452 Fifth Avenue (also the HSBC Tower and 10 Bryant Park; formerly the Republic National Bank Building) is an office building at the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 40th Street in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. The building primarily consists of the 30-story, HSBC Tower, completed in late 1985 and designed by Attia & Perkins. The 10-story Knox Building, a Beaux-Arts office building designed in 1902 by John H. Duncan, is preserved at the base of the skyscraper. 452 Fifth Avenue faces Bryant Park immediately to the north.
The HSBC Tower is designed with a glass facade, which curves around the Knox Building to the north; a similar curved tower across Fifth Avenue was never built. The Knox Building's facade remains largely as it was originally designed, with decorated limestone cladding, a cornice above the sixth floor, and a mansard roof. The Knox Building is a New York City designated landmark and is on the National Register of Historic Places. Internally, the tower is tied into the stories of the Knox Building.
The Knox Building was erected between 1901 and 1902 for Edward M. Knox, who operated the Knox Hat Company and leased out several stories to office tenants. In 1964, the Knox heirs sold the building to a group that founded the Republic National Bank of New York and used the building as the bank's headquarters. The bank acquired the neighboring lots in the 1970s and hired Attia & Perkins to design a tower to house its new world headquarters, which would wrap around the Knox Building. The tower was expanded in the 1990s and sold to the investment bank HSBC. In October 2009, HSBC Holdings sold the building to Midtown Equities and Israeli holding company IDB Group, the latter of which passed the building to a subsidiary, Property & Building Corporation (PBC). HSBC continued to lease back its space in the building until 2022, when the bank announced it would relocate.
Site The building at 452 Fifth Avenue is on the western sidewalk between 39th and 40th Streets, in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. The building occupies an L-shaped land lot with a frontage of along Fifth Avenue to the east, a depth of , and an area of . 452 Fifth Avenue is the eastern end of a row of masonry structures on 40th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, which forms the southern border of Bryant Park. On the same block to the west are the Engineering Societies' Building, Engineers' Club Building, The Bryant, the American Radiator Building, and Bryant Park Studios. Other nearby places include the New York Public Library Main Branch across 40th Street to the north, 461 Fifth Avenue to the northeast, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library and 10 East 40th Street to the east, and the Lord & Taylor Building to the south.
The northeastern corner of the base contains the Knox Building at Fifth Avenue and 40th Street, which has been incorporated into 452 Fifth Avenue. The original Knox Building covers a lot of . The Knox Building directly replaced the Lawrence Kip residence, which had been on that corner since the mid-19th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, development was centered on Fifth Avenue north of 34th Street, where new store buildings were quickly replacing the street's brownstone residences. These included the B. Altman and Company Building, the Tiffany and Company Building, the Gorham Building, and the Lord & Taylor Building.
The modern skyscraper includes the former Kress Building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 39th Street, which was originally designed in the Art Deco style and built in the mid-1930s. An annex on 20 West 40th Street replaced the Willkie Memorial Building, designed by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh and built in 1905.
Architecture The modern skyscraper at 452 Fifth Avenue, formerly known as the Republic National Bank Building, is composed of four distinct sections. The ten-story Knox Building,; at the southwest corner of 40th Street and Fifth Avenue, was designed by John H. Duncan in the Beaux-Arts style. The newer HSBC Tower (originally the Republic National Bank Tower), occupying much of the rest of the site, was designed by Attia & Perkins. The Kress Building and another structure on 39th Street are also incorporated into the skyscraper. The building is tall, with 30 stories.
The Knox Building is on the National Register of Historic Places and is protected by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) as a city landmark. However, the Kress Building was not similarly designated because the LPC did not find it to be architecturally significant.
Facade Knox Building The Knox Building's facade remains largely as it was originally designed. The first six floors are clad with rusticated blocks of limestone along Fifth Avenue; a similar motif is used on 40th Street, but the third through sixth floors use buff brick instead of genuine rusticated limestone.; The first floor has show windows, and the entrance is shielded by an iron-and-glass canopy on Fifth Avenue. A mezzanine level was originally placed in the upper section of the first floor, and a sparsely decorated cornice runs above the first floor. On the second floor, the arched windows on 40th Street have keyed blocks above them, while the rectangular window on Fifth Avenue has a palm branch and female head above the center.
The third through eighth floors have elaborately decorated window screens. The third through sixth floors use a similar window arrangement, with three windows per story on Fifth Avenue and eight per story on 40th Street. The extreme ends of either facade contain quoins. Above the sixth floor, there is a cornice with dentils and large console brackets; the metal railing above the cornice has since been removed. The seventh and eighth stories contain windows between vertical brick piers and horizontal ornamental spandrels. The spandrels on the Fifth Avenue facade and in the end bays on 40th Street are decorated with lions' heads and elaborate cartouches. A bracketed cornice runs above the eighth floor.
