ManhattanSkyscrapers

ManhattanSkyscrapers

R E V I S E D A N D E X PA N D E D E D I T I O N

Eric P. NashP H OTO G R A P H S B Y Norman McGrath

I N T R O D U C T I O N B Y Carol Willis

P R I N C E T O N A R C H I T E C T U R A L P R E S S N E W Y O R K

P U B L I S H E D B Y

Princeton Architectural Press37 East 7th StreetNew York, NY 10003

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No part of this book may be used or reproduced in anymanner without written permission from the publisher,except in the context of reviews.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges all of the individualsand organizations that provided photographs for this publi-cation. Every effort has been made to contact the owners ofcopyright for the photographs herein. Any omissions will becorrected in subsequent printings.

F I R S T E D I T I O N

D E S I G N E R : Sara E. StemenP R O J E C T E D I T O R : Beth HarrisonP H O T O R E S E A R C H E R S : Eugenia Bell and Beth Harrison

R E V I S E D A N D U P D AT E D E D I T I O N

P R O J E C T E D I T O R : Clare JacobsonA S S I S TA N T S : John McGill, Lauren Nelson, and Dorothy Ball

S P E C I A L T H A N K S T O :

Nettie Aljian, Nicola Bednarek, Janet Behning, Penny (YuenPik) Chu, Russell Fernandez, Jan Haux, Clare Jacobson,John King, Mark Lamster, Nancy Eklund Later, Linda Lee,Katharine Myers, Jane Sheinman, Scott Tennent, JenniferThompson, Paul G. Wagner, Joe Weston, and Deb Wood ofPrinceton Architectural Press

Kevin Lippert, Publisher

L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S

C ATA L O G I N G - I N - P U B L I C AT I O N D ATA

Nash, Eric Peter.Manhattan skyscrapers / Eric P. Nash ; photographs by

Norman McGrath ; introduction by Carol Willis.Rev. andexpanded ed.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references.ISBN 1-56898-545-2 (alk. paper)1. SkyscrapersNew York (State)New York. 2. Architec-tureNew York (State)New York20th century. 3. Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)Buildings, structures, etc. I. McGrath, Norman. II. Title.NA6232.N37 2005720'.483'097471dc22

2005002264

Para Rebecca, rosa rara, perla preciosa, hija hermosa de la luna

Hearst Magazine Building

(originally International Magazine Building)

Chanin Building

One Fifth Avenue

Helmsley Building

(originally New York Central Building)

Fuller Building

Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower

(now Republic National Bank)

Downtown Athletic Club

Daily News Building

40 Wall Street

(originally the Bank of

Manhattan Company Building)

Chrysler Building

San Remo Apartments (originally San Remo Hotel)

Riverside Church

120 Wall Street

500 Fifth Avenue

Empire State Building

Waldorf-Astoria Hotel

McGraw-Hill Building

General Electric Building

(originally RCA Victor Building)

City Bank Farmers Trust Company Building

Cities Service Building (now 70 Pine Street)

Acknowledgments

Introduction by Carol Willis

American Tract Society Building

Bayard-Condict Building

Park Row Building

Flatiron Building

West Street Building (now 90 West Street)

Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower

Bankers Trust Company Building

(originally 14 Wall Street)

Woolworth Building

Municipal Building

Candler Building

Equitable Building

Bush Tower

Shelton Towers Hotel

(now Marriott East Side Hotel)

American Radiator Building

Ritz Tower

Paramount Building

Barclay-Vesey Building

Fred F. French Building

Beekman Tower (originally Panhellenic Tower)

Tudor City

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Trump Tower

IBM Building

AT&T Building (now Sony Building)

Marriott Marquis Hotel

Lipstick Building

425 Lexington Avenue

Worldwide Plaza

1585 Broadway

(originally Solomon Equities Building)

Bertelsmann Building (originally 1540 Broadway)

712 Fifth Avenue

World Financial Center

Four Seasons Hotel

LVMH Building

Times Square Buildings

Trump World Tower

Austrian Cultural Forum

Westin New York at Times Square

Time Warner Building

Bloomberg Tower

Freedom Tower

Bibliography

Glossary

Credits

One Wall Street

(originally Irving Trust Company Building)

Metropolitan Life Insurance Company,

North Building

Rockefeller Center

100 Park Avenue

United Nations Secretariat

Lever House

Seagram Building

Time & Life Building

Union Carbide Building

(now Chase Manhattan Bank)

Chase Manhattan Plaza

Pan Am Building (now Met Life Building)

CBS Building

Silver Towers (originally University Plaza)

Marine Midland Bank Building (now 140 Broadway)

General Motors Building

One Astor Plaza

XYZ Buildings: Exxon, McGraw-Hill,

and Celanese Buildings

W. R. Grace Building

1 and 2 World Trade Center

One Liberty Plaza (originally U.S. Steel Building)

1 and 2 UN Plaza

Citicorp Center

Contents

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A b o o k , like a skyscraper, is puttogether by many unseen hands.Thanks to my editors and drafts-men, Beth Harrison at PrincetonArchitectural Press and Julie Iovine at the NewYork Times, for their sharp minds and pencils,and general grace under pressure. My publisher,Kevin Lippert, provided the site to build upon.Norman McGrath created the framework ofcolor photographs by which this sheath of texthangs. Eugenia Bell laid the foundation withintrepid archival photo research. Like a mastermason, the design director Sara Stemen put thepieces in place. Sylvie Ball did the finish carpen-try with several supplemental photographs, andthe architectural historian John Kriskiewiczhelped get the customers in the door with hisinsightful introduction. Carol Willis, the direc-tor of the Skyscraper Museum, deliriously trans-formed my view of the city when I learned inher class at the New School for Social Researchthat the Empire State Buildings crown wasdesigned as a mooring mast for zeppelins. Andthanks to my sister, Laura, who has been as trueas a surveyors level in helping me set my sights.

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Acknowledgments

Wow! New York, just like I pictured it . . . skyscrapers and everything!

Stevie Wonder

...when I try to imagine a faultless love

Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur

Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

W. H. Auden

In the first half of the history of the NewYork skyscraper, steel frames were clad in stone,brick, or terra cotta and offered the illusion ofmonumental mass. In the second half, from the1940s through today, the aesthetic has beenprincipally transparent planes and volumes, acurtain wall that reveals the structural systemand the space within. Advances in technology,including high-strength steel, bolted and weldedskeletons, curtain-wall systems, air-conditioning,and fluorescent lights, made these innovationspossible, and the triumph of International Stylemodernism made the glass box ubiquitous.McGrath has a special empathy for the mod-ernist towers, shooting them for the most parteither face-on or slightly angled to define theirprecise prismatic volumes. From the paragons ofthe styleLever House, Seagram Building, andBlack Rock (CBS Building), to the interchange-able tower-in-the-plaza slabs of Sixth Avenueand other like-minded monolithsNash andMcGrath give Manhattan modernism duerespect. Likewise, the buildings of the lastdecades of the century, which range from theslick surface of the Lipstick Building, the pun-ning postmodern AT&T (Sony) Building, andthe collaged faades of 4 Times Square, to thefolded-glass envelopes of 1 and 2 UN Plaza andthe faceted LVMH Building, are presented withflair, flash, and cool.

