Vol. 17, No. 822, Tuesday, March 24, 2015 Dick Wien, Editor / [email protected] / 212-975-5607 “BLACK ROCK” HITS 50! SPECIAL EDITION ON THE 5OTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE OPENING OF THE ICONIC CBS HEADQUARTERS BUILDING IN NEW YORK On March 24, 1965, CBS Corporate headquarters “officially” moved from 485 Madison Avenue to 51 West 52nd Street, New York. Like everything else about CBS, the move underscored the Company’s dedication to quality, creativity and leaderArchitect ship. Profiling the building in a Eero Saarinen 1966 article titled “Total Design On A Grand Scale” Life Magazine wrote: “Across the U.S. businessmen have commissioned stunning new buildings to house their corporations. … Foremost among these design devotes are the top executives of the Columbia Broadcasting System which has just completed one of the handsomest – and most austere – buildings in New York City.” The New York Times (March 13, 1966) wrote: “It does not look like a cigar lighter, a vending machine, a nutmeg grater. It is a building in the true classic sense: a complete design in which technology, function and esthetics are conceived and executed integrally for its purpose. … As such CBS (has) set the shape and standard for New York building today.” (Continued on page 2) (BLACK ROCK, continued from Page 1) Constructed of specially selected black Canadian granite and rising 490 feet from a sunken plaza (37 floors/two mechanical floors and the lobby floor), “Black Rock” was the first CBS executives at groundbreaking and only breaking ceremony for the new CBS skyscraper headquarters building at 51 West 52nd Street, New York, NY. Image designed by the dated June 29, 1962. Copyright © 1962 CBS Broadcasting Inc celebrated architect Eero Saarinen, best known for the Gateway Arch in St Louis MO, the Vivian Beaumont Theater (inside New York’s Lincoln Center) and the (original) Trans World Airlines Terminal at JFK. Black Rock was also New York’s first high rise office building to be executed in reinforced concrete. With its gray tinted heat absorbing glass windows and triangular shaped columns, CBS’s new headquarters displayed then, as it does today, an elegant visual complexity and beauty in sharp contrast to its neighbors on 6th Avenue which the New York Times once described as “no more than weatherproof containers of rentable square footage, or candy wrapped bulk space.” HOW LIFE INSIDE HAS CHANGED CBS employee moving into Black Rock. When Black Rock first opened its doors, CBS employees found its interior to be as meticulously designed as its exterior. Chairs and tables were crafted by Saarinen, iron ashtrays were created in Japan and TV screens were concealed by mechanically moving walls covered with beige wool. Pencil holders and in-and-out mail boxes were standardized, as was the lettering on elevators and bathroom doors. Weekly watering teams attended to “official” office greenery. Two committees decided on the pictures that could be hung in public areas – mostly “hard-edged” canvases compatible with the exterior of the building. As for the decor of personal offices, CBS Corporate Affairs VP E. Kidder Meade said at the time: “If you want to hang a picture of your Aunt Maizie from the Bronx, the Art Department will help you to frame it. (But) there will be discipline on how they are hung.” The sole exception to this mandate of “total design” was the 35th floor corner office of CBS’s founding Chairman William S. Paley, which Life Magazine described as being “filled with French antique tables and chairs, family pictures, a clutter of memorabilia, and one of Paley’s most prized possessions; an old battered cigar store Indian.” Over the years Black Rock has been compared to such classic structures as The Parthanon and the Strozzi Palace as an example of a “masterpiece of stony strength.” The building, and those associated with its design, have received recognition from many prestigious organizations including The New York Board of Trade; The Municipal Art Society of New York; The American Institute of Architects; The New York Chapter; The American Institute of The American Inside and out, Black Rock was created to underscore CBS’s corporate identity as a company that embraced art, culture and good taste. The intent of that goal remains today, but as most employees would probably agree, such practices as mandating the exact placement of furniture, and cleaning all clutter out of offices at the end of the day, are happily in the far distant past. (Continued on Page 3) 2 COLUMNS UP: DID YOU KNOW BLACK ROCK GOES GREEN A half Century Black Rock’s after Black Rock diamond-shaped was built, CBS columns are “neither remains committed as simple nor as to maintaining the solid as they seem. buillding’s status as Rising uninterrupted one of the most from ground to top, innovative structures they have a dual pur- in New York, if not pose: as a bearing the country. As in all wall and as conduits for services. From the second floor business units, level they are hollow for ducts, and sheared flat on the interi- energy efficiency or. At the ground floor, they are solid and fully diamond- improvements are shaped inside and out and almost as impressive as the being made, includ- columns of the Parthenon. What is involved here are the ing an ongoing complexity of structure and service of the modern high-rise migration to new LED lighting and the other low-energy use building and its relationship to visual esthetics, a problem lighting systems; the installation of a new, high-efficiency air that separates the men from the boys and good buildings filtration system installed that cuts electrical use by 160,000 from bad. CBS solves it with maximum logic and minimum kWh’s annually and eliminates about 5,000 filters from dis- ambiguity.” posal in landfills; and a new TelePrescence video confer- -- The New York Times, March 13, 1966 encing room which reduces the need for airline travel, thus cutting our carbon footprint. But perhaps the most dramatic innovation of all is the installation in 2010 of a living “Green Roof” atop Black Rock which is reducing energy costs while removing greenhouse gases and rainwater pollutants, generating oxygen, protecting the roof from UV and environmental damage, and keeping the building cooler, as plants absorb the majority of the sun’s energy. To view a video of CBS SVP Corporate Services and Chief Security Officer Tom Cruthers describing the “Green Roof,” go to http://tinyurl.com/nfv647w (Continued from Page 2) Unidentified CBS employee amidst demolition at future CBS headquarters site at 51 West 52nd Street, New York, NY. Institute of Architects; The Architechiteral League of New York; the Avenue of the Americas Association; The New York Landmarks Preservation Foundation and The Tiffany Annual Award for Corporate Efforts to Promote and Advance Design. But all honors aside, perhaps the most appropriate testament to the nobility and elegence of BlackRock 50 years on is the simple statement: “Good art equals good business.” (Continued on page 4) 3 UPDATE is published by CBS Communications Group. Gil Schwartz, Senior Executive Vice President Richard Wien, Editor, x5607 (NY) Phoebe Gittelson: Assistant Editor 4