Excerpt from Architectural Record:
Apple’s latest store to open in New York is ultradiscreet. No large glass cube beckons passersby as it does on Fifth Avenue at 59th Street; no backlit Apple logo grabs your attention, as you find in its Grand Central Terminal location: the neighbors on the Upper East Side of Manhattan wouldn’t want either. Here, between the posh residential palaces of Fifth Avenue on the west and Park Avenue to the east, the Apple Store sits on Madison Avenue at 74th Street amid elegant shops, galleries, museums, and quiet hotels. In this enclave of restrained taste, you would sooner expect to see billionaires Michael Bloomberg, Stephen Schwartzman, or David Koch strolling past a window of Stubbs & Wootton slippers before you would a younger generation of with-it consumers trolling for the next iPhone.
The store is ensconced within a late English Renaissance-style two-story building designed in 1921 by Henry Otis Chapman of Barney & Chapman (RECORD, February 1923, page 143) as a branch of the United States Mortgage & Trust Company. As is frequently Apple’s policy with new stores, not only in New York but internationally, such as in Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin, it seeks to retain the aura of an original structure while accommodating its famously future- oriented technological goods. For 940 Madison Avenue, the company again enlisted Bohlin Cywinski Jackson (BCJ)—the San Francisco and Philadelphia offices—as it had with four out of the five previous Manhattan outposts.
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