Final Pan Am Departure

Like a giant beacon of the Jet Age, heralding the sleek white-and-silver clippers that could breach the oceans in a matter of hours, the words "Pan Am" have hung high above Park Avenue for a generation.

Now, a year after Pan American World Airways left its namesake tower in mid-Manhattan and collapsed in bankruptcy, the Pan Am Building is to lose its familiar skyline signature in favor of something a little more stolid, but considerably more solid: "MetLife."

The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which has owned the Pan Am Building since 1981, announced yesterday that it would dismantle and replace the aluminum and neon sign over the next several months.

"Since Pan Am is no longer a tenant in the building and virtually out of business, it makes sense to replace the sign with a familiar name that symbolizes strength, stability and long-term commitment to New York City," said Robert G. Schwartz, chairman, president and chief executive of the insurance company. Potential for Confusion

The 15-foot-high letters, with their distinctly windswept edges, as well as the 26-foot-wide globes on either side of the tower are to be taken apart in pieces. They will be hauled up over the building's edge to the abandoned rooftop heliport -- from which true jet setters once embarked on worldwide journeys -- and removed on freight elevators.

Like the old sign, the new one will be illuminated. The words "MetLife" will appear at the top of the north and south facades. The company's logotype, four interlocked M's, will replace the globes on the east and west sides.

What remains to be seen is whether New Yorkers will stop referring to 200 Park Avenue as the Pan Am Building and start calling it the Met Life Building. If they do, that might lead to confusion, since the company's headquarters are in a landmark skyscraper on Madison Square Park that is called the Met Life Tower.

Pan Am's headquarters once took up 15 floors in the 58-story skyscraper astride Park Avenue, which was the world's largest office building when it opened in 1963. The ailing airline was down to four floors by the time it moved to Miami last year.

New Yorkers might have been fond of the globe-girdling airline but they never liked the building, a behemoth that altered forever the vistas up and down Park Avenue. 'It Means Crash and Burn'

"Couldn't they just leave the sign up and take the building down?" asked the architect Robert A. M. Stern, who is working on a history titled, "New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial."

Tama Starr, the president of the Artkraft Strauss Sign Corporation, was an unsuccessful bidder for the dismantling project. (The contract was won by Universal Unlimited of Glen Cove, L.I.) However, she still approves of the effort.

"Pan Am symbolizes failure, where Met Life symbolizes assurance and security," Ms. Starr said. "The emotional resonance of Pan Am is not holding. It no longer means flight. It means crash and burn. So it's no good for the building or the cityscape. But a sense of assurance would certainly be helpful in these gloomy days."

In contrast, Edward Kaufman, the associate director of issues at the Municipal Art Society, said he believed it would be a "real shame" to lose the Pan Am sign.

"Normally, we see signs as peripheral to a building," he said. "In this case, it's almost a reverse situation, where the sign has become a certain kind of icon of New York culture and history. I'd hate to see that go without really serious thought."

There would seem to be no impediment to Met Life's plan, however. The Buildings Department has approved the necessary permits, said Vahe Tiryakian, a spokesman for the agency.

Although the new sign would not be permitted under zoning rules today, Mr. Tiryakian said, it is allowed as an uninterrupted continuation of a use that was permitted before the current zoning was adapted.

The first evidence of the change will be the erection in the near future of rooftop scaffolding and netting, said Charles Sahner, a spokesman for Met Life. The project should take several months, he said.

Mr. Sahner dismissed any potential for confusion between 200 Park Avenue and 1 Madison Avenue, the Met Life Tower. "The two buildings are substantially different in terms of architecture, style and history," Mr. Sahner said, "and, we feel, are pretty easily differentiated."

As to popular nomenclature, he said "I think New Yorkers will ultimately make up their own minds as to what they call the building."