The Hearst Tower is a building at the southwest corner of 57th Street and Eighth Avenue, near Columbus Circle, in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, United States.

The Hearst Tower is on the border of the Hell's Kitchen and Midtown Manhattan neighborhoods of New York City, two blocks south of Columbus Circle.

The building faces Central Park Place on the north, 3 Columbus Circle on the northeast, and Random House Tower on the east.

[6] Although the original Hearst Magazine Building was just outside the artistic hub, its proximity to these institutions was a factor in the choice of its location.

[8] By the 21st century, the arts hub had largely been replaced with Billionaires' Row, a series of luxury skyscrapers around the southern end of Central Park.

[14][15] Completed in 1928 and intended as the base of a future tower,[16] the Hearst Magazine Building was designed in early Art Deco style.

[19] The Hearst Corporation and Tishman Speyer developed the tower; WSP Global was the structural engineer, and Turner Construction was the main contractor.

[31] The cast-limestone facade of the Hearst Magazine Building, now the base, is a New York City designated landmark with 450,000 square feet (42,000 m2) of surface area.

[39] The main entrance, at the center of the Eighth Avenue elevation, contains a large archway flanked by a pair of smaller, rectangular doorways.

[35] On either side of the entrance arch, the Eighth Avenue elevation contains glass and metal storefronts at ground level and seven sash windows on the second story.

[40][43] Between the pairs of pylons on Eighth Avenue and on 57th Street, on each of the third through sixth stories, is a tripartite window with fluted stone spandrels.

[26][28][46] The diagrid divides the tower's sides horizontally into four-story segments and diagonally into alternating upright and inverted triangles, which intersect at "nodes" along points of the facade.

[51] The structural system, similar to the Commerzbank Tower in Frankfurt[28] and 30 St Mary Axe in London, was developed in conjunction with Ysrael Seinuk.

[56][57] It incorporates "a rectangular steel box the size of a Smart car" on the roof, which hoists a 40-foot (12 m) mast and a hydraulic boom arm.

[57][58] The rig, installed in April 2005 on 420 feet (130 m) of elevated steel track circling the tower's roof,[58] snapped in 2013 and trapped two window cleaners.

[22][48] The floors were designed to house many Hearst publications and communications companies, including Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, and Seventeen.

[83][84] Hearst gradually acquired large areas of land around the intersection of Eighth Avenue and 57th Street, though none of the other sites were developed.

[91][92][c] In conjunction with the canceled opera house, Hearst originally planned to construct a two-story office and retail building with a 2,500-seat theater designed by Michael Bernstein.

[99] The section of Eighth Avenue between 42nd and 59th Streets was experiencing rapid development, with surrounding real-estate values increasing 200 percent since the beginning of the 1920s.

[105] With the onset of the Great Depression shortly after the Hearst Magazine Building's completion, planning for its upper stories stalled for over a decade.

[85][86] He considered borrowing an additional $35.5 million, part of which was to repurchase the Hearst Magazine Building, but ultimately reconsidered.

[111] The additional stories were never completed; a New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) report about the building did not specify a reason for this.

[114] During much of that decade, the Hearst Corporation rapidly acquired media companies such as magazines, publishers, and television stations.

[126] Following the attacks, Foster and Hearst decided to restrict visitor access to part of the atrium and relocate the tower's core away from the street.

[62] The only major opponent was the Historic Districts Council, whose executive director said that the tower "does not respond to, respect, or even speak to its landmark base".

[129] Before the start of construction, Good Housekeeping moved to another Hearst Corporation building,[130] and two thousand employees were relocated.

[28][32] The original framework was left intact until new steel beams were installed,[44][132] and the landmark facade was preserved and cleaned for $6 million.

[106] Architectural writer Eric Nash wrote in 1999 that the Hearst Magazine Building was a vestige of the original tower that had been planned on the site.

[147] The architectural writer Paul Goldberger regarded the Hearst Tower as the city's best-looking skyscraper since 140 Broadway, which had been completed in 1967.

[149] The American Institute of Architects' 2007 List of America's Favorite Architecture ranked the Hearst Tower among the top 150 buildings in the United States.