Stand on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 45th Street and tilt your head all the way back. The thing you are looking at — that orange-brick tower with the strange winged beasts above the doors and the explosion of color near the roofline — is one of the most ambitious Art Deco buildings ever erected in New York. And almost nobody knows its name.

This is the Fred F. French Building, 551 Fifth Avenue, completed in 1927. It is older than the Chrysler Building. It is older than the Empire State Building. It is older than 30 Rockefeller Plaza. And while those neighbors have absorbed every photograph and postcard and movie shot for nearly a century, this thirty-eight-story Mesopotamian dream has been quietly holding the corner, waiting for someone to notice.

Let me show you why you should.

The Real-Estate King Who Built His Own Monument

In the 1920s, Fred Fillmore French was a giant of New York real estate — the man behind Tudor City, the first middle-class residential skyscraper complex in the world, carved out of the bluffs above the East River. By the middle of the decade he had outgrown his rented offices and decided to do what real-estate kings do: he built himself a tower and stamped his name on it.

The commission went to the firm of Sloan & Robertson — John Sloan and T. Markoe Robertson — working with French’s in-house chief designer, H. Douglas Ives. The 1916 Zoning Resolution, the law that gave New York its iconic wedding-cake setbacks, dictated the building’s stepped silhouette. But within those legal lines, Ives and Sloan & Robertson did something extraordinary. They went looking for inspiration not in the Beaux-Arts past or the streamlined future, but somewhere far stranger.

They went looking for Babylon.

A Mesopotamian Skyscraper, Hiding in Plain Sight

The 1920s were the decade when King Tut’s tomb had just been opened and the world was electric with rediscovered antiquity. Architects across Manhattan were pulling from ancient Egypt, Assyria, and the Near East. The Chrysler Building borrowed eagle gargoyles from a Chrysler hood ornament. Rockefeller Center would soon stack its lobbies with allegorical reliefs. But the Fred F. French Building went further than almost anyone, dressing itself head to toe in the visual language of the ancient world.

The base of the building is wrapped in a bronze frieze of winged beasts and stylized glyphs — the kind of creatures you would expect to find guarding a gate in Nineveh, not a midtown lobby. Two enormous bronze entrances open onto Fifth Avenue and 45th Street, framed by mythological figures pressed into the metal. Then the eye climbs the brick and limestone shaft, past the setbacks demanded by zoning, until it reaches the crown.

And the crown is where the building stops being a building and starts being a manifesto. Bright faience tiles in turquoise, gold, and burnt orange are arranged in panels of bas-relief that depict winged griffins, the rising sun, and beehives — the beehive being French’s personal symbol of industry. The colors, the architects said openly, were chosen to evoke the Tower of Babel. The setbacks themselves were meant to recall the stepped ziggurats of ancient Sumer.

Most people walking down Fifth Avenue have no idea any of this is up there. The faience is just slightly too high to register from the sidewalk unless you stop, plant your feet, and look up.

Why It Was Overlooked — and Why That’s Changing

For decades, the Fred F. French Building lived in the shadow of its more famous siblings. When the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission began protecting Art Deco towers in the late 1970s, the Chrysler and Chanin Buildings were among the first to receive landmark status, in 1978. The Fred F. French Building waited until 1986 to be designated a New York City Landmark — and only in 2004 did the federal government list it on the National Register of Historic Places.

Part of the reason it was overlooked is that it does not punch its silhouette into the skyline the way the Chrysler does. From a distance it is just another orange-brown midtown tower. The magic lives in the details, and the details require you to stand at the base and look up.

Which is exactly the kind of New York moment this column exists for.

How to Visit

Address: 551 Fifth Avenue at East 45th Street, Midtown East, Manhattan.

Nearest subway: Grand Central–42nd Street (4, 5, 6, 7, S) — exit at 42nd and Vanderbilt and walk three blocks north on Fifth.

Hours: The building is a working office tower. The lobby is generally accessible during weekday business hours (roughly 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.), but access is at the discretion of building security. The exterior, of course, is visible day or night.

Cost: Free. This is a public sidewalk and a public landmark.

Tips: Come at golden hour. The faience at the top of the tower is designed to catch warm light, and on a clear afternoon the entire crown lights up like a Mesopotamian sunrise. Bring something with a zoom — a phone with a 3x lens is enough — because the most beautiful elements are at the very top of a thirty-eight-story shaft.

Insider Tip

Walk west from the building along 45th Street and turn around. From the south side of 45th, between Fifth and Sixth, you get the cleanest view of the setbacks and the faience crown in profile. This is the angle the original architectural photographers used in 1927, and it is still the best free view of the building in the city. Most pedestrians never bother to cross the street, so you will usually have the sight line to yourself.

Why This Matters

New York is a city of overlooked things. We are surrounded, every day, by buildings that other cities would mythologize. The Fred F. French Building was the first major Art Deco skyscraper on Fifth Avenue. It rose two years before the stock market crashed and the Jazz Age ended. It is a survivor of the decade that gave New York its skyline.

Today, the building houses offices for hundreds of tenants. Most of them, like the millions who pass on the sidewalk, have never craned their necks far enough back to see the winged beasts above their heads. You can be the exception. Five minutes on the corner of Fifth and 45th will give you something almost nobody else in this city is bothering to notice.

That is the whole point of this column. Look up.

Sources

Primary source verification: Wikipedia entry on the Fred F. French Building, the official building website at 551fifthavenueny.com, and the Historic Districts Council building file. Designation dates confirmed via the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (1986) and the National Register of Historic Places (2004).