432 Park Avenue

The building is located in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, New York, U.S. It is in the middle of the block bounded by 56th Street to the south, Madison Avenue to the west, 57th Street to the north, and Park Avenue to the east. The roughly L-shaped lot encompasses . The tower is centered within the block, while its base extends east along 56th Street to Park Avenue. The base has a frontage of on Park Avenue, though its main entrance is on 56th Street. Nearby buildings include Park Avenue Tower to the south, 550 Madison Avenue to the southwest, 590 Madison Avenue to the west, the Fuller Building and Four Seasons Hotel New York to the north, Ritz Tower to the northeast, and 425 Park Avenue to the east. == Architecture ==

432 Park Avenue was designed by Rafael Viñoly, and SLCE Architects served as the architect of record. The interiors were designed by Deborah Berke and the firm Bentel & Bentel. Other firms involved in construction included structural engineer WSP Cantor Seinuk, MEP engineer WSP Flack and Kurtz, and general contractor Lendlease. The project was developed by Harry B. Macklowe's company, Macklowe Properties. Five two-story windbreaks, spaced every 12 floors from the top, are unenclosed and serve to reduce the tower's wind load. The windbreaks contain modular mechanical services for the six floors above and below to reduce required ducting. Abutting the main tower are a plaza designed by Zion Breen Richardson Associates, a retail entrance at 56th Street and Park Avenue, an underground retail space, and a four-story office wing on 57th Street. When 432 Park Avenue officially topped out at , it became the tallest building in New York City by roof height, and the third-tallest by total height, after One World Trade Center and the Empire State Building. , 432 Park Avenue is the 30th-tallest building in the world, the sixth-tallest building in the United States, and the fifth-tallest building in New York City. At 15:1, The building's height was permitted by the city's zoning regulations partly because nearly a quarter of the building's floor area is devoted to structural and mechanical equipment, which is excluded from floor area ratio calculations. Due to its slenderness, the building has been characterized as part of a new breed of New York City "pencil towers". The tower's exterior is a lattice of poured-in-place concrete made from white Portland cement. Each usable floor features six windows on each elevation of the facade, and each double-story windbreak features twelve unglazed openings per elevation. The facade forms a regular grid of apertures. The windbreaks were intended to reduce swaying caused by wind, but after the tower was completed, the facade experienced excess wind forces that caused the concrete to crack. Structural features The superstructure is composed of a square reinforced concrete core with walls and an outer shell of columns that taper from wide at the bottom of the tower to at the top. The core houses the elevator shafts and mechanical services. The tower also contains an emergency-stair shaft with two concrete stairways. To maximize occupiable space, the stairways are installed in a scissor-stair configuration, in which each stairway's flights are installed atop the other's. The floor-to-floor height of each story is , of which at least is the depth of the floor slabs. Upper floors have slabs up to thick to add more mass, which dampens acceleration from wind loads. When 432 Park Avenue was being designed, structural engineer Derek Kelly created a model of Midtown Manhattan to determine the wind forces that the tower would receive. The foundation of the building contains about 60 rock anchors that descend into the underlying bedrock, providing stability. To mitigate swaying further, the top of the tower contains two Motioneering designed tuned mass dampers, and several additional dampers are located in the outriggers of some of the mechanical floors. On floor 12 is an private restaurant with a private terrace, which has been led by chef Shaun Hergatt . Floors 12 through 16 comprise a "club unit" with a fitness center; a swimming complex with a pool, whirlpool, sauna, and steam room; private meeting rooms, including a 14-seat boardroom; and a library curated by Assouline Publishing. The Atlantic magazine described the screening room as having velvet armchairs and the meeting room as having mahogany paneling. ==History==

Macklowe acquisition and financial crisis The 21-story, 495-room Drake Hotel had been constructed in 1926 at the corner of Park Avenue and 56th Street. Harry Macklowe purchased the Drake in 2006 for $418 million (equivalent to $ million in ). Following his acquisition of the hotel, Macklowe paid French delicatessen company Fauchon $4 million to shorten the terms of their lease on the ground floor of the Drake Hotel and vacate in April 2007 instead of 2016. Shortly after the agreement was reached, Fauchon sued Macklowe in New York Supreme Court claiming that the developer was harassing the store to leave by blocking their entrance with scaffolding and threatening to cut off air conditioning and access to the hotel's bathrooms. In April 2007, Macklowe purchased the Buccellati store at 46 East 57th Street for $47.5 million. This followed Macklowe's purchase of the Audemars Piguet store at 40 East 57th Street for $19.2 million, the Franck Muller store at 38 East 57th Street for $60 million, as well as 44 and 50 East 57th Street for $41 million. Following over 14 