Still, Manhattan Skyscrapers has an every-day quality, in the best sense of the word.McGraths photographs generally portray hissubjects in full daylight (not the dramatic rakinglight of dawn or sunset or other types of atmos-pherics), and the towers are embedded in thecity, as they are in life. These are the buildings,from masterpieces to mundane, that NewYorkers see around them every day. Nashsentries are minihistories that are sensitive, infor-mative, and fun to read: they make the buildingsapproachable.

One thing we have learned from 9/11 isthat the everyday architecture we take forgranted is really something to treasure. The TwinTowers were giants the likes of which we will notsee again. But contrary to the questions posed byso many journalists and writers in the monthsafter the tragedy, it is clear that New York isgoing to keep building towers. ManhattanSkyscrapers will surely have another new edition.

Sk y s c r a p e r h i s t o r y changedon September 11, 2001. This book,first published in 1999, needs a newedition, if only to place the entry on

the World Trade Center in the past tense and toacknowledge that the title is tinged with tragedy.Academics debate perspectives through whichwe view the past, and in the late twentieth cen-tury the postmodern mindset argued the impos-sibility of a single truth or unshifting narrative.But the first year of the twenty-first centuryproved that there are some historical markersthat are definitive and indelible.

Exactly what has changed, though, is hardto pinpoint. Our first skyscraper martyrs is howcritic Paul Goldberger described the loss of thetwin towers and the emotional public response.New Yorks shared sorrow over the structuresstands in striking contrast to sentiments in thelast years of the twentieth century, when therewas a clear animus in the city against tall build-ings. Preservationists and good-governmentgroups marshaled protests and lawsuits thatstymied towers such as the early Columbus Circleproject (now completed as the Time WarnerBuilding), and the Department of City Planningsought to curtail height by revising the zoningcode in an ultimately failed effort inelegantly, butaptly, named the Unified Bulk Proposal.

Post 9/11, there seems to have been a shiftin both popular and critical perception: soaringheight now seems to transcend the association ofprivate interests and investment and represent acollective identity. There is a new emotionalconnection to the skyline. The fervent desire tofill the void at Ground Zero with a monumentaltower has had overwhelming support, even if thedesign of the Freedom Tower has been contro-versial. Other bold tower proposals throughoutthe city by international celebrity architects havebeen eagerly embraced.

Lamenting lost landmarks is a tradition inwriting about New York, especially since the1960s, when the demolition of masterworkssuch as Pennsylvania Station spurred grassrootspolitical efforts to create the LandmarksPreservation Commission. Books like NathanSilvers classic Lost New York (1967) mourned the disappearance of the nineteenth-centuryarchitecture of the cityfrom individual man-sions, to blocks of early row houses, to grand

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civic and commercial structures of two to tenstories. The Destruction of Lower Manhattan(1969), an album by photographer DannyLyons, captured the last remnants of down-towns working waterfront at the moment ofmassive urban renewal, including the construc-tion of the new World Trade Center. In this storyline, skyscrapers were the ultimate villainsin a march of modernity that squashed humanscale and erased history.

It is a clich that the essential characteristicof New York is continuous change. But a walkthrough the streets todaythe dense urban fab-ric of lower Manhattan, the spine of Broadwayas it travels up the island, the corporate corridorof Park Avenue, still mixed with patrician co-opsand Art Deco hotelsshows how rich and rang-ing an archive of American architecture remainsin the city. In Manhattan Skyscrapers, we have ahappy survey of survivors.

Eric Nash and Norman McGrath haveselected a set of gems that span the 1890s to thepresent. From the early, eclectic American TractSociety Building and Louis H. Sullivans refinedBayard-Condict Building, to the Park RowBuilding, the turn-of-the-century title holder forworlds tallest building, through the classicalmonumentality of the Flatiron Building,Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower,and Bankers Trust Company Building and theGothic spire of the Woolworth Building, we seethe highlights of the first, laissez-faire era of sky-scraper development, when no constraints tai-lored the foursquare form of these straight-upstructures.

The second era was distinctively shaped bythe setback formula of the 1916 zoning law,which produced the stepped-pyramid bases andslender tower shafts of the Art Deco stars of the1920s and early 1930s, including the Chanin,Chrysler, General Electric, and Empire Statebuildings. These Jazz Age greats have an impres-sive backup band in midtown that each get a riffhere. Downtown, a second scene hits the highnotes with the Wall Street cluster of 40 Wall,One Wall, and City Bank Farmers Trust andCities Service buildings. Clearly Nashs favorites,the 1920s towers dominate the book in numberand personality, just as they seem to define NewYork in the minds eye of millions or in the top-ten lists of tourists.

IntroductionCAROL WILLIS

ManhattanSkyscrapers

motif for a Bible publisher, look out from thecorners.

At the time, there was no consensus onhow to treat the top of a tall building and allkinds of variations on historicist styles wereattempted, from Gothic spires to Greek temples.These richly detailed sculptural cornices becameobsolete when buildings regularly were 30 and40 stories tall.

Tw o c o m p e t i n g styles of archi-tecture predominated in the UnitedStates when the American Tract SocietyBuilding was completed. The earlier

style was Richardsonian Romanesque, namedfor Henry Hobson Richardson, critically consid-ered to be our first native-born architect ofworld-class genius. Richardson combined themassive, lithic qualities of the Roman stone archwith his own uncanny sense of flowing, organicenergy and balanced asymmetry. The other style,called Sullivanesque for Louis Henry Sullivan,represented a break with the past because it wasan expression of the new tall building as a verti-cal design.

R. H. Robertsons 23-story American TractSociety Building is a premodern skyscraper inthat its primary organization is horizontal. Thearcaded, rock-faced granite ashlar base takes itsinspiration from Florentine palazzi, an appropri-ate image for the expanding mercantile andindustrial empire of the United States. Thebuilding was commissioned by the AmericanTract Society, which published Bibles in theinterest of promoting a universal, nondenom-inational Protestantism, the culture of theemerging business class. Robertson was an eccle-siastical architect, familiar with the then-popularRomanesque style, so it was natural for him todesign a Romanesque skyscraper.

Robertson made no attempt to unify thebuilding vertically, as Sullivan would have done.The styling of the squarish tower on a 100-by-94-foot site is Renaissance, with stacked, hori-zontal layers separated by numerous beltcoursesand window moldings. At 291 feet tall, thebuilding was skyscraper height for its day (theworlds record was still held by the 302-foot-tallMasonic Temple of 1892 by Burnham & Root inChicago). However, its relatively low scale andproportions of 3:1 make the Renaissance stylingvisually appealing.

The three-story crown at the corner ofNassau and Spruce Streets adds visual interest by

[ 1 ] A typical pamphlet published by the American Tract Society.

