Steel Glass City

Working Backwards with Forward-Reaching Features Lever House, August 2025 Lever House at 390 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan—an icon of...

A Photo Worth $4,000 The New York Public Library was designed by Carrère & Hastings and constructed by the Norcross Brothers between 1902...

The Value of a Second Opinion This 59-story Citicorp (n/k/a Citigroup) Tower, completed in 1977 for $175 million, was designed by...

The Skyscraper Design Service without a Signature. The 77-story Chrysler Building is celebrated for its infamous Art Deco needle spire structure with terraced, stainless-steel cladding in an arched sunburst pattern, and its flamboyant ornaments all relating to the automobile industry, including its hubcaps, eagles and hood-ornament decorations.

The Grand Hyatt hotel, adjacent to Grand Central Terminal on West 42nd Street, is a renovated version of the old Commodore Hotel, designed by Warren & Wetmore, and constructed by its general contractor the Fuller Company in 1919.

It is only fitting, for a blog dedicated to the intersection of real estate development/ construction and the law, that the premiere post center on the historic train terminal into which passengers continue to enter the City of New York – given the structure’s association with the seminal, United States Supreme Court decision Penn Central Transportation Co. v. City of New York, 438 U.S. 104, 124 (1978), involving the extent to which landmarking properties can constitute gover