Lever House
About this property
Lever House is a 307-foot-tall (94 m) office building at 390 Park Avenue in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, United States. Constructed from 1950 to 1952, the building was designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) in the International Style, a 20th-century modern architectural style. It was originally the headquarters of soap company Lever Brothers, a subsidiary of Unilever. Lever House was the second high-rise in New York City with a glass curtain wall, after the United Nations Secretariat Building. The building has 21 office stories topped by a triple-height mechanical section. At the ground story is a courtyard and public space, with the second story overhanging the plaza on a set of columns. The remaining stories are designed as a slab occupying the northern one-quarter of the site. The slab design was chosen because it conformed with the city's 1916 Zoning Resolution while avoiding the use of setbacks. There is about 260,000 square feet (24,000 m2) of interior space in Lever House, making it much smaller than comparable office buildings in Midtown Manhattan. The construction of Lever House changed Park Avenue in Midtown from an avenue with masonry apartment buildings to one with International-style office buildings. Several other structures worldwide copied the building's design. Lever House was intended solely for Lever Brothers' use, and its small size had prompted proposals to redevelop the site with a larger skyscraper. The building was nearly demolished in the 1980s, when Fisher Brothers proposed a 40-story tower on the site; afterward, it was narrowly approved as a New York City designated landmark in 1982 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places the next year. In 1997, Unilever relocated most of its offices out of Lever House, and Aby Rosen's RFR Realty took over the building. After SOM renovated the building between 2000 and 2001, Lever House was used as a standard office building with multiple tenants. Brookfield Properties and WatermanClark obtained a majority ownership stake in the building in 2020 and hired SOM to conduct another renovation in the early 2020s.
Location
Categories
Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).
Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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Questions about this property
When was Lever House listed on the National Register?
Lever House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 1, 1983.
What type of historic resource is Lever House?
Lever House is classified as a building in the National Register of Historic Places.
What is the period of significance for Lever House?
The period of significance for Lever House is recorded as the industrial era.
Can I research the history near Lever House?
Yes. Aubrey Research reports search National Register listings, battlefield records, land patents, and other primary historical sources within any radius of a US address. A report for an address near Lever House will include this listing and all other historical records in the area.
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