The top of the Knox Building is a double-height mansard roof that contains dormer windows. On Fifth Avenue, the central dormer is a large two-story opening topped by a gable with a female head. There are single-height dormers on each side of the large opening, at the ninth story. On 40th Street, the outermost bays have two-story dormer windows and the inner bays are designed as single-height dormers at the ninth story. The inner bays on 40th Street contain three wide openings on the tenth floor, each designed with nine narrow vertical glass panes. The top of the mansard has a cresting containing torches and anthemia with eagles. When built, the southern and western facades were brick party walls.
HSBC Tower The HSBC Tower is designed with a glass facade. On the northern side, the facade appears to curve around the Knox Building in a series of steps. This, in turn, gave the HSBC Tower the impression that it had an irregularly shaped roof. The eastern facade along Fifth Avenue is tinted in bronze to blend in with the facades of other structures on the avenue. By contrast, the northern facade along 40th Street contains full-height silicone-stiffened glass panels, with glazing that gives the facade a green tint. The green facade was intended to complement the Knox Building. The tower's facade was built without exterior vertical mullions but is instead stiffened by internal glass mullions, with structural silicone linking the facade and the floor plates. A two-story mockup was created in Florida before the HSBC Tower's facade was installed.
The HSBC Tower is recessed from the original building's street-facing facades. According to Attia & Perkins, this allowed the HSBC Tower to rise as a distinct entity from the mansard roof of the Knox Building. The HSBC Tower was originally planned with a mirror-image tower across Fifth Avenue, which was never built.
The tower is cantilevered over the Kress Building at the southeastern corner of the site. Several beams are cantilevered from strips that rise from the 11th story to the roof. The Kress Building's original facade had included six each of black marble panels and carved limestone crests, as well as four sets of brass doors, including two revolving doors. Unlike the Knox Building, the facade of the Kress Building was completely redesigned when the Republic National Bank Tower was built. The facade of the former Kress Building was replaced with a granite cladding containing rose, beige, and gray hues. The Kress Building's rebuilt facade ascends from north to south like a staircase. At ground level, the Kress Building received a glass facade as well. The Kress Building's original decorations were placed into storage when the HSBC Tower was built.
Interior The floor areas of 452 Fifth Avenue's constituent structures range from , which allowed the tower's original tenant, Republic National Bank, to consolidate many of its departments on their own floors. The building as a whole occupied when completed, of which the tower comprised .
The building has bank vaults below ground, spanning . The lobby, which faces 40th Street, contains a double-height glazed facade as well as an entrance canopy. The space covers and is clad with stone and glass. The lobby has a banking space on Fifth Avenue, used for quick deposits and transactions. It was designed with several chandeliers, including a globe-shaped fixture designed by Attia Architects. The banking space covers .
Eight of the lowest floors in the HSBC Tower's base span each and are tied into floors in the old Knox Building. At each of these floors, glass corridors connect the HSBC Tower and the old Knox Building, giving the impression of bridges. The Kress Building, also eight stories tall, was expanded by two floors, with a terrace installed on the Kress-Building's roof. This required the removal of a bulkhead on the top of the Kress Building. The two additional floors originally served as a trading floor that could fit 260 people. The trading desk was designed to be flexible and had no fixed-position furniture. According to Nancy J. Ruddy of Eli Attia Architects, the trading floor was "one of the largest single trading floors" in the city when completed.
The first full story in the HSBC Tower is the 11th floor, which was designed as an executive dining room story. Originally, the corridors of that story were decorated with pieces of artwork from Republic National Bank's collection. The main dining room was clad with original wall paneling taken from the Knox Building's banking hall, as well as some replica panels, which were created because there were not enough original panels for the whole room. The serving counters of the dining room were adapted from the green marble countertops of the Knox Building's original banking hall. Above the 12th floor, each story has . The 27th through 29th floors were designed as executive suites but, because of Republic National Bank's rapid expansion in the late 1980s, some of the suites were converted to operations offices.
History Original structure Charles Knox founded the Knox Hat Company on Fulton Street, in what is now Lower Manhattan, in 1838.; The company had many customers until the American Civil War, and it became known for selling high-quality hats. At some point after the Civil War, Charles Knox's son Edward M. Knox took over the family business. Through the latter half of the 19th century, Knox opened stores in the fashionable shopping districts of Manhattan;; by 1900, the Knox hat was known worldwide.
Construction and early years