2 Columbus Circle

2 Columbus Circle is a small, trapezoidal lot on the south side of Columbus Circle in Manhattan, New York City, USA.

The seven-story Pabst Grand Circle Hotel, designed by William H. Cauvet, stood at this address from 1874 until it was demolished in 1960. From 1964 to 2005 the site contained a 12 story modernist structure designed by Edward Durell Stone for Huntington Hartford, heir to the founder of A&P Supermarkets, to display his art collection. As Stone designed it, the building was marble-clad with Venetian motifs and a curved façade. It had filigree-like portholes and windows that ran along an upper loggia at its top stories.

The building was often called "The Lollipop Building" in reference to a mocking review by architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable in which she called it a "die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops." However, three decades later she admitted that she got "a little lift, a sense of pleasure" when she walked past it. Nonetheless, Huxtable took issue with the campaign to save the building, writing in the Wall Street Journal that: "It was an unworthy performance that did little credit to anyone who cares about preservation and can only serve as an object lesson of how not to go about it."

With architect Philip L. Goodwin, Stone had previously designed the Rockefeller family's Museum of Modern Art in the International style. Hartford wanted his "Gallery of Modern Art" to represent an alternative view of modernism.

Interest in landmarking this building began in 1996, soon after the building turned thirty years old and became eligible for landmark designation. In this year, Robert A. M. Stern included it in his article " A Preservationist's List of 35 Modern Landmarks-in-Waiting" written for the New York Times.

Stone's design at 2 Columbus Circle was listed as one of the World Monuments Fund's "100 Most Endangered Sites for 2006." In 2004, the National Trust for Historic Preservation called it one of America's "11 Most Endangered Historic Places."

Despite a serious preservation effort, The Museum of Arts & Design has radically altered the building for their occupation in 2008.

Architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff named the new building as one of seven structures in New York City that should be torn down because they "have a traumatic effect on the city." Ouroussoff also wrote:

The renovation remedies the annoying functional defects that had plagued the building for decades. But this is not the bold architectural statement that might have justified the destruction of an important piece of New York history. Poorly detailed and lacking in confidence, the project is a victory only for people who favor the safe and inoffensive and have always been squeamish about the frictions that give this city its vitality.