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American Tract Society Building150 NASSAU STREET R. H. ROBERTSON, 1896

breaking up the roofline against the sky, an earlyeclectic forebear of the fanciful Art Decocrowns. A double-arcaded window with deepintrados is supported by a three-quarter-roundbrick Corinthian column and heavy scrollbrackets. A curved copper cornice decoratedwith egg-and-dart molding and lions heads sur-mounts the hollow double arches, and terra-cotta winged angel caryatids, an appropriate

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mullions. The regular, square-headed windowsof the open, glassy faade visually recede into thebackground behind the organizing vertical linesof white terra cotta. The piers themselves aredecorated with fluted piping that furtherenhances the vertical line.

The thin curtain wall of terra cotta thatexpresses the inner steel skeleton was a radicaldeparture from the heavy masonry walls of theperiod. Montgomery Schuyler, a leading critic ofthe time, wrote of the Bayard, Everywhere thedrapery of baked clay is a mere wrapping, whichclings so closely to the frame as to reveal it, andeven to emphasize it. . . . The Bayard Building isthe nearest approach yet made, in New York, atleast, to solving the problem of the skyscraper.

Though known for saying form ever fol-lows function, Sullivan was a poet rather than apure functionalist at heart. The six spread-winged angels at the cornice express the build-ings soaring aspirations, making it part of anoneiric cityscape.

Lo u i s h e n r y s u l l i v a n sgraceful, terra-cotta-clad Bayard-Condict Building does not quite qual-ify as a skyscraper at only 13 stories, but

Sullivan revolutionized the way architects thinkabout tall buildings. As Frank Lloyd Wright toldthe story, Louis Sullivan invented the modernskyscraper after a walk through Chicagos Loop,when in three minutes he dashed off an esquissefor the Wainwright Building (1891) in St. Louis.I was perfectly aware of what had happened,wrote Wright, who was then Sullivans appren-tice. This was Louis Sullivans greatestmomenthis greatest effort. The skyscraper asa new thing under the sun, an entity with . . .beauty all its own, was born.

Sullivans contribution was nothing lessthan to overthrow the heritage of Greek andRoman architecture. Before the age of elevatorsand structural steel, buildings were low to theground and the emphasis was on the horizontalline. Even when new technologies allowed archi-tects to build vertically, they adhered to the

[ 1 ] Richly ornamental terra-cotta panels incorporate classical and Celtic motifs. [ 2 ] Breathtakingly modern, the Bayarddates to the horse-and-carriage era.

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Bayard-Condict Building6569 BLEECKER STREET LOUIS H. SULLIVAN, 1898

horizontal layer-cake construction of the clas-sical model. Rather than counteract the inherentverticality of a tall building by imposing a hori-zontal plan, Sullivan realized that a skyscrapermust be tall, every inch of it tall. . . . It must beevery inch a proud and soaring thing, rising insheer exaltation that from bottom to top it is aunit without a single dissenting line.

This commercial office building, the onlyexample of Sullivans work in New York, appearsmuch taller than its neighbors because of its ele-gantly organized faade. The structural piersthat run the entire length of the faade from theground floor to the deep overhanging corniceare distinguished by their heft and thickness. Incontrast, the three-quarter-round colonettes thatserve as window mullions begin at the secondfloor, above open spaces, denoting their decora-tive rather than structural function.

Sullivan created a new visual lexicon forthe tall building, in which everything is subordi-nated to the vertical expression. The surface ofthe spandrels is suppressed behind the piers and

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buildings over 10 stories tall in New York; by1908, when the title of worlds tallest buildingwas ceded to Ernest F. Flaggs 47-story, 612-foot-tall Singer Building, there were 538 buildingsover 10 stories. The benchmark of 10 storiesrapidly became meaningless in the explosion of commercial construction. An apostate,Robertson recanted the skyscraper aesthetic in1900, and argued for a return to the Beaux-Artsscale, in which new buildings should be nohigher than 150 feet on avenues (roughly the tra-ditional cornice level of Park Avenue), and 100feet on side streets.

The Park Rows lobby is a period gem, wellworthy of landmark designation, although it isnot one. Nearly perfectly preserved, it is linedwith marble panels that would become thetrademark of New York office buildings untilwell into the 1960s, under a gilded, coffered ceil-ing. Ten remarkable wedge-shaped elevator cabsfan out to form a semicircle.

Developed as a speculative commercialoffice venture by a syndicate of investors, thePark Row contained nearly 1,000 office spacesand accommodated 4,000 workers. It wasemblematic of the gigantism to come. Munseysmagazine called it a city and a world withinfour towering walls . . . a footprint of the twenti-eth century.

Th e v i c t o r i a n culture that pro-duced the first skyscrapers was an oddmix of forward-looking technologyand romantic nostalgia for the bucolic

past that technology was replacing. The 30-story,391-foot-tall Park Row Building, for nine yearsthe worlds tallest building, was constructed withan internal steel cage frame pioneered by theChicago School, but its cluttered classical revivalfaade works to disguise its height rather thanaccentuate it.

R. H. Robertson drew on metaphors froman age before steel construction. Four massivelimestone caryatids at the fourth-four level,sculpted by John Massey Rhind, emphasize anillusion of masonry support in the buff-brickand limestone faade, even though steel girderscan be plainly seen bracing the light courts. Thevertical organization of the building is confusedby horizontal divisions of stringcourses andheavily bracketed balconies at many levels.

Robertson apparently could not decidebetween presenting the building as a free-stand-ing tower or a simple infill. As a result, thebuilding partakes of both and has virtually nodistinguishing silhouette. The presentation isalmost entirely oriented toward its 104-foot-wide Park Row faade, except for the narrow 20-foot-wide front on Ann Street to the south. Ellssprawl octopus-like, covered only by bare brickparty walls.

Diminutive, copper-covered cupolas thatonce served as a public observatory are a won-derful romantic holdover, but also reveal a mis-comprehension of the impact of classicaldecoration on a tall building. Seen from streetlevel, the tiny turrets only work to lessen thescale of the building. The design problem oftopping off a tall building led to eclectic and attimes eccentric variations before the setback silhouette was arrived upon in response to theZoning Code of 1916.

In 1890, less than a decade before the Park Row was completed, there were only six

[ 1 ] The Park Row Buildings semicircular lobby features wedge-shaped elevator cabs. [ 2 ] The buildings steel structureis belied by its masonry motifs.

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Park Row Building15 PARK ROW R. H. ROBERTSON, 1899

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masks is a link with a classical past. At the fourthstory, foliated ovals alternate with roundels thatcontain mysterious Greek masks of women. Theterra-cotta blocks are deeply incised and richlypatterned, creating a florid play of light andshadow over the entire surface. The windows, setin deep reveals, seem like somber voids in thesurface. Eight-story oriels, relatively rare in New

We l l p a s t World War I, thesteamship continued to be themost powerful metaphor for thetwentieth century. Nautical

design demanded that no space be wasted, nogesture be superfluous, and that an objects form be subordinated to its use. It is not coinci-dental that the Flatiron Building so muchresembles a steamship fashioned out of stone.Alfred Stieglitz, who took one of the best-known images of the sheer, thin wall of theFlatiron floating weightlessly above the snow ofMadison Square Park, wrote that the buildingappeared to be moving toward me like the bowof a monster ocean steamera picture of newAmerica still in the making. With its undulat-ing French Renaissance terra-cotta cladding, theFlatiron seems to swim out of a dream of a clas-sical past toward the future of the steel sky-scraper. It is a perfect snapshot of the skyscraperas a Janus-faced evolutionary object, lookingback to the past, but anticipating the future.

