The General Motors Building (also the GM Building) is a 50-story, office tower at 767 Fifth Avenue at Grand Army Plaza on the southeast corner of Central Park, in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. The building occupies an entire city block between Fifth Avenue, 59th Street, Madison Avenue, and 58th Street on the site of the former Savoy-Plaza Hotel. It was designed in the International Style by Edward Durell Stone & Associates with Emery Roth & Sons and completed in 1968.

The GM Building was developed by London Merchant Securities and was half occupied by General Motors (GM) upon its opening. The building's facade is made of vertical piers of white Georgia marble, alternating with strips of glass. The building has about of space, and the lobby originally contained a GM showroom, later an FAO Schwarz department store. The public plaza outside the building on Fifth Avenue was originally below grade but, after two renovations, contains the Apple Fifth Avenue entrance and a seating area above ground level. Architecture critics, including Paul Goldberger and Ada Louise Huxtable, widely disapproved of the building upon its completion.

All of the space in the building had been leased by January 1967, over a year prior to opening. General Motors relocated most of its employees and announced their intention to sell the building in 1981. Ultimately, Corporate Property Investors (CPI) bought an option on the building in 1982 and conducted a renovation in 1990. Conseco and Donald Trump purchased the General Motors Building from CPI in 1998. Five years later, it was sold to Macklowe Organization for $1.4 billion, then the highest price for a North American office building. Macklowe sold the building in 2008 to the joint venture of Boston Properties, Zhang Xin, and the Safra banking family for $2.8 billion. The joint venture continues to own the building .

Site

The General Motors Building is at 767 Fifth Avenue in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. It is bounded by 59th Street to the north; Fifth Avenue and Grand Army Plaza to the west; 58th Street to the south; and Madison Avenue to the east. The General Motors Building's site covers , with a frontage of on Fifth and Madison Avenues and on 58th and 59th Streets. The building is assigned its own ZIP Code, 10153; it was one of 41 buildings in Manhattan that had their own ZIP Codes .

The General Motors Building is near The Sherry-Netherland to the north; 500 Park Avenue to the east; the Fuller Building and Four Seasons Hotel New York to the southeast; the LVMH Tower, 3 East 57th Street, and 745 Fifth Avenue to the south; the Solow Building and Bergdorf Goodman Building to the southwest; and the Plaza Hotel to the west. In addition, The Pond and Hallett Nature Sanctuary within Central Park is to the northwest, across Grand Army Plaza.

Fifth Avenue between 42nd Street and Central Park South was relatively undeveloped through the late 19th century, when brownstone rowhouses were built on the avenue. By the early 1900s, that section of Fifth Avenue was becoming a commercial area. The corner of Fifth Avenue, Central Park South, and 59th Street was developed with the Plaza, Savoy, and New Netherland hotels during the 1890s. The site of the General Motors Building was then occupied by the Savoy, which would be replaced in 1927 by the Savoy-Plaza Hotel. The only other structures on the Savoy-Plaza block were the four-story Emmet Arcade and the 15-story Madison Hotel. By the 1950s, almost all of the 19th-century structures on Grand Army Plaza had been either destroyed or renovated.

Architecture The General Motors Building was designed by Edward Durell Stone and the firm Emery Roth & Sons. It is 50 stories tall with a roof of . The building also has two basement levels. The stories are connected by 35 elevators.

Facade The facade is made of vertical piers of white Georgia marble, alternating with strips of glass. According to Stone, he used white marble because many of the surrounding buildings had similar cladding on their lower stories. Stone believed that "those black buildings that have been modish in the past look perfectly horrible". The load-bearing marble piers are rhomboid in shape and contain a thick cladding, behind which are hollow concrete columns with service ducts.

At the ground and second stories, the General Motors Building was originally clad with thirty large windows, measuring tall and thick. Ten of these panels, weighing and measuring wide, were the largest single windows ever made for a building at the time of their installation. The other twenty panels were wide. These windows enclosed a General Motors (GM) showroom.

Interior The building has about of space, though its rental space is also estimated at . According to the New York City Department of City Planning, the building has of gross floor area. A 2013 transaction among minority owners valued the building around $3.4 billion while a 2017 appraisal valued it at over $4.8 billion. The building's prestige was in part due to its proximity to Central Park, as well as its floor plates, which tended to attract larger companies.

