Image title | Madison Square, Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States of America
The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company tower, designed by Pierre L. LeBrun of Napoleon LeBrun & Sons, is a major and memorable evocation of the world-famous campanile in Venice's Saint Mark's Square. Built in 1907-09, the Metropolitan Life tower was for a time, the tallest building in the world. It is also the final and crowning work of a firm, father and sons, whose combined production spanned almost seventy years of American architecture.
The tower was extensively renovated (1960-64) by Lloyd Morgan & Eugene V. Meroni, Architects, successors to Leonard Schultze & Associates, who retained the tower's major features — monumental clock faces, setback arcade, pyramidal spire, cupola, chime and lantern — as well as its original entasis. The tower's site, opposite historic Madison Square Park at 24th Street, is one of the finest settings in the city. For the past eighty years the tower has been both a significant silhouette on the Manhattan skyline and a corporate symbol; the lantern at its top has been called "The light that never fails."
<strong>Madison Square Park - a brief history</strong>
Few buildings in New York enjoy the spacious and verdant setting Madison Square Park provides the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company home office complex and tower. The park itself had been included by the Street Commissioners in their 1811 Map of Manhattan nearly 180 years ago. Then the park was a reserve of almost 239 acres; it was not pared down to its present seven acres until 1844. Even as the park's size diminished, its historical significance increased; decades before the architecture of commerce came to dominate its borders, Madison Square possessed a rich civic, military, social and cultural history.
With the onset of the War of 1812, President James Madison mobilized troops and the site, a temporary home to upstate volunteers, became "Camp Madison, |
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