500 Park Avenue
building in New York City, New York, United States

500 Park Avenue is an office and residential condominium building on the southwest corner of Park Avenue and 59th Street in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, composed of the 11-story Pepsi-Cola Building and the 40-story 500 Park Tower. The original Pepsi-Cola Building along Park Avenue was constructed from 1958 to 1960 and designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM). The tower along 59th Street was constructed between 1981 and 1984 to designs by James Stewart Polshek & Partners.
The old Pepsi-Cola Building was designed in the International Style with a curtain wall made of glass and aluminum. The second through tenth stories slightly overhang a plaza at ground level, while the eleventh floor contained a company penthouse. Inside, the original building's lobby was initially used as an exhibition space, while the upper stories contained offices. 500 Park Tower contains a facade made of thermal black granite, as well as glass and aluminum. Inside 500 Park Tower, the first eleven floors contain office space that extends into the original building, while the upper floors contain 56 residential condominiums.
The original structure was the headquarters of the Pepsi-Cola Company from its construction until 1967 and was initially owned by the John Hancock Mutual Insurance Company. It then served as the headquarters of Olivetti S.p.A. until 1978, when it was successively resold to Peter Kalikow, Securities Groups, and then the Equitable Life Assurance Society.
The public source identifies “500 Park Avenue” as building in New York City, New York, United States. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Park, Avenue and building.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19759763. Authority coordinates are 40.763, -73.971. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1958, 1960, 1981 and 1984.
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This entry incorporates text from “500 Park Avenue” 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.