CBS Building

The CBS Building in New York City, also known as Black Rock, is the headquarters of CBS Corporation. The building, opened in 1965, was designed by Eero Saarinen. It is located at 51 West 52nd Street, at the corner of Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas). The 38 story building is 490 feet (150 m) tall and measures approximately 872,000 rentable square feet. The interior spaces, as well as the furnishings were designed by Saarinen and Florence Knoll.

Background

The building is known as Black Rock for the dark granite cladding. Unlike some major skyscrapers built in that section of midtown Manhattan during the 1950s and 60s, the pillars are more dominant than the glass windows between them. The building was the result of intricate planning between Eero Saarinen and CBS's then-president, Frank Stanton.

CBS moved to Black Rock from its longtime corporate headquarters, 485 Madison Avenue at 52nd Street. Prior to Black Rock’s completion, CBS moved its radio network studios - the CBS News network radio studios on the 17th floor of 485 Madison and other studios across the street in the CBS Studio Building - to the CBS Broadcast Center on 57th Street starting in 1964. The TV news studios, based mostly at the Graybar Building at Grand Central Terminal, also moved to the Broadcast Center around that period of time, starting with the CBS Evening News studio-newsroom in 1963.

Black Rock also houses the offices of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.[1] and the New York offices of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe.

Black Rock was the longtime home of CBS's New York City flagship radio stations, WCBS (AM) and WCBS-FM, until 2000, following the merger with Viacom. At that time WCBS (AM) joined the network at the Broadcast Center, and WCBS-FM moved to One Astor Plaza.

Gastrotypographicalassemblage, a 35-foot (11 m) wide by 8½ foot tall design was designed by Lou Dorfsman to decorate the cafeteria. The work used varied typefaces to list all of the foods offered to patrons in hand-milled wood type.

Broadcast Row

Black Rock is part of a virtual Broadcast Row on Sixth Avenue. The NBC headquarters - the GE Building in Rockefeller Center, home of NBC News and MSNBC (since moved from Secaucus, New Jersey in 2007) - is located south of Black Rock, on Sixth Avenue at 50th Street. South of CBS and NBC, Fox News Channel and Business unit has its headquarters and streetside studios in the former Celanese building at 1211 Sixth Avenue at News Corporation lot, in the west extension of Rockefeller Center.

Prior to its acquisition by Capital Cities Communications, the American Broadcasting Company's headquarters were at 1330 Sixth Avenue (corner of 54th Street), two blocks north of CBS. In the mid-1980s, ABC moved to West 66th Street and Columbus Avenue, just west of Central Park, in the neighborhood where the network already has many TV and radio studios.

The local cable channel SportsNet New York has its own streetside studios on the first floor of the Time & Life Building in Rockefeller Center west, on Sixth Avenue at 51st Street, just across from CBS. The studio was previously occupied by Time and Life magazines' sister Time Warner division CNN, and CNN's breakfast show American Morning. The program has since moved north to CNN's New York bureau at Columbus Circle.