1221 Avenue of the Americas is an international-style skyscraper located at 1221 Sixth Avenue, in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The 51-floor structure has a seven-storey base and a simple, cuboid massing. The intentionally featureless facade offers no decoration and consists of red granite piers alternating with glass stripes to underline the tower's verticality. There is a 35-meter setback from Sixth Avenue, featuring a sunken courtyard dominated by the 15-meter abstract steel sculpture named Sun Triangle by Athelstan Spilhaus. The tower's lobby is clad in dark red terrazzo and red marble, and is also decorated with aphorisms by Plato and John F. Kennedy.
Background
The building was part of the later Rockefeller Center expansion dubbed the "XYZ Buildings". Their plans were first drawn in 1963 by the Rockefeller family's architect, Wallace Harrison, of the architectural firm Harrison & Abramovitz. Their letters correspond to their height. 1251 Avenue of the Americas is the "X" Building as it is the tallest at 750 ft and 54 stories, and was the first completed, in 1971. The "Y" is 1221 Avenue of the Americas, which was the second tower completed and is the second in height. The "Z" Building, the shortest and the youngest, is 1211 Avenue of the Americas with 45 stories. It is the 80th tallest building in New York. The building is the former headquarters of McGraw-Hill Financial, from which it derived its former name. Other tenants include Sirius XM Satellite Radio, whose headquarters and broadcast facility are in the building, and the law firmWhite & Case. The sunken courtyard of this building contains a large metal triangle designed by Athelstan Spilhaus and fabricated by Tyler Elevator Products, arranged so the Sun aligns with its sides at solstices and equinoxes. When built, the southwestern corner held a display of scale models of planets in the Solar System. A mosaic map of the Earth survives in the northwestern corner. In 2009, the structure earned LEED for Existing Buildings certification from USGBC.
1999 elevator incident
After entering an express elevator at approximately 11:00 p.m. Friday on October 15, 1999, Nicholas White, a Business Week employee whose office was in the building, returning from a cigarette break, became trapped after a brief power dip caused the elevator to stop between the 13th and 14th floors. Though he signaled an alarm, and there was surveillance video inside the elevator cab, White was not rescued until approximately 4:00 p.m. on Sunday, October 17, nearly 41 hours later, after security guards spotted him in the surveillance cameras.
The buildings are featured in the title sequence of Saturday Night Live, seen from below looking up in the street from a car. It was used for the exteriors and lobby of Elias-Clarke's headquarters in the 2006 filmThe Devil Wears Prada and the interior shots for Suits. It is also the headquarters of Sirius XM Radio, and many radio shows broadcast from the building including The Howard Stern Show.
