2 Columbus Circle - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

2 Columbus Circle is a small, trapezoidal lot on the south side of Columbus Circle

Columbus Circle

Columbus Circle, named for Christopher Columbus, is a major landmark and point of attraction in the New York City borough of Manhattan, located at the intersection of Eighth Avenue, Broadway, Central Park South , and Central Park West, at the southwest corner of Central Park. It is the point from...

in Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

, New York City, USA.

The seven-story Pabst Grand Circle Hotel, designed by William H. Cauvet, stood at this address from 1874 until it was demolished in 1960. From 1964 to 2005 the site contained a 12 story modernist structure designed by Edward Durell Stone

Edward Durell Stone

Edward Durell Stone was a twentieth century American architect who worked primarily in the Modernist style.-Early life:...

for Huntington Hartford

Huntington Hartford

George Huntington Hartford II was an American businessman, philanthropist, filmmaker, and art collector. The heir to the A&P supermarket fortune, he owned Paradise Island in the Bahamas, and had numerous other business and real estate interests over his lifetime including the Oil Shale Corporation...

, heir to the founder of A&P Supermarket

The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company

The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, better known as A&P, is a supermarket and liquor store chain in the United States. Its supermarkets, which are under six different banners, are found in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. A&P's liquor stores, known as...

s, to display his art collection. As Stone designed it, the building was marble-clad with Venetian motifs and a curved façade. It had filigree-like portholes and windows that ran along an upper loggia

Loggia

Loggia is the name given to an architectural feature, originally of Minoan design. They are often a gallery or corridor at ground level, sometimes higher, on the facade of a building and open to the air on one side, where it is supported by columns or pierced openings in the wall...

at its top stories.

Stone's building was often called "The Lollipop Building" in reference to a mocking review by architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable

Ada Louise Huxtable

Ada Louise Huxtable is an architecture critic and writer on architecture. In 1970 she was awarded the first ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for "distinguished criticism during 1969."...

in which she called it a "die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops." However, three decades later she admitted that she got "a little lift, a sense of pleasure" when she walked past it. Nonetheless, Huxtable took issue with the campaign to save the building, writing in the Wall Street Journal that: "It was an unworthy performance that did little credit to anyone who cares about preservation and can only serve as an object lesson of how not to go about it."

With architect Philip L. Goodwin, Edward Durell Stone

Edward Durell Stone

Edward Durell Stone was a twentieth century American architect who worked primarily in the Modernist style.-Early life:...

had previously designed the Rockefeller family

Rockefeller family

The Rockefeller family , the Cleveland family of John D. Rockefeller and his brother William Rockefeller , is an American industrial, banking, and political family of German origin that made one of the world's largest private fortunes in the oil business during the late 19th and early 20th...

's Museum of Modern Art

Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...

in the International style

International style (architecture)

The International style is a major architectural style that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, the formative decades of Modern architecture. The term originated from the name of a book by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style...

. Hartford wanted his "Gallery of Modern Art" to represent an alternative view of modernism. Edward Durell Stone

Edward Durell Stone

Edward Durell Stone was a twentieth century American architect who worked primarily in the Modernist style.-Early life:...

also did the Kennedy cultural Center for Jackie Kennedy. Mr. and Mrs. Huntington Hartford went with Jackie Kennedy and Edward Durell Stone

Edward Durell Stone

Edward Durell Stone was a twentieth century American architect who worked primarily in the Modernist style.-Early life:...

for the opening.

Interest in landmarking this building began in 1996, soon after the building turned thirty years old and became eligible for landmark designation. In this year, Robert A. M. Stern

Robert A. M. Stern

Robert Arthur Morton Stern, usually credited as Robert A. M. Stern, is an American architect and Dean of the Yale University School of Architecture....

included it in his article " A Preservationist's List of 35 Modern Landmarks-in-Waiting" written for the New York Times.

Stone's design at 2 Columbus Circle was listed as one of the World Monuments Fund

World Monuments Fund

World Monuments Fund is a private, international, non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of historic architecture and cultural heritage sites around the world through fieldwork, advocacy, grantmaking, education, and training....

