Hearst Tower (Manhattan)

The Hearst Tower is a building at the southwest corner of 57th Street and Eighth Avenue, near Columbus Circle, in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, United States. It is the world headquarters of media conglomerate Hearst Communications, housing many of the firm's publications and communications companies. The Hearst Tower consists of two sections, with a total height of 597 feet (182 m) and 46 stories. The six lowest stories form the Hearst Magazine Building (also known as the International Magazine Building), designed by Joseph Urban and George B. Post & Sons, which was completed in 1928. Above it is the Hearst Tower addition, designed by Norman Foster and finished in 2006.
The building's main entrance is on Eighth Avenue. The original structure is clad with stone and contains six pylons with sculptural groups. The tower section above has a glass-and-metal facade arranged as a diagrid, or diagonal grid, which doubles as its structural system. The original office space in the Hearst Magazine Building was replaced with an atrium during the Hearst Tower's construction. The tower is certified as a green building as part of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program.
Hearst Magazine Building developer William Randolph Hearst acquired the site for a theater in the mid-1920s, in the belief that the area would become the city's next large entertainment district, but changed his plans to construct a magazine headquarters there. The original building was developed as the base for a larger tower, which was postponed because of the Great Depression. A subsequent expansion proposal, during the 1940s, also failed. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the facade of the original building as a city landmark in 1988. After Hearst Communications considered expanding the structure again during the 1980s, the tower stories were developed in the first decade of the 21st century.
The Hearst Tower is on the border of the Hell's Kitchen and Midtown Manhattan neighborhoods of New York City, two blocks south of Columbus Circle. It is bounded by 56th Street on the south, Eighth Avenue on the east, and 57th Street on the north. The building faces Central Park Place on the north, 3 Columbus Circle on the northeast, and Random House Tower on the east. It is one block south of Deutsche Bank Center (formerly Time Warner Center) and 2 Columbus Circle. The base of the Hearst Tower has three street addresses: 951–969 Eighth Avenue, 301–313 West 56th Street, and 302–312 West 57th Street. The site is a nearly-square lot covering 40,166 square feet (3,731.5 m) and measuring 200 by 200.83 feet (60.96 by 61.21 m). Entrances to the New York City Subway's 59th Street–Columbus Circle station are in the base of the tower.
The Hearst Tower, and the Hearst Magazine Building at its base, are near a former artistic hub around a two-block section of West 57th Street between Sixth Avenue and Broadway. The hub had been developed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, after the opening of Carnegie Hall on Seventh Avenue in 1891. The area contained the headquarters of several organizations, such as the American Fine Arts Society, the Lotos Club, and the ASCE Society House. Although the original Hearst Magazine Building was just outside the artistic hub, its proximity to these institutions was a factor in the choice of its location. By the 21st century, the arts hub had largely been replaced with Billionaires' Row, a series of luxury skyscrapers around the southern end of Central Park.
Immediately prior to the construction of the Hearst Magazine Building in the 1920s, the site was referred to as the Hegeman site. Sixteen people had owned the land, which was largely vacant except for an open-air movie theater and some stores.
The original six-story structure, known as the Hearst Magazine Building or the International Magazine Building, was designed by architect Joseph Urban and the architectural firm George B. Post & Sons. Completed in 1928 and intended as the base of a future tower, the Hearst Magazine Building was designed in early Art Deco style. Henry Kreis designed six sculpture groups at the third story. The Hearst Magazine Building is the only survivor of an unbuilt entertainment complex which its developer, Hearst Communications founder William Randolph Hearst, envisioned for Columbus Circle in the early 20th century. The tower, designed by Norman Foster, was completed in 2006—almost eight decades after the base was built. The Hearst Corporation and Tishman Speyer developed the tower; WSP Global was the structural engineer, and Turner Construction was the main contractor.
The two sections have a combined height of 597 feet (182 m), with forty-six stories above ground. Its base occupies nearly the whole lot and originally contained floors, arranged in a "U" shape, flanking a courtyard on the west. Along much of the base, the third through sixth stories are slightly set back from the lowest two floors. The original building's roof was 70 feet (21 m) above ground. The upper stories are more deeply set back from the lowest six floors on the north, east, and south sides Each of the upper stories has a footprint of 160 by 120 feet (49 by 37 m), with the longer dimension extending from east to west. The setbacks above the sixth floor contain a skylight 40 feet (12 m) wide.
