New York City
New York is the most populous and most international city in the United States of America (USA). The megacity has about 20 million inhabitants in its metropolitan area and is not only an important economic hub, but also a popular destination for tourism and especially for the arts and culture.
On the streetline panorama you can see Fifth Avenue. It divides Manhattan – one of the five administrative districts of New York City (NYC) – into East and West, and the house numbers on the streets count upwards from Fifth Avenue. Dutch merchants settled on the peninsula of the district on the southern tip of Manna-Hatta Island as early as 1610. Today, the city district with its numerous sightseeings defines the classic image of New York.
Fifth Avenue | Midtown Manhattan
Here we are located in Midtown Manhattan, the central part of the peninsula. Here you will find the most expensive real estate lots in the world. The High Rise 666 Fifth Avenue on the left side of the Panorama dates back to 1957. The 41-storey skyscraper was designed by Carson & Lundin, it includes a subway entrance and has served as the location for films such as The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).
Saint Thomas Church
Right next to it we see the Saint Thomas Church, which in 1914 was built in the style of Historicism, relating back to French Gothic. The architects Ralph Adams Cram and Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue replaced a church destroyed by an earthquake on the same site. The Buchmann Tower on its right side, which is part of the ensemble, was built in 1957 and has three floors facing the street. This creates a compagnon to Saint Thomas Church, also adapting to the church in its materiality, the sand-lime brick.
University Club of New York | The Peninsula
The University Club of New York is residing in the representative building in the centre of the panorama. Due to increasing membership numbers in the 1890s, the new building on Fifth Avenue was realized by club members Charles McKim, William Mead and Stanford White. The architects were inspired by Italian Renaissance palazzi when designing one of the largest urban clubhouses in the city. The regular arrangement of the windows, the symmetrical parts of the building and the clear accentuation of the individual floors are clear characteristics of a palazzo.
The design of the façade was also adopted in the directly adjacent Peninsula Hotel building. The luxury hotel was designed in 1908 by the architectural office Hiss and Weekes and adapts to its neighbouring building in a historicizing way by using the style of Beaux-Arts.
Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church
The Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church is the second sacral building in the panorama and is particularly striking for its colorfulness thanks to the red New Jersey sandstone used. At the time of its construction in 1875, the Victorian-style building was the highest in Manhattan. Until today the church clock can only be operated mechanically and has to be wound weekly. Due to the neighbouring hospital (at Peninsula Hotel location) at the time of construction, church bells were not used, which might have disturbed patients.
On the right a little to the backg we see the youngest building in the picture, as the skyscraper was built in 1990. Nevertheless, different epochs are united on the property: The five-storey buildings along the road date from the beginning of the 20th century. Instead of being demolished, the listed buildings had to be integrated by the new building and thus still remind us today of Manhattan’s building scales before the time of the skyscrapers.
Additional streetline visualizations of New York City are currently in preparation.
Among the detail pictures of the panorama there is also a complete view of it with the full height of the skyscrapers. For more unusual street fronts including church buildings you can check our church archive.