months of negotiations, Macklowe also had to pay Audemars Piguet $16.6 million to end their lease early and move across the street to 137 East 57th Street. The total cost of additional nearby parcels and air rights brought the acquisition cost to over $724 million and yielded a large L-shaped site between 56th and 57th Streets. In early 2007, Macklowe Properties secured a $543 million mortgage from Deutsche Bank on the site. Additionally, Nordstrom had signed a letter of intent to open their first New York store, a flagship, at the building's base. Macklowe had been in contract to purchase the Turnbull & Asser storefront at 42 East 57th Street for $33 million but the company's owner executed a call option in the store's lease to allow him to buy the building for $31.5 million instead. Jacob & Co's founder Jacob Arabo also demanded $100 million for the store's building at 50 East 57th Street, a price Macklowe was unable to pay. These holdouts meant Macklowe was unable to connect the other buildings he owned on East 57th Street, depriving Nordstrom of the space needed for the store's ground floor entrance. This caused Nordstrom to back out of the deal and instead open their flagship in Central Park Tower several blocks west on 57th Street. In October 2007, the New York City Department of Buildings issued demolition permits for the site; at the time, the demolition cost was estimated at $6 million, or roughly . During the 2008 financial crisis, Macklowe defaulted on the Deutsche Bank loan which was due in November 2007. In October 2007, Harry Macklowe personally repaid $156.3 million of Macklowe Property's debt on the site, bringing his personal investment in the project to over $250 million. In May 2008, hotelier Kirk Kerkorian and investment company Dubai World reportedly considered purchasing the site for $200 million in addition to assuming the existing debt on the property. The bank sued in August 2008 to begin foreclosure on the loan (which had amortized down to $482 million at the time) and take control of the development site. The bank retained just $12 million of the loan on its own balance sheet. Initially, over 20 bidders were believed to be interested including Apollo Global Management, The Related Companies, and Silverstein Properties. Only a half-dozen bidders eventually offered between $100 million and roughly $130 million, or 45 and 58 cents on the dollar respectively. Paul Manafort and CMZ Ventures In late 2007, Joseph Sitt, founder of Thor Equities, introduced Macklowe to an investment firm named CMZ Ventures. The letters "CMZ" represented Arthur G. Cohen, a New York real estate developer; Paul Manafort, a former lobbyist, political consultant, and lawyer; and Brad Zackson, a frequent partner of Manafort and Fred Trump. In 2008, CMZ Ventures agreed to pay $850 million for the development site which would fully pay off the Deutsche Bank loan and represent a small profit on top of Macklowe's total acquisition price. In fact, the purchase price was higher even than the appraised value of $780 million, a premium of over 10 percent which was unheard of for development site purchases. agreed to fund $112 million in equity and paid Manafort a deposit of $25 million. The deposit was wired from a Raiffeisen Zentralbank account that U.S. officials alleged was a front for Russian organized crime "boss of bosses" Semion Mogilevich. Manafort had met Firtash while consulting for the pro-Russia Party of Regions, at the time the ruling political party in Ukraine. French fund Inovalis also agreed to arrange another $500 million of equity for the project from various backers. Ultimately, the bid fell apart when CMZ could not arrange the necessary financing. CIM Group investment on 56th Street|alt=The porte-cochère on 56th Street, as seen from across the street. It consists of a small driveway looping in front of the main entrance; there is a canopy over the entrance. In January 2010, CIM Group agreed to pay $305 million for the complete development site including 434 Park Avenue and 38, 40, 44 and 50 East 57th Street while keeping Macklowe involved as a partner. The investment by CIM allowed Macklowe to repay the senior-most tranche 90 cents on the dollar while the junior-most tranches were completely wiped out. Citigroup's private banking arm raised an additional $415 million in equity for the project from high-net-worth individuals who invested $1 million to $5 million each. Another $100 million in equity came from CIM's existing institutional investor clients. CIM and Macklowe were sued by Franck Muller in September 2010 after the company tried to evict the watch retailer from their space at 38 East 57th Street that Macklowe had purchased several years earlier for over $60 million. The building was master-leased to a real estate investment company, Sovereign Partners, who in turn had subleased the ground floor and mezzanine space to Franck Muller until 2018. CIM and Macklowe had purchased that master lease for $5.35 million in November 2008, making a CIM-owned company Franck Muller's new landlord. The developers received a $30 million mortgage from Pacific Northwestern Bank on the site in early April 2011. Later that month, CIM filed dummy permits for a 5-story office building in order to begin excavation work on the site and by the following month had hired Rafael Viñoly to design the new tower. Macklowe, speaking at a real estate conference in New York, claimed the building would be "monumental" and a "capstone" to his career. In October, plans