The original Pepsi-Cola Building along Park Avenue was constructed from 1958 to 1960 and designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM).

It then served as the headquarters of Olivetti S.p.A. until 1978, when it was successively resold to Peter Kalikow, Securities Groups, and then the Equitable Life Assurance Society.

The original building was occupied by the Amsterdam and Rotterdam Bank (later ABN AMRO) starting in 1982, and 500 Park Tower was concurrently developed to the west.

[19][20] Pepsi had small office requirements, similar to the tenants of Lever House and the Manufacturers Trust Company Building, both of which SOM had previously designed.

[22] According to de Blois, she had come up with the concept of the Pepsi-Cola Building as a glass box, while Bunshaft was responsible for arranging the structural columns to create this effect.

[3][26][27] The ground-story wall consists of nearly full-height glass windows within stainless steel frames, which are set atop a granite sill.

[19] The penthouse contained the offices of actress Joan Crawford, the widow of Pepsi's chairman Alfred Steele, who had commissioned the building but died before it was completed.

[40][41] The western part of the north facade has a slightly projecting oriel window from the second to tenth floors, with the glass and aluminum skin; the design was intended to emphasize how the tower was an extension of the original building.

[57] To reverse declining profits, Pepsi hired Alfred Steele as president in 1950, and sales and earnings per share increased dramatically within five years.

[60][61] By the 1950s, the land under the Board of Education building was subject to high tax assessments, prompting the Fifth Avenue Association to recommend in 1955 that the city government sell the structure.

[36][37] Lynda Lee Mead, who had been crowned as Miss America 1960, performed the building's official ribbon-cutting, while two thousand Pepsi workers at the Waldorf Astoria New York watched the event on television.

[78] Nevertheless, in February 1967, Pepsi announced it was moving to 112 acres (45 ha) on the Blind Brook Polo Club in Purchase, within suburban Westchester County.

[80] At the time, Olivetti was starting to manufacture a variety of mechanical products such as copiers, banking terminals, and electronic typewriters.

[86] The Olivetti Building was then owned by a syndicate led by Peter Kalikow, which had also acquired the eight-story Nassau Hotel immediately to the west on 59th Street.

[50] The then-new firm of Kohn Pedersen Fox reportedly devised fourteen proposals to incorporate the structure as the base of a skyscraper on the Nassau Hotel site.

[40][87] At the time, 500 Park Avenue's site was a prime candidate for redevelopment since it had a large volume of unused development rights.

[50][51] By 1979, the Kalikow interests resold the structures to Securities Groups, led by brothers Charles and Randall Atkins,[40][50] whose company 500 Park Avenue Associates paid over $40 million.

[40][89] Shortly afterward, they decided to redevelop the Nassau Hotel site while preserving the original structure; the brothers calculated that 250,000 square feet (23,000 m2) would need to be built to make the development profitable.

[88] The development was also delayed by the New York City Planning Commission (CPC), which was studying a potential change of zoning for Midtown Manhattan.

[93] Sales at 500 Park Tower launched in February 1983 with announcements in the European cities of St. Moritz, Monte Carlo, and Frankfurt.

[94] 500 Park Tower's residential units were not expected to be ready until January 1984, but within a week of the sales launch, tenants were already in contract for eight apartments.

[100] Herbert Muschamp of The New York Times thought the designation to be ironic, as the landmarks law had originally been intended to "curtail the proliferation of modernist buildings and the loss of the fine old masonry edifices that they replaced".

At the end of that year, Equitable reached an agreement to sell 500 Park Avenue and the company's other structures to Lend Lease Corporation.

[26][112] Ada Louise Huxtable of The New York Times characterized the building as "a kind of Pazzi Chapel of corporate design" in a 1981 article.

[23] Upon Bunshaft's 1990 death, The New York Times wrote that his glass-slab designs like Lever House and the Pepsi-Cola Building "received nearly unanimous praise from the critics".

[68][114] After the lobby was divided into storefronts in the 1990s, Herbert Muschamp wrote for The New York Times: "The desecration of 500 Park raises the issue of how effectively landmark laws can protect glass buildings.

"[101] The 2010 edition of the AIA Guide to New York City described the building as "understated elegance that bowed to the scale of its Park Avenue neighbors".

[91] Huxtable considered the plans to be "one of the most skillful of 'shoehorning' jobs" for an addition to a building in New York City, much better than the Palace Hotel or Park Avenue Plaza several blocks south.

"[41][54] Also in 1984, Paul Goldberger wrote that he thought the design was largely successful, with the "only major failing" being the dark granite at the base.

[54][115] Two years after 500 Park Tower was completed, architectural writer Cervin Robinson said that "the expansion of the original space has been handled with grace and tact", describing Polshek & Partners' design as giving a "special pleasure".