's "100 Most Endangered Sites for 2006." In 2004, the National Trust for Historic Preservation

National Trust for Historic Preservation

The National Trust for Historic Preservation is an American member-supported organization that was founded in 1949 by congressional charter to support preservation of historic buildings and neighborhoods through a range of programs and activities, including the publication of Preservation...

called it one of America's "11 Most Endangered Historic Places."

Despite a serious preservation

Historic preservation

Historic preservation is an endeavor that seeks to preserve, conserve and protect buildings, objects, landscapes or other artifacts of historical significance...

effort, The Museum of Arts & Design

The Museum of Arts & Design

The Museum of Arts and Design , based in Manhattan in New York, New York, is a center for the collection, preservation, study, and display of contemporary hand-made objects in a variety of media, including: clay, glass, metal, fiber, and wood...

has radically altered the building for their occupation in 2008.

Architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff

Nicolai Ouroussoff

Nicolai Ouroussoff is the architecture critic for The New York Times.-Biography:Born in Boston, Massachusetts United States, he received a bachelor’s degree in Russian from Georgetown University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of ArchitectureThe protégé of the...

named the new building as one of seven structures in New York City that should be torn down because they "have a traumatic effect on the city." Ouroussoff also wrote:

The renovation remedies the annoying functional defects that had plagued the building for decades. But this is not the bold architectural statement that might have justified the destruction of an important piece of New York history. Poorly detailed and lacking in confidence, the project is a victory only for people who favor the safe and inoffensive and have always been squeamish about the frictions that give this city its vitality.

Redesign and landmark controversy

Proposed changes to the building by architect Brad Cloepfil

Brad Cloepfil

Brad Cloepfil is an American architect, educator and principal of Allied Works Architecture of Portland, Oregon and New York City. His first major project was an adaptive reuse of a Portland warehouse for the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy...

touched off a preservation debate joined by Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe

Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.-Early life and education:...

(The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

; October 12, 2003 and October 13, 2003), Chuck Close

Chuck Close

Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits...

, Frank Stella

Frank Stella

Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...

, Robert A. M. Stern

Robert A. M. Stern

Robert Arthur Morton Stern, usually credited as Robert A. M. Stern, is an American architect and Dean of the Yale University School of Architecture....

, Columbia

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

art history department chairman Barry Bergdoll

Barry Bergdoll

Barry Bergdoll is a Professor of architectural history in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.-Education:...

, New York Times architecture critics Herbert Muschamp

Herbert Muschamp

Herbert Mitchell Muschamp was an American architecture critic.- Early years :Born in Philadelphia, Muschamp described his childhood home life as follows: “The living room was a secret. A forbidden zone. The new slipcovers were not, in fact, the reason why sitting down there was taboo. That was...

and Nicolai Ouroussoff

Nicolai Ouroussoff

, urbanist scholar Witold Rybczynski

Witold Rybczynski

Witold Rybczynski , is a Canadian-American architect, professor and writer.Rybczynski was born in Edinburgh of Polish parentage and raised in Surrey, England before moving at a young age to Canada. He attended Loyola High School , located on Sherbrooke street, in Montreal-Ouest...

, among others. Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney

Carolyn B. Maloney

Carolyn Bosher Maloney is the U.S. Representative for , serving since 1993. She is a member of the Democratic Party. The district, popularly known as the "silk stocking district", includes most of Manhattan's East Side; Astoria and Long Island City in Queens; and Roosevelt Island.-Early life,...

(D-NY) referred to it as "one of New York's most photographed and readily recognizable buildings."

Stone's building was listed as worthy of preservation by organizations, including: the New York/Tri-State Chapter of DOCOMOMO, the Historic Districts Council, the Municipal Art Society

Municipal Art Society

The Municipal Art Society of New York, founded in 1893, is a non-profit membership organization that fights for intelligent urban planning, design and preservation through education, dialogue and advocacy in New York City....

, the National Trust for Historic Preservation

National Trust for Historic Preservation

, the New York Landmarks Conservancy

New York Landmarks Conservancy

The New York Landmarks Conservancy is a non-profit organization "dedicated to preserving, revitalizing, and reusing New York’s architecturally significant buildings." It provides technical assistance, project management services, grants, and loans, to owners of historic properties in New York State...

, the Preservation League of New York State, and the World Monuments Fund

World Monuments Fund

.

