787 Seventh Avenue (Axa Equitable Center)

787 7th Avenue | also 155 West 51st Street, 156 West 52nd Street, 152 West 52nd Street | Times Square | built 1985

Open on the map11 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

    Equitable buys Thomas Hart Benton's America Today murals for its new tower

    Equitable Life paid a reported $3.1 million for the ten panels of Thomas Hart Benton's America Today, which the New School had commissioned in 1930 and removed from a fifth-floor classroom in 1982. The Janet Gallery had held them while looking for a buyer, and the mayor's office pointed it to buildings under construction, which led to Equitable's headquarters going up on Seventh Avenue.

    Source: Internet Archive

  2. 1985

    July 18

    A construction hoist topples from Equitable Tower West and kills two workers

    Shortly after 2 p.m., a construction elevator that three workers were jacking into position on the 52nd Street side of the nearly finished tower fell 30 feet. Kevin McClosky, 37, and Thomas O'Brien, 43, died, and Cosmo Urcino was hurt. They worked for a scaffolding subcontractor under Turner Construction, and city inspectors had found no violations two weeks before.

    Source: Internet Archive

  3. 1986

    Edward Larrabee Barnes's two-tone tower for Equitable rises with a five-story cube atrium

    Equitable's board approved a Seventh Avenue headquarters in February 1983 and hired Barnes, after the Victoria and Abbey hotels on the site were taken down by hand. The 54 stories are faced in reddish granite verticals and buff limestone bands, with three setbacks and an arch-windowed penthouse. The main lobby is a five-story atrium shaped as an 80-foot cube. Paul Goldberger called the design "54 stories of ambivalence."

    Source: Wikipedia

  4. 1986

    February 11

    Lichtenstein paints a 68-foot mural in the atrium as a Whitney Museum branch opens in ground-floor galleries

    Roy Lichtenstein painted Mural with Blue Brushstroke, 68 by 32 feet, on the atrium wall in 1986. Equitable had bought Thomas Hart Benton's America Today murals in 1984 for a reported $3.1 million and hung them in a passage. A Whitney Museum of American Art branch opened in two storefront galleries on February 11, 1986, with Equitable covering its operating costs for six years.

    Source: Wikipedia

  5. 1986

    Le Bernardin and Palio open as the building's first restaurants

    Equitable wanted only top restaurants, and the building opened with an Italian one, Palio, and a French one, Le Bernardin. Palio's bar room still has a mural by Sandro Chia of the Siena horse race; that space has held the Aldo Sohm Wine Bar since 2014. Le Bernardin, a Michelin-starred restaurant, was still operating there in the 2010s.

    Source: Wikipedia

  6. 1995

    Equitable signs to move across the Avenue of the Americas to 1290, a decade after finishing its tower

    The Times reported in July 1995, citing real estate executives, that Equitable had signed a lease with Olympia & York covering 12 floors, about 531,000 square feet, at 1290 Avenue of the Americas. The insurer occupied only about 10 percent of the three-million-square-foot Equitable Center and had put 300,000 square feet at 787 Seventh Avenue on the market earlier that year. The move was not to be completed until 1999.

    Source: Internet Archive

  7. 1997

    IBM's Deep Blue beats Garry Kasparov in a chess match held at Equitable Center

    Equitable Center hosted the 1997 chess match in which IBM's Deep Blue beat the reigning world champion, Garry Kasparov. The building also has a corporate auditorium of about 500 seats, used for the announcement of the merger of IBM and Lotus Development and that of Kimberly-Clark and Scott Paper, as well as for jazz performances and film premieres.

    Source: Wikipedia

  8. 2002

    January

    Palio closes, but its Sandro Chia horse-race mural is kept for the bar room

    The Italian restaurant Palio, off the atrium on West 51st Street, closed in January 2002. Office workers mourned its bar, whose four walls carry a mural of the Siena horse race painted by Sandro Chia in 1985 as part of Equitable's push for cultural recognition. The landlord said it would stay, and the next operators, hoping to reopen by fall, would be required to keep it.

    Source: Internet Archive

  9. 2002

    Sidley Austin moves 1,000 people into eleven floors less than a year after losing its World Trade Center offices

    Over the Fourth of July weekend in 2002, Sidley Austin Brown & Wood relocated about 1,000 people from temporary space on Third Avenue to floors vacated by Ernst & Young. The firm had lost its offices on floors 56 to 60 of the World Trade Center's north tower, could not find 340,000 square feet downtown, and had just 62 days to renovate. Staff from the old World Trade Center group got their former phone numbers back.

    Source: Internet Archive

  10. 2016

    February

    CalPERS buys the tower after showing interest at $1.9 billion, among the priciest single-building sales in New York

    Axa Equitable put the tower and its neighbor at 1285 Sixth Avenue up for sale in August 2015. By the year's end the California Public Employees' Retirement System had shown interest in paying $1.9 billion for 787 Seventh Avenue, which would make it one of the costliest single buildings ever sold in the city. It announced the purchase in February 2016, with a $780 million Deutsche Bank mortgage. The building was almost fully occupied at the time, with only 1.6 percent vacant.

    Source: Wikipedia

  11. 2019

    June 10

    A helicopter crashes on the roof, killing the pilot and forcing an evacuation

    On June 10, 2019, a helicopter crashed onto the roof of the tower, killing the pilot and starting a fire that led to the building's evacuation. Nobody else was injured, and the wreckage was cleared away. In early 2020 an Urbanspace food hall opened at ground level, and in 2022 BNP Paribas, a major tenant, had its name put above the Seventh Avenue entrance in place of Equitable's.

    Source: Wikipedia

Further reading

Nearby

All 91 buildings with stories in Times Square