16 Facts About Lever House

Lever House is a 307-foot-tall office building at 390 Park Avenue in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City.

Construction of Lever House changed Park Avenue in Midtown from an avenue with masonry apartment buildings to one with International-style office buildings.

Lever House is at 390 Park Avenue, on the western sidewalk between 53rd Street and 54th Street, in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City.

Lever House contains the equivalent of 24 stories, including 21 usable office stories and a triple-height mechanical space, and stands 307 feet tall.

In practice, Lever House was the city's first high-rise building to take advantage of this provision.

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The core was placed on the west end of the slab so that, if Lever House Brothers had ever built a westward addition to the tower, the elevators could serve the addition.

Demolition of the four buildings on Lever House's site was scheduled to commence immediately after the plans were announced.

Lever House Brothers leased the building from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, taking over the responsibility of maintaining it.

Lever House Brothers rejected media reports that it was considering moving to New Jersey.

Lever House Brothers supported the designation, but it had hired its own architectural firm, Welton Becket and Associates, to prepare plans for the Jofa site.

Lever House's preservation was described by The Christian Science Monitor as "sparking heated debate only in New York City" because, nationally, there was a trend in favor of preservation at the time.

Furthermore, William H Jordy thought Lever House set a "standard for office buildings" following World War II, while Goldberger wrote in his 1979 book The City Observed that Lever House was as influential to architecture as the Daily News Building and 330 West 42nd Street had been.

In 1961, art historian Vincent Scully said Lever House's construction divided the landscape of Park Avenue without regard to the existing architecture.

In 2022, Audrey Wachs of Curbed wrote: "In recent years, Lever House has become more of a landmark than a functional office tower", especially considering that the building's floors were too small to accommodate many modern companies' needs.

Lever House received the Fifth Avenue Association's award for "best New York building" constructed between 1952 and 1953.

Lever House's influence spread to Scandinavia with Copenhagen's SAS Radisson, designed in 1960, as well as numerous consular offices in Germany, designed in the 1950s by SOM.