Despite this, the New York City Landmarks Commission never held a public hearing on its fate. E-mails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act between NYC Landmarks Commission chairman Robert Tierney and Laurie Beckelman, who works for the Museum of Art and Design, suggest that the pair worked behind the scenes to keep the building from being considered by the landmarks panel. A city permit to allow removal of the existing facade was issued on June 29, 2005. http://www.newyorkcity.com/people/walton/blog/2631/chopping_2_Columbus_Circle_down

The August 9, 2005 edition of The New York Times reported that members of the Landmarks Preservation Commission took the rare step of public disagreement over this issue, despite City Hall's insistence that the case against the building had been closed for nine years. Roberta Brandes Gratz, a commission member, said in a letter to The New York Times, "Neither I as an individual commissioner nor the current commission as a whole has rendered a 'professional judgment' on whether there should be a hearing or a designation." In addition, telephone interviews conducted by The New York Times suggested that at least some of the other eleven commissioners also favored a public hearing. Yet the commission's executive director, Ronda Wist, said chairman Tierney "is not inclined to revisit this question."

Tierney said his principal architectural education occurred when he took an undergraduate course with Vincent Scully

Vincent Scully

Vincent Joseph Scully, Jr. is Sterling Professor Emeritus of the History of Art in Architecture at Yale University, and the author of several books on the subject...

, now the Sterling professor emeritus of art history at Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

. On August 14, 2005, Scully stated in a letter to Tierney:

Something rather wonderful has occurred, by which the building, rarely anyone's favorite in the past, is looking better every day.... Its own integrity, its uniqueness, the indomitable determination to make a point that produced it, are coming to the fore and are powerfully affecting the way we see it.... It is in fact becoming the icon it never was, one about which the city now cares a great deal.

The New York City Landmarks Commission's refusal to hold a public hearing on the building was based on a consensus reached in June 1996 by a four-member committee made up of the Rev. Thomas F. Pike, Charles Sachs, Vicki Match Suna, and Professor Sarah Bradford Landau. However, on August 18, 2005, The New York Times reported that Landau joined other former commissioners - William E. Davis, Stephen M. Raphael, Mildred F. Schmertz, along with Gene A. Norman, a former chairman, and Beverly Moss Spatt, a former chairwoman - in calling for a hearing. She wrote:

Had there been such a large and broad demand for a public hearing about the building in 1996, I'm not at all sure I would have voted the way I did.... It is in the long-term interest of the commission to maintain good rapport with the preservation community. Whether the building merits designation is another issue, and should be decided by the current commission.

On December 25, 2005, New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote:

Recent landmark preservation battles in New York suggest that the civic powers-that-be insist on defending a narrow view of the past and of Modernism in particular. That became apparent during the crusade to preserve Edward Durell Stone's so-called lollipop building at 2 Columbus Circle, a landmark of late Modernism.... As a result, the facade is being utterly revamped.... This was an atrocious betrayal of the public trust.... A similar debate is unfolding in Berlin, where the German government plans to demolish the 1970's Palast der Republik

Palast der Republik

The Palace of the Republic in Berlin was the seat of the parliament of the German Democratic Republic, the People's Chamber, and also served various cultural purposes...

.... Both 2 Columbus Circle and the Berlin building represent important moments in their cities' collective memories. The pressure to remake or raze them is arguably a form of censorship, a drive to cleanse history of anything but a strictly prescribed view of the past.

In 2008, Ouroussoff named the building as one of seven buildings in New York City that should be torn down because they "have a traumatic effect on the city." Ouroussoff also wrote:

The redesigned building has the same massing and geometric shape as the original, but has channels carved in the its exterior. The original white Vermont Marble

Vermont Marble Museum

The Vermont Marble Museum or Vermont Marble Exhibit is a museum commemorating the contributions of Vermont marble and the Vermont Marble Company, located in Proctor, Vermont, USA...

has been replaced with a glazed terra-cotta and glass facade.

Ada Louise Huxtable

Ada Louise Huxtable

Ada Louise Huxtable is an architecture critic and writer on architecture. In 1970 she was awarded the first ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for "distinguished criticism during 1969."...

