The Real Deal New York

488 Madison Avenue is a 24-story, 447,000-square-foot, cake-like officer tower in midtown Manhattan, overlooking Saint Patricks Cathedral, erected in 1949 by Uris Buildings Corporation. In April 1953, Uris sold the building to Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. In the 1970s, an affiliate of the Feil Organization, a New York City-based real estate investment, development, and management firm, acquired the building in partnership with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The Class A, modernist office building, located between 51st and 52nd Streets, was designated a landmark in 2010. Architecture firm Emery Roth & Sons designed the glazed white brick building, which is configured of round-edged layers, reminiscent of an ocean liner.

The building is also known as the Look Building, named after a now-defunct magazine of that name that was one of its first tenants. In the late 1990s, Feil Organization hired architects Hardy Holzman & Pfeiffer Associates to conduct a restoration of the faade. As of March 2015, tenants included Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz PC, a law firm focused on media, entertainment, and advertising, Hahn & Hessen LLP, a law firm focused on the finance industry, and TBWA WORLDWIDE, an advertising agency that is a subsidiary of Omnicom Group.

-MK