383 Madison Avenue, formerly known as the Bear Stearns Building, is a , 47-story skyscraper in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, New York, U.S. Built in 2002 for financial services firm Bear Stearns, it was designed by architect David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). It housed Bear Stearns's world headquarters until 2008, when Bear collapsed and was sold to JPMorgan Chase. Since then, JPMorgan's investment banking division has occupied the building.
383 Madison Avenue occupies an entire city block bounded by Madison Avenue, 47th Street, Vanderbilt Avenue and 46th Street. The eastern two-thirds of the building is erected over two stories of tracks leading to the nearby Grand Central Terminal. Above the rectangular base, there are several setbacks tapering to an octagonal tower. The facade is made of granite with glass panels, and the tower is topped by a glass crown. To accommodate the railroad tracks under the site, the foundation and superstructure contain large sloped girders and trusses, and the elevators are placed on the west side of the building. The ground story also contains public spaces and an entrance to Grand Central Terminal. Above are seven trading floors, as well as office stories. The building has a usable floor area of ; including mechanical spaces, its total floor area is .
G. Ware Travelstead, First Boston, and the al-Babtain family acquired the site in 1982 and tried to develop a building with more than 70 stories. That plan stalled after Travelstead could not acquire the required air rights from Grand Central Terminal. HRO International then proposed redeveloping the site, but al-Babtain acquired full ownership in 1995 before HRO could obtain the lot. Bear Stearns agreed to develop the site in 1997 after several potential tenants declined to lease space there. Work started in 1999 and was completed in early 2002. When demolition of JPMorgan Chase's world headquarters at 270 Park Avenue commenced in 2019, the bank's headquarters was temporarily relocated to 383 Madison Avenue, pending the completion of the JPMorgan Chase Tower on the Park Avenue site.
Site 383 Madison Avenue is in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. It occupies an entire city block bounded by Madison Avenue to the west, 47th Street to the north, Vanderbilt Avenue to the east, and 46th Street to the south. The land lot covers about with a frontage of on either avenue and on either street. Nearby buildings include the old New York Mercantile Library and 400 Madison Avenue to the northwest; 270 Park Avenue to the north; 277 Park Avenue to the northeast; 245 Park Avenue to the east; the Helmsley Building and MetLife Building to the southeast; and the Roosevelt Hotel to the south.
By the late 19th century, the Park Avenue railroad line ran in an open-cut in the middle of Park Avenue, one block east. The line was covered with the construction of Grand Central Terminal in the early 20th century, spurring development in the surrounding area, Terminal City. Among the developments were office buildings such as the Chanin Building, Bowery Savings Bank Building, and New York Central Building, as well as hotels like the Biltmore, Commodore, Waldorf Astoria, and Summit. By 1920, the area had become what The New York Times called "a great civic centre". Largely commercial International Style skyscrapers replaced many of the residential structures on Park Avenue during the 1950s and 1960s.
Previous buildings The original building at 383 Madison Avenue was the Knapp Building, an office structure designed by Cross & Cross and built in 1923 for real estate firm Webb & Knapp. The limestone structure was 14 stories tall and contained . The northern half of the building was erected first; it was quickly rented, prompting Webb and Knapp to build the southern half in the same style. The Knapp Building then served as the headquarters of the Manhattan Savings Bank. By the 1980s, the building also contained offices for advertising firm BBDO and CBS Educational and Professional Publishing.
The Knapp Building occupied the entire block, and its facade resembled a simplified classical palazzo. There were bronze-framed display windows at ground level, a string course above the third floor, paired windows in the intermediate floors, and single windows on the top stories. There were swags between the upper-story windows and a flat cornice atop the building.
The roof of the Knapp Building contained a modernist two-story penthouse designed by I. M. Pei and William Lescaze in 1952. The penthouse's reception area alone occupied about one-third of the lower level. This penthouse included a circular office on the lower level, used by William Zeckendorf of Webb & Knapp. Zeckendorf's office was covered in oak panels, and there was a private terrace adjacent to it. The offices of the firm's secretaries were arranged around the penthouse as well. On the upper level was a circular dining room accessed by a circular elevator and a rounded staircase. The penthouse was topped by a small cylindrical tower, cantilevered from the core.
Architecture
Designed by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) for defunct investment bank Bear Stearns, 383 Madison Avenue is tall with 47 floors. Turner Construction was the general contractor; Jaros, Baum & Bolles and Robert Derector Associates were the main engineers, and Cantor Seinuk was the structural engineer.
