Art & architecture

Mocked for lying down when every other tower stood up

At 330 West 42nd Street in Hell's Kitchen stands a 33-story tower once known as the McGraw-Hill Building, completed in 1931 by architect Raymond Hood as the publisher's new headquarters. Its blue-green terracotta facade, chosen to blend with the sky in any weather, alternates with green-framed windows arranged to emphasize horizontal bands rather than the vertical lines typical of Art Deco skyscrapers of the era. That choice scandalized critics at the time, one dismissing the building for ignoring the natural upward thrust of a tall structure, even as others praised it, and it later became recognized as an early, idiosyncratic example of the International Style. The design was practical as much as artistic, built around the needs of a publishing company, with industrial floors for printing and binding below and brighter office floors above.

McGraw-Hill occupied the building for four decades before outgrowing it and departing in 1972 for Rockefeller Center, leaving the tower empty for three years as the surrounding blocks grew seedier. A health insurer, Group Health Insurance, bought it cheaply in 1974 and gave the building its second name, GHI, before landmark status arrived in 1979 and 1980 protected both the structure and its place on the National Register. Ownership passed through various hands afterward, including a stretch under Newmark & Company that restored and refilled the building with tenants, and a sculpture mounted on its corner that was later removed due to decay. Deco Towers, the owner since 1994, carried out a long restoration beginning in the late 1990s and more renovations in the following decades.

More recently the building has been pulled toward residential use, with its office floors emptied, its original lobby demolished despite preservationist objections and a failed lawsuit to save it, and a large renovation completed in 2021. Plans have since shifted again, with much of the upper portion of the tower slated for conversion into hundreds of apartments amid softening demand for office space after the pandemic. Financial complications followed, including a loan sale that fell through and a foreclosure effort by new lenders, leaving the conversion still underway. Through all these changes in ownership, use and appearance, the building has kept its reputation as a strange, striking hybrid of styles, once nicknamed the "green giant" and still argued over by architectural historians.

The stepped, wedding-cake profile was not an aesthetic choice but compliance with New York's 1916 zoning law, which forced setbacks on the 41st and 42nd Street sides.

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