Unfortunately I didn’t tape it, but there was a show that said that.
They put it into the break teasers at least 3 times, then they never did say why,
except that the 23rd floor was where the building narrows from the widest floors.
The show was “Secrets of New York”
Episode: “Secrets in the Sky: The Towers of Gotham (2006)”
A web search didn’t find any mention of the oddity, but I found two press releases:
Oct 18, 2006 Portware, a firm that develops computer software for equities trading, has subleased 28,000 s/f, the entire 23rd floor,
December 18, 2006Levitz Furniture Opens New Headquarters in Downtown Manhattan …officially opened its new corporate headquarters today.
Which sounds like the floor was being refitted during the time Portware was announcing its move.
I actually did work with a client called Telerate which is on the 23rd floor of that building. I don’t recall ever seeing two 23rd floors but it was a few years ago.
Thanks! This makes more sense than my other guess, which was that they somehow split a floor in half horizontally well after the building was completed. (That would have been a good trick. )
Once the 26th floor is identified as the odd one, the details can be searched. For one thing, the 26th appears to be where the observation deck is.
And it has, or will have, other odd floors.
“And then there are the idiosyncrasies. Woolworth famously insisted that his building was 60 stories high, which in its day it was (counting the uninhabitable cupola as two floors). Today, however, there is no designated 42nd floor, and soon the 48th floor will be demolished to create a 47th floor with 19-foot ceilings, part of a plan by the building’s current management to convert the upper floors into luxury residential units. At the same time, there are two 26th floors, one of them a sort of half-floor reminiscent of the 7½th floor in the film “Being John Malkovich.” It’s a dark place reached through a very small door.”
A related question: there seems to be a lot of pre-WWII skyscrapers with odd half-floors. Buffalo City Hall has an actual 13th floor, but the ceiling is only 5’ or so high. Why were these odd half-height floors built to begin with, and do newer buildingshave such quirks?
I was immediately reminded of Being John Malkovich, too. I loved that grainy little Encyclopedia Britannica-style film-within-a-film about the low-ceilinged floors.
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