, who had originally coined the term "Lollipop Building" for the original structure, wrote:

Two Columbus Circle was on the down curve of an architect who had done his best work in the 1930's.... Something has gone noticeably wrong. This is a precisely calibrated aesthetic that can be destroyed by one bad move, and that move has been the late insertion of a picture window on the restaurant floor. The client insisted and the architect resisted, and we will never know when and where the relationship fell apart -- but at some point it obviously did, and so did the design....The eternal banality of the picture window is forever with us...Even with the building's flaws, however, criticism of the structure has been alarmingly out of proportion and flagrantly out of control.

Of the newly uncovered redesign, James Gardner, architecture critic for the NY Sun wrote:

Say what you want about Stone’s building, it was indubitably a landmark; the best that can be said for its replacement is that, if we’re lucky, no one will ever notice it...A thought occurs that might help us out of our newfangled mess: Assuming that what was done to the interior is what needed to be done all along, it might be relatively easy — not now of course, but after a decent interval of, say, five years — to restore the original façade.

Francis Morrone, also of the NY Sun, wrote:

The new façade...uses glass bands, or "cuts," rather than conventionally patterned fenestration, across a plane of ceramic tiles glazed so as to change color subtly when viewed in different light conditions. For me, I am sorry to say, it's all scaleless. Where Stone's original building read as neatly scaled to its setting, Mr. Cloepfil's redesign reads as a piece of abstract sculpture that, at building scale, seems all wrong.

Paul Goldberger

Paul Goldberger is the Architecture Critic for The New Yorker, where since 1997 he has written the magazine's celebrated "Sky Line" column. He also holds the Joseph Urban Chair in Design and Architecture at The New School in New York City...

praised the new building's "functional, logical, and pleasant" interior in a review in the New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

, but wrote:

Ultimately, Cloepfil has been trapped between paying homage to a legendary building and making something of his own. As a result, if you knew the old building, it is nearly impossible to get it out of your mind when you look at the new one. And, if you’ve never seen Columbus Circle before, you probably won’t be satisfied, either: the building’s proportions and composition seem just as odd and awkward as they ever did.

Witold Rybczynski

wrote in Slate

Slate (magazine)

Slate is a US-based English language online current affairs and culture magazine created in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN. On 21 December 2004 it was purchased by the Washington Post Company...

that the new design:

feels like an alien presence...Slots appear at random, and a continuous ribbon of fritted glass zigzags down the building, graphic effects that belong more to the packaging of consumer products than to architecture. At the base, several of Stone's original Venetian columns are preserved behind murky glass like body parts in formaldehyde. As for the glazed terra-cotta tiles of the exterior, they are dull and lifeless and make even the slick steel-and-glass facade of the Time-Warner Center next door look lively. The new Museum of Arts and Design is artsy and designy, but it is not good architecture, and it makes me miss Stone's winsome palazzo all the more.

Pulitzer Prize

The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...

-winning critic, Justin Davidson

Justin Davidson

Justin Davidson is a classical music and architecture critic. He began his journalism career as a local stringer for the Associated Press in Rome before moving to the United States to study music at Harvard...

, said:

This version won’t satisfy those who thought it should never have been touched, and it’s not bold enough to overpower their arguments—or, I suspect, to turn the Museum of Arts and Design into an essential destination.

History of attempts at preservation

November 2003 - The Preservation League of New York State listed 2 Columbus Circle among its "Seven to Save" sites, prompting artist Chuck Close
Chuck Close
Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits...

to write, "I have always enjoyed this distinctive and delightful building with its opaque white facades and punched out hole windows."

December 2003 - Then chief New York Times architect Herbert Muschamp
Herbert Muschamp
Herbert Mitchell Muschamp was an American architecture critic.- Early years :Born in Philadelphia, Muschamp described his childhood home life as follows: “The living room was a secret. A forbidden zone. The new slipcovers were not, in fact, the reason why sitting down there was taboo. That was...

cited the failure of the Landmarks Commission to hold a hearing on 2 Columbus Circle one of the architectural "Lows" of 2003, writing, "The refusal of the New York City Landmarks Commission to hold hearings on the future of 2 Columbus Circle is a shocking dereliction of public duty. Unacceptable in itself, this abdication also raises the scary question of what other buildings the commission might choose to overlook in the future."