Originally built as the headquarters of theGeorge A. Fuller construction company, thebuilding was only briefly called the FullerBuilding and soon became known as theFlatiron because of its distinctive shape. Thecompany built some of the most importantbuildings in the city, including the originalPennsylvania Station, the Plaza Hotel, and LeverHouse and the Seagram Building in the postWorld War II era. The 21-story, 307-foot-tallbuilding was the tallest skyscraper north of WallStreet when it was built.

Buckminster Fuller rightly remarked thatthe Flatiron dated to an era when architectswere still pretending there was no steel, but the Chicago architectural firm of Daniel H.Burnham was already one step ahead. Burnhammaximized the delta-shaped site to establish theskyscraper as a freestanding sculptural object,but the viewer intuits that the walls are too sheerto support its weight. The onlooker cannot helpbut be swept into the vortex of its six-foot-wide

[ 1 ] The underlying steel skeleton stands exposed in this construction photo.

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Flatiron Building175 FIFTH AVENUE DANIEL H. BURNHAM, 1902

apex at the intersection of Broadway and FifthAvenue. The radically narrow corner seems tocompress space, making the viewer look up forthe lost volume of the building, further addingto a sense of overwhelming height.

Sometimes called Burnham Baroque,the rippling terra-cotta curtain wall decoratedwith lions heads, wreaths, and architectural

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York office buildings but more common inChicago skyscrapers such as Burnhams FisherBuilding of 1896, give an undulating rhythm tothe faade. The banded rustication of the wallsenhances the sense of many layers stacked ontop of one another.

The Flatiron is one of the most aggressiveformulations of the tall building as a classicalcolumn, with a defined, anchoring base, a regu-lar shaft, and an ornamental capital. The base,which can be read as four or five stories becauseof the double-height ground floor, is distin-guished by heavily rusticated limestone blocks.Burnham capped his building with a massive,projecting dentiled cornice topped by flatbalustrades interspersed with squat piers. Thefact that from certain angles the building can be perceived as a column is a marvelously literal demonstration of the essence of the free-standing tower.

The column form was the summa for a sky-scraper of this height, but at greater distances of30 and 40 stories that tall buildings soon attained,heavy, classical cornices became unwieldy. ElyJacques Kahn, one of the most prolific architectsof the setback style, perhaps now remains alonein his judgment, but wrote: Consider theFlatiron, the Tribune Tower, the World Buildingas notable shafts of a generation ago and find howlittle reason exists for most of their decorationand how feebly they stop. The cornice, once ofstone and purporting to shed rain water from theface of the building, became a distorted andridiculous affair of tin, copper, sheet iron, terracotta, tied on with wires and merely lasting as aweak reminder of mere classicism.

But the Flatiron is a thoroughly modernobject in that it requires the viewer to completethe picture. There is no single image of the build-ing; it depends on your point of view. Fromhead-on it is a flying wedge; from close up it is adizzying wall that seems to have no more depththan a standing column; and from broadside, the190-foot-wide faade on Broadway presents apalazzo of almost unimaginable scale. The wall isas massive yet knifelike as the prow of a ship. Theimage is not stable, resonating between stasis andmotion, giving a sense of dynamism to the wholethat predicted the restless forward momentum ofthe twentieth century.

[ 1 ] The Flatirons dynamic apex appears to be a pure column. [ 2 ] From uptown, the Flatiron looks like either a sheer,six-foot-thick wall, or a steamship prow.

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Set around a rear light court, the U-shapedbuilding is now hemmed in by the superscaleOne World Trade Center just across narrowLiberty Street, but originally commanded amore prominent site at what was then the edgeof the Hudson River. The first occupants weremembers of the proliferating railroad and ferryindustries. Cesar Pelli paid a contextual tributeto this festive holdover from the ancien rgimeby echoing the West Street Building in the deco-rative glass mastaba crown of his No. 1 WorldFinancial Center.

Th e w e s t s t r e e t b u i l d i n g

is a Gilded Age skyscraper, a celebrationof wealth and culture in terra cotta, butalso incorporates some of the most for-

ward-looking ideas in skyscraper design. FromLouis Sullivan, Cass Gilbert took the idea ofclearly expressing the underlying steel structure:broad piers that support the West Street Buildingrise without interruption from street level to anarcaded crown, while decorative, three-quarter-round colonettes run only the length of the shaft.The shafts overall verticality is emphasized by itssimple lines and recessed spandrels. Rows of win-dows between the piers form nearly uninter-rupted perpendicular strips of glazing, adding tothe airiness and openness of the faade.

Following Burnham, Gilbert treated thetall building as a classical column, with a three-story limestone base, Gothic ornamentation,unaccented modernistic shaft, and crown thatresembles a fireworks explosion in terra cotta. Inan advance in skyscraper design, the West StreetBuilding presents its crown rather than thedetailing of the whole faade as the image of the

[ 1 ] Illuminated at night, the West Streets attic is a monument to the Gilded Age. [ 2 ] The West Street Building dominated the Hudson River waterfront before the landfill. [ 3 ] A relatively plain base and shaft lead up to the crowns visual pyrotechnics.

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West Street Building (now 90 West Street) CASS GILBERT, 1907

building. In his Woolworth Building six yearslater, Gilbert took this idea a step further bymaking the silhouette the overall symbol of theskyscraper. With a sculptors sense for visual pro-gression, Gilbert leads the eye up from the WestStreet Buildings massive white granite base,through the sweeping verticals of the matchingwhite terra-cotta shaft to the six-story crown,where the gaze becomes lost in a cannonade ofFrench and Belgian Gothic detail. Red granitecolumns flanking the entrances, windowsframed in green cast iron, and the lushly tinted,overscale, polychrome terra-cotta rosettes in theintrados of the arches play vibrantly against thebuildings stark white skin. The eye devours thesurface, seeking a resting point, traveling up theblank piers only to be brought earthward againby the grand three-story arches in the capital,then returning upward to seek out the finerdetails of corbels, turrets, dormers, and pinna-cles in the crown. The festive composition isframed by the rigorously simple roofline andheavy corner piers, a great visual balancing actbetween the tension of curved and straight lines.

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overall silhouette become more critical to itsappearance at great distances than the faadedetailing.

Experimenting with eclectic styles contin-ued into the late 1950s, culminating in the Neo-Renaissance crown of 40 Wall Street, whichPhilip Johnson recently admired as among NewYorks prettiest towers. LeBrun was less confi-dent about the future of the skyscraper:Whether architects are working toward theright evolution of a tall building, irreverentlytermed skyscraper design, the verdict of timeonly can determine.

Wi t h o u t a clear precedent forwhat the worlds tallest buildingshould look like, Pierre L.LeBrun of Napoleon LeBrun &

Sons reached back to one of the best-knownbuildings in historythe campanile of St.Marks in Venicefor his model. The scaleproblems of transposing an historical style to askyscraper are immediately apparent: stretching700 feet, one inch, from the sidewalk, the Met Life Tower does not seem particularly tall or distinctive.