were revealed for a tall condominium tower on the site using the address 432 Park Avenue. Previously, CIM had reportedly considered using the building's lower floors as a luxury hotel similar to nearby One57 and spoken to operators including Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, Taj Hotels, and One&Only Resorts. The next month, CIM purchased Turnbull & Asser's storefront at 42 East 57th Street for $32.4 million and concurrently sold the nearby 50 East 57th Street to the clothier for $31.5 million, allowing CIM to expand their development site and Turnbull & Asser to remain on the same block. In December 2011, LVMH reportedly considered investing in the site for an expansion of the company's "Cheval Blanc" luxury hotel chain, creating a campus with the company's nearby LVMH Tower. Construction Excavation for the building's foundations began in early 2012. In March, CIM filed plans for the full building, revealing its 82-story, height. The New York City Department of Buildings issued the construction permit two months later. By September 2012, the building's concrete foundation had been completed and the tower crane had been installed. The building passed street level by the end of the year. As construction progressed, 432 Park's developers raised asking prices for the building's units several times. A brochure in June 2012 indicated that units would cost , but that rate had increased to by September 2012. By March 2013, asking prices had reached . In October 2012, the development also received $400 million in construction financing from hedge fund The Children's Investment Fund Management. However, the loan was also nonrecourse meaning that the lender could not go after CIM or Macklowe's other assets if they defaulted on the construction loan. Though work resumed within the month, a worker was injured in an on-site construction accident that March, when a piece of wood dropped from the fifth story. In mid-2013, developers filed a revision to the plan to add another floor. This was achieved by converting floor 95, a formerly double-height story, into two separate stories of standard height. The film also featured famed French high-wire artist Philippe Petit dangling from a helicopter, music by Cass Elliot, references to Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion and the Pantheon, and depictions of King Kong, Le Corbusier, Al Capone, and Anna May Wong. 432 Park Avenue passed the mark in June 2014. The topping out ceremony was held on October 10, 2014, signifying that the building had reached its maximum height. 432 Park Avenue was nearly completed in January 2015 when work was temporarily halted again after another construction accident. In November 2015, Macklowe added a team from brokerage Douglas Elliman to supplement the developer's internal sales team tasked with selling the tower's units. By early 2016, several websites reported that 432 Park had been officially completed on December 23, 2015. Post-opening 2010s In June 2016, Macklowe Properties agreed to pay $411.1 million to acquire the building's retail component from CIM. Several months later, it was announced that boutique watch store Richard Mille would occupy part of the ground-floor retail space. The , two-story store opened in October 2018. At the time, Richard Mille was the only retail tenant. Two months later, auction house Phillips signed a contract for retail space, consisting of at the base of the building, as well as underground, with plans to move into the space in May 2020. By the end of 2018, John Barrett also agreed to open a salon on the building's second floor and boutique perfumery Amaffi leased on the ground floor. Joanne Podell, broker for Cushman & Wakefield, stated in 2019 that she had to promise lower rents in order to attract retail tenants. In 2016, Linda Macklowe filed for divorce from Harry Macklowe. As part of the divorce proceedings, she filed a lawsuit in September 2017 claiming that Harry had illegally shrunk a condo on the building's 78th floor that Linda had agreed to purchase for $14.4 million. The couple initially agreed to purchase "his and hers" condominiums on the 78th floor in 2013, with Linda occupying the smaller "A" unit and Harry purchasing the larger "B" unit. After paying a deposit of $2.2 million, Linda claimed that the developers delayed closing four times and shrank her unit from to , giving the additional space to Harry's neighboring "B" unit. The divorce court judge ordered the tower's developers to give Linda until December 21, 2017, to decide whether to purchase the downsized unit. Linda instead chose to remain at the couple's penthouse in the nearby Plaza Hotel and dropped her lawsuit over the unit's shrinkage in exchange for the return of her $2.2 million deposit. The divorce trial also revealed that Macklowe earned just $2.5 million from his investment in 432 Park Avenue and held only a $15.7 million equity stake in the retail portion of the development. .