Prospect Tower, Tudor City

45 Tudor City Place | also 45 1/2 Tudor City Place, 351 East 42nd Street, 350 East 43rd Street | Murray Hill | built 1927

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The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1927

    Fred F. French puts a 30-by-50-foot electric 'Tudor City' sign on Prospect Tower's roof

    To sell apartments in a district few New Yorkers had ever looked at, Fred F. French builds framing for an electric sign about 30 by 50 feet on top of Prospect Tower, reading 'Tudor City' and visible as far west as Lexington Avenue. French's slogan for the complex was 'A city within a city.' A 1927 photograph in the company magazine The Voice shows the sign, and the matching sign on Tudor Tower was gone by 1933.

    Source: Internet Archive

  2. 1927

    Prospect Tower and the Manor are 90 percent rented by November 1927

    By November 1927, about 90 percent of the apartments in Prospect Tower and the Manor, the first two buildings of Tudor City, have been rented. The figure climbs to 99 percent by May 1928, and the complex's later towers also fill soon after they are completed.

    “By November 1927, ninety percent of the apartments in the Manor and Prospect Tower had been rented, a figure that had increased to 99 percent by May 1928.”

    Source: Wikipedia

  3. 1927

    September 30

    Prospect Tower opens as one of the first buildings of Fred F. French's Tudor City

    The Fred F. French Company began Tudor City in 1926 on the old Prospect Hill, an area by then crowded with tenements and noxious industries such as slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants. Prospect Tower, at 45 Tudor City Place, and the Manor opened on September 30, 1927, the first of the complex's buildings. The towers on Tudor City Place were built as apartment hotels with very few windows facing east toward the industrial plants across First Avenue.

    Source: Wikipedia

  4. 1927

    Tudor City's towers end up with few windows facing First Avenue

    When Fred F. French built Tudor City starting in 1926, slaughterhouses and other industrial buildings already lined the blocks east of First Avenue toward the East River. Because of that industrial strip, the complex's towers, including Prospect Tower, ended up with very few windows facing east.

    Source: Wikipedia

  5. 1949

    September

    A storm knocks the Tudor City sign off Prospect Tower, and a replacement goes up

    The rooftop sign, first built from incandescent bulbs and retrofitted with neon in 1939, falls during a September 1949 storm and is replaced. It became the last survivor of the two big advertising signs that the French Company once put on Tudor City roofs. The sign on Tudor Tower had come down around 1933.

    Source: Wikipedia

  6. 1988

    May 17

    Tudor City is landmarked after residents save its private parks

    Harry Helmsley bought most of Tudor City in 1970 and proposed replacing its two private parks with luxury apartments. Residents fought the plan for about a decade through lawsuits and activism, and the parks survived; Tudor City Greens was formed in 1987 to look after them. The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the complex on May 17, 1988.

    Source: Wikipedia

  7. 1995

    The city refuses to let Prospect Tower remove its rooftop sign

    In 1995 Prospect Tower's co-op asked the Landmarks Preservation Commission for permission to remove the illuminated "Tudor City" sign from the tower's roof. The commission refused the request, and the sign stayed up.

    Source: Wikipedia

Further reading

Nearby

All 26 buildings with stories in Murray Hill