In the American race to outdo all therecords of the Old World, at least in sheer size,the Met Life Tower is more than twice theheight of the original 325-foot-tall Campanile.The Met Lifes proportions are that of a Doriccolumn applied to a 52-story building. The shaftis organized into three bays of three windowseach, bracketed by rusticated quoins, ending inan arcaded loggia at the thirty-first floor.However, the height of the new tower is coun-

[ 1 ] Met Life executives prepare to drive in the ceremonial last rivet in 1908. [ 2 ] The Metropolitan Life Towers familiaroutline fights the impact of its height. [ 3 ] The executive gym, complete with medicine balls and Indian clubs.

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Metropolitan Life Insurance Company TowerONE MADISON AVENUE NAPOLEON LEBRUN & SONS, 1909

teracted, because the minds eye inevitablyshrinks it back down to the scale of sixteenth-century Venice.

Ornamentation was not meant to beviewed so far from the ground. The four-sided,26.5-foot-in-diameter clock faces with four-foot-tall numerals and minute hands weighing half aton lose their impact at such distances. The highpyramidal roof with ocular windows is toppedwith a cupola and glazed lantern that was lit atnight. Dolphins head balustrades and lionsheads once adorned the now-severe lines of theshaft. The tower, originally sheathed inTuckahoe marble, was stripped in a 1964 renova-tion and recovered in plain limestone. However,the architects drawing is still preserved inside a14.5-foot-tall frame at the 320 Park Avenueentrance. The simple fact of skyscraper design,that details had to be outscaled to be perceivedat all, may have contributed as much to thespare, modernist style as much as any structuralconsiderations. The buildings massing and its

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bolized in the bronze gate inside the lobby,which was renovated in 193133: a tipping vatof molten ore represents metallurgy; a helminterlaced with rigging stands for shipping; aderrick ball and rivets stand for construction; agenerator with zigzag lightning bolts that antici-pates Expressionist motifs stands for power; andan ox-head, engine valves, and shovel-head withpaired sticks of dynamite represent agriculture,manufacturing, and mining, respectively.

Th e p e r v a d i n g metaphor for theskyscraper in the eclectic era was mon-umentality. As a powerful but youngnation, America felt a need to compete

with the landmarks of history. If not in age, wecould outdo the past in sheer size and height:The Met Life Tower was twice as big as the orig-inal in Venice; the Woolworth outdid LondonsHouses of Parliament and the cathedrals ofEurope as the worlds tallest building. Trow-bridge & Livingston turned to one of the bestknown images from antiquitythe pyramidalMausoleum at Halicarnassus (c. 352 b.c.)tocap off their 37-story skyscraper at the corner ofWall and Nassau Streets. At 539 feet tall, butwith fronts measuring only 94 by 97 feet, it wasconsidered the worlds tallest structure on sosmall a site.

The formidable four-story granite base,sited on one of the most valuable intersectionsin the world at the corner of Wall and NassauStreets, is patterned like a colonnade atop a clas-sical stylobate. Three-story-tall, three-quarter-round Ionic columns marching across the faadeabove Greek fretwork are interrupted by gar-landed beltcourses, and support an echinated,dentiled cornice decorated with rosettes andlions heads.

Above the highly decorative base, derivedfrom the Erectheum Ionic order, the plain, cur-tain-walled shaft that houses office rental spacerises for 20 stories. The light gray granite faadesof the square tower are organized into five baysof two windows, with little decoration otherthan the flat voussoirs surmounting the win-dows. Deep reveals give an impression of lithicsolidity.

In a strange synchronicity, the crown seemsto anticipate the jagged figure-ground effects ofthe later setback style. The granite-clad pyramid,which housed record rooms and storage space,caught the publics eye, and soon was claimed asthe registered trademark for the bank. The pyra-mid top is also one of the most influential

[ 1 ] The pyramidal top is one of the most influential designs on downtown skyscrapers.

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Bankers Trust Company Building(originally 14 Wall Street) 14 16 WALL STREET TROWBRIDGE & LIVINGSTON, 1912

designs on other downtown skyscrapers,repeated in the 480-foot-high Standard OilBuilding (Carrre & Hastings and Shreve, Lamb& Blake, 1922) and Kevin Roche JohnDinkeloo, & Associates glassy postmodernMorgan Bank Headquarters (1988) at 60 WallStreet.

The Bankers Trust Company was foundedto provide fiduciary services in cooperationrather than competition with commercial banks.The mighty enterprises of capitalism are sym-

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The Woolworth rises from a 29-story plat-form to become a tower inset on all four sides atthe forty-second story. Like a medieval spire, thetower metamorphoses from a square to an octa-gon at the forty-eighth story, and culminates in athree-story, 125-foot-tall, copper-clad roof. TheWoolworth stands out among its contemporariesbecause Gilbert resolved the problem of placinga smaller tower on top of a base by integratingthe tower into the front faade. The building wasdesigned to be seen as a free-standing tower, soall four sides were treated architecturally.

The three-story limestone base with gran-ite at street level is topped by creamy, ivory-col-ored terra-cotta cladding anchored to a brickbacking. Terra cotta, a light and decorativerather than structuralmaterial, emphasizes thesteel cage that supports the building. Thestraight, structural lines of the piers end in thetower decorated with gargoyles, turrets, pinna-cles, buttresses, and delicately colored terra-cottapanels in shades of green, cobalt blue, sienna,and deep rose. Gilbert skillfully used poly-chromy to bring out the relief of the faade.

The Woolworth was the eras most promi-nent example of the confluence of advertisingand ego that went into skyscraper development.Frank Winfield Woolworth, the founder of theWoolworth retail chain, specifically instructedS

k y s c r a p e r s a r e not onlyobjects of their own time, but have an uncanny knack for pointing theway to the future. Cass Gilberts

Woolworth Building is the most successfullyrealized skyscraper of the eclectic era, but alsoseems to anticipate the setback designs of theArt Deco skyscrapers. At 55 stories, theWoolworth was the tallest and most recogniz-able skyscraper in the world for 16 years until itwas topped by the Chrysler Building. Manyheights are given for the building, but its highestpoint is 793.5 feet on the Barclay Street side. Theowner had the building measured himself tomake sure it was the tallest in the world. Thestories that vary from 11 to 20 feet high are theequivalent of about 80 modern-day stories.

Gilbert decided on the Flamboyant Gothicstyle of fifteenth-century France to express the

[ 1 ] The worlds tallest building at the time pierces the clouds.[ 2 ] A 1910 study for the Woolworth; the owner rejected many early versions.

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Woolworth Building233 BROADWAY CASS GILBERT, 1913

buildings height because he liked the visualinterest of the styles summits. The skyscraper,he wrote, is a monument whose masses mustbecome more and more inspired the higher itrises. The Gothic style gave us the possibility ofexpressing the greatest degree of aspiration . . .the ultimate note of the mass gradually gainingin spirituality the higher it mounts.

