New York Life Building

The building you are approaching is the New York Life Building, a massive structure that serves as a monument to the permanence of the insurance industry. Completed in nineteen twenty-eight, it occupies the entire city block between Madison Avenue and Park Avenue South, facing the greenery of Madison Square Park. Architect Cass Gilbert designed the tower to project stability, choosing a neo-Gothic style that reaches upward with vertical grace while incorporating the solid, geometric massing required by city zoning laws of the era. Its exterior is wrapped in a staggering four hundred and forty thousand cubic feet of Indiana limestone, which was the largest single order of that stone used in a building at the time of its construction.