Assembling A Campus

…in postcard form! The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company decided in 1892 to move uptown, to Madison Square. The new company headquarters was a building at the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and 23rd Street. Business was good, and expansion was necessary, and over the following 35 years the company assembled a group of buildings that covered the entire block between 23rd and 24th Streets, Madison and Park Avenue South, and then the next block to the north between 24th and 25th Streets. Two postcards show some of that progress. First, 1905: The original building is at the corner facing us, and ended with the second balcony on the 23rd Street (right) facade. Everything to the right of that, further east and ending at Park Avenue South (then Fourth Avenue), is a later extension. That portion of the complex is still there today, but with the facade very much altered. Next, 1911: Met Life bought and demolished the Madison Square Presbyterian Church and constructed a tower that was…