The building soon became known as theCathedral of Commerce, a designation thatGilbert bristled at, because the sources of hisinspiration had all been secular northern Gothicstructures. The Gothic style influenced earlyskyscraper architects because it was the only his-toricist style that emphasized height and verti-cality. The tallest manmade point in Manhattanfor more than half a century was the 284-footsteeple of Trinity Church, designed by RichardUpjohn in 1846.

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his architect to make it 50 feet taller than theMetropolitan Tower, so that his new buildingwould beat the record. Woolworth recognizedthe symbolic and advertising function of theworlds tallest building: I do not want a merebuilding, he said after revising dozens ofGilberts sketches. I want something that willbe an ornament to the city.

Gilbert felt to a large degree that his designwas simply a logical expression of the demandsof the project, as did William Lamb with theEmpire State Building. The economic condi-tions which call for the use of every bit of avail-able space and at the same time provide amplelight for rooms leave little opportunity for thearrangement of the masses, Gilbert said.Nonetheless, the Woolworth abounds withdetails that transcend the merely functional. Thelobby is ahistorically designed in a Romanesquestyle featuring barrel-vaulted ceilings with glassmosaics patterned after the early Christian mau-soleum Galla Placidia in Ravenna, Italy. Thepolished steel doors with gold backgrounds atstreet level were produced by the TiffanyStudios, and the walls are lined with dark, fine-veined marble from the Greek island of Skyros.

The extraordinary corbel grotesques in thelobby form a parable of how a skyscraper isfinanced and constructed. There is the developer,the mustachioed Frank Woolworth, countingout the coins of his five-and-ten-cent fortune.(Woolworth actually paid the $13.5 million con-struction costs in cash as the building proceeded,so that it opened without a mortgage or debt ofany kind.) A bespectacled Cass Gilbert cradles ascale model of his setback tower, and the struc-tural engineer, Gunwald Aus, who also workedon Gilberts West Street Building, measures asteel girder. Louis J. Horowitz, head of theThompson-Starrett Building Company, lam-bastes a contractor over the telephone, andEdward J. Hogan, the rental agent, peruses alease.

[ 1 ] F. W. Woolworth counts out his five-and-dime fortune in a corbel caricature. [ 2 ] The builder, in a monks hood, talks into a stand-up telephone. [ 3 ] The Woolworths terra-cotta cladding accentuates the underlying steel structure.[ 4] The towers electrifying modernistic impact is often overlooked because of its Gothic styling.

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Th e m u n i c i p a l b u i l d i n g

was the first skyscraper constructed byMcKim, Mead & White, in the wan-ing years of the firms influential

Beaux-Arts career. The 40-story building, whichcontains 650,000 square feet of city offices, wasdesigned by the partner William MitchellKendall. Charles McKim himself was averse toskyscrapers and the trend towards gigantism andsaid, I think the skyline of New York dailygrows more hideous. The Municipal Buildingfeatures some of the best aspects of Beaux-Artsarchitecture, which sought to be both monu-mental and an integral part of the citys fabric.The 559-foot-tall building, including a 15-storytower, is superbly metropolitan: it straddles theextension of Chambers Street (now closed totraffic) with a Roman triumphal arch like amodern-day Colossus of Rhodes. The 24-storywings of the U-shaped court, covered in light-colored Maine granite, reach out to embraceCity Hall.

The Municipal Building is both ceremo-nial and sheltering. Adolph A. Weinmans 20-foot-high gilded statue of Civic Fame, thelargest statue in the city, holds aloft a crownwith five turrets, symbolizing the five boroughsof New York City. A giant Corinthian colon-nade, modeled after Giovanni Lorenzo Berniniscolonnade at St. Peters, marches across theentrance, a protective yet penetrable perimeter.Vaults of Guastavino tile protect commuters in aloggia on the south concourse of the subway.Although the Woolworth Building was the firstto provide sheltered subway entrances from thesidewalks of the side streets, the MunicipalBuilding was the first to incorporate a subwaystation as an integral part of its base.

Henry Hope Reed exulted that theMunicipal Building was the nations finest sky-scraper, but here we see the Beaux-Arts stylestretching at the seams to cope with the newdemand for height. The insistent horizontalstyling of classical architecture fights with the

[ 1 ] The gold-leafed statue of Civic Fame atop the Municipal Building. [ 2 ] The Municipal Building, near completion in1912, is a monument to civic pride.

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Municipal BuildingCENTRE STREET AT CHAMBERS STREET MCKIM, MEAD & WHITE, 1914

sense of height, so that the building appearsmore like a massive wall with a tower, ratherthan a tall building.

The crown of a Corinthian drum adaptedfrom the Choregic Monument of Lysicrates inAthens of 334 b.c. is a kind of funerary monu-ment for historical styles. There were simply toofew models left to copy, and skyscraper designhad to move forward instead of back. A compar-ison with developments in the other arts istelling: in 1913, the Armory Show featured newworks by Picasso, Braque, and Duchamp, andJames Joyce published Dubliners.

However, the buildings Imperial Romanimage was enormously influential in other cities,and was a prototype for Chicagos WrigleyBuilding (1924) and Clevelands Terminal Tower(1930), both by Graham, Anderson, Probst &White; the Fisher Building in Detroit (AlbertKahn, 1928); andstrangely enough at such alate datethe main building of MoscowUniversity (L. V. Rudnev, S. E. Chernyshov, P. V. Abrosimov, and A. F. Khryakov, 194953).The Municipal Building houses a Dickensianmaze of old-fashioned city offices, and dozens ofcouples still marry here every week.

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almost invisible from street level. A perforatedrailing of addorsed, overscaled sea horses andwinged griffins at the top cornice compensatesfor the distance. This kind of ornamentationmight cause one to speculate that Americanbusinessmen were furnishing an empyrean realmmeant only for each other.

Th e p r o t o - s e t b a c k silhouetteof the Candler Building seems to sum-mon the future in a dream form, withits embryonic winged base, its plain,

functional shaft, and its indented crown. TheCandler sets an important precedent, because itwas one of the most successful solutions to theproblem of building on a midblock site. Thearchitects solved the problem of how to make atower stand out among lower flanking buildingsby setting it off on its own base, a model thatneatly adapted itself to the requirements of thesetback zoning code of 1916. Because of thisorganization, the outlines of the Candler pre-dominate over its surface ornament.

Neglected by the public and critics alikefor much of its 75-year history, the 24-storyCandler Building, clad in gleaming white terracotta, has become a showpiece of the recentTimes Square revival. The Candler is a fascinat-ing transitional form between the fussiness ofclassical revival skyscraper design and the emerg-ing spare lines of modernism. NominallySpanish Renaissance, the design is more impor-tant because the configuration of base, shaft,and crown anticipates the silhouette of the set-back skyscraper.

Built as the New York headquarters of theCoca-Cola Company, and named after itsfounder Asa Candler, the tower rises from a five-story, 78-foot-wide arcaded base attached to themain shaft by unusual wings that give it theappearance of a finned 1950s rocket ship. Abovethe decorative fourth-floor spandrels, the shaftrises in three uninterrupted bays of metal-frameddouble windows for 13 stories, ending in archesthat echo the base. The lines of the shaft areremarkably clean cut, without the stringcourses,colonettes, and gewgaws of its predecessors.

