One Chase Manhattan Plaza for Sale One Chase Manhattan Plaza, the silvery, sky-scraping symbol of Lower Manhattan's emergence into the modern era of architecture and finance, is being offered for sale by JPMorgan Chase & Company. It might become a luxury apartment building and will almost surely get a new name. Elwood P. Johns/Photo courtesy of JPMorgan Chase Archives One Chase Manhattan Plaza, a 60-story skyscraper clad in aluminum and glass, was designated a city landmark in 2008. Given the recent prices paid per square foot for some of the more desirable office buildings in New York City, Chase might expect to make $1 billion or more in a sale. The building's prospective sale was reported on Friday by Crain's New York Business and confirmed by spokesmen for the bank and for the real estate company CBRE, which will represent Chase in marketing the building. Though Chase moved its headquarters to 270 Park Avenue in 1996, when it merged with Chemical Bank, it still occupies more than half of the 2.2 million square feet in Chase Manhattan Plaza. The 60-story tower, clad in aluminum and glass, is set on a two-and-half-acre plaza named for David Rockefeller, the former bank chairman. It has been closed to the public since September 2011. It might reopen by Thanksgiving. The complex was designated a city landmark in 2008, with the bank's assent. Therefore, any new owner's renovation or reconstruction plans would be subject to review by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Whatever is to happen with the building - renovated office space, apartments, hotel rooms or some combination - the transformation would probably not begin until 2014, the 50th anniversary of the completion of the main plaza, at Pine and William Streets. While allowing a buyer to change the building's name, Chase will not give up its branch bank under the plaza. It is among the more serene and better used banking spaces in the city, surrounding a circular sculpture garden by Isamu Noguchi. A buyer would also be required to preserve the artist Jean Dubuffet's "Group of Four Trees" on the plaza. This organic, 40-foot-high sculpture, which belongs to the Museum of Modern Art, delightfully offsets the tower's austere, linear geometry. Against the backdrop of the three new World Trade Center towers, the commercial complex at Battery Park City and the growing allure of downtown as a residential neighborhood, it might be difficult now to discern how revolutionary 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza was in its day. "The renaissance of Lower Manhattan began with David Rockefeller's decision to build the Chase Manhattan headquarters downtown in the late 1950s," Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in 1970, when she was the architecture critic for The New York Times. "That tipped the scale toward keeping in the Wall Street area a financial community that had been on the verge of uptown flight," she added. The 60-story structure at 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, started the spectacular renewal.