This Building’s Exterior Is a Landmark. Should Its Lobby Be One, Too?

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Maybe they loved it. Maybe they hated it. But to many New Yorkers, the granite office building at 550 Madison Avenue was a landmark from the moment it was unveiled almost 40 years ago. Now some preservationists are upset that only the exterior might become an official one.

With a Chippendale-inspired broken pediment at the top and a Renaissance-inspired colonnade at the bottom, the building was instantly identifiable, a shape as firmly fixed in the public imagination as the shapes of the Citicorp Center and the Chrysler Building. It was completed in the 1980s as the city marked 50 years of another instantly identifiable element of modern Manhattan, Rockefeller Center.

The building on Madison Avenue, at East 55th Street, was designed by the architect Philip Johnson and his partner John Burgee. Mr. Johnson called it “a symbolic shift from the flat top” look of postwar office buildings like the Seagram Building, where Mr. Johnson had designed the original interiors of the Four Seasons and Brasserie restaurants.

Last month, the Landmarks Preservation Commission decided that the interior of 550 Madison Avenue did not deserve landmark designation. It said the building’s lobby was not in original condition, mainly because a statue had been taken out in the 1990s when the building’s original occupant, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, moved away and the Sony Corporation moved in.

Sony, in turn, left several years ago, and the new owners are renovating. They support designating the exterior as a landmark, and the commission has put that possible designation on its calendar, meaning that it will vote on the matter, probably in a few weeks.

Interior landmark designations are rarer than exterior designations. The city has 1,405 individual landmarks — buildings or the exteriors of buildings — but only 120 interior landmarks, among them the lobby of the Empire State Building, the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center and the dining room of the Gage & Tollner restaurant in Brooklyn.

Preservationists are unhappy that the commission rejected interior landmark status for 550 Madison Avenue, especially the soaring lobby. “There is not an interior and an exterior of the AT&T Building, there is the AT&T Building,” said Nathan Eddy, a documentary filmmaker who helped organize a demonstration outside the building last month. “As Philip Johnson would put it, it is a complete work. It should be preserved in its entirety.”

But a commission spokeswoman said by email that “the lobby does not hold the same level of broad significance as the exterior.” She said the lobby did not qualify as an interior landmark because of “the removal of ‘Golden Boy’ as a focal point, alterations within the lobby itself and its diminished relationship to the overall design of the base.”

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“Golden Boy” was the statue that was removed when AT&T left and the lobby underwent what preservationists said were minor changes. The statue, commissioned before World War I when AT&T’s headquarters were in Lower Manhattan, went by a number of names — first “Genius of Telegraphy,” then “Genius of Electricity” after AT&T shed Western Union, then “Spirit of Communication.” After stops in New Jersey in the 1990s, it is now at the company’s headquarters in Dallas, all 16 tons of it.

Thomas Collins, a preservationist who asked the commission to consider landmark status for the interior as well as the exterior after becoming “alarmed by the renderings” from the new owners, called the landmarks commission’s rationale “flimsy.”

“The lobby is quite refined,” he said. “It’s a beautiful interior, clad in the same granite that covers the exterior. It’s replete with historical motifs and sources that Johnson had mined throughout history. The same themes he was exploring on the exterior are magnified on the interior. The two are really inseparable.”

Elizabeth Goldstein, the president of the Municipal Art Society of New York, echoed that idea.

“The arcades, the open space, all of that was really designed with a single aesthetic vision in mind,” she said last week, “and that includes the lobby, no question about it.”

The preservationists are upset that work has begun in the lobby. Liz Waytkus, the executive director of Docomomo US, a nationwide organization that works to preserve modernist buildings, said, “We were of the understanding that no work would be done, including in the lobby, until the exterior designation has been made and that more was needed to be known about the lobby area.”

A spokesman for the developers said by email that “all work being performed is in accordance with appropriate permits and approvals.”

Tara Kelly, the vice president for policy and programs of the Municipal Art Society, described meetings with the developers and said that the work that is going on “is very much contrary to the good-faith conversations that we had with them.”

The spokesman for the developers, Jeremy Soffin, said he “vehemently disagreed” with that characterization.

The preservationists say the lobby should have been left untouched.

“Johnson knew exactly what he was trying to do,” said Mr. Eddy, who is working on a documentary about Mr. Johnson, “which was to create a monumental space made out of half-foot-thick panels of Stony Creek granite, the same material as Grand Central Terminal, the same material as base of the Statue of Liberty. You don’t have to like the architecture, but you have to respect the thought that went into the corporate headquarters of, and this sounds insane now, what was then the largest company in the world.”