The crown above the projecting twentieth-floor cornice is not fully setback as later build-ings would be, but is massed with cornerindentations so that it is perceived as a separatesection, surmounted by a pyramidal copper roof

[ 1 ] Both of the bases embryonic wings are intact in this early photo.

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Candler Building220 WEST 42ND STREET WILLAUER, SHAPE & BREADY, 1914

352 feet above street level with a 36-foot flagpole.The Candler was the tallest building north of theMetropolitan Life Tower at 24th Street, and rep-resented Manhattans inexorable march uptown.

Much of the terra-cotta detailing ofcherubs heads, architectural masks set inroundels, and well-articulated diapering is

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The Equitable was unpopular because ofits banality as well as its bulk. Its unornamented23-story shaft rises through sheer numbing repe-tition of layers of square-headed windows sepa-rated by piers of shallow pilasters. A course ofundersized lions heads at the twenty-fourth-story cornice seems to be an afterthought. Thesetback silhouette combined with the zigzaggeometry of the 1925 Exposition Internationaledes Arts Dcoratifs et Industriels Modernes inParis led to the astonishing richness of visualdesign in skyscrapers of the 1920s, a match madein the heavens.

[ 1 ] The Equitable rises through sheer multiplication of its one-acre site. [ 2 ] The steel skeleton of the Equitable Buildingtops out in August 1914. [ 3 ] The H-shaped Equitable stands out in bright contrast to the shadows of Lower Manhattan.

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Equitable Building120 BROADWAY ERNEST R. GRAHAM, 1915

Th o u g h f r e q u e n t l y singledout as the behemoth that broughtabout the 1916 Zoning Code, theEquitable Building was still on the

drawing boards when city planners were lookingfor ways to increase the amount of sunlight andair circulation to the streets. You need only standon Pine Street to understand the problem: thesky is reduced to a narrow stretch of ribbonbetween the cornice of the 41-story Equitableand the 19-story 100 Broadway, less than 35 feetapart. The Equitable rises, cliff-like, straightfrom the sidewalk for 542 feet. The experience is like standing at the bottom of a man-madecanyon. Even at noon in midsummer, the streetsare half-plunged in shadow.

Before the advent of fluorescent officelighting, what most determined the value ofoffice space (after location) was the amount ofnatural light it received. When the Equitablewent up in 1915, it cast a shadow for four blocksuptown, causing surrounding real-estate valuesto plummet. Falling real-estate values meantfalling tax assessments, and the city required aremedy, so that market logic as much as environ-mental concerns led to the zoning reform, thefirst of its kind in the nation. The timing of the1916 Zoning Code was fortuitous, because archi-tects working in eclectic styles were running outof ideas about how to treat the tall building. Thecode forced architects to think about skyscrapersin fresh ways.

Henry James meant buildings like theEquitable when he called skyscrapers giants ofthe mere market. The Equitable packs in anastonishing 1.2 million square feet of rentalspace, or 30 times the area of its site, which isslightly less than an acre. The barrel-vaulted,block-long arcade of stores in the lobby wasinnovative, but its colossal scale, the ceilingstudded with giant plaster rosettes, and the icycorridor lined in lustrous marble make you feelmouse-sized even today.

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Corbett was clear about his plans for BushTower: We were determined it should be athing complete in itself, with fine, clean, upris-ing lines; a building that could be looked atfrom every angle, sides and back as well asfront. In a brilliant design stroke, the Gothicstyling of the party walls becomes a purely two-dimensional representation. In monochromaticbrick, Corbett limned white piers that seem tocast a black shadow, continuing the insistentverticality of the faade. On the eastern partywall, an overscaled pointed arch spanning thelight court adds an upward-thrusting visualimpact to what would have otherwise been astrictly utilitarian feature. The building is oftenphotographed from this angle rather than fromthe main faade.

The symbolic Gothic trimming was aneconomical way of resolving the problem ofwhether the building would be perceived as atower or piece of infill. At the same time, it wasa statement by Corbett that the eclectic eras lit-eral interpretation of historical styling was nolonger necessary and that architects were free touse only what they needed from the past to cre-ate the future.

[ 1 ] Corbett watched the development of 42nd Street from his top-floor office. [ 2] In 1927 Bush Tower signified the business districts shift to midtown.

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Bush Tower130 WEST 42ND STREET HARVEY WILEY CORBETT, 1918

Th e n a r r o w 32-story Bush Towerwas the first skyscraper built after theZoning Code of 1916, but it had beendesigned before the code went into

effect. Nonetheless, Harvey Wiley Corbett accu-rately foresaw how architects would respond tothe new setback envelope presented by the code.

Like the Candler Building one block tothe west, Bush Towers most expressive feature isits lines rather than its surface ornament.Corbett clearly chose the English Gothic stylefor its emphasis on vertical lines. Much of thebuildings impact is due to its exiguous siting,with a 480-foot-tall sheer tower on a front only50 feet wide and 90 feet deep. The decoration ofthe base and shaft is remarkably stripped down,confined to four limestone corbel gargoyles atstreet level that caricature the Bush TerminalCompanys role in the shipping industry. Thegargoyles depict a navigator with his sextant, ahardy helmsman wearing a souwester, a fright-ened cabin boy holding on to the mast, and astrangely apathetic sailor entangled with ananchor. Flush with the World War I effort, theBush shipping and warehousing concern at onetime occupied 150 buildings and eight piers onthe west side of midtown.

Projecting triangular buff-brick mullionssubdivide three deeply incised window bays.From an oblique angle, the reveals are so deepthat the spandrels disappear entirely, giving theimpression of a faade composed entirely ofskinny vertical lines. John Mead Howells adaptedthis method of scraping lines into the faade toadd verticality to his Beekman Tower in 1928.

A kind of proto-setback is formed at thetwenty-fourth-story cornice line, where a six-story section is chamfered and set off by copperpinnacles at the four corners. Above the double-height top floor with pointed arch windows, ashallow mansard disguises a water tower.Corbett moved his offices into the top floor towatch his prophecies for the development of42nd Street come true.

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not appear to sag. Projecting brick headers add atexture of shadows. Shallow projecting 14-storybays form lights courts on three sides, around acentral shaft that sets back at the twentieth-storycornice. Structural girders span a deep rear lightcourt, but the building is meant to be perceivedfrom all sides as a tower. The crown continuesfor an additional 10 stories, ending in a doublearcade at the thirty-second floor. Griffins sejantface outward at the four corners. The surface ishighly variegated, with the reveals of the piersstanding out at different thicknesses. In direc-tional light, the piers cast deep perpendicularlines of shadow that lend the building a sense oftapering height.

Except for its delightful limestone gar-goyles, the Shelton is relatively free of ornamen-tation. Blind corbeled arcades line the cornicedivisions, topped by a double-story crown undera mansard roof. The carved capitals of the three-story-tall columns at the base denote theSheltons origins as an athletic club for men.One figure in a toga is ready to serve up a tennisball, and another towels off after a swim.

