One Astor Plaza, also known as 1515 Broadway and formerly the W. T. Grant Building, is a 54-story office building on Times Square in the Theater District of Midtown Manhattan in New York City, New York, U.S. Designed by Der Scutt of Ely J. Kahn & Jacobs, the building was developed by Sam Minskoff and Sons. One Astor Plaza occupies a site bounded by Broadway to the east, 45th Street to the north, Shubert Alley to the west, and 44th Street to the south. The building is named after the Hotel Astor, which had occupied the site from 1904 to 1967. SL Green Realty and Allianz own One Astor Plaza, which served as the corporate headquarters of Paramount Global until 2025. The building was the operational, secondary headquarters and major office space for Skydance Corporation (then Paramount Skydance) from August 2025 until its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery in 2026, when it again became the company’s headquarters.
The building consists of a low base that occupies most of the site, as well as a tower section with smaller floor areas. The facade is designed in glass and stone, with large signs. The upper stories have dark glass windows, with stone mechanical shafts on all sides of the tower. The lower stories contain a public passageway and retail at ground level, as well as a lobby and Paramount Global's Studio 1515 at the second story. The building was constructed with two theaters: a Broadway house called the Minskoff Theatre on the third floor, as well as a cinema in the basement (now an event venue called Palladium Times Square).
Sam Minskoff and Sons bought the Hotel Astor site in 1966 and initially proposed a 50-story tower without any theaters. Following a series of discussions, the Minskoff Theatre was included in exchange for additional floor area. Construction began on October 10, 1968, and the first tenants moved into the building in May 1971, with the building being completed the next year. One Astor Plaza was originally named after its anchor tenant, the W. T. Grant retail chain, which only occupied the space until 1976. Tishman Speyer and the Equitable Life Assurance Society bought One Astor Plaza in 1984. Tishman Speyer sold its ownership stake in 1990, just before Equitable filed a bankruptcy proceeding against the building, which was withdrawn after a lawsuit. Viacom leased space at One Astor Plaza starting in 1990, and its successors gradually came to occupy most of the building. SL Green Realty has owned or co-owned the building in some capacity since 2003.
Site One Astor Plaza is at 1515 Broadway, along Times Square, in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, New York, U.S. While the building carries a Broadway address, it is actually on the west side of Seventh Avenue. The section of Broadway and Seventh Avenue between 43rd and 45th Streets is officially listed on city maps as "Times Square", but the adjoining section of Broadway was converted into a permanent pedestrian plaza in the 2010s. One Astor Plaza's rectangular land lot is bounded by Times Square to the east, 45th Street to the north, Shubert Alley to the west, and 44th Street to the south. The lot spans , with a frontage of on Times Square and on 44th and 45th Streets. Shubert Alley, which covers of the land lot, is a private passageway shared with the Shubert Organization. The intersection of Times Square and 44th Street, directly outside One Astor Plaza, was renamed after Viacom founder Sumner Redstone in 2021.
The surrounding area is part of Manhattan's Theater District and contains many Broadway theatres. 1515 Broadway shares the block with seven theaters to the west: the Shubert, Broadhurst, and Majestic on 44th Street and the Booth, Gerald Schoenfeld, Bernard B. Jacobs, and John Golden theaters on 45th Street. The Music Box Theatre, Imperial Theatre, and Richard Rodgers Theatre are across 45th Street to the northwest, and the New York Marriott Marquis hotel is to the north. Across Times Square are 1540 Broadway to the northeast, 1530 Broadway and the Millennium Times Square New York to the east, and 1500 Broadway to the southeast. One Astor Plaza is also close to 1501 Broadway to the south and 229 West 43rd Street, the Hayes Theater, and the St. James Theatre to the southwest.
Prior to the development of One Astor Plaza, the site had been owned by the Astor family. The site had contained the eleven-story Hotel Astor, which had been designed by Clinton & Russell in a Beaux-Arts style and opened in 1904 with 1,000 guest rooms. The hotel had contained a red-brick facade, a mansard roof, and a lobby with a 22-foot-high colonnade. According to architecture writer Robert A. M. Stern, the Astor inspired "a new species of popular hotels that soon clustered around Times Square, vast amusement palaces that catered to crowds with scenographic interiors that mirrored the theatricality of the Great White Way."
Architecture One Astor Plaza was developed by the Sam Minskoff and Sons company and designed by Kahn and Jacobs, with Der Scutt as the principal architect. In addition, Ben Schlanger was hired as a consultant for the design of two theaters in the building: the Minskoff Theatre, a Broadway house on the third floor, and the Loews Astor Plaza (now the Palladium Times Square), originally a movie house in the basement. The building engineers are Shmerykowsky Consulting Engineers.
The building has 54 stories and measures to its pinnacle. According to Emporis, the building is tall to its main roof. Internally, One Astor Plaza is served by 36 elevators. The New York City Department of City Planning cites the building as having a Gross Floor Area of , while The Skyscraper Center gives a floor area of . Underneath the building is a parking lot for 225 cars.
