text: Upon the building's completion, Chase Manhattan hired twelve young women to lead visitors through the building and published a special edition of its magazine, The Chase Manhattan News. A photograph of the building by Erich Locker, called "The Chase Manhattan Tower at Dawn", was utilized in many advertisements. Time magazine stated that 28 Liberty Street had "the Rockefeller touch" while The New York Times referred to the tower as "New York’s newest landmark". Architectural Forum described the project as "a milestone, perhaps even an end point in the development of the American skyscraper", saying that "the big, broad-shouldered Chase stated crisply the mood and abilities of a newer age". Mayor Wagner called the plaza "an example of New York City’s endless renaissance" upon the plaza's opening.
  Reviews among architecture critics were more varied. Carol Herselle Krinsky lauded the building's massing and the reflective facade, as opposed to "the earlier building surfaces of brick and stone [which] absorb light." New York Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable, writing in 1960, said that 28 Liberty Street, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, and 270 Park Avenue all had a "still too-rare esthetic excellence". The next month, Huxtable said that the tower and plaza "carry the double promise of corporate efficiency and a more enduring value: significant civic beauty." Wolf Von Eckardt said in 1962 that the design was "another quiet triumph" for architecture despite being "not sensationally original". Huxtable's successor Paul Goldberger said that the plaza and its "progeny" had failed, but that the tower had a positive impact on the nearby area. William H. Whyte, a sociologist, praised the plaza as among the "great processional spaces" in New York City. As early as 1996, architect Robert A. M. Stern had suggested that 28 Liberty Street was a viable candidate for official landmark status. Eric Nash, writing in 2005, said: "Its big-shouldered parti is monotonous and seems to muscle aside the surrounding delicate stone towers of the 1930s."