Classy Newcomer on the Skyline

Citicorp's Manhattan tower actually seems to welcome people

For Big Business, Manhattan in recent years has not been an isle of joy. Many corporations have fled New York City; few have had the faith or the funds to build there. Thus the opening of the new $150 million Citicorp Center in midtown Manhattan was an event in itself. More important to New Yorkers and tourists is that the skyscraper gives a stunningly imaginative new accent to the skyline --and, at ground level, is one of the world's few megabuildings that actually appear hospitable to human beings.

Citicorp, an international financial force with assets of $73 billion and offices in 93 countries, is the parent of Citibank--formerly First National City Bank --New York City's biggest bank, second largest in the nation and the world (after Bank of America). It is not, obviously, your friendly, flexible Bert Lance lending and saving shop. It is a hard-nosed company that will as swiftly foreclose a multimillion-dollar high-rise as a mom-and-pop delicatessen if the mortgage payments lag. Considering the cost of Manhattan real estate and the sensitivities of its stockholders, Citicorp might well have elected to erect yet an other no-frills cereal box as its new showplace.

But no. Almost from its beginnings, Citicorp Center was envisioned as a place to shop and savor and feast at all hours, an In spot in the inner city. To Citicorp Chairman Walter Wriston, it will be "a living, positive part of the neighborhood, 24 hours a day, for decades to come. We would like to think of the Citicorp Center as the cornerstone of a new New York."

Resting on four immense ten-story stilts, the new glass-and-aluminum skyscraper is the world's eighth tallest, soaring 915 ft. It is topped by a thrusting 130-ft. wedge angled at 45DEG to catch sun and moon and every passing eye. Inside, the 59-story building looks as if it might have landed from outer space. Its vital functions are controlled by a battery of electronic mechanisms that, among other things, wash the air and launder the noise of the city with "white sound," an almost imperceptible brrr.

The Center is divided into three parts. There is the skyscraper, with 1.3 million sq. ft. of office space. The Market, three floors of a glass-roofed, tree-dotted building within a building, houses shops and restaurants. And, paying its dues to God as well as Mammon, Citicorp Center includes one of the most beautiful churches to be erected in Manhattan in this century, a jagged 85-ft.-high polygonal structure of granite and glass that stands free of the office tower and shares a sunken plaza with The Market.

The nine-year evolution of the buildings, from preconception to opening, has been documented by TIME Reporter-Researcher Georgia Harbison. Her account:

In the beginning, there was the Block. Between Lexington and Third Avenues, 54th and 53rd Streets, it housed such familiar neighborhood establishments as Carroll's Pub, Lexington Sandwich Shoppe, a Pizza Plaza, a Howard Johnson's snack counter. Also, there was a haute cuisine restaurant, Cafe Chauveron, the Medical Chambers Building, owned cooperatively by 40 doctors, and Saint Peter's Lutheran Church, a handsome two-spired Gothic structure erected in 1905 and all but deserted by a suburban-bound congregation.

The creation of Citicorp Center might have been scripted by Ross Macdonald in collaboration with Pirandello (Six Characters in Search of an Author). It all began one Saturday afternoon in September 1968. Two ambitious real estate brokers, Donald Schnabel, then 36, and Charles McArthur, then 45, had heard that Saint Peter's might be for sale. As Schnabel and McArthur cased the other buildings in the block, they became possessed of what is almost an impossible dream in modern Manhattan: "assembling" all the parcels so that one mighty building could rise on the site.

The two brokers brought this notion to their boss, Julien Studley, then 41, head of an aggressive real estate firm in the neighborhood. "Who would put up the building?" Studley mused; then he had an idea. "How about the people across the street?" Across the street, as it happened, was the corporate headquarters of First National City Corp. (now Citicorp).

It took the real estate team five months to meet the right man at the bank. He was Henry Muller, vice president in charge of real estate, who was keenly aware that the rapidly expanding bank had to rent office space all over town. Even so, when Schnabel and McArthur got to see him, Muller threw them out. Said he: "I thought these two bandits were out to screw me."

But Muller had second thoughts, and so did the bank. There then ensued a cloak-and-dagger operation. If any property owners on the block had known the identity of the buyer, their asking prices would have skyrocketed and, as Schnabel recalls, "the whole deal would have died. It took guts for the bank to say, 'We're going to do this.' It was risky as hell."

The brokers and the bank set up 14 dummy corporations to acquire the 30 separate parcels involved. So closely was the secret held that when one of the dummy companies set up by the bank's top brass sought a loan to buy a parcel of the block, a lower-level Citibank officer turned it down. Chuckles Wriston: "He didn't know who he was saying no to."

More than $41 million was to change hands before the land was free and clear. Amazingly, there were no real holdouts among the 17 property owners, but it did take 3 1/2 years to get the doctors who owned the Medical Chambers group to capitulate. The trouble was that they did not want cash. Finally, the doctors merged with Citicorp, with the medics getting $6.8 million worth of Citicorp shares.