The Hearst Tower has 856,000 square feet (79,500 m) of office space. According to the New York City Department of City Planning, the building has a gross floor area of 703,796 square feet (65,384.8 m). The tower received a zoning bonus which enabled its maximum floor area to be expanded by six floors or 120,000 square feet (11,000 m), a twenty-percent increase from the previous maximum allowed floor area of 600,000 square feet (56,000 m). The Hearst Corporation agreed to improve access to the subway station underneath in return, adding three elevators and reconfiguring the station's circulation areas. Without the zoning amendment, the Hearst Corporation might have had to pay up to $10 million for additional air rights, as the company had already used up all the air rights above the Hearst Magazine Building.
The cast-limestone facade of the Hearst Magazine Building, now the base, is a New York City designated landmark with 450,000 square feet (42,000 m) of surface area. It is divided horizontally into the two lowest stories, three intermediate stories, and a sixth-story attic. The base's northeastern and southeastern corners are chamfered (angled). A balustrade is in front of the third-story windows, supported by a shelf with notches and interrupted by the chamfered corners. A parapet is above the fifth story, except in the bays above the entrance arches on Eighth Avenue and 57th Street and at the chamfered corners. With the construction of the Hearst Tower, the base's facade was retrofitted to meet updated city seismic codes. Because the original office space was replaced with an atrium in the Hearst Tower's construction, the windows on the third through sixth stories of the facade now illuminate the atrium.
The main entrance, at the center of the Eighth Avenue elevation, contains a large archway flanked by a pair of smaller, rectangular doorways. The archway has gray granite panels at its base and voussoirs and a beveled keystone at its top, overlapping with a balcony. The barrel-vaulted vestibule inside the archway contains embossed octagonal coffers. The far western end of the vestibule has an entrance with a bronze frame and four glass doors beneath a bronze-and-glass transom. There is a subway entrance on the right (north) side of the Eighth Avenue entrance vestibule. On either side of the entrance arch, the Eighth Avenue elevation contains glass and metal storefronts at ground level and seven sash windows on the second story. On 57th Street, a former secondary entrance was altered to create a storefront topped by a window. There is another subway entrance on the left of the original doorway. The remainder of the ground-story facades at 57th and 56th Streets also contain glass and metal storefronts, with loading docks on the far western section of the 56th Street facade.
The base contains six pylons, which are supported by stone pedestals with sculptural groupings on the third story and topped by sculpted urns above the sixth story. The pylons indicate that the building was originally planned as a theater. The centers of the Eighth Avenue and 57th Street facades are identical, with two pylons each. The left pylon on both entrances contains sculpture groups depicting comedy and tragedy, and the right pylon contains sculptures representing music and art. Similar pylons rise in front of the northeast and southeast corners of the base. The northeast-corner pylon contains a group representing printing and the sciences, and the southeast-corner pylon has a group representing sports and industry.
Between the pairs of pylons on Eighth Avenue and on 57th Street, on each of the third through sixth stories, is a tripartite window with fluted stone spandrels. The Eighth Avenue and 57th Street elevations contain seven bays, on either side of the vertical bay, which are set back above the second story. The third through fifth stories of these elevations have sash windows, slightly recessed behind the main facade, and the sixth-story windows are flush with the cast-stone facade. The setback and window arrangement are carried around to the eight eastern bays on 56th Street. The two westernmost bays on 57th Street and the twelve westernmost bays on 56th Street are not set back above the second story, and do not contain third-story balustrades. The third-through-fifth story bays on the western section of the 56th Street facade are grouped into six pairs, separated by pilasters which were designed to emphasize the upper, never-built stories.
A clerestory wraps around the seventh through tenth floors atop the base, structurally separating the tower from the base. The tower facade has a triangular framing pattern known as a diagrid (short for "diagonal grid") above the tenth floor, which is the tower's structural support system. The diagrid divides the tower's sides horizontally into four-story segments and diagonally into alternating upright and inverted triangles, which intersect at "nodes" along points of the facade. The arrangement of the diagrid creates chamfered "birds' mouths" at the tower's corners at the 14th, 22nd, 30th, and 38th floors. The New York Times wrote that the beams and "birds' mouths" run at a 75-degree angle to the horizontal floor slabs; another author cites the beams as running at a 65-degree angle. The structural system, similar to the Commerzbank Tower in Frankfurt and 30 St Mary Axe in London, was developed in conjunction with Ysrael Seinuk.
