608 Fifth Avenue, also known as the Goelet Building or Swiss Center Building, is an office building at Fifth Avenue and West 49th Street in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, adjacent to Rockefeller Center. It was designed by Victor L. S. Hafner for the Goelet family, with Edward Hall Faile as structural engineer. The facade uses elements of both the Art Deco and International styles, while the lobby is designed exclusively in the Art Deco style.
The building consists of a two-story base and an eight-story upper section, with a facade of green and white marble. The base includes storefronts while the upper stories contain offices. The second story is cantilevered from the bottom of the third story so the storefronts could be combined into a large department store if necessary. The building's elaborately designed lobby is divided into an entrance vestibule, an S-shaped outer lobby, and an elevator lobby. These spaces are decorated extensively with marble and aluminum, and the outer and elevator lobbies also include the Goelet family's crest. The three elevator cabs contain ornate marble and aluminum decorations.
Prior to the construction of the present office building, Mary and Ogden Goelet lived in a mansion at 608 Fifth Avenue. The mansion was torn down in 1930, and Ogden's nephew Robert Walton Goelet built the office building on the site, which was finished in 1932. The structure was built while the construction of Rockefeller Center was ongoing, and its design was meant to complement that of the other buildings in Rockefeller Center. During the 1960s, the building was sold to the Korein family and was renovated. 608 Fifth Avenue was renamed the Swiss Center Building in 1966 after several Swiss companies leased space there. Both the lobby interior and the exterior were designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission as official city landmarks in 1992. The leasehold was sold to RFR Holding in 1998, and Vornado Realty Trust operated the retail space from 2013 to 2020.
Site 608 Fifth Avenue is in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, on the southwestern corner of Fifth Avenue and 49th Street. The land lot is slightly L-shaped, covering . The lot measures on Fifth Avenue to the east and on 49th Street to the north. The longer leg of the "L" extends west–east along 49th Street, while a shorter leg extends north–south along the western portion of the site.
608 Fifth Avenue is one of three buildings on the western side of Fifth Avenue between 48th and 49th Streets. Directly to the south is the Childs Restaurants building at 604 Fifth Avenue. The southern side of the block, 600 Fifth Avenue, was built in 1949–1952 and was later incorporated into Rockefeller Center. Other nearby buildings include 600 Fifth Avenue to the south, 1 Rockefeller Plaza to the west, the British Empire Building to the north, the Saks Fifth Avenue flagship store to the northeast, and 597 Fifth Avenue to the southeast.
Fifth Avenue between 42nd Street and Central Park South (59th Street) was relatively undeveloped through the late 19th century. In the latter half of that century, mansions and other residences were constructed along the avenue. Among these were two country mansions that Edward H. Kendall designed for brothers Robert and Ogden Goelet, within one block of each other. The brothers were part of the Goelet family, a wealthy Dutch family that had founded the Chemical Bank. Robert's estate was at 589 Fifth Avenue, near present-day 48th Street, while Ogden's estate was at 608 Fifth Avenue one block north.
Architecture 608 Fifth Avenue is a ten-story building in the Art Deco style, with elements of the International Style. It was designed by Victor L. S. Hafner and built by structural engineering firm E. H. Faile & Co. The planning application to the city's Department of Buildings was submitted by Roy Clinton Morris on behalf of Edward Hall Faile, leading to occasional disputes over who was the building's architect. Hafner worked for Faile for one and a half years. Although Hafner had worked on several projects in New York City, the Goelet Building was the only such design mentioned by name in his New York Times obituary in 1947.
Form and facade
The facades at the first story and the second-level mezzanine are composed of glass curtain walls. Green marble fills the spaces between each floor. From the outset, 608 Fifth Avenue was designed as a commercial structure that would maximize the rapidly rising land value of the area, with retail on the lower floors and office stories above. At the time, retail space was more profitable per square foot than office space was. The retail space required large display windows facing the street, which were extremely profitable. To maximize the surface area of these show windows, Faile designed the third and higher stories on two-story-tall columns that are recessed from the facade. An archway surrounded with green marble is placed along the western end of the 49th Street facade. A metal screen, painted bronze, is at the second story.
The building has a recessed light court above the second story on 49th Street, allowing additional windows to be placed further inside the building. Faile engineered the building's columns to be strong enough to accommodate a possible conversion of the light court into additional office space.
The exterior of the upper stories is made of two main types of marble. The horizontal spandrel panels between each story are made of white marble, and the vertical piers are made of green marble. On both Fifth Avenue and 49th Street, the piers divide the facade into sets of three bays, each with multiple windows. The Fifth Avenue elevation contains one set of three bays, while the 49th Street elevation includes two sets of three bays (one on either side of the light court). Most of the building is nine stories high, but the central bay of each set rises to a dormer on the tenth story. The central bays' windows are separated by four green-marble "ribs", which frame the tenth-story dormers. The tenth story and penthouse are sheathed in green marble, and the penthouse has white trim lines.
