280 Park Avenue: Bankers Trust

Banker’s Trust Company Building
280 Park Avenue
Emery Roth & Sons, 1960-63

The Banker’s Trust Company Building was the last tower-on-base office building to be built on Park Avenue. Industrial designer Henry Dreyfus worked in collaboration with Emery Roth & Sons, architects of the exterior, and Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, interior architects, on the 412-foot-tall structure situated between East 48th and 49th Streets. Like other banks at the time, the Banker’s Trust Company wanted to make a presence for itself in midtown. The building though was a departure in a number of ways from more typical construction. Rather than a glass and metal curtain wall, pre-cast concrete frames surround floor-to-ceiling windows. The 16-story base and 14-story single tower are of roughly equal height, differing itself from the multiple stepping of wedding cake buildings. The three foot high podium or plaza on which the building sits was necessitated to clear the two levels of railroad tracks beneath it.

References:

Stern, Robert A.M., Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial (New York City: The Monacelli Press, 1995), 336.