The triangles in the diagrid are prefabricated panels, which were manufactured by the Cives Steel Company in New York and Virginia. Each of the triangles is 52 feet (16 m) tall. The diagonal beams are typically 57 feet (17 m) long by 40 feet (12 m) wide. The columns are bolted, rather than welded, to each other at the nodes. The diagrid required 10,480 short tons (9,360 long tons; 9,510 t) of structural steel, twenty percent less than what would have normally been required for a building of similar size. More than ninety percent of the steel in the diagrid is recycled. The exterior curtain wall was constructed by Permasteelisa, which mounted 3,200 glass panels on the facade. The panels are typically 13.5 feet (4.1 m) tall by 5 feet (1.5 m) wide, although 625 of them were built to custom specifications.
Because of the facade's intricate design, the tower's window cleaning rig took three years and $3 million to plan. It incorporates "a rectangular steel box the size of a Smart car" on the roof, which hoists a 40-foot (12 m) mast and a hydraulic boom arm. Sixty-seven sensors and switches are housed in the box. A window-cleaning deck hangs from the hydraulic boom arm, supported by six wire-rope strands. The rig, installed in April 2005 on 420 feet (130 m) of elevated steel track circling the tower's roof, snapped in 2013 and trapped two window cleaners.
The Hearst Magazine Building is supported by steel columns on its perimeter. The original framework was intended to support at least seven additional stories. Joseph Urban's original plans for the tower no longer exist but, by some accounts, it would have been up to 20 stories tall. The Hearst Magazine Building had six elevator shafts, double or triple the expected number of elevators for a building of its size. A white-brick penthouse was completed above the sixth story for future expansion of the elevators. The Hearst Magazine Building's original framework was removed when the Hearst Tower was built in the 2000s. Its structure was hollowed out for the atrium of the expanded building, and new columns were installed behind the facade. "Mega columns" extend down from the perimeter of the tower, and the existing frame and new columns are connected with beams at the third and seventh stories. Eight 90-foot-long (27 m) "super-diagonals" slope from the third to the tenth floors.
The Hearst Tower has twenty-one elevators. Its stairways and elevators are in a service core along the west side, the only one that does not face a street. The original plan called for the service core to be at the center of the tower, but it was redesigned after the September 11 attacks in 2001 as a security precaution against possible attacks from the street. The offset core also enables the office floors to have an open plan, without interior columns. To compensate for the offset service core and lack of interior columns, the tower's weight is supported by the exterior diagrid (which is braced by the service core).
Since the layer of bedrock under the Hearst Tower varies in depth, the tower's foundation was built with two methods. Bedrock is only a few feet under half of the basement, and spread footings were used. Under the other half of the basement, where bedrock is a maximum of 30 feet (9.1 m) down, twenty-one caissons were installed.
The Hearst Magazine Building initially contained office space with 11-foot (3.4 m) ceilings. The original building's office space was replaced with a 95-foot-tall (29 m) atrium when the tower was built. The atrium has a volume of 1,700,000 cubic feet (48,000 m). The lobby, accessed by escalators from the Eighth Avenue entrance, is on the third story of the original building. The escalators run through a 27-by-75-foot (8.2 by 22.9 m) waterfall, which uses recycled water from the building's green roof. The waterfall is complemented by Riverlines, a 70-foot-tall (21 m) fresco by Richard Long. The atrium has two mezzanines; one contains a 380-seat cafeteria, and the other houses an exhibition area. The cafeteria, Cafe 57, is used by Hearst employees and visitors. The north side of the atrium has a screening room. Two storefronts are at ground level under the atrium: an anchor space with about 12,000 square feet (1,100 m), and another space with about 2,500 square feet (230 m).
The tower begins with the tenth story, which is 110 feet (34 m) high and slightly above the roof of the atrium. Each tower story covers 22,000 square feet (2,000 m), and has 13.5-foot (4.1 m) ceilings. The floors were designed to house many Hearst publications and communications companies, including Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, and Seventeen. In addition to Hearst offices, the tower has a staff fitness center on the 14th floor. Executive rooms are on the 44th floor.
The tower has several design features intended to meet green building standards as part of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program. The limestone-clad floor slabs of the atrium and office floors contain polyethylene tubes for heated (or cooled) water to regulate temperature and humidity. A 14,000-US-gallon (53,000 L) tank in the basement collects rainwater from the building's roof, some of which is pumped through the lobby's waterfall. The furniture and lights were designed to be energy-efficient. Two executive stories have daylight dimming systems, which dim when there is sunlight; the other office stories have daylight switching systems, which turn off when there is sunlight. About 85 percent of the material from the old building's interior was recycled for use in the tower's construction.
