Our editorial team has a favorite number in New York, and it is nine.
It is taller than a person — about 10 feet (3 meters) high, painted bright orange, weighs more than 5 tons, and stands on West 57th Street. It is just a few steps from the flagship Tiffany store in New York and the Louis Vuitton flagship (currently covered in the construction scaffolding that everyone photographs).
Why is it there? The giant number 9 marks the address of the building beside it: 9 West 57th Street.
Americans’ love of turning building addresses into eye-catching design is one of our favorite traditions in the United States. It belongs on the same list as the country’s love for neon signs (we have written about the most famous one).
The sculpture stands so far away from the building itself that, after a dispute with the city in the 1970s, the building’s owner had to pay an annual rent of $1,000 for the space it occupied. By the 1990s, The New York Times was describing the giant number as a “cultural artifact.”
Interestingly, the designer and sculptor behind the Big Nine was Ivan Chermayeff, the British-American graphic designer and co-founder of the branding studio Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv. The firm created logos for companies and organizations including Xerox, National Geographic, Chase, the US Open, Warner Bros., Mobil, and many others.
Although Ivan was born in London, his father, Serge Chermayeff, was born in the city of Grozny and lived there until he was ten years old. If you have a few minutes, read his Wikipedia biography. It is a remarkable story.
Now, back to the building beside the giant 9️⃣.
It is called the Solow Building, and it was developed by the well-known New York billionaire, real estate developer, and art collector Sheldon Solow, who died in 2020. He left his fortune to his rather unconventional son, Stefan, who changed his surname from Solow to Soloviev about fifteen years ago to emphasize his family’s Eastern European heritage.
📍Solow Building / 9 W 57th St, New York
