BGuthrie Photos: NY -- NYC -- MetLife (formerly PanAm) (200 Park Avenue)

NY -- NYC -- MetLife (formerly PanAm) (200 Park Avenue):

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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[1] METLIF_020413_01.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[2] METLIF_020413_03.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[3] METLIF_020413_05.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[4] METLIF_020413_07.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. METLIF_020413_01.JPG: The Met Life building used to be the PanAm building
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Wikipedia Description: MetLife Building
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The MetLife Building is a 59-story skyscraper at 200 Park Avenue at East 45th Street above Grand Central Terminal in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Built in 1960–63 as the Pan Am Building, the then-headquarters of Pan American World Airways, it was designed by Emery Roth & Sons, Pietro Belluschi and Walter Gropius in the International style. The world's largest commercial office space by square footage at its opening, it remains one of the 100 tallest buildings in the United States.

History

In September 1960, Pan Am founder Juan Trippe signed a 25-year, $115,500,000 lease with the building's developer, Erwin Wolfson, allowing the airline to occupy 613,000 square feet (56,900 m2), or about 15 floors, plus a new main ticket office at 45th Street and Vanderbilt Avenue.

When it opened on March 7, 1963, the Pan Am Building (as it was known at the time) was the largest commercial office space in the world by square footage. It was initially an unpopular sight due to its lack of proportion and huge scale—it dwarfed the New York Central Building to the north and Grand Central Terminal to the south and blocked the views of upper and lower Park Ave. The building was surpassed in size by the World Trade Center in 1970–71 as well as 55 Water Street in 1972.

The last tall tower erected in New York City before laws were enacted preventing corporate logos and names on the tops of buildings, it bore 15-foot-tall (4.6 m) "Pan Am" displays on its north and south faces and 25-foot-tall (7.6 m) globe logos east and west.

Pan Am originally occupied 15 floors of the building. It remained Pan Am's headquarters even after Metropolitan Life Insurance Company bought the building in 1981. By 1991, Pan Am's presence had dwindled to four floors; during that year Pan Am moved its headquarters to Miami. Shortly afterwards, the airline ceased operations. On Thursday September 3, 1992, MetLife announced that it would remov ...More...
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.) I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Same Subject: Click on this link to see coverage of items having the same subject: [Structures]
2002 photos: Image quality isn't going to be very good for the first half of this year because these are scans of prints. Equipment this year: I took the plunge and bought my first digital camera. It was August 2002 and I bought an Epson PhotoPC 3100Z. While a nice camera, it had some quirks and bumping it would result in it being totally out of focus until you manually shut it down -- something which blurred almost every picture I took in New York City one day. Trips this year: Two weeks out west, one week in New York, and one week down south. This was the year I started the photo web site. It started to come together in August 2002, mostly as a way of allowing me to keep track of the pictures I was taking. It took awhile to add some basic bells and whistles (logging didn't get added until November) but it's been pretty much like it started out since then. Archaic but working, and free!
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