William Randolph Hearst moved to New York City in 1895, and became a successful magazine magnate over the following three decades. Almost immediately after moving to the city, Hearst envisioned the creation of a large Midtown headquarters around Columbus Circle in the belief that the area would become the city's next large entertainment district. From 1895 to the mid-1920s, Hearst bought several large plots around the circle for his headquarters. Hearst also believed that Manhattan's Theater District would extend to Columbus Circle and became interested in theater partially because of his mistress, actress Marion Davies. Hearst hired Joseph Urban for several early-20th-century theater projects, and the men became close friends.
By early 1924, Hearst had obtained an option to acquire a 200-by-200-foot site along Eighth Avenue from 56th to 57th Street, near the 57th Street artistic hub. That April, he acquired the property title for the site. Hearst gradually acquired large areas of land around the intersection of Eighth Avenue and 57th Street, though none of the other sites were developed. Metropolitan Opera director Otto Hermann Kahn had begun planning a new opera house to replace an existing building at 39th Street and Broadway at the same time, spending $3 million in late 1925 to acquire the site west of Hearst's lot. Plans for the 57th Street opera house were made public in January 1926, but the Met abandoned the plans two years later.
In conjunction with the canceled opera house, Hearst originally planned to construct a two-story office and retail building with a 2,500-seat theater designed by Michael Bernstein. This was subsequently changed to a six-story office and theater building, designed by Thomas W. Lamb. Hearst's magazines were slated to be published three blocks west, on a block bounded by 11th and 12th Avenues between 54th and 55th Streets. The 11th Avenue site was abandoned by August 1926 and Hearst had replaced Lamb, hiring Urban to design a magazine headquarters for the Eighth Avenue site. The proposed magazine headquarters was a skyscraper and Hearst hired George B. Post & Sons, who had experience building skyscrapers.
Excavation of the Hearst Magazine Building had begun by June 1927. The section of Eighth Avenue between 42nd and 59th Streets was experiencing rapid development, with surrounding real-estate values increasing 200 percent since the beginning of the 1920s. This was, in part, due to the development of the Independent Subway System's Eighth Avenue Line and zoning regulations which permitted skyscrapers along that section of Eighth Avenue. By January 1928, the Hearst Magazine Building was nearly completed, having cost $2 million (equivalent to $28 million in 2023).
Urban and Post drew up plans for a street-level 1,000-seat concert hall shortly after the Hearst Magazine Building was finished, with a 600-seat secondary auditorium in the basement and a planned 1929 completion date. The Hearst Corporation acquired the land under the building in 1930 for $2.25 million or $2.5 million. With the onset of the Great Depression shortly after the Hearst Magazine Building's completion, planning for its upper stories stalled for over a decade. The New York Evening Journal, one of Hearst's newspapers, transferred ownership of the building to Hearst Magazines in 1937 as part of a reorganization of Hearst Corporation properties. At the time, the building was valued at $3.253 million (equivalent to $54.19 million in 2023); Hearst owed $126 million (equivalent to $2.1 billion in 2023) and was selling his holdings. He considered borrowing an additional $35.5 million, part of which was to repurchase the Hearst Magazine Building, but ultimately reconsidered.
In 1945, George B. Post & Sons prepared plans for nine additional stories. The plans were filed with the New York City Department of Buildings the following year, when the tower was estimated to cost $1.3 million. The additional stories were never completed; a New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) report about the building did not specify a reason for this. The Hearst Magazine Building retained most of its original architecture throughout the 20th century, though the ground-level storefronts were replaced in 1970.
The Hearst Corporation again began planning a tower atop the Hearst Magazine Building in the early 1980s. A restoration of the building had then been recently completed. During much of that decade, the Hearst Corporation rapidly acquired media companies such as magazines, publishers, and television stations. In 1982, the LPC began considering city-landmark designation for the Hearst Magazine Building. Further discussions of landmark status took place in 1987, and the LPC granted landmark status to the building's facade on February 16, 1988. The designation meant that the LPC had to approve any proposed changes to the Hearst Magazine Building exterior. Beyer Blinder Belle proposed a 34-story green-glass tower during the late 1980s, which did not come to fruition.
