initially prompting false speculation that he had been fired from his position at Lever Brothers due to Lever House's design. Final plans for Lever House were filed with the New York City Department of Buildings in April 1950, three months after Luckman's departure. The plans were publicized the same month. Demolition of the four buildings on Lever House's site was scheduled to commence immediately after the plans were announced. The George A. Fuller Company received the contract to construct Lever House in August 1950. The steel framework was topped out in April 1951. The building officially opened on April 29, 1952, with a tour of the building and a ceremony attended by Mayor Vincent R. Impellitteri. Lever Brothers leased the building from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, taking over the responsibility of maintaining it. The New York Times estimated that the promotional value of Lever House amounted to $1 million per year, substantially more than the estimated $200,000 annual loss due to the lack of retail shops. The building also had an average of 40,000 yearly visitors, many of whom were architecture students, and employee turnover was just over one-third of the average turnover for the city's other large companies. In Lever House's early years, the enclosed section of the ground level was used for art exhibitions. These included the Sculptors Guild's annual exhibit as well as an annual heliography exhibition. Lever Brothers commissioned Robert Wiegand in 1970 to paint a mural, Leverage, along a now-demolished wall adjacent to the third-story courtyard. Decline Lever House's small floor–area ratio became a drawback for real estate developers in the years after its completion, even as that same quality remained popular among the public. The Lever Brothers Company rejected numerous rumors that the building would be replaced by a larger structure, even advertising the building's 25th anniversary in 1977 with a full-page New York Times ad. At that time, Lever House had hosted more than 250 exhibitions. Proposed demolition and preservation Until the 1980s, relatively few preservationists were concerned about the demolition of curtain walls that had been completed between the 1950s and the 1970s. Preservationists only started to express concern in 1982, Fisher Brothers had signed a contract to purchase the fee position for the underlying land. The firm wished to replace Lever House, as well as the neighboring Jofa Building on 53rd Street, with a forty-story building containing three times the