized as the ESB. It's also too big and bulky.

The way it is now is just perfect and it could not be any better. Even if they began construction on the original plan...

What happened to 1 Penn plaza?
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3476/...1d3a510e_b.jpg

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/re...capes.html?hpw

Ghost Buildings of 1929

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/...capes_span.jpg

DEEP-SIXED The Watergate apartments, left, were planned for Midtown, on the banks of the East River. Center, a colorful 40-story building on West Street was to have housed financial workers. Right, Metropolitan Life had designs on the clouds.

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
April 23, 2009

ALL over New York, projects that broke ground with irrational exuberance are topping out in uncertain conclusion. But others that are only in the planning stages have gone to the back burner, perhaps never to surface again.

When the stock market crashed in October 1929, many ambitious plans that would have changed the face of New York simply vanished.

For real estate developers, 1929 seemed like a slot machine stuck in the pay position. In Manhattan in 1928, plans were filed for 14 buildings of 30 stories or higher, but by the next year the number was 52. Only with the passage of time did it become clear that of these 52, just 19 would be built.

This ambitious cohort included designs that were indeed completed, like the Waldorf-Astoria and the Empire State Building. But it also encompassed major projects in unexpected locations, like a 40-story apartment hotel designed by Emery Roth for the northwest corner of 106th Street and Central Park West, an area of third-rung apartment houses.

Other buildings of 40 stories or more were planned for 70th and West End Avenue; 85th and Central Park West; 87th and Park Avenue; 90th and East End Avenue; and 105th and Broadway.

Of the many fallen visions, three stand out in particular: an East River idyll, a richly colored West Street enclave and a Madison Square tower that was to have been the tallest in the world.

Early in 1929, a syndicate including Douglas Elliman and the architect-developer Eliot Cross announced plans for the blockfront on the East River from 48th to 49th Streets, to be known as Watergate. Working with Rosario Candela, the group proposed an asymmetrical assemblage of Gothic-, Tudor- and Venetian-style towers, with its own garage underneath a 10,000-square-foot waterfront courtyard.

A medieval-style drawbridge at river level dropped to a boat landing for co-op owners, and a bridge was to connect the swanky complex to Beekman Place, to the north. A warehouse for The New York Times was part of the design.

In April, a group headed by Albert Mayer, an architect and planner, acquired a swath of West Street south of Rector Street for a mixed-use development of offices and apartment houses.

Calling itself Downtown Homes, the consortium proposed an initial 40-story building of 428 apartments and 255 bachelor rooms, with a gym, banquet hall and handball courts. The idea was to accommodate the rapid increase of financial district workers in the growing crop of skyscrapers downtown.

The blocky tower was to have a white brick top with a gold cap, illuminated at night. But even more spectacular was the body of contrasting sections of red and buff, designed by the architects Thompson & Churchill. They are now known for the voluptuously pink faience tile entrance of their Hotel Lowell, at 28 East 63rd Street, built in 1927.

Henry S. Thompson of Thompson & Churchill told The New York Times in 1929 that he was introducing the cascade of color to fight what he called “the monotony of flat surfaces” common in emerging modernist designs.

In September 1929, news got out that the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was considering a 100-story tower on the block just north of its distinctive campanile of 1909, at 24th and Madison. The company released a drawing by its architects — the skyscraper advocate Harvey Wiley Corbett and Dan Everett Waid — showing a faceted, somewhat oval column, made up almost entirely of glass and metal.

Mr. Waid told The Times that the tower would eschew all “extraneous ornament or embellishment which has not a rational meaning and practical use” and that it would be “unhampered by archaeological precedent.”

All three projects foundered at various points after the stock market crash that October. Mr. Cross’s Watergate simply vanished; the site is now occupied by the cool, glassy United Nations Plaza apartments of 1966.

Excavation for Mr. Mayer’s visionary Downtown Homes did begin in December but got no further, and the site was sold in a foreclosure in 1932 for $250,000. It is now the location of the entrance to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.

In November, Frederick H. Ecker, the president of Metropolitan Life, said that Mr. Corbett’s designs were tentative. The 28-story building now on the site went up in 1938.

The theory in the real estate industry was that happy days would soon be here again because the stock market had drained investment capital that might otherwise have gone into bricks and mortar.

In December, Alfred E. Smith, the former New York governor, told The Real Estate Record and Guide that “I haven’t much use for pessimists who say we are building too fast.” He was involved with the construction of the Empire State Building.

And in January 1930, Roland F. Elliman, vice president of Douglas L. Elliman & Company, assured The Times that the real estate industry in New York was far too prudent for speculative ventures.

In any event, he said, fail-safe protection was provided by “the conservative policies of lending institutions, whose executives refuse to make loans in excess of conservative valuations.”

hey photolither land wht do you want exactly ^^ come on man i feel you

full emotion of feeling .

The building was so large that is was built in 3 phases, which is why it started in 1928 and finished in 1950, pretty interesting, check it out:

1938

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2603/...0bee3755_b.jpg

1942

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2532/...8c000b3a_b.jpg

Pictures from the wonderful Eralsoto:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8534413@N03/

It'd sure be interesting to see how they would have lit this at night.

Wow. I never knew that the stump itself was built in phases.

jee, that's really interesting Patrick!!

Amazing that even with such extreme truncation, it is still such a beautiful building.

sort of reminds me of a steroid version of Pitt's cathedral of learning:

http://www.donnan.com/images/PittCthdrl.JPG

The water gate apartments look interesting. You wonder how attractive Manhattan would look if the FDR and Henry Hudson weren't built.