In 1939, the Museum of Modern Art opened its first purpose-built home on West 53rd Street, a rectangular, six-story International Style palazzo clad in Thermolux glass and panels of milky white marble. Stylish and surprisingly homey, the building, designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, replaced four old brownstones. The neighborhood was mostly low-rise and residential back then, full of limestone row houses and Beaux-Arts town houses. The Goodwin-Stone building landed on prewar 53rd Street like a UFO, planting the flag for modernism. Ever since, the museum has ballooned on site. That’s never an easy thing to do in the middle of a busy block in the middle of Midtown. The story of the Modern, art aside, is one of those classic, ruthless New York real estate tales.
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