|alt=The top stories of 432 Park Avenue. There are windows on each story, except near the bottom of the image, where there is a double-height windbreak with no windows. Following his subsequent marriage to Patricia Landeau, Macklowe installed a portrait of the couple taken by Studio Harcourt on the northwest corner of the tower's retail space in March 2019. The wedding's 200-person reception took place on the building's 78th floor in a condo that was turned into a temporary ballroom. The building also hosted an event for theater director Robert Wilson's Watermill Center as part of the Park Avenue Armory's "Armory Week" of art sales in January 2018. The event, attended by Macklowe, Zac Posen, and Claude Grunitzky, was notable for employing multiple nude performers in a departure from the more classically focused events of Armory Week which centered on 18th and 19th century art. 2020s The New York Times published residents' allegations of defects and complaints about the building in early 2021. According to the report, a leak at a mechanical floor forced two elevators out of service for several weeks in 2018. An engineer hired by the board discovered an alleged 1,500 flaws in the building. CIM filed its answer to the lawsuit that December, claiming that the safety complaints were "vastly exaggerated". The lawsuit against CIM and Macklowe had grown to include four million pages of documents by early 2024. The New York City Department of Buildings also issued building-code violations to the developers after discovering issues with the facade. that dispute was settled the next year. There were 18 apartments on sale by May 2024, including one that the sponsors had never managed to sell, Macklowe requested that CIM's lawsuit against him not go to trial, but a judge denied his request in November 2024. Several residents filed another lawsuit against Macklowe and CIM in April 2025, claiming that the building's facade had many cracks and that the developers had tried to conceal the structural defects. A New York Times article from that October stated that the roof damper had already undergone significant refurbishment and that the issues would cost $100 million to fix. == Residents ==

As early as 2012, a dozen potential clients were described as being interested in occupying units at 432 Park, By the end of 2015, close to 90 percent of the apartments had been sold, with almost half of those owned by a foreign citizen, "part of a global elite that collects residences like art." Many of the buyers were wealthy Chinese, though there were also numerous Brazilian and Russian clients. The German newspaper Der Spiegel estimated that the majority of the units would remain unoccupied for more than ten months a year. Other wealthy residents include Bridgewater Associates executive Bob Prince and Douglas Elliman owner Howard Lorber. Apartment selling prices |alt=432 Park Avenue and surrounding buildings as seen from 30 Rockefeller Plaza on a sunny day. In 2016, 81 of the 104 units had been sold at a median price of $18.4 million; by the following year, the remaining unsold units were put for sale at prices between $6.5 and $82 million. Ten additional apartments were available at that time, ranging from $17.4 to $44.25 million. The median higher-floor units were more expensive than the other units. Two units on floor 91 were sold for $60 million in 2018 to Caryl Schechter, the wife of hedge-fund manager Israel Englander, while three units on floors 92 and 93 were sold in 2017 for a combined $91 million. The 94th-floor unit was sold for $32.4 million in 2019, about 25 percent lower than the original asking price. The 95th-floor unit, originally listed for $82 million, was split in half in 2018 and the individual units were sold at $30 million. The highest unit, on floor 96, but actually sold to Saudi businessman Fawaz Alhokair for $88 million in 2016. The sale of all of the units was expected to bring in a total of $3.1 billion, the highest aggregate sales price of any building in New York City. he had reduced his asking price to $105 million by May 2024. Conversely, one unit sold for $70 million in 2022, after the structural issues had been announced. An August 2025 analysis by The Real Deal found that 10 of the 13 original owners who had resold their apartments in 2017 and 2018 (before the structural issues were reported) had done so at a profit. Conversely, 10 of the 16 owners who had resold their apartments between 2021 and 2025 (after the issues were reported) had taken a loss. ==Critical reception==

The skyscraper has received mixed reviews from both professionals and the public. 432 Park's slenderness and simplicity have been the subject of both praise and criticism. For example, Jonathan Margolis of the Financial Times said, "I have become obsessed by the almost childlike simplicity of 432 Park Ave". Aaron Betsky of Architect magazine called 432 Park "a gridded tube abstracting and punctuating the more leaden masses of the lesser boxes around it", while James Gardner of The Real Deal said that "the sense of pure geometry, the almost polemical denial of scale, only enhances the sense of immensity." Some critics have cited 432 Park Avenue as a representation of New York's increasing cost of living and ostentatious wealth. while New York magazine called the building's units "fancy prisons for billionaires". Bianca Bosker wrote for The Atlantic magazine that some New Yorkers had given 432 Park the nickname of "Awful Waffle", saying that New York City's supertall buildings were "an eyesore" at best and a symbol of wealth inequality at worst. Several residents of nearby buildings said that the influx of rich residents at 432 Park Avenue would increase the worth of their own properties. Though Viñoly and Macklowe were friends, they often insulted each other over the various perceived flaws in the design. while Macklowe said that Viñoly's supertall design was motivated by "penis envy" among the city's developers, who were vying to build the tallest structures. he later apologized for his comments. ==See also==