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<\/a><\/p>\nHugh Stubbins\u2019 cantilevered design spanned Lexington Avenue between East 53rd and East 54th Streets. It included a sunken plaza, new subway station access, retail shops, and an iconoclastic triangular roof that sloped at a 45 degree angle (below photo).<\/p>\n
The bold design, plus the four raised columns located in the center of the building\u2019s base rather than the corners, awed many architectural critics.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe building starts nine stories above ground, raised on four colossal square columns and a central core in one of the most impressive\u2014if somewhat disquieting\u2014architectural acrobatic acts in the world,\u201d wrote Ada Louise Huxtable in the New York Times<\/a>, four months before the tower officially opened.<\/p>\n \u201cI am not ever going to ask what Citicorp\u2019s steel cost,\u201d continued Huxtable. \u201cBut all that brute strength is now encased in the thinnest, flattest, sleekest panels of softly glistening, silvery aluminum, alternating with horizontal bands of glass. It is steel muscle in a silken glove.\u201d<\/p>\n Not everyone loved the design. But at a time when the city almost went bankrupt and few skyscrapers were being built to reshape the skyline, Citicorp Center could be viewed in hindsight as a sign that New York City was not down for the count.<\/p>\n Yet the Citicorp Center wasn\u2019t all about the new. Nestled amid all this steel and glass is a remnant of the New York of old.<\/p>\n Beneath the mid-wall columns that hold up the tower sits St. Peter\u2019s Church. Clad in granite at the corner of East 54th Street, it\u2019s an unorthodox surprise in the sleek skyscraper canyon that Lexington Avenue has become.<\/p>\n The story of how this Modernist church ended up here has to do with a 19th century German congregation, the value of land in postwar East Midtown, and an unusual agreement that resulted in part of a skyscraper overhanging a brand-new church sanctuary.<\/p>\n Dial back to 1862 with the founding of St. Peter\u2019s German Lutheran Church five blocks to the south. \u201cWorship services in the German language began in a loft above a feed and grocery store at the corner of 49th Street and Lexington Avenue,\u201d states nycago.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n The congregation moved to a vacated church building on Lexington Avenue and 49th Street in the 1890s. That church was soon purchased by the New York Central Railroad and marked for demolition to make way for Grand Central Terminal. The congregation then built a new Gothic-style church<\/a> on Lexington Avenue and 54th Street (above, in 1928), which opened in 1905.<\/p>\n Over the decades, the church evolved, adding English-language sermons. More than a thousand people belonged to St. Peter\u2019s earlier in the 20th century, but in the postwar years the congregation faced a more commercial Lexington Avenue and a dwindling number of parishioners. <\/p>\n Then in 1969, church leaders were approached by a real estate broker who was buying up nearby parcels of land along Lexington Avenue to offer as a whole for development.<\/p>\n St. Peter\u2019s, now a church that welcomed a more artistic group of parishioners\u2014including the jazz musicians at the clubs along 52nd Street\u2014struck a deal. The congregation would vacate the Gothic building, which would be demolished. In exchange, a new church would be built beside any new development, of which the congregation would be given partial ownership.<\/p>\n The congregation approved the sale in 1971, and ground broke on Citicorp Center in 1974. \u201cSt. Peter\u2019s was promised that \u2018at least 63 percent of the perimeter\u2019 of the church would be \u2018freestanding\u2014that is, with nothing built above it,’\u201d states the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) report. <\/p>\n \u201cThis was accomplished by raising the office tower above the ground and by placing it far from the corner, where the [new] church was built,\u201d continued the LPC report. <\/p>\n The new St. Peter\u2019s<\/a> opened in December 1977, two months after the opening of Citicorp Center, which hangs over the church on the northwest corner. <\/p>\n During the dedication ceremony, Stubbins, who was the architect of the church as well, compared the steel-framed structure to \u201chands held up in prayer,\u201d according to the LPC report. New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger called it a \u201cgreat granite tent sitting beneath the Citicorp tower.\u201d <\/p>\n The stone and geometric exterior belies the warmth of St. Peter\u2019s Modernist sanctuary. While it looks like a gray jewel box from 54th Street, the space rises to two triangular points joined by a walls of windows on Lexington Avenue. <\/p>\n The unique Chapel of the Good Shepherd was designed by Louise Nevelson<\/a>, who created a peaceful \u201csculptural environment\u201d within St. Peter\u2019s. And the exterior of the church is marked by the untraditional Cross of the Resurrection (above), by Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro.<\/p>\n In the past half-century, Citicorp Center has undergone transformations. Less than a year after it opened, a design flaw was discovered that put the tower at risk of toppling over<\/a> due to high winds, which set off a panicked effort to stabilize the tower before hurricane season without alarming tenants.<\/p>\n The switch to a new name, Citigroup Center, and then landmark designation followed in the new century. In 2021, a fashionable food hall\u2014er, \u201cculinary collective\u201d\u2014and event space debuted on the lower level of the tower. <\/p>\n It\u2019s appropriately named The Hugh<\/a>, after the architect of both the tower and the sacred space that sits beneath it.<\/p>\n [Second image: Alamy; fourth image: NYPL Digital Collections<\/a>; sixth image: Luther League Review<\/a>, 1904] <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In October 1977, the 59-story Citicorp Center (now known as the Citigroup Center) made its debut on a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17935,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[75,84,83,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-119675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n