Form and facade
One Astor Plaza consists of a 54-story office tower above a low base. The tower stories are set back from Broadway. Under normal zoning regulations, the maximum floor area ratio (FAR) for any building on the tower's site was 15, but the developers received two bonuses of 20 percent each, bringing the FAR to 21.6. The developers had to include privately owned public space at the building's base for the first bonus, and they built a new theater for the second bonus. The Minskoff Theatre was among the first theaters built under a 1968 regulation that allowed office buildings to include a legitimate theater in exchange for additional floor area.; The bonus applied only to Broadway theaters; the movie theater in the basement did not provide any FAR bonus for the building. The building has two privately operated public spaces: the open-air Shubert Alley, as well as a ground-floor arcade beneath the center of the tower.
At the base of the tower, the facade's Broadway elevation contains a glass front. The second-floor studios contain full-height windows facing Times Square. A rooftop restaurant was originally planned for the setback above the Minskoff Theatre on the third floor, but it was never built. During a 2008 renovation by Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), the glass facade of the studios and theater was extended upward by . Two pairs of three-story-high LED signs are installed along the base's northeast and southeast corners. Each pair of signs consists of a primary display facing each intersection, used for advertising, and a smaller display facing Times Square's western sidewalk, used for displaying show information for Minskoff Theatre. The primary displays measure high by wide, while the smaller displays are 48 feet high by wide.
The tower's facade is largely made of dark glass. Vertically aligned, stone-clad mechanical ducts are placed on each side, separating the leftmost quarter from the rightmost three-quarters of the facade. These mechanical shafts rise above the roof, terminating in pointed pinnacles at each corner of the roof. The shafts were overlaid by aluminum panels during KPF's 2008 renovation. A stone band also runs at the top of the roof. The use of pinnacles and stonework was a departure from previous International Style buildings with flat roofs. Initially, the top of the building contained signs on all four sides, spelling out the name W. T. Grant, the original anchor tenant. The signs consisted of illuminated letters. They were removed in 1976 when W. T. Grant went bankrupt.
Structural features One Astor Plaza's superstructure is made of steel floor spans around a concrete core. The superstructure contains some uncommon features due to the presence of the Minskoff Theatre at the base. In typical skyscrapers, the columns of the superstructure could extend directly to the underlying bedrock, but One Astor Plaza's eastern section was directly above the theater and had to be supported entirely by the theater's roof. The steel was provided by Bethlehem Steel; its supervising engineer Thomas Connolly said One Astor Plaza's superstructure "would have been a snap from an engineering point of view", but the theater's presence made for "a humdinger of an engineering feat". The theater roof is a Vierendeel truss that rests on two girders, one weighing and the other weighing . These girders were the heaviest in any building at the time, and they had to be delivered in several pieces from the factory, itself an intricate operation.
Interior
Palladium Times Square
The Loews Astor Plaza movie theater originally occupied the building's public space below street level, accessible from 44th Street. It opened on June 26, 1974, and was the city's largest capacity cinema at 1,440 or 1,500 seats. The single-screen theater was designed with a steeply raked stadium seating layout and was intended to show the first runs of major films. There were 42 rows of seats facing the screen, which was wide. After an unsuccessful attempt to divide the theater into six screens in 1993, the theater closed in July 2004. After a $21 million renovation, the space reopened in 2005 as a music venue under the ownership of Anschutz Entertainment Group. The venue was originally sponsored by Nokia, then by Best Buy in 2010 and PlayStation in 2015. The PlayStation Theater closed on December 31, 2019, and it reopened as the Palladium Times Square event venue in 2020.
Ground level and lobby The building's main entrances are at the southeast and northeast corners, facing Times Square. Inside the entrances, escalators lead to the office lobby, which is on the second floor. The lobby contains the artwork Alight Embrace by Chris Cosma, which was installed in 2010. The artwork consists of a section of wall between the two entrances, weighing , and is made up of 1,100 glass panels measuring .
At the first floor, there is a covered arcade under the center of the building, connecting 44th and 45th Streets. This passageway is also unofficially known as Minskoff Alley. The space covers . The arcade provides an entrance to the Minskoff Theatre, which is accessed primarily by escalators. From 1982 to 1986, the arcade also contained a museum dedicated to the history of Broadway theatre, including photographs and memorabilia. The ground level also contains retailers. During the 2000s and 2010s, these included a Bank of America branch with three floor-to-ceiling stock ticker signs; a Aeropostale clothing store; an Oakley, Inc. sports accessories store; and a Swatch watch store. Facing Shubert Alley was an Italian restaurant called Cucina; and a Junior's restaurant. , Oakley, Kiko Milano, and Swatch were among the retail tenants.
Second-floor studios Originally, the second floor was occupied by a branch of the Bankers Trust bank. The branch adjoined the building's main lobby and contained a domed ceiling, as well as design features reminiscent of early-20th-century banks. The bank's office also contained a glass enclosure with an escalator between the lobby and the Minskoff Theatre, as well as a vault. By the 1990s, this level served as offices for Viacom's human-resources department.