Pepsi-Cola Building
500 Park Avenue | also 500 Park Avenue Tower | Midtown | built 1960
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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.
- 1956
City sells its nine-story Board of Education building to Pepsi-Cola for a record $2 million
In June 1956 the city auctioned the Park Avenue corner at East 59th Street, where a nine-story building from 1898 had held the Board of Education's offices for 42 years. Pepsi-Cola paid $2 million, then the largest sale of city-owned property, about $160 a square foot for the 100-by-125-foot plot. Pepsi sold the land on to the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company, which then signed a lease and construction agreement with Pepsi.
“…had been sold at public auction in June 1956 to the Pepsi-Cola Company for a record $2 million…”
- 1958
The Pepsi-Cola tower's steel columns are bolted together instead of riveted
The new headquarters used 390 tons of steel columns, joined with a high-tensile bolting method already proven on bridges and industrial plants. The method was first used in Manhattan after the city changed its building code on July 30, 1956. Two-man teams could tighten about 400 bolts in a working day, which was quicker, cleaner, safer and much quieter than the four-man riveting gangs that bolting replaced.
Source: wp2.docomomo-nytri.org
- 1958
Natalie de Blois does most of the design work on the Pepsi-Cola Building while Bunshaft is busy elsewhere
Gordon Bunshaft was the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill design partner, but he was absorbed by the Union Carbide headquarters, and senior designer Natalie de Blois recalled being practically alone on the Pepsi-Cola design. She was one of very few women architects of her day and had joined the firm in 1944. SOM founder Nathaniel Owings later wrote that some solutions credited to the firm's male stars owed more to her than SOM or the client acknowledged.
“…she "was practically alone on the design work" for the Pepsi-Cola Building…”
- 1959
Nixon and Khrushchev pose at the Pepsi booth in Moscow while the tower is going up
While the new headquarters was still being built, Pepsi's president, Donald M. Kendall, arranged a publicity coup at the 1959 Moscow Trade Fair. Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, political adversaries, were photographed together at the Pepsi booth for the world's press. Kendall led the company after the death of Alfred N. Steele, who had championed the Park Avenue project.
- 1960
Joan Crawford keeps offices in the penthouse of her late husband's headquarters
Alfred Steele, Pepsi-Cola's chairman, commissioned the building but died in 1959, before it was finished. Donald M. Kendall became president and oversaw the rest of the construction. The recessed eleventh-floor executive penthouse held the offices of Steele's widow, the actress Joan Crawford.
“The penthouse contained the offices of actress Joan Crawford, the widow of Pepsi's chairman Alfred Steele…”
Source: Wikipedia
- 1960
Pepsi-Cola dedicates its glass headquarters, and the Municipal Art Society names it Building of the Year
The 100,000-square-foot tower, built by the George A. Fuller Company for $7.8 million, was dedicated in the first days of February 1960, in the middle of a four-day convention at the Waldorf-Astoria for roughly 2,000 Pepsi bottlers. Three months later the Municipal Art Society voted it Building of the Year. In 1964 the City Club of New York gave it a First Honor Award as the best structure completed in the city since 1960.
- 1967
Pepsi-Cola leaves Park Avenue for Purchase, and Olivetti Underwood takes the building
In 1967 Pepsi-Cola moved out of Park Avenue to a campus-style headquarters on a 112-acre former polo club in Purchase, New York. That December the Olivetti Underwood Corporation signed a lease. The company, founded near Milan in 1908 as a typewriter maker, was by then also producing electronic typewriters, banking terminals, copiers and industrial robots. It stayed until 1978, when it was close to bankruptcy.
“In December 1967 the Olivetti Underwood Corporation signed a lease for the building.”
- 1984
500 Park Tower rises beside the old Pepsi building, and Larry Silverstein moves in
The Equitable Life Assurance Society bought the building and the neighboring Nassau Hotel site in 1981 and added 500 Park Tower, designed by James Stewart Polshek & Partners. When it was completed in 1984, its first eleven floors extended the office space of the old building and its upper floors held 56 condominiums. The developer Larry Silverstein lived there with his family for 33 years, and the Walt Disney Company had New York offices in the complex by the mid-1990s.
“Among the building's residents were developer Larry Silverstein, who lived there with his family for 33 years after its opening.”
Source: Wikipedia
Further reading
- 500 Park AvenueWikipedia
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