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“Ancient traditions of pure melody clash along the avenue with the modern dissonance of jazz; the towering aggressive structures of industry and commerce are like the clarion calls of architecture, all about us.” It was 1926 and Whitney Warren, a partner in the architectural firm Warren & Wetmore, was speaking at the dedication ceremonies for the Aeolian Building at 689 Fifth Avenue on the northeast corner at 54th Street.

“What to do? Man is not always strident, the soul is not always in haste, the eye does not always seek the restless gesture of the skyscraper, never attaining its sky,” Mr. Warren suggested. He added that he hoped the new 14‐story building would convey perhaps “a little peace.”

Fifth Avenue has since added a few more skyscrapers, including the soon-to-be completed Iranian building, but the Aeolian Building has survived as perhaps New York's most Parisian building, offering an elegance of restrained scale and “noble materials” to successive generations tenants.

When it erected its modest new building, which was considered by the Fifth Avenue Association as that year's outstanding new structure, the Aeo1ian Company, which manufactured pianos, was following its own tradition of commercial pioneering on the avenue, and a general move northward by many of the city's musical establishments.

In 1900, the company had taken over the piano business of Albert Webber who had had his “warerooms” on the avenue at 16th Street. Two years later, the company moved just to the north of the A. T. Stewart mansion at 34th Street.

By 1912, the company moved into a new 18‐story building at 29 West 42d Street, on the former site of the Latting Tower, a prominent 19th Century landmark. The New York Symphony Society then divided its performances between the new building, which featured the 1,100‐seat Aeolian Hall, and Carnegie Hall. In 1924, the society decided to shift its Aeolian Hall concerts to the new Mecca Auditorium at 135 West 55th Street and the Aeolian Company began to contemplate another move.

While on 42d Street, the Aeolian Hall served as major cultural center with performances by such artists as Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Busoni, Paderewski, and it held the preiniere with Paul Whiteman's Orchestra of George Gershwin's “Rhapsody in Blue.”

The Aeolian Company then sold its 42d Street building to the Schulte Retail Stores for more than $5 million, the first of three transactions involving that building, which is now used by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, within 16 months. Next, it entered a 63‐year lease with Charles A. Gould for a new building to be constructed on the former site of William Rockefeller's brownstone mansion on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 54th Street, an area that was then an enclave of Rockefeller family homes.

The new building was designed in the French Renaissance style and featured an Indiana limestone facade with a pink granite base and Italian marble panels and insets.

Like the St. Regis Hotel at the other corner of the block on the avenue, the Aeolian Building meets the corner with a curve rather than a sharp edge and it is one of the few buildings in the city that still has curved windows at the corner. In keeping with Mr. Warren's interest in softening the harshness of many skyscrapers, the avoidance of hard edges is further accented by the building's bronze ribbon sashes, curved balustrades and cornices and a sloped roof capped by copper lantern finial covered in gold leaf.

The entrance to the main showroom was through a circular vestibule with a floor of Belgian black marble and tavernelle squares, jasper pilasters and a coffered ceiling where Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was “translated” into mural by Regal. An “intimate” recital hall to accommodate about 150 persons was on the second floor with a statue of the Daughter of Pan.

No sooner had the building been completed and occupied, in earlg 1927, than it once again featured prominently in the news of real estate when it was the star attraction at the auction of the estate of the builder, who had been a founder of the Gould Coupler Company and a prominent yachtsman. More than 3,000 people, including such leading investors as Robert E. Dowling, Benjamin Winter, Max Nathanson, Charles F. Noyes and J. Clarence Davies attended the auction at the Hotel Commodore, then the biggest dispersal of midtown properties since the Astor and Sage auctions five years earlier. The Aeolian building was bought by Mr. Gould's daughter, Mrs. Cecilia Gould Milne, for $3 million, which established new high value of $432 a square foot for land and building in that area.

In 1930, the building took on a new image with the placing of a bright red door at its store at 691 Fifth Avenue heralding, with the help of a liveried doorman, the flagship salon for Elizabeth Arden, who was born as Florence Nightingale Graham. The Elizabeth Arden company continues to occupy several floors in the building.

Many years later, the building was to become pacesetter again when in 1970 Dr. Aldo Gucci paid a record $100 a square foot a year for the corner store. Larry Silverstein, who acquired the building that year, was concerned that the architectural integrity of the building might suffer if its stores were treated separately and he was, after considerable negotiation, able to persuade Elizabeth Arden to cooperate, and help share the costs, in the redesign that was being planned by Dr. Gucci.

Ernest Castro of the design firm of Weissberg Castro Associates, which handled the remodeling, said he was very concerned that the new store “not clash and destroy the existing building” and concluded that the best solution was to use “only noble materials.” The expansive use of travertine marble and stainless steel at the Gucci store heralded the foreign onslaught here, and Mr. Castro said he believed it was the first use of stainless steel for fine detailing on building facades (other than machine‐stamped panels, as can be found on the Mobil Building at 150 East 42d Street.)

In remodeling the former I. Miller store for Dr. Gucci, Mr. Castro said he did not find any traces of a former auditorium, although there was part of a mezzanine section hidden behind a partition.

His firm is now designing Dr. Gucci's expansion across the street, which will be a four‐level store cut through two buildings and something of “an echo” of the store at 689 Fifth Avenue. Mr.Castro said Dr. Gucci intends to retain the store at 689 Fifth Avenue after the new stores, which will be Dr. Gucci's largest in the world, open up later this year across the street, but intends to close the ones in the St. Regis Hotel on the same block.