Lever House

Homestalgia Archive

Community memory · 1952–today · Aug 7, 2026

Verified

Lever Brothers, a soap company, hired Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and in 1952 got the first glass curtain-wall office tower on Park Avenue. Gordon Bunshaft set a thin slab on a horizontal base raised on columns, leaving an open plaza underneath at a time when zoning encouraged filling the lot to the property line — the design pushed New York toward the 1961 zoning that traded height for public space. The sealed green glass skin meant the windows never open, so the building has its own gondola for the crews who wash it. Soap company, permanently clean building: that was the joke and the point.

Source: New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, Lever House Designation Report (1982); New York City Department of City Planning, history of the 1961 Zoning Resolution and privately owned public space incentives