Midtown Architecture, around Murray Hill

The area around Murray Hill in Midtown is incredibly rich in different styles of architecture...here are just a few examples:

First, A pure 1960's modern-International Style office building on the Eastern Edge of Murray Hill that is ALL business...
At the time buildings like this were erected, some architects and critics hailed its lack of any kind of stylistic detailing and or ornamentation as brilliantly futuristic -- ignoring the Manhattan was being filled with glass and steel boxes whose design was framed mostly by zoning laws.
It did not take long before there was a revolt against this austerity and unadorned utilitarianism and we began to see "Post Modern" buildings that have developed in all kinds of sometimes fanciful ways, often echoing their Art Deco and "Moderne" skyscraper neighbors..

Second, a classic example of the kind of building that still makes up a lot of the residential area of Murray Hill ( not so much residential now as home to Consulates, it seems)....this was built as the Civic Building about 1901 I believe and is now the Estonia House, which is more than just a Consular building but a center for the (not significant) Estonian population of New York City.

I chose this because it is such a pure example of form with its Beaux Arts style ( though most Murray Hill residences go back to stylistic periods earlier than that)...

Third, a "modern/post modern" apartment building just South of Murray Hill ( but where you still find places that call themselves "Murray Hill Dry Cleaners," etc.) with its unusual feature of having fire stairs built on the outside of the building as they only did in tenements mostly years ago (there are a few old high rise apartment buildings with classic iron NYC exterior fire escapes, but these are really pretty rare...there is one called "The Mango" in Murray Hill East--here is a link

http://www.mns.com/content/murray_hill/the-mango-301-east-38th-street/

The Mango, by the way, is a nice enough  building and apparently has roomy apartments that at least until fairly recently were being rented very reasonably for the area...