Form and facade The building consists of an octagonal tower rising out of a rectangular base. The lowest nine stories occupy the entire site, measuring . Above a setback on the ninth story, the cross section of the 10th and 11th stories is rectangular, measuring . There is a further setback at the 12th story, where the building shrinks to an octagon measuring . The octagonal tower sets back again at the 18th story (numbered as floor 14), where the building rises straight to its crown. This design maximized the size of the perimeter wall, and it created eight corners for private offices on each story.
The facade is made of granite with glass panels. The tower terminates at a glass crown, which is illuminated at night. The glass crown consists of panels, which can also reflect sunlight during the daytime. Childs described the crown as being made of "crinkled glass", which is laminated and rolled.
Mechanical and structural features Foundation About two-thirds of the building's foundation sits above two levels of Metro-North Railroad tracks just north of Grand Central Terminal, rather than being attached to the bedrock itself. The columns of the building's substructure had to be arranged to avoid the tracks, which descended as much as beneath ground level. There is also a utility tunnel below the lower track level, which was built in the early 20th century, with unreinforced concrete walls measuring thick. The footing subgrade has a bearing capacity of .
The general contractors reinforced many of the Knapp Building's existing columns and added new footings where necessary. Additionally, a new footing was placed atop the utility tunnel. During construction, the tracks under the site were temporarily closed. The contractors removed most of the track beds for storage, though one track remained in place. The contractors then installed new foundation walls. Each of the new concrete walls is thick and can carry loads of . Steel grillages, measuring long by wide, are placed under the walls, distributing the loads to the bedrock.
Superstructure The superstructure of the first 18 stories is placed on an orthogonal grid. The elevator pits could not descend below the first story, due to the presence of the tracks on the eastern portion of the site. Thus, the structural engineers placed the elevators, and the structural core of the lower stories on the western portion of the site. This created large floor areas but also decreased the effectiveness of the building's lateral bracing. North and south of the lower core are concrete shear walls, which run to the building's western elevation. To compensate for the offset core, the building's eastern elevation contains a Vierendeel truss with columns spaced every .
Above the double-height lobby are two trusses, each measuring long. These trusses support all of the upper floors while allowing the lobby to be designed as a column-free space. At ground level, the building contains storefronts, with columns at each corner. Above ground level, the corners of the building contain executive offices without any columns. This required the installation of slanted girders at each corner, as well as spandrel beams that connect opposing corners. The trading floors, which are immediately above the lobby and storefronts, contain fewer columns than usual, requiring that the upper stories be supported by complex trusses. On the trading floors, the easternmost and the westernmost of each story do not have columns.
HVAC and mechanical equipment are placed on several intermediate stories, since there is not enough room in the basement. The building was designed to run for four days without exterior power through four emergency electrical generators, its own steam turbines, and tanks that can store of emergency water. The mechanical spaces are on the 14th through 17th stories (labeled as floors 10 through 13). The core of the upper stories is at the center of the site. Therefore, diagonal girders are installed within the mechanical levels to shift loads up to westward, between the upper and lower cores. The sloped girders measure up to across and can carry up to . The girders intersect at nodes, which each consist of several layers of steel plates. Each node connects up to four girders.
Above the 18th story, the columns at the perimeter of the octagonal tower are placed apart, creating a rigid moment frame. Each corner of the octagon has no columns. Additionally, the perimeter columns are not aligned with the steel frame below, which required the use of a double-height ring truss wall on the 18th and 19th stories to distribute loads to the lower stories. The 18th and 19th stories contain technological equipment for the tenants. In total, the superstructure has of steel.
Interior
The building has a total floor area of . The usable floor area covers only , giving it a floor area ratio (FAR) of 21.6. At the time of the building's planning, this was the maximum FAR allowed in any building in New York City. This includes of space that the developers could build "as-of-right" without additional zoning provisions, as well as of air rights from above the terminal. About 26 percent of the building is mechanical space, which does not count toward FAR calculations. This was allowed since 383 Madison Avenue's zoning district does not specify any height limit. Under normal zoning regulations, the maximum FAR for any building on the tower's site was 15, but the developers received two bonuses of 20 percent each, bringing the FAR to 21.6. The developers had to include privately owned public space at the building's base for the first bonus, and they built a transit entrance for the second bonus.
Ground floor