Then there was the church. Under the Rev. Ralph Peterson, 45, Saint Peter's had become a lively midtown gathering place. Peterson introduced jazz vespers on Sundays, and made the basement into a lunchtime theater where office workers could eat their sandwiches and watch plays. Saint Peter's had found a new role in the city, and the well-named Peterson was loath to move out. Yet the church held the key position on the block. The solution: Citicorp bought the old church for $9 million, demolished it and built in its place a new structure that included a chapel and sanctuary. The church bought this new building, under an unusual condominium contract, for $7 million.

Citicorp did not announce its plans to build until July 1973. At the time an estimated 30 million sq. ft. of Manhattan office space was standing empty, including 10 million sq. ft. in the World Trade Center, which had opened only three months earlier. Nonetheless, Walter Wriston & Co. remained faithful to their plan to build not merely rentable space but a midtown magnet for people.

The choice of an architect was crucial. Before coming to Citicorp, Muller had been in charge of real estate and construction at Harvard. There he had come to know and admire Hugh Stubbins, who designed the college's Loeb Drama Center and its Countway Library of Medicine. In line with the bank's desire for a "humane" building, Stubbins proposed to loft an aluminum-faced structure on huge columns 112-ft. tall, thus creating the space for the shopping area and atrium, a sunken entrance plaza with a waterfall tumbling down from street level, a renovated subway station and, of course, the new church. "Aesthetically," says Stubbins, 65, "the Citicorp Center brings back to the city lightness and brightness--it meets the street with drama, and opens up the city canyons in a way no other building has ever attempted."

Stubbins was also the architect for the church, which has five entrances from the street or the plaza. None have steps. This was Pastor Peterson's idea. "I wanted Saint Peter's to be related to the side walk," he explains. "We're all handicapped. We all need to move in." The sanctuary, into which people on the street can freely gaze, has movable pews, a movable altar and a 2,175-pipe German organ that stands like a sculpture on one wall. Pastor Peterson persuaded premiere Sculptress Louise Nevelson, a Russian Jew, to design the interior of a small chapel, for which she made five white-on-white wood sculptures and a white-and-gold Nevelsonian crucifix.

Besides the skyscraper's towering stilts and bright aluminum sheathing, its most unusual feature is the angled wedge on top. It was originally designed to house luxury apartments--a plan that was dropped because the zoning laws were not advantageous. Then the bank hoped to use its southern-faced panels as a solar energy generator; it even got a $185,000 federal grant to study its feasibility. Given the state of the art, solar energy proved an impractical undertaking for the moment--though there is a possibility that in two years or so the cheeky wedge will be producing energy from the sun.

Already in place is another new and mighty technological widget: the Tuned Mass Damper (TMD), an 800,000-lb. concrete block capable of moving three feet in four directions, which greatly reduces the lightweight building's sway in a gale. Determined to make the building as energy efficient as any in existence, Citicorp consulted Robert Bell, director of research and development for Consolidated Edison, who also happened to be president of Saint Peter's and chairman of the church building committee. Says Bell today: "Citicorp, in terms of energy conservation, is one of the most, if not the most, technically advanced buildings in the world." The heating-ventilation-air conditioning system (HVAC), for example, is so refined that the building will use about 42% less energy than any comparable highrise. The Citicorp offices also have an economical, semiopen design, with walls about three-quarters of the way to the ceiling. One of Citicorp's most popular features: 50 battery-operated messenger wagons ($10,000 apiece) that travel on magnetic strips, stopping every 20 minutes at predestined points to pick up and deliver mail.

Apart from the 14 floors occupied by the banker-owners, the building is already 90% rented, at $25 per sq. ft. --twice the going rate in the area. Bank executives estimate that a fourth of their total effort was devoted to developing 68,000 sq. ft. of retail space, which will return only some $1.5 million a year, compared with the $14 million they expect to realize from the office rentals. But The Market, which will be open seven days a week, is a showpiece of the Center. The first of its stores to open was Conran's, offshoot of a successful 34-shop home furnishings chain, called Habitat in Europe.

There are, as well, a French bakery, a bookstore, a flower shop, a chocolatier, an international newsstand-tobacconist, six other shops and nine eating places. These include a 24-hour English restaurant, whose waitresses seem to be on loan from Upstairs, Downstairs; a Hungarian rendezvous with an imported gypsy band; a Greek establishment with the salty flavor of Piraeus. Thus at Citicorp it is possible to leave work and, without stepping outside the Center, shop for a book or a new pipe, pick up a bag of custom-blended coffee, cash a check, raise a glass of wine and down a fondue, exchange smiles, go to a play, hear a concert--or even kneel in prayer.

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