Lever House (Fred Charles)

No Clear Solution

When you replace all the glass in the all-glass Lever House, is that restoration or desecration?

BY WAYNE CURTIS

The resemblance, it must be admitted, is a little uncanny. Stroll down Manhattan’s Park Avenue and pause at the northwest corner of East 53rd Street and you’ll see a building that looks exactly like the famed Lever House. I mean exactly. You could stand with a photo of the original 1952 building in one hand and compare it with what’s in front of you.

There it is in the photo: a slender, 21-story tower of aquamarine glass, as graceful as a waterfall frozen in midtumble, apparently levitating over a delicate horizontal base, which itself floats above the street. And there it is in midtown, the same. Sure, the plaza beneath and around the building’s elevated base is more inviting, with a new garden featuring Isamu Noguchi sculptures. And perhaps by the time you get there, a new restaurant will be open in a former executive meeting room along 53rd Street.

These minor differences notwithstanding, a reasonable person would have to agree that this building looks awfully similar to the one in the picture. Some people—quite a few, actually—would say that this is the authentic and original Lever House, built on this very site by the noted manufacturer of soap products and designed by the influential architect Gordon Bunshaft, who in the early postwar years headed up the young design team in the New York office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

Yet how could these two be the same? Over the past couple of years, as anyone who’s seen it can attest, the Lever House was stripped of its exterior wall, right down to its bones, and then a new wall went up. Like a sofa that’s been reupholstered with a more stain-resistant material, the Lever House was covered with a new fabric that’s even better than the original.

The Lever House restoration has gone over rather well with New Yorkers in general and with preservationists in particular, some of whom have hailed the sensitivity of the work. The city’s Landmarks Conservancy even gave an award last spring for the stunning job. “It hasn’t looked this good since the day it opened,” the conservancy’s Roger Lang told me when I called to ask about it. Clearly, all involved in the restoration deserve accolades.

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