CBS Building

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

The CBS Building, also known as Black Rock and 51W52, is a 38-story office tower at 51 West 52nd Street in Midtown Manhattan. It stands about 491 feet (150 meters) tall and was built from 1961 to 1965 as the headquarters for CBS.

The building was designed by Eero Saarinen as the main architect, with associates Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo. Interiors were designed by Saarinen and, after his death, Florence Knoll Bassett. Its dark, vertical granite piers alternating with dark glass give a solid, slab-like look, earning the nickname “Black Rock.” The tower is noted for its uniform exterior and its use of a concrete superstructure, with polyurethane insulation in the piers.

The facade features 5-foot-wide granite piers and glass bays, with corners shaped by triangular piers that form large V-shaped effects. The main entrances face 52nd and 53rd Streets, not Sixth Avenue, and the building sits above a plaza that wraps around it.

Inside, the lobby was Saarinen’s design, and the ground floor originally housed a Bank of New York branch and a restaurant. The Ground Floor restaurant opened with the building in 1965 and later hosted other eateries over the years. The interior spaces were later renovated, with notable artwork linked to CBS.

CBS occupied the building as its headquarters for several decades, and CBS Records (later Sony Music Entertainment) also used space there before moving out in the 1990s. The building was designated a New York City landmark in 1997.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, CBS and its successors explored selling the building. In August 2021, Harbor Group International bought it for about $760 million and renamed it 51W52 after renovations that followed. The company spent substantial money upgrading the lobby and tenant amenities, completed in 2023–2024. CBS announced it would move its remaining NYC employees out, with plans to vacate by late 2024.

The CBS Building has been praised for its bold modernist language and unity of design, though some critics once found its interior austere. It remains an important example of mid-20th-century architecture and a landmark on Sixth Avenue near Rockefeller Center.