Stieglitz and OKeeffe were enormouslyfond of their nest in the sky. He took pho-tographs of the raw new steel structures in midtown such as the Waldorf-Astoria. OKeeffepainted abstracts of industrial views of the East River far below, and employed photo-graphic techniques, such as the flare created bydirect light in a camera lens, to paint TheShelton with Sunspots.

Wi t h t h e Shelton TowersHotel, the first tall buildingspecifically designed to conformto the setback code, the sky-scraper comes into its own as a symbol of mod-ernism. The role of the Sheltons two mostfamous occupantsthe painter GeorgiaOKeeffe and her photographer husband AlfredStieglitzcannot be discounted in this process.The couple moved into a tiny, two-room apart-ment on the twenty-eighth floor with views of the East River shortly after their marriage in 1924.

Arthur Loomis Harmon was the firstarchitect to exploit the aesthetic possibilities ofthe new zoning code envelope. Warren &Wetmores 23-story Heckscher Building (1921,now the Crown) was actually the first skyscraperbuilt after the code, but was really a 14-storyclassical revival tower with three-story wings seton a broad nine-story platform rather than atrue setback. Harmon later joined Shreve &

[ 1 ] Fanciful gargoyles and capitals adorn the base of this modernist milestone.

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Shelton Towers Hotel (now Marriott East Side Hotel) 525 LEXINGTON AVENUE ARTHUR LOOMIS HARMON, 1924

Lamb to design the archetypal skyscraper, theEmpire State Building.

Architects turned to ever more reconditesources from history and prehistory to fill thedemand for buildings that met the code.Harmon adapted the massively lithic Lombardrevival style of the Church of SantAmbrogio inMilan. His design is particularly successfulbecause it relies on the overall grouping of largemasses to form the buildings image rather thanornamentation.

The warm, yellow-brick faade of the 32-story Shelton is treated as a single surface, sothat the eye is drawn to the sculptural outlinesof the cornices and setbacks. The tripartitegrouping, set on a corner site, seems taller thanit is because of a few tricks of classical masonry.The two-story limestone base slopes away fromthe viewer at street level, counteracting the sensethat the building looms overhead. Upper storiesemploy entasis, the method of adding a slightbulge to long vertical elements so that they do

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continuous, wrapped surface. Gold-coloredstone highlights the shifts in the setbacks.

The buildings image was dramaticallyreversed at night, when glowing windowsburned in the black faade and the crown was litup, an attention-getting metaphor for the head-quarters of a company that specialized in homeheating. Playful, classically styled corbel figuresat the third-story cornice, including a pipe fitterwith a wrench, refer to great moments in thehistory of steam heat.

Ea c h m a j o r work in RaymondHoods compressed, prolific careercut short by his death at 53is a fasci-nating metamorphosis from the

skyscrapers Gothic roots to his early champi-onship of the International Style in America.Hood and his collaborator John Mead Howellswinning entry for the highly visible ChicagoTribune Building competition in 1922 was a 36-story, 460-foot-tall version of Rouen CathedralsButter Tower in France, complete with eightoverscaled flying buttresses. Sensitive to criticismthat Eliel Saarinens stripped-down, styleless(read modern) second-place entry was the supe-rior design, Hood combined Gothic and modernstyles in his American Radiator Building (thoughdesigned after the Tribune Building, theRadiator was actually completed a year earlier).

The Art Deco towers of midtownManhattan were built within about a decade ofone another and are textbook examples of howbuildings learn from each other through synthe-sis. For his 22-story tower on a midblock site,Hood used the Candlers device of setting off the tower on a platform so that it would be free-standing. The Gothic style, stripped down to itssymbolic essentials, is indebted to Corbetts BushTower. At the same time, Hood incorporated theclean, modernist lines of Saarinens Tribune entry.

The Radiator is pivotal in the develop-ment of the skyscraper because it is the first true

[ 1 ] Barrel-vaulted arches led to the showroom floor. [ 2] Georgia OKeeffe celebrated the tower in R A D I ATO R B U I L D I N G ATN I G H TN E W YO R K, 1927. [ 3] The pilaster bases reiterate the setback motif in miniature.

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American Radiator Building40 WEST 40TH STREET RAYMOND HOOD, 1924

expression of the Art Deco skyscraper silhouette.You can almost see the struggle to arrive at theform. From a complicated series of shallow set-backs at the sixteenth- and twentieth-story cor-nices, the distinctive step-like profile of the ArtDeco skyscraper springs forth breathtakinglyagainst the sky at the twenty-first floor. After theRadiator Building, architects would deal withthe arrangement of large masses as solids setagainst the void of the sky. Hood intuitivelyunderstood this break with the past, and coloredhis building with black brick to emphasize thatit should be perceived as a single, massive form.Usually, fenestration appears as darker holes in a light-colored building; here Hood makesthe windows blend into the faade. The shaftssculptural mass is intensified by the chamferedcorners, which make the eye read it as a

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seem homey and familiar. He brought inThomas Hastings, the surviving member of thegreat Beaux-Arts team of Carrre & Hastings, todecorate the faade with Italian Renaissancedesigns typical of Park Avenues palazzo-likeapartment buildings. Bronze-trimmed coachlanterns at the street level of the three-story rus-ticated limestone base welcome home the resi-dents, and raised panels of putti and a wingedcherubs head over the entrance symbolize homeand family.

Roth seemed embarrassed about the verticalelements of the building, which emerge nakedly,like the limbs of an adolescent undergoing agrowth spurt. No attempt was made to integratethe plain, unaccented, buff-brick shafts of square-headed windows with the ponderous balustrades,obelisks, cartouches, and broken pediments. Theoverall image of the building is a classical obelisk,but the form seems to stutter at every cornice,afraid to let the setbacks spring free. The crown,with its superfluous attic story under a mansardroof and heavy capping obelisk that recapitulatesthe overall parti looks as if it is trying to put a lidon the buildings unseemly height.

New Yorkers, however, took to skyscraperliving like ducks to the Lake in Central Park.The new status symbol was no longer a brown-stone on a quiet side street, but a room with aview. The duplexes in the tower offered double-height, 40-foot-long living rooms with uninter-rupted 25-mile views in all directions. The Ritzis an interesting transition from the clutteredcomforts of the Edwardian era to the emergingslim lines of the Jazz Age. Roth achieved a moresatisfying synthesis of styles in later designs fortwin towers such as the San Remo and ElDorado apartment buildings, which look as ifthey have always belonged along Central ParkWests skyline.

[ 1 ] The Ritzs Renaissance base abounds with symbols of domesticity. [ 2 ] The Ritz is a giant obelisk, decorated with smaller obelisks.

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Ritz Tower109 EAST 57TH STREET AT PARK AVENUE EMERY ROTH AND CARRRE & HASTINGS, 1925

Th e 5 4 6 - f o o t tall, 41-story RitzTower, now lost in a shuffle of midsizebuildings, was the first residential sky-scraper in the world. Emery Roth,

whose main concern was to provide the com-forts of Park Avenue living to its residents, seemsto have done everything in his power to disguisethe buildings height. The resulting parfait iseasy to find fault with: heavy, classical revivallayers alternate with a few starkly bare stretchersthrown in for height. The Ritz is exactly thekind of building Ayn Rand scorned in her