Ornamentation on the exterior includes aluminum mullions on the windows and at the corners. Other decorative elements include a monogram consisting of interlocked letters "G", as well as the Goelet family crest of a swan. These elements are displayed above the second story on the Fifth Avenue elevation. The crest and monogram were hung above the original main entrance arch on Fifth Avenue, demolished in 1965, as well as the arched entryway on 49th Street. The original main entrance had a bronze door with the Goelet family's crest and reportedly cost $14,000 ().
Interior According to the New York City Department of City Planning, 608 Fifth Avenue has of gross floor area, with 55 units.
Lobby The building's lobby was designed in a full Art Deco style, as Victor Hafner was not constrained by the need to conform the building's interior to those of nearby buildings. The lobby is reached from a doorway on the southernmost portion of the Fifth Avenue facade. Various marbles are used, including what The New York Times described as "aurora rossa, samosa golden, American pavonazzo, bleu belge, numidian red and Belgian black". The lobby is composed of three primary spaces: an entrance vestibule to the southeast, an S-shaped outer lobby, and an elevator lobby to the west.
The entrance vestibule has strips of veined gray marble, running diagonally toward the room's corners. The floor is surrounded by a rectangular band of white-and-black marble. The bottoms of the entrance vestibule's walls contain red-marble baseboards. Above those are black-marble wall panels with white veining, which are placed at regular intervals. Vertical aluminum battens hold these panels in place. The ceiling is made of aluminum painted in a bronze color. Art Deco motifs, inspired by both natural and geometric patterns, are placed on the ceiling and walls. Illumination is provided by four aluminum grilles, one at each corner of the vestibule, which are decorated with curving foliate patterns.
A set of three swinging silver doors leads from the vestibule to the outer lobby. The doors contain symmetrical patterned designs, with three triangles at the top of each door and stepped patterns at the bottom. The outer lobby's travertine floor is surrounded by a black marble band and a deep-red marble band. The west and east walls contain reeded dark-marble pilasters. The walls contain wide horizontal bands of beige marble with white and brown veins, interspersed with narrower bands of brown marble with yellow veins. These bands are separated by aluminum battens. Stylized motifs are cast into the aluminum cornices above each wall. Lighting fixtures are placed behind the cornices. The outer lobby has a coved plaster ceiling with aluminum-leaf decorations. Inlaid in the middle of the ceiling is a depiction of the Goelet swan, surrounded by geometric patterns.
The floors, walls, and ceiling of the elevator lobby are similar to those in the outer lobby, with a floral motif at the center of the ceiling. The elevator lobby contains three openings for elevators, as well as a staircase to the floors above. Each elevator opening is recessed from the wall surface and flanked by reeded dark-marble pilasters. The soffits of the elevator openings contain indirect lighting sources, which shine onto the cast-metal doors. The elevator doors themselves are decorated with stylized leaves atop vertical bands of white and yellow metal. The centers of the doors contain octagonal medallions, which depict a gazelle and two maidens. The elevator openings and the staircase are all topped by decorative octagonal medallions made of metal. Each elevator cab has baked enamel wall panels, held in place by aluminum bands, as well as stylized aluminum motifs.
Retail space The construction of Rockefeller Center made it difficult to forecast whether numerous small stores or a single large retailer would be more suitable for the site. 608 Fifth Avenue included features such as wide staircases and fire sprinklers, as well as a ceiling in the rear of the first floor. This allowed the retail space to be converted into a department store easily. When the second story was built, it was cantilevered from the third-story slab instead of being supported by columns above the first floor, thus maximizing the first-floor retail space. In total, the retail space covers .
History
By the beginning of the 20th century, most of the area's mansions had given way to office and commercial buildings. When Ogden Goelet died in 1897, his widow inherited his property at 608 Fifth Avenue, while his brother Robert became the trustee, a role later passed to Robert's son Robert Walton Goelet. In 1920, Robert Walton Goelet commissioned the construction of an art gallery at 606 Fifth Avenue, directly south of Ogden's estate. Ogden's widow Mary R. Goelet continued to live in the 608 Fifth Avenue mansion until 1926.
Development By the time Mary died in February 1929, the house had been unused for three years. By then, the construction of Rockefeller Center was ongoing in the area immediately surrounding the Goelet lots. Rockefeller Center's developers allowed Robert Walton Goelet to keep the lots at 2–6 West 49th Street because the company considered his "interest and concern" to be a significant factor. However, Goelet could not yet develop the western part of his site due to an easement that a neighbor held on the land. Goelet started selling the objects in the house in December 1929, hosting four such sales.