physics

One Penn Plaza

One Penn Plaza is a physics topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand One Penn Plaza rather than just read about it. In short: Penn 1 (originally One Penn Plaza and stylized as PENN 1) is a skyscraper in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. It is located between 33rd Street and 34th Street, west of Seventh Avenue, and adjacent to Pennsylvania Station and Madison Square Garden.

Key takeaways

One Penn Plaza belongs to physics; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect One Penn Plaza to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of One Penn Plaza from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Penn 1 (originally One Penn Plaza and stylized as PENN 1) is a skyscraper in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. It is located between 33rd Street and 34th Street, west of Seventh Avenue, and adjacent to Pennsylvania Station and Madison Square Garden. One Penn Plaza is the tallest building in the Pennsylvania Plaza complex of office buildings, hotels, and entertainment facilities. The building is assigned its own ZIP Code, 10119; it was one of 41 buildings in Manhattan that had their own ZIP Codes as of 2019.

Architecture The skyscraper was designed by Kahn & Jacobs and completed in 1972. It reaches 750 feet (230 m) with 57 floors. The tower has three setbacks: at the 7th, 14th, and 55th floors. From its location on the west side of Manhattan, most south, west and north-facing tenants have unobstructed views of the Hudson River. One Penn Plaza is built with structural steel and concrete, with grey solar glass and anodized aluminum on the outside walls. Mechanical rooms are located on the 12th and 13th floors; placing these on lower floors instead of the top of the building allowed equipment to be installed before the structural steel framework was complete and shaved six to nine months off the building's construction schedule. The building has 14 entrances and 44 elevators in seven banks. An underground parking garage provides 695 spaces for cars and is accessible from both 33rd and 34th Streets. Direct passageways at each end of the building provide underground connections (weekdays only) to the Long Island Rail Road concourse of Pennsylvania Station, which is located one block to the south. The ground floor is leased to several commercial tenants, The top floors include a retail space of 142,000 square feet (13,200 m2) which was formerly occupied by a three-story Kmart store (closed in 2020), and before that a Woolworth. A public plaza and fountain are located on the west end of the building. Unlike traditional fountains, steam is dispensed in the winter and fog is dispensed in the summer to prevent water from splashing out during gusty wind conditions.

History One Penn Plaza is currently owned by Vornado Realty Trust. It was previously owned by Helmsley-Spear Inc., which sold the building for $420 million in the late 1990s. In 2009, plans were made to install a cogeneration plant in order to heat the building more efficiently. By 2010, it was reported that when the new plant was activated, it cut the building's carbon output nearly in half. The lobby was refurbished in 1995 and underwent another refurbishment in 2019. The building had been rebranded as Penn 1 by 2021. A restaurant called The Landing opened on the second floor of the rebranded Penn 1 in 2022. More than 80 percent of the action in the 2011 independent film Margin Call was shot on the 42nd floor of the building, which had recently been vacated by a trading firm.

Tenants Cisco Systems, a networking and telephony company, occupies part of the 6th and the entire 9th floor. North Highland, a global consulting firm on the 32nd floor Cookie Jar Entertainment has an office in Suite 3324. Dun & Bradstreet has an office on the 44th floor. Expeditors has an office on the 46th floor. Gibbons P.C., a law firm, occupies the entire 37th floor. Insight Enterprises has offices on the 19th floor. Lumen Technologies has an office on the 51st floor MarkLogic, an enterprise NoSQL software vendor, has a suite of offices on the 42nd floor. Milliman, an actuarial consulting firm, occupies a suite of offices on the 38th floor. Mitel Networks, a telecommunications provider, occupies a suite of offices on the 25th floor. Polycom, a telecommunications equipment manufacturer, occupies the 48th floor. Riverbed Technology occupies a suite of offices on the 17th floor. Samsung Electronics America occupies the 26th floor. URS Corporation New York City Office occupies most of the 6th and 7th floors of One Penn Plaza. WSP USA, formerly Parsons Brinckerhoff, is headquartered in One Penn Plaza and occupies the 4th and 5th floors. The Independent has its US headquarters in the building. Additionally, Publicis formerly occupied the fifth floor and part of the fourth floor.

See also List of tallest buildings in New York City

References

External links

Official website

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with One Penn Plaza

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what One Penn Plaza claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In physics, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to One Penn Plaza before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about One Penn Plaza ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of One Penn Plaza

In research: One Penn Plaza appears in physics research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses One Penn Plaza in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: One Penn Plaza is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1972 establishments in New York City, 34th Street (Manhattan), Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certified buildings, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for One Penn Plaza outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study One Penn Plaza in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what One Penn Plaza means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain One Penn Plaza out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is One Penn Plaza in simple terms?

Why does One Penn Plaza matter?

Because it connects several physics ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study One Penn Plaza?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on One Penn Plaza.