May 2004 - The National Trust for Historic Preservation
National Trust for Historic Preservation
The National Trust for Historic Preservation is an American member-supported organization that was founded in 1949 by congressional charter to support preservation of historic buildings and neighborhoods through a range of programs and activities, including the publication of Preservation...

named 2 Columbus Circle as one of America's 11 "most endangered" buildings, stating, "Radically altering 2 Columbus Circle would create a gaping void in the record of design and urbanism in the city, state, nation, and world."

August 2004 - Former Landmarks Commissioner Anthony M. Tung wrote a letter to Landmarks Commission Chair Robert B. Tierney, stating, "Simply, in the twenty six years of my involvement in preservation matters, beginning with my appointment as a commissioner by Mayor Edward I. Koch in 1979, I have never seen the commission turn its back on such a widely supported and substantive argument for a hearing."

September 2004 - Former Landmarks Commission Chair Beverly Moss Spatt wrote in a letter to current Chair Tierney that "a public hearing on 2 Columbus Circle is necessary to afford space and opportunity to hear from all sides whether it is not or is worthy of designation.... Good government is that government in which all people have a part."

March 2005 - An article entitled, "In Preservation Wars, a Focus on Midcentury," featured quotes from Robert A. M. Stern
Robert A. M. Stern
Robert Arthur Morton Stern, usually credited as Robert A. M. Stern, is an American architect and Dean of the Yale University School of Architecture....

("The commission ought to hear the arguments and let them be debated in a public forum -- that's democracy.") Modern Architecture Working Group co-chair John Jurayj ("Modern preservation is in a major crisis in our city, a crisis that is shortly going to get worse unless the Landmarks Preservation Commission starts to act more aggressively.") and Landmarks West! Executive Director Kate Wood ("If the Landmarks Commission held a public hearing for 2 Columbus Circle, literally hundreds of people would attend and testify -- both for and against designation. The question is, what more will it take?")

May 2005 - The New York Times reported: "Not to preserve [2 Columbus Circle] is shocking, but not to hear it is criminal," said architect and Yale Dean Robert A. M. Stern
Robert A. M. Stern
Robert Arthur Morton Stern, usually credited as Robert A. M. Stern, is an American architect and Dean of the Yale University School of Architecture....

to fellow panelist Robert B. Tierney, Chair of the New York's Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), at the 92nd Street Y.

May 2005 - Crain's New York Business reported: "The battle between preservationists and the city over 2 Columbus Circle is about to get noisy again" -- Landmark West! hired The Advance Group, the consultants behind the successful "Save the Plaza Hotel
Plaza Hotel
The Plaza Hotel in New York City is a landmark 20-story luxury hotel with a height of and length of that occupies the west side of Grand Army Plaza, from which it derives its name, and extends along Central Park South in Manhattan. Fifth Avenue extends along the east side of Grand Army Plaza...

" campaign, to help convince the Bloomberg Administration to hold a landmark designation hearing on 2 Columbus Circle.

May 2005 - At a May 16 City Council oversight hearing on the Landmarks Preservation Commission (only the third in the forty-year history of the agency), former Landmarks Commission Chair Gene A. Norman called on current Chair Tierney to hold a hearing on 2 Columbus Circle, arguing that "if people are preventing things from moving in a forward direction, they should be replaced."

May 2005 - Nicolai Ouroussoff
Nicolai Ouroussoff
Nicolai Ouroussoff is the architecture critic for The New York Times.-Biography:Born in Boston, Massachusetts United States, he received a bachelor’s degree in Russian from Georgetown University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of ArchitectureThe protégé of the...

, chief architecture critic of The New York Times, wrote, "Representing a pivotal moment in architecture's eventual turn from mainstream Modernism, the Stone building's modest scale and concave facade are a gentle counterpoint to the new Time Warner Center's bland gigantism. Even so, the [Landmark's Preservation] commission declines to debate whether it deserves landmark status.

May 2005 - "Architecture Lovers Rally to Save 2 Columbus Circle" is the headline of an NY1
NY1
NY1, New York One, is a 24-hour cable-news television channel focusing on the five boroughs of New York City. In addition to news and weather forecasts, the channel also features human-interest segments such as the "New Yorker of the Week" and the "Scholar Athlete of the Week", and specialty...

news report following a May 31 demonstration in front of the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD, formerly the American Craft Museum).

