By Jared Ebersole in Video 05 Nov 2026

The Fifth Avenue Tower That Curves Around a Hat Factory’s Headquarters

At Bryant Park, a glass skyscraper bends around the ornate Knox Building. Behind that gesture lies an intricate effort to turn occupied buildings into one bank headquarters.

At Fifth Avenue and West 40th Street, a small building appears to have persuaded a skyscraper to give it some room. The ornate Knox Building holds the corner, its mansard roof silhouetted against a glass tower that sweeps around it. The older building gets the foreground. The much larger addition supplies the backdrop.

The arrangement makes an irresistible architectural story: a stubborn survivor forces modern development to bend. The history is more interesting. Republic National Bank wanted to expand around its existing headquarters while keeping important operations running. Preserving the old building’s presence became part of the design problem, alongside the less visible challenge of making separate buildings work together.

Completed in 1985, the tower associated with architects Eli Attia and Brad Perkins turned those constraints into a distinctive addition to the Bryant Park skyline. Its most memorable feature is the space it seems to surrender.

Where it is

452 Fifth Avenue, at the southwest corner of West 40th Street, Manhattan, opposite the New York Public Library.

The address and the older building’s prominent relationship to the library are documented in the city’s Knox Building designation report.

The building beneath the curve began with hats. Constructed in 1901–1902 for the Knox Hat Company, it was designed by John H. Duncan, whose work also included Grant’s Tomb. Duncan brought the vocabulary of grand Beaux-Arts residences to a commercial building: deeply articulated masonry, abundant ornament and a two-story mansard roof. Ten stories tall, Knox was substantial in its own right. Its later neighbor changed the scale of the comparison.

Its location also captured a commercial transition. As prestigious retailers moved north along Fifth Avenue, a conspicuous headquarters could serve as an advertisement as well as an investment. The building gave Knox a permanent presence on an increasingly important shopping street. New York designated it a city landmark on September 23, 1980, recognizing both its architecture and its unusually visible corner. These details come from the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s report.

By the late 1970s, Republic faced a different kind of space problem. Its operations were spread across 15 New York buildings. Bringing them together promised a more coherent headquarters, but the bank had already established itself at Fifth Avenue and wanted to stay. Over roughly 11 years beginning around 1970, it assembled neighboring property into a larger development site.

Ownership did not produce an empty canvas. Six existing structures had to remain because banking operations inside them could not simply stop. Republic also wanted the Knox Building to retain its architectural importance. Those requirements shaped a project in which expansion depended on working around existing buildings and activities. The development history is summarized, with contemporary references, in the history of 452 Fifth Avenue.

This changes how the curve should be understood. There was no separate holdout owner occupying the corner and bargaining with the tower next door. The bank’s attachment to its headquarters, its operating needs and the building’s landmark status together established the conditions for the addition. The apparent standoff was a design brief.

The response was a concave sweep behind Knox. Perkins Eastman describes the north facade as an elliptical curve assembled from rectangular sheets of clear glass. That distinction matters: the impression of a continuous bend comes from a sequence of flat panels, each contributing to the larger geometry. The architects deliberately used that geometry to suggest that a portion of the tower had been removed to accommodate the landmark. Perkins Eastman’s project account explains the facade’s construction and intended effect.

Seen from the library side, the result creates a clear visual hierarchy. The masonry building remains an identifiable object, complete with its own roof and emphatic corner. Behind it, the glass surface changes direction rather than presenting one broad, unbroken plane. The tower is plainly larger, yet the eye has somewhere else to settle first.

That is a useful distinction in preservation. Keeping an old facade standing does not automatically preserve its prominence. A new neighbor can overwhelm it through scale, proximity or sheer visual repetition. Here, the tower’s shape makes the relationship itself legible. A passerby can understand that the older building influenced what came afterward without knowing anything about the bank’s construction program.

Inside, the project required another kind of accommodation. The architects connected three existing, fully occupied buildings with the new construction, tied their levels into a unified series of floors and provided a new elevator and mechanical core. They also placed a new trading floor above an existing floor containing the bank’s main computer center. The Knox facade was restored as part of the work. These are documented features of Perkins Eastman’s account.

The practical issue is easy to picture. Two neighboring buildings may share a wall while placing their floors at different elevations. Combining them into useful office space requires more than opening doorways. Circulation, services and working areas have to make sense across the joins. In this case, the architectural achievement extended horizontally through the block as well as vertically into the skyline.

A later appraisal makes that integration concrete. Cushman & Wakefield’s 2017 report describes four adjacent buildings operating as one office property: Knox, the tower, the Kress Building and One West 39th Street. Their construction dates span different generations, including 1902, 1923 and 1935. The report describes integrated floors and a portion of the tower cantilevering over Kress. The property was an assembled complex, with the new structure organizing older pieces into a larger whole. Cushman & Wakefield appraisal.

The exterior offers the elegant version of that story. Stone meets glass; a roof remains visible; a tall facade bends. The interior reveals the harder bargain: growth had to coexist with occupied space, inherited floor levels and equipment that the bank needed to keep using.

Look up from the corner and the two stories come together. Knox still announces itself with the architectural confidence of a company selling hats on Fifth Avenue. Behind it, the bank’s tower makes expansion visible through an act of accommodation. The curve is memorable because it gives a practical constraint a form that anyone on the sidewalk can read.