Metropolitan Life North Building

The Metropolitan Life North Building stands as a massive, block-long monument to a dream that was cut short by the Great Depression. When construction began in nineteen twenty-nine, the vision was to create a one-hundred-story skyscraper that would reclaim the title of the world's tallest building for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. As you look at the structure today, you are seeing what was intended to be merely the pedestal for that record-breaking tower. Financial ruin forced the architects to abandon the upper seventy stories, leaving behind a bulky, thirty-story base that now defines the skyline on this side of Madison Square Park.