Midtown Manhattan's Lever House marked a watershed in U.S. architecture when completed in 1952. Located on the west side of Park Avenue between 53rd and 54th Streets, the corporate headquarters—with its façade of blue-green glass and stainless steel mullions—was one of the first glass-walled International Style office buildings in the U.S. To save on air conditioning, there were no operable windows; the glass was tinted blue. Three of the most notable people involved with the project include Gordon Bunshaft, the design Principal at SOM, Natalie de Blois who assisted him as the Project Designer, and Charles Luckman who was President of Lever Brothers and went on to practice architecture in New York and later LA. The building was allowed to be a rectangular tower as the zoning requirements permitted it not to be stepped if it occupied less than 25% of its site. This was a the first time anyone had done this. The renovation begun in 1998 added the Isamu Noguchi sculpture garden which had been planned but never installed.

This Byzantine-style church incorporates a 1903 French Romanesque portal from its previous Madison Ave. location. Designed by Stanford White and funded as a memorial for Cornelius Vanderbilt II, the portal features Renaissance-inspired sculpture and ornate brass doors. There are stained glass windows by Hildreth Meire and the city's largest pipe organ. The community house was constructed later by Goodhue's firm after he had died.

Located to the north of Grand Central Terminal, this building was the center of a series of hotels and office buildings sponsored by the New York Central Railroad. Once visible for miles away along Park Avenue, this building served as a powerful reminder of the dominance of railroads in the era.

Indicative of Manhattan’s changing social geography, this Art Deco-style hotel relocated to Park Ave. from what is now the site of the Empire State Building. Originally William Waldorf Astor built the first hotel to emulate Philadelphia's Bellevue in 1893. In 1897, his cousin John Astor constructed the Astoria. The combined hotel was moved to its current site. The Waldorf-Astoria has a legacy of famous residents: U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, Nikola Tesla, Cole Porter , General Farley (who lived there about 30 years )and Marilyn Monroe.

The Seagram Building is recognized as one of the world's great architectural masterpieces. The distinctive landmark building was commissioned in 1958 by the Seagram Company and designed by the legendary Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. With the lobby and interiors designed by the equally renowned Philip Johnson, New York's favorite skyscraper is celebrated as a culmination of sophistication and refinement. The building's elegant simplicity juxtaposed against its constructional rigor embodies Mies van der Rohe's famed dictum "less is more" and personifies modern architecture. The New York Times heralds the Seagram Building as "the millennium's most important building."

Considered a part of the Seagram Building, the Four Seasons Restaurant is renowned for its luxurious interior in very elegant International Style. It is a first-class restaurant featuring a walnut-paneled dining room, a Grill Room, and Pool Room that has been a watering hole for the city's powerful since it's opening. The restaurant has been in the process of renovation for the last couple of years.

Considered a part of the Seagram Building, the Four Seasons Restaurant is renowned for its luxurious interior in very elegant International Style. It is a first-class restaurant featuring a walnut-paneled dining room, a Grill Room, and Pool Room that has been a watering hole for the city's powerful since it's opening. The restaurant has been in the process of renovation for the last couple of years.

This was the first office building to break into the formerly residential Park Avenue. It became the precedent for the iconic stepped back “wedding cake” style skyscraper, which was developed in adherence with the area’s zoning laws meant to reduce shade from tall buildings.

Acting as a foil to the surrounding excess of modernist skyscrapers, this Florentine palazzo-style men’s club demonstrates an acute attention to detail in its Renaissance sense of proportion – its height is exactly twice the width of Park Avenue.

After removing all traces of Philip Johnson’s original interior, the gutted shell is resurfaced with thin liners of varying materials that sometimes lift away to become structural, spatial, and functional elements. While the Seagram Building is considered to be the quintessential modernist glass tower, the restaurant is lodged in its stone base and is without glass, view or connection with the street. This irony prompted a series of alternate responses to the relation between glass and vision. A plasma monitor at the entry, back-to-back with a video camera to the street, produces a virtual transparency. Like a remnant of past construction, a 50-foot long sheet of lenticular glass is propped against an interior wall to support 24 seated diners. It sheaths artifacts on display and teases a direct view of them. The ritual of making an entrance is split into two events. A sensor above the revolving door triggers a video snapshot with the entry of every new patron and his or her image is added to a continuously changing video display over the bar. At the same time, entry into the main space one-half level below the street is made theatrical: a glass stairway of unusually gradual proportions prolongs the descent and deposits each patron into the center of the dining room.

Originally built as the headquarters for Pan American Airways, this 59-story octagonal-plan skyscraper straddles Park Ave. and dominates the air space of Grand Central and the Helmsley Building. At the time of its opening, the PanAm building had the most square-footage of office space in the world.