The interiors are clad with Greek marble; the highest-quality marble was used in the lobby while lower-quality marble was relegated to upper-story spaces such as restrooms. The lobby has a patterned polygonal ceiling, green-and-white marble walls, and green marble floors with inlaid brass strips. The ceiling is original, but the floors and walls date from a 1999 renovation. The original design of the lobby included octagonal white-marble floor tiles as well as marble grilles on the walls. Originally, the north wing of the lobby had a GM showroom with of display rooms on the ground and mezzanine levels. The space housed toy store FAO Schwarz from 1986 to 2015. The store, featured in the 1988 film Big, won an award for its lighting in 2005. On the second floor is the Savoy Club, an amenity space spanning . The amenity space includes a fitness center, three conference rooms, and a dining area. The Savoy Club is clad in travertine, oak, and terrazzo, and the design of its tables and carpets is based on the decorations in the lobby.

The interior space is supported by "modules" of columns spaced apart. The executive offices of GM, on the 25th floor, were devoid of the "traditional" artwork that was standard of other executive headquarters in the city. Instead, these offices were furnished with replicas of traditional work. The upper stories' decorative elements were selected by their tenants. Three of the original upper-story tenants, cosmetics manufacturers Estee Lauder, Revlon, and Helena Rubinstein Inc., collectively took more than six stories, each with varying color schemes and art collections.

Plaza The building contains a public plaza on the Fifth Avenue end. The plaza was originally composed of a space, sunken below grade. It was connected to the ground level via a staircase, and it was partially overhung by a promenade, with shops on three sides of the plaza. Because of its position under ground level, it was seen as an "underused, unattractive desolate place" by the 1990s, with green artificial turf and mostly empty retail space. It was raised to street level around 1999. Slightly elevated groves of trees were installed on the plaza's north and south ends while fountains, benches, and a retail pavilion were built below grade, accessed by stairs at the center of the Fifth Avenue facade.

The plaza was again reconstructed around 2005 for the construction of Apple Fifth Avenue, a large Apple Store. The building's public plaza was further leveled and low L-shaped parapets were installed at the four corners of the plaza, framing its sides. Shallow decorative pools were installed on the north and south sections of the plaza, surrounded by tables, chairs, planters, and a few honey locust trees. In its configuration following the 2005 renovation, the plaza is slightly raised above ground level, with pools, trees, and benches on the plaza's northern and southern sides. The Apple store's entrance, at the center of the plaza, is a glass cube that has been likened to the Louvre Pyramid; the cube allows a descent into the store via glass elevator and spiral staircase. This addition was designed by Apple and the firm of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson.

History The Savoy-Plaza Hotel was purchased in 1962 by Webb and Knapp. The same year, the company resold a two-thirds interest to Canadian company British Commercial Property Investments and a one-third interest to British company London Merchant Securities. The companies also acquired the Emmet Arcade prior to August 1964. When the companies purchased the Madison Hotel in October 1964, they gained ownership of the whole city block.

Development

In August 1964, the media reported that the Savoy-Plaza would be razed at the end of the 1965 World's Fair, and a 40-story building occupied primarily by GM would be constructed on the site. At the time, GM was housed in 1775 Broadway (now 3 Columbus Circle) at Broadway and 57th Street, three blocks west; GM had leased space in that structure since 1927, and it had become dilapidated. The announcement of the GM Building led to a significant public outcry and protests. In December 1964, Stone presented plans for a 48-story office tower on the Savoy-Plaza Hotel site, with a one-story podium and vertical marble strips on the facade. According to Stone, he wished "to create a building that will salute the skyline and enhance one of New York's finest neighborhoods". The same month, GM acquired a half interest in the Savoy Fifth Avenue Corporation from London Merchants.

Plans for the GM Building were filed in January 1965, in spite of opposition to the proposed closure of the Savoy-Plaza. Cecilia Benattar, president and chief executive officer of the North American holdings of London Merchants, was to oversee development of the new structure. A group called Save Our Landmarks threatened a boycott of GM products if the project proceeded. Even so, the Savoy-Plaza was already being shuttered in stages, and the Savoy-Plaza closed permanently at the end of June 1965. Demolition of the Savoy-Plaza began that year, but two existing tenants of the hotel had leases that were not scheduled to expire for several more years. Consequently, Benattar considered leaving a remnant of the old hotel in place unless London Merchants could reach an agreement with the lessees.

The General Motors Building was nearly completed by October 1967, except for facade sheathing. Much of the controversy and boycott threats had decreased by then. The building was only the fourth major skyscraper to be developed on Fifth Avenue following World War II, after the Tishman Building at 666, the Canada House at 680, and the Corning Glass Building at 717 Fifth Avenue. The replacement of the Savoy-Plaza with the General Motors Building spurred a movement to save other hotels nearby. This prompted the New York City Planning Commission to rezone a three-block area around Grand Army Plaza in 1968.

20th-century use