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Stand at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street today and you will see 660 Fifth Avenue, a sleek mid-century office tower of glass and steel. Rewind less than a hundred years, and the exact same corner held one of the most beautiful private homes in America: the Petit Chateau, the French Renaissance masterpiece that Richard Morris Hunt built for William K. and Alva Vanderbilt and completed in 1882.
It is one of the most dramatic before-and-after transformations on the entire avenue, and it is worth lingering on, because the two structures could hardly be more different. To stand on that corner is to stand at the meeting point of two completely different ideas about what a city should be.
The 'then' is almost dreamlike. Picture carved Indiana limestone rising three and a half stories, worked by more than forty stone carvers into a confection of Gothic and Renaissance detail. Picture a steep slate roof trimmed with copper, irregular and romantic against the sky. Inside was a sixty-foot grand hall of pale Caen stone, a salon built in Paris and shipped across the Atlantic, and a banquet hall two stories high. This was the house where Alva Vanderbilt threw the 1883 costume ball that broke Mrs. Astor's grip on New York society.
The 'now' is the opposite in every way. The office building at 660 Fifth Avenue is a product of the mid-twentieth century, a tower built for commerce rather than display, its ground floor given over to retail. It is efficient, anonymous, and utterly of its time, the kind of building that thousands of people walk past every day without a second glance.
The transformation took just a single lifetime. The Petit Chateau was demolished in 1927, after only forty-five years of existence, and an office building eventually rose in its place. A person born when the chateau was new could have lived to see the tower that replaced it. That is the breathtaking speed at which this corner, and so much of Fifth Avenue, was remade.
What makes this particular before-and-after so powerful is the completeness of the substitution. There is no fragment of the chateau left on the site, no preserved doorway, no plaque. The carved limestone, the slate roof, the grand hall, all of it is gone, and in its place stands a building whose very purpose, anonymous commerce, is the antithesis of the chateau's purpose, which was to announce one family's arrival at the summit of society.
If you want to feel the change, find an old photograph of the Petit Chateau and hold it up against the modern tower. The mind struggles to accept that they occupied the same ground. One is a fairy-tale castle of carved stone; the other is a grid of glass. And yet they are the same address, separated by a few short decades of New York's relentless reinvention.
This is the essence of the then-and-now story on Fifth Avenue. The avenue did not slowly evolve, with old and new blending gently together. It was remade, abruptly and completely, as the age of private palaces gave way to the age of commerce. The corner of Fifth and 52nd is one of the clearest places to see that rupture, because the two structures are so utterly unlike each other.
For anyone who loves the lost mansions, this corner is a kind of pilgrimage site, even though there is nothing there to see. You go not to look at a building but to stand on a spot, to occupy the same ground where the Petit Chateau once stood, and to feel the strange vertigo of knowing what used to be there.
From the house that defined Gilded Age taste to an office tower that could be in any city in the world: that is the journey this single patch of Manhattan made in under a century. It is the lost mansions story in miniature, written into one corner of Fifth Avenue, waiting for anyone who knows to look.
