APPLE OPENS BIG APPLE CORE STORE
Peter Slatin
Steve Jobs had a big hand in designing the 32-foot-square cubed entrance
to the new Apple store, below the GM Plaza.
From the time the General Motors Building opened in 1968, at Fifth
Avenue and 59th Street, its sunken retail plaza has been a failure.
Retail experts in Manhattan's real estate community called it "the Well"
when trying to entice a tenant or just talk it up; in private, though,
they referred to it as 'the Pit."
But when Apple Computer's 147th retail store there opens to the public
on May 19, the company hopes that dank image will be jettisoned like a
well-tongued apple seed. They hope the Pit becomes instead a fleshy,
juicy fruit drawing hordes of consumers into the transparent,
32-foot-square cube jutting up from the GM Building's beautifully
transformed plaza (now brought up just above the street and graced by
two small pools), and down the glass-enclosed circular elevator or the
broad floating, curving staircase to the 10,000-square-foot store below.
cont'd....
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