The Hearst Magazine Building was too small to house all the Hearst Corporation divisions, although it was the company's headquarters. By the beginning of the 21st century, the building contained the Good Housekeeping offices, corporate offices, and Hearst's media division; the corporation's other magazines were published in several nearby buildings. In 2000, the Hearst Corporation announced plans to consolidate all its divisions by completing its long-delayed tower. Planning for the tower had been fueled in part by the development of other media headquarters nearby, such as the planned New York Times Building and the Condé Nast Building at 4 Times Square. Hearst reportedly met with Polshek Partnership early in the planning process.
In February 2001, the Hearst Corporation announced that it had hired Norman Foster to design a tower addition. Foster's selection, which followed his failed bid to design the New York Times Building, led one architect to say: "My guess is Hearst wanted to outdo the Times." Despite the September 11 attacks later that year, the Hearst Corporation decided to proceed with the project. Foster said that the board felt that "If we don't do anything, [the terrorists] have won". Following the attacks, Foster and Hearst decided to restrict visitor access to part of the atrium and relocate the tower's core away from the street. Other parts of the design were also reviewed, but the tower's glass facade was retained. Foster's team designed over one hundred plans for the tower. He filed plans for the construction of the Hearst Tower that October, and the LPC approved the tower one month later. Hearst had consulted with the community to allay any concerns, and the approval took less than three hours. The only major opponent was the Historic Districts Council, whose executive director said that the tower "does not respond to, respect, or even speak to its landmark base".
The Hearst Tower was the first major skyscraper in Manhattan built after the September 11 attacks. Before the start of construction, Good Housekeeping moved to another Hearst Corporation building, and two thousand employees were relocated. Work on the Hearst Tower began on April 30, 2003, and the Hearst Magazine Building's interior was demolished in the middle of that year. The original framework was left intact until new steel beams were installed, and the landmark facade was preserved and cleaned for $6 million. Steel construction began in March 2004. The floor slabs were installed at an average rate of one floor every four days, and the curtain wall was installed at a rate of one floor every six days. The Hearst Tower was topped out on February 10, 2005. The first employees moved into the tower during the last week of June 2006, but it was not officially completed until that October. The Hearst Tower cost a total of $500 million.
Shortly after completion, it was the first New York City building to receive a LEED Gold certification for its overall design. Because of the building's environmental features, its operating costs were 25 percent lower than those of a typical similar-sized skyscraper. The LEED certification was upgraded to Platinum in 2012. Although the upper floors were quickly occupied, the ground-floor retail space remained vacant for several years; any retail lease had to be approved by several Hearst Corporation officials, and the space's asking price was $400 per square foot ($4,300/m) per month. The space was not occupied until 2011, when cookware retailer Sur La Table opened a store. Panera Bread leased a ground-level storefront in 2022, intending to open a flagship store; the shop opened that November.
Before the tower's construction, the Hearst Magazine Building was considered an indication of unexecuted plans. One observer, writing to the LPC in 1982, said that the structure was designed in "an unusual style, by an unusual (and unusually talented) designer". Architectural writer Eric Nash wrote in 1999 that the Hearst Magazine Building was a vestige of the original tower that had been planned on the site. Two years later, Herbert Muschamp of The New York Times wrote that, despite Urban's experience with both theatrical design and architecture, the Hearst Magazine Building was little more than a standard Art Deco building. Christopher Gray, another Times reporter, described the structure as having a funereal quality. William Randolph Hearst left little indication of what he thought the Hearst Magazine Building represented.
Critics noted the tower's contrast with the older base. The architectural critics Justin Davidson and Edwin Heathcote both described the tower as floating above the base due to the sharply differing architectural styles. Nicolai Ouroussoff of The New York Times wrote that the tower "may be the most muscular symbol of corporate self-confidence to rise in New York since the 1960s", even as its design clashed with that of the Hearst Magazine Building. The architectural writer Paul Goldberger regarded the Hearst Tower as the city's best-looking skyscraper since 140 Broadway, which had been completed in 1967. Not all analysis was positive; an Architectural Record writer likened the tower to a misplaced military structure, while Herbert Muschamp called it a "glass square peg in a solid square hole".
The Hearst Tower addition received the 2006 Emporis Skyscraper Award as the best skyscraper in the world completed that year. The American Institute of Architects' 2007 List of America's Favorite Architecture ranked the Hearst Tower among the top 150 buildings in the United States. The tower received a British Construction Industry Award in 2007, and it was a runner-up for the Royal Institute of British Architects' Lubetkin Prize. The Hearst Tower received the 10-Year Award from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat in 2016, which cited the tower's "structural complexity" as a consideration in its value and performance. Since 2018, Hearst Television stations have used on-screen graphics based on the diagrid of the tower's facade.