Beekman Tower

The Beekman Tower, also known as the Panhellenic Tower, is a 26-story Art Deco skyscraper situated at the corner of First Avenue and East 49th Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The building was constructed between 1927 and 1928 and was designed by John Mead Howells.

The Beekman Tower had been built for the Panhellenic Association's New York chapter as a club and hotel for women in college sororities. However, due to a lack of patronage, it was opened up to non-sorority women and men by the mid-1930s. It was later converted into a hotel and then corporate apartments.

The Beekman Tower contains a design with numerous setbacks, chamfers at its corners, and a massing that abuts onto the boundaries of its lot. Its sculptural ornamentation was designed by Rene Paul Chambellan in the Art Deco style with Gothic influences. In 1998, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission made the building an official city landmark.

The Beekman Tower is located at the northeast corner of First Avenue and Mitchell Place/49th Street. It has a frontage of 81 feet (25 m) on First Avenue and 126 feet (38 m) on Mitchell Place. The building consists of three portions. The westernmost portion, abutting First Avenue, is a 26-story tower with a square floor plan and short setbacks. The central portion contained a two-story event space with another entrance to Mitchell Place. The easternmost portion was an eight-story, 18-foot (5.5 m)-wide annex.

The design was inspired by two plans for the Tribune Tower in Chicago, as well as the American Radiator Building at 40th Street in Midtown Manhattan. Howells's plan incorporated the setback massing used in the Tribune Tower design by Finnish-American architect Eliel Saarinen, while incorporating the corners, lines, and decorations from Raymond Hood's final designs for both the Tribune Tower and the American Radiator Building. The decoration of the Beekman Tower was largely derived from geometric massing rather than ornamental decoration. This contrasted with the Gothic-style Tribune Tower and the Gothic and Art Deco-style American Radiator Building, which were both ornately decorated.

The facade materials were colored so as "to produce the impression that the building has been built out of, or carved out of one material". The base is largely two stories tall, with two leaded-glass windows within each of the second-story bays. An entrance to the tower portion of the building is located at the building's southwestern corner, at First Avenue and Mitchell Place. The hotel entrance further east on Mitchell Place is distinctive in that it contains a three-story-tall base with three bays, separated by wide pilaster strips, as well as cast-stone moldings. There are three Art Deco sculptural panels designed by Rene Chambellan: one at the corner and two on Mitchell Place. The panel above the corner depicts a floral motif above an octagon, while the other two panels resemble "frozen fountains". On the third story of the Mitchell Place entrance, there were formerly tripartite windows topped with lunettes, which were later replaced with casement windows.

The building's western section contains a tower section, measuring 75 feet (23 m) square and rising 24 stories above the two-story base. Each of the tower's corners contain a small pier with a single column of windows. The tower's four sides contain piers that rise to the 24th floor, with recessed window bays located between them. The recessed bays, as well as vertical recesses within the piers in the upper levels of the building, were intended to create a shadow-like effect. The roofline of the building contains various ornamentation, while the base contained Greek-letter designs.

The building's central section consists of a three-story wing that was originally an auditorium/event space. This portion is 33 feet (10 m) wide by 81 feet (25 m) deep, and its 33-foot-wide southern elevation contains four bays divided by pilaster strips.