May 2005 - Landmark West! files Article 78 lawsuit against LPC Chair Robert B. Tierney, MAD and its affiliates Laurie Beckelman, Holly Hotchner, and Jerome Chazen for "conspiracy to obstruct and subvert the lawful functioning of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission." Holly Hotchner wins the right to go ahead with her Portland architect for removing the outside of 2 Columbus Circle using the lawyer Charles Moerdler from Stroock Stroock and Lavan Law Firm.

June 2005 - Supporters of a public hearing for Edward Durell Stone's iconic 1964 design join hands in a "circle of support" all the way around the building's famous "lollipop" base at a rally on June 23.

June 2005 - The World Monuments Fund
World Monuments Fund
World Monuments Fund is a private, international, non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of historic architecture and cultural heritage sites around the world through fieldwork, advocacy, grantmaking, education, and training....

(WMF) included 2 Columbus Circle on its 2006 "Watch List" of the 100 Most Endangered Sites on earth. WMF's website (www.wmf.org) states, "The listing of 2 Columbus Circle highlights the widespread failure of public authorities to recognize the architectural merit of postwar buildings and sites as part of our collective cultural heritage."

July 2005 - The New York Times, New York magazine, and the Architect's Newspaper report on "chummy" e-mail exchanges between NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission chair Robert Tierney and Laurie Beckelman, a representative from the Museum of Arts and Design. Their relationship is described as a "conflict of interest
Conflict of interest
A conflict of interest occurs when an individual or organization is involved in multiple interests, one of which could possibly corrupt the motivation for an act in the other....

" and "easily lead one to think that Tierney...is in cahoots with MAD." In one e-mail, Tierney tells Beckelman, "Let me know how I can help on the trouble ahead." The e-mails were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Landmarks West!

July 2005 - The New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, announced in a letter to Landmarks West! that 2 Columbus Circle "does appear to meet the eligibility criteria for listing on the State and National Registers of Historic Places." The State is reviewing the building's eligibility under criterion "C" for sites that "embody the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction, or that represent the work of a master, or that possess high artistic values..."

July 2005 - The New York City Law Department
New York City Law Department
The New York City Law Department is the branch of the municipal government of New York City responsible for most of the city's legal affairs. The Department is headed by the Corporation Counsel of New York City.-Duties of the Department:...

commits to a New York Supreme Court
New York Supreme Court
The Supreme Court of the State of New York is the trial-level court of general jurisdiction in thestate court system of New York, United States. There is a supreme court in each of New York State's 62 counties, although some smaller counties share judges with neighboring counties...

justice that the City "will neither close on the sale [of 2 Columbus Circle] nor authorize work under any existing building permits prior to either September 7, 2005" or the date of a court decision in the matter of Landmark West! et al. v. City of New York (one of three still-pending lawsuits brought by LW! and other citizens to prevent the defacement of 2 Columbus Circle without due process).

August 2005 - The New York Times reports in an article titled “Unanimity on a Building Is a Façade, Insiders Say": “The debate over whether 2 Columbus Circle merits consideration as an official landmark is playing out on the Landmarks Preservation Commission itself. A letter from Landmarks Commissioner Roberta Brandes Gratz to the editor of the Times “suggested that at least some of the 11 commissioners favor a public hearing, as did telephone interviews yesterday with several members.”

Miscellany

Mikasa & Company created a china pattern inspired by "the graphic window pattern" of Edward Durell Stone's original design. http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-3583.html
In March 2007, artist Emily Katrencik created an homage to Edward Durell Stone's lost design at the EXIT ART gallery in Manhattan.http://www.exitart.org/site/pub/exhibition_programs/building_show/emily_katrencik.html The artist formed a sculpture of hung lollipops containing flakes of marble from Stone's original facade. The sculpture’s architectural form, outlining the shape of the building, slowly eroded as visitors to the exhibit were invited to take a lollipop.

Timeline of the site

1874 - John D. Voorhis, a carriage maker, builds the seven-story Pabst Grand Circle Hotel on this irregular plot. Designed by William H. Cauvet, the hotel was made of brownstone with a mansard roof.
1913 - One hundred and twelve stage performers gather at the site and vote to form a union, the Actors' Equity Association
Actors' Equity Association
The Actors' Equity Association , commonly referred to as Actors' Equity or simply Equity, is an American labor union representing the world of live theatrical performance, as opposed to film and television performance. However, performers appearing on live stage productions without a book or...

.
1964 - A&P Heir Huntington Hartford
Huntington Hartford
George Huntington Hartford II was an American businessman, philanthropist, filmmaker, and art collector. The heir to the A&P supermarket fortune, he owned Paradise Island in the Bahamas, and had numerous other business and real estate interests over his lifetime including the Oil Shale Corporation...

hires Architect Edward Durell Stone
Edward Durell Stone
Edward Durell Stone was a twentieth century American architect who worked primarily in the Modernist style.-Early life:...

to build a Museum for him at 2 Columbus Circle. Hartford has one of the world's greatest art collections with a Rembrandt, Claude Monet
Claude Monet
Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. . Retrieved 6 January 2007...

's, Manet
Manet
-MANET as an abbreviation:*MANET is a mobile ad hoc network, a self-configuring mobile wireless network.*MANET database or Molecular Ancestry Network, bioinformatics database-People with the surname Manet:*Édouard Manet, a 19th-century French painter....

, Turner
Turner
Turner is a common surname of English 12th Century origin, meaning "one who works with a lathe". Turner is the 28th-most common surname in the United Kingdom.-List of people with surname Turner:...

, Salvador Dali
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....

. Hartford commissions Salvador Dali
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....

to paint a painting called The Discovery of America by Chrisopher Columbus for the opening. The opening attracts many celebrities such as the Duke of Windsor
Duke of Windsor
The title Duke of Windsor was created in the Peerage of the United Kingdom in 1937 for Prince Edward, the former King Edward VIII, following his abdication in December 1936. The dukedom takes its name from the town where Windsor Castle, a residence of English monarchs since the Norman Conquest, is...

. Hartford poses in the lobby in Black Tie with a Camel. The building at Two Columbus Circle, designed by Edward Durell Stone, opens as the Gallery of Modern Art. It displays the collection of Huntington Hartford
Huntington Hartford
George Huntington Hartford II was an American businessman, philanthropist, filmmaker, and art collector. The heir to the A&P supermarket fortune, he owned Paradise Island in the Bahamas, and had numerous other business and real estate interests over his lifetime including the Oil Shale Corporation...

, heir to the founder of A&P Supermarket
The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company
The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, better known as A&P, is a supermarket and liquor store chain in the United States. Its supermarkets, which are under six different banners, are found in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. A&P's liquor stores, known as...

s.
1969 - The Gallery of Modern Art closes. Fairleigh Dickinson University
Fairleigh Dickinson University
Fairleigh Dickinson University is a private university founded as a junior college in 1942. It now has several campuses located in New Jersey, Canada, and the United Kingdom.-Description:...

receives 2 Columbus Circle as a gift from Hartford and operates it as the New York Cultural Center. Art exhibitions are sometimes hosted there.
1975 - Gulf and Western Industries purchases 2 Columbus Circle, Sumner Redsone The building is unused until 1980.
1980 - Gulf and Western presents 2 Columbus Circle to the City of New York as a gift. The City of New York accepts 2 Columbus Circle and installs the headquarters for the Department of Cultural Affairs. The New York Convention and Visitors Bureau will also be housed in 2 Columbus Circle.
1996 - Jennifer Raab, Chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, reviews with the Designation Committee of the Commission the possibility of recommending a hearing on 2 Columbus Circle.
1998 - The Department of Cultural Affairs and the Convention and Visitors Bureau vacate 2 Columbus Circle.
2002 - Under Landmarks Preservation Commission Chairman Sherida Paulsen, the Designation Committee reviews the request to hold a hearing and again votes not to.
June 2002 - The Museum of Arts & Design (MAD) is designated as the site developer of 2 Columbus Circle by the NYC Economic Development Corporation.
June 2005 - The NYC Department of Buildings approves the permit for the Museum of Arts & Design to begin removing 2 Columbus Circle's facade.

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