OWNER: Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., NYC
ARCHITECT & STRUCTURAL ENGINEER: Robert Silman Associates, NYC
HISTORIC PRESERVATION CONSULTANT: Building Conservation Associates Inc., NYC
SCAFFOLDING CONTRACTOR: Regional Scaffolding & Hoisting Co., Bronx, N.Y.
MASONRY CONTRACTOR: Graciano Corp., Pittsburgh, Pa.
WINDOW SUBCONTRACTOR: Airmaster Window Systems Inc., Larchmont, N.Y.
WINDOW CONSULTANT: Gordon H. Smith Inc., NYC
LIGHTING CONSULTANT: Horton Lees Brogden Lighting Design Inc., NYC
CONSTRUCTION MANAGER & GENERAL CONTRACTOR: Structure Tone Inc., NYC

It is a landmark among the office towers on Madison Avenue and one of the more recognizable structures in the city's skyline. As such, the restoration of its exterior - a painstaking and time-consuming task - took many years.

To implement the $35 million restoration of the exterior of this beautiful structure at 1 Madison Avenue first required erection of a 55-story scaffold to access the facade in order to do the necessary repair work.

Initially, 4,000 facade deficiencies were earmarked for repair and restoration, but it was soon discovered that 10,000 deficiencies need to be addressed, including rigging 2,000-lb. pieces of stone out of the building and replacing them.

The heart of the project consisted of three different combinations of scaffolding and hoists to facilitate the work. One was an exterior hoist that allowed access to the fixed scaffold on the building, but due to weight constraints, the scaffold was planked every second floor. In addition, the scaffold was kept 3 ft. away from the building at all times. Inside each 3-ft. cavity were 16 electric hanging rigs to allow movement up and down along the facade and to feed personnel and materials off the scaffold.

Work also include repointing the entire limestone and Tuckahoe marble structure, replacing 1,100 historic windows, re-gilding the building's gold dome and installing a new computer-controlled lighting system to be installed on the entire building.

The restoration also included all four clocks on the building, replication of glass tiles that needed replacement, and removal of all of the bronze frames that served as the hour and minute marks on the clock so that they could be refurbished, reinstalled, recaulked and reglazed.

Because the building is a landmark, a solution needed to be devised to allow it to remain visible while work was performed on a building that had to remain operational. To achieve this, netting was installed around the scaffold that allowed the tower to still be visible.

To deal more safely with the stone on the building, which presented unique anchorage conditions, a combination of different anchorages were used.

Locating Tuckahoe marble to replace the damaged Tuckahoe marble was also difficult. Since Tuckahoe marble quarries had been closed for decades, it became a quest to locate the required material. The search for the material led to the discovery of a "sedan-sized" boulder of the marble in a service station. After the owner purchased it, it was sliced into 3-in. slabs, trucked to the site and then carved into "Dutchman" repair pieces. The carving took place in a makeshift stone yard on the building's roof. A drove was used on the new slabs so they could match the original slabs while others were sandblasted to match older stone. The marble was supplemented with white, gray and buff cast stone and with salvaged marble from the new Columbia University boathouse in Inwood Hill Park and from the MetLife tower itself.

The jury said this project was "inherently complicated by its size and therefore required great attention to detail while re-establishing the lost art of tile setting."