Tower 49

7 East 48th Street | also 12 East 49th Street | Midtown | built 1984

Open on the map8 entries

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. 1984

    Tower 49 opens after two years of construction with First Boston and Saks as tenants

    Tower 49 opened in 1984 after two years of construction, with a roster of international tenants. According to its gallery's history, the first tenants included Saks Fifth Avenue, Bank Generale and the First Boston Corporation (now Credit Suisse). Many of them or their successors were still renting space there more than 25 years later.

    Source: tower49gallery.com

  2. 1984

    Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designs Tower 49 as a mirror-glass crystalline form

    Tower 49 stands on a lot with frontage on both East 48th and East 49th Streets between Fifth and Madison Avenues. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill gave it a simple crystalline form of two masses with beveled corners, linked by a central service core. Blue-tinted mirrored glass covers the whole tower.

    Source: Wikipedia

  3. 1992

    Tower 49 starts art programming in its lobby and creates Tower 49 Gallery

    In 1992 the building began showing art in its main lobby, creating Tower 49 Gallery. Its tall walls and ceilings suit site-specific installations, paintings and sculpture. Over the years the lobby has shown work by Frank Stella, Mark di Suvero, Jules Olitski and Shigeno Ichimura, and the gallery has also worked with the Art Students League of New York.

    Source: tower49gallery.com

  4. 2002

    January

    The Tower 49 Gallery shows five large Ronnie Landfield paintings in its lobby

    From January to December 2002, five large paintings by the New York artist Ronnie Landfield hung in the lobby of Tower 49. The building's gallery works with artists on long-running exhibitions and usually invites a curator to organize each one. Later shows included Jules Olitski in 2013 and 2014 and Natvar Bhavsar in 2014 and 2015.

    Source: Wikipedia

  5. 2013

    July

    The Olitski family installs eight paintings and two sculptures at Tower 49

    From July 2013 to July 2014 the family of Jules Olitski showed eight paintings and two sculptures at Tower 49, all from the family collection and made between 1965 and 1982. The Color Field painter, who pioneered spraying paint on unprimed canvas, was born in Russia in 1922 and died in New York in 2007. The family's statement said the artist might well have agreed that the building's modernist design and open spaces made an extraordinary setting.

    Source: tower49gallery.com

  6. 2014

    October 7

    Natvar Bhavsar's 1970 canvas is shown at Tower 49 for the first time in decades

    Natvar Bhavsar's show Rang Rasa ran at Tower 49 from October 7, 2014 to March 12, 2015. The gallery singles out his monumental THEER-A-THEER-A (1970), which it says was exhibited publicly there for the first time in decades. Bhavsar works with his canvas on the floor, sifting layers of fine pigment over it, sometimes as many as eighty, in a method drawn from India's rangoli tradition.

    Source: tower49gallery.com

  7. 2018

    April

    Michele Oka Doner turns the lobby into a stage for bronze deities

    Michele Oka Doner's year-long show Strategic Misbehavior, curated by Deborah Rothschild, began in April 2018. Three large deity-like bronzes, Mana, Primal Self-Portrait and Purana, stood at the main entrance with palm fronds at their feet, and two smaller bronzes sat on the reception desk. A series of 54 photographs of marine invertebrates hung in the sky lobby.

    Source: tower49gallery.com

  8. 2019

    May

    Enrico Isamu Oyama wraps the plaza columns and hangs a 60-foot painting

    In May 2019 the Japanese artist Enrico Isamu Oyama began Inside Out, a site-specific show curated by Eric Shiner. His Quick Turn Structure motif, drawn from aerosol writing, covered the six columns of Tower 49's public plaza with tall sticker installations, and a painting 60 feet wide hung on the wall behind the lobby's main desk.

    Source: tower49gallery.com

Further reading

Nearby

All 178 buildings with stories in Midtown