Olympic Tower

• 1. Introduction

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  Olympic Tower, at 641 Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, opened on the 6th of September 1974, and its first residents moved in just months before New York City entered its worst fiscal crisis in living memory. Standing 51 stories above St. Patrick's Cathedral, the tower was the first skyscraper built inside a special zoning district designed to save Fifth Avenue's retail character. Its glass curtain wall was intentionally tinted brown so it would mirror the Gothic stone facade of the cathedral directly to its south. At the dedication, 70 percent of the commercial space was already leased, and 24 apartments had already sold. But critics from The New York Times called it 'oppressively banal' and said it overwhelmed the avenue 'like an aircraft carrier beside a row of sailboats.' Who built it, who bought it, and why it became one of the most exclusive addresses in New York are questions whose answers keep surprising.

• 2. A Zoning Gambit

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  In February 1971, New York City mayor John Lindsay proposed a special zoning district along Fifth Avenue's midtown section. The legislation went into effect in April 1971 and offered developers bonuses in floor area in exchange for ground-floor retail and mixed uses. Olympic Tower was the first building anywhere on Fifth Avenue to take advantage of it. Its floor area ratio reached 21.6, the maximum the city allowed at the time. That figure was 20 percent above the ceiling then permitted in the densest commercial districts, achieved entirely through the bonuses the new district provided. Developers Arlen Realty and Aristotle Onassis's Victory Development received an additional variance exempting them from a required setback on 51st Street. The only setbacks on the finished building face 52nd Street, where a 22-story section known as the 'bustle' steps back from the main facade. Jaquelin Robertson's mayoral Office of Midtown Planning collaborated directly with the developers to shape the mixed-use program that unlocked those bonuses.

• 3. The Architects Who Didn't Build It

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  Morris Lapidus recalled begging Arthur Levien and Arthur G. Cohen, the presidents of Arlen Realty, 'for two long years' to be hired on the project. Arlen had considered six other firms before reluctantly giving Lapidus one week to produce a design. His proposal was an L-shaped 40-story building with a granite slab base topped by a glass cube containing a sky plaza, a full-story art gallery, and executive apartments. Meshulam Riklis, chairman of the Rapid America corporation that owned McCrory's, recalled the design fondly. Onassis himself approved it. Then, after the Fifth Avenue zoning district was created and Robertson's office characterized the design as excessively unconventional, Aristotle's wife Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis intervened. She said she 'could not have his name associated with such vulgarity.' Lapidus was fired. Kahn & Jacobs was hired next and then also dismissed. In September 1971, Lindsay announced that Skidmore, Owings and Merrill would design the tower. Whitson Overcash of SOM served as partner in charge and Paul Baren as project manager.

• 4. Engineering the Hybrid Tower

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  By June 1973, the steel framework had passed the twelfth story of what would become an unusual structure. Olympic Tower's superstructure is split: the lower 21 stories are framed in structural steel, while the upper 30 stories are cast concrete. The 22nd floor acts as a transfer truss, carrying vertical and lateral loads from the concrete columns above down onto the steel frame below. Because the concrete columns and the steel columns do not align perfectly, the floor uses transfer girders bridged by steel billet plates welded to their top flanges. Above these plates sit steel base plates with dowels, to which the rebar cages of the concrete columns are attached. Concrete was chosen for the residential floors because it offered better acoustics, thinner floor slabs, and no need for the flexible partitioning that office floors require. Tishman Speyer, the general contractor, decided afterward not to repeat this hybrid approach on later projects, describing it as time-consuming and expensive. The Bloomberg Tower is among the few structures that have since adopted a similar steel-topped-by-concrete design.

• 5. Selling to the World

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  Olympic Tower Associates released its offering plan for 230 condominiums in May 1974, valuing the units collectively at $46.9 million, the most expensive offering for any building in New York City at that time. The developers chose the condominium structure deliberately. Most luxury buildings in New York were cooperatives, which Curbed noted could 'reject applications for almost any reason'; the developers wanted foreign buyers to face no such barrier. Brochures were printed in French, German, Japanese, and Spanish. Public relations firm Burson Marsteller advertised the building across Europe, South America, and Mexico. Arlen vice president Stanley Thea said the building had been marketed 'to a select core of 80,000 people around the world.' Individual units at opening ranged from $40,000 for a studio to $650,000 for a nine-room duplex. By 1975, foreign residents had purchased roughly 80 percent of the condominiums, with Mexicans and Venezuelans alone accounting for a quarter of all buyers. Units were priced between $122,000 and $650,000 apiece at that point, and only 20 apartments remained unsold.

• 6. Residents and Reputations

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  Aristotle Onassis himself took an apartment when the building opened. Fashion designer Halston occupied the entire 21st floor as his showroom and workrooms until 1984. Billionaire Adnan Khashoggi owned a penthouse duplex from 1976 to 1993; that unit included its own swimming pool, a 300-seat catering kitchen, a ballroom, five bedrooms, six bathrooms, indoor gardens, and a sauna. The Marcos family of the Philippines allegedly owned five condominiums, including a ten-room apartment on the 43rd floor, which the administration of President Corazon Aquino seized in the late 1980s. Actress Anne Hathaway and her then-partner Raffaello Follieri lived in Khashoggi's former duplex until 2012. Alessandra and Allegra Gucci, daughters of Maurizio Gucci, owned a penthouse listed for sale in August 2015. Curbed wrote in 2022 that residents were 'obsessed with anonymity' and that 'a number have gone decades without even seeing their next-door neighbors.' The National Basketball Association has maintained its headquarters at the property since 1998, on floors 11 through 20, under a lease running through 2035.

• 7. The Atrium Bargain

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  A Washington Post writer noted in 1992 that the atrium's 'white chairs discourage lingering.' That sentence captured something the city itself had failed to anticipate. Olympic Tower received development bonuses in exchange for including a public pedestrian atrium, Olympic Place, connecting 51st and 52nd Streets. Yet in the building's first five years of operation, none of the retail space had been rented and the atrium remained largely empty. New York City Planning Commission head Robert F. Wagner Jr. threatened to revoke the building's certificate of occupancy in 1979 unless the owners honored their agreement. After that threat, a newsstand, public restrooms, and restaurant space were added. Restaurant La Cote Basque was operating there by 1981. The atrium was fully rented by August 1982. City legislation that had incentivized heated and cooled public spaces with higher bonuses was changed after Olympic Tower's experience. In 2019, the firm Moed de Armas and Shannon renovated the atrium; sculptor Liam Gillick's five-panel work Triangulated Passage Work was installed, and a new cafe and a green wall carrying five types of plants were added. The lighting system was calibrated to shift intensity across the day in alignment with circadian rhythms.