Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower
office skyscraper in Manhattan, New York
The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower (colloquially known as the Met Life Tower and also as the South Building) is a skyscraper occupying a full block in the Flatiron District of Manhattan in New York City, New York, United States. The building is composed of two sections: a 700-foot-tall (210 m) tower at the northwest corner of the block, at Madison Avenue and 24th Street, and a shorter east wing occupying the remainder of the block bounded by Madison Avenue, Park Avenue South, 23rd Street, and 24th Street. The South Building, along with the North Building directly across 24th Street, comprises the Metropolitan Home Office Complex, which originally served as the headquarters of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (now publicly known as MetLife).
The South Building's tower was designed by the architectural firm of Napoleon LeBrun & Sons and erected between 1905 and 1909. Inspired by St Mark's Campanile, the tower features four clock faces, four bells, and lighted beacons at its top, and was the tallest building in the world until 1913. The tower originally included Metropolitan Life's offices, and since 2015, it has contained a 273-room luxury hotel known as the New York EDITION Hotel. The tower was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, made a National Historic Landmark in 1978, and designated as a city landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1989.
The east wing was designed by Lloyd Morgan and Eugene Meroni and constructed in two stages between 1953 and 1960. The east wing is also referred to as One Madison Avenue. It replaced another building on the site, which was built in phases from 1893 to 1905, and which was also designed by LeBrun's firm.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower” is office skyscraper in Manhattan, New York. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Metropolitan, Life and Insurance, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q652452. VIAF identifies the subject as 222144782728960539663. The Library of Congress control number is n50081001. Authority coordinates are 40.741, -73.987. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1905, 1909, 1913 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.