The construction of the Pan Am Building: a captivating event for New Yorkers

Crews worked in shifts to coordinate a careful ballet of arriving materials – much of it via the rail tracks below the site – and the clearing of unwanted materials. The early stages, involving the foundation, had to be timed very precisely to reduce impacts on daily commutes to a minimum.

When the building started to rise, a dedicated live camera feed was fed to TV monitors on the balcony of the Grand Central Terminal down below. The construction process proved endlessly fascinating to passers-by.

The Process

Creating the new structure would mirror the scale and complexity of the Grand Central Terminal construction a half-century earlier.

In the early 1900s it meant the titanic job of blasting and digging, before creating the dual-layered track system and erecting the station above. Now nearly a half century later, that old groundwork had to be opened up and a new foundation set into bedrock before the 59-story building could rise above it.

The project would be particularly complex. First, planning got underway for the intricate and extensive foundation work that would support the building.

James Ruderman, the consulting engineer in charge, was a veteran of several other “air rights” projects along Park Avenue. For this project however, the dual layer of tracks and platforms below the building site would have to accommodate 99 new steel supports, driven down 55 feet below grade, often within inches of existing infrastructure. The supports would need special shock-absorbing materials to minimize transmitting vibration to the new building above.

In November 1959, building plans were officially filed by Emery Roth and Sons to the City, about 15 months after the architectural design team had started their work.

A MATTER FOR PUBLIC DEBATE

The sheer size of this new building – the largest commercial office building in the world – generated new debates in the public sphere. Public and professional scrutiny grew more intense after a conference on design and planning held in January 1960.

Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in the "New York Times" a few days later: “By virtue of its size and location, Grand Central City will inevitably be New York’s most important structure. Whether it is a monster or marvel, however, is being hotly debated…” ("New York Times," January 24, 1960).

Huxtable’s article described a debate at the conference between the project’s principals and an opposing panel of critics. Responding to the skeptics, Wolfson and the three architects — Roth, Gropius and Belluschi — provided some qualifying responses. The new building would have its own service establishments, and the subway system would provide increased service at nearby stops. Belluschi pushed back against the critics, adding wryly that, “When a baby outgrows its shoes, you don’t cut off his toes - you buy new shoes.”

Erwin Wolfson projected the $100 million cost of construction was more than he was ready to commit on his own. In late 1959 he secured the participation of British developer Jack Cotton, head of City Centre Properties, Ltd., who took a 50% stake in the project. (Cotton’s decision, only weeks after Gropius and Belluschi came onboard, suggested that the British developer might have been swayed by their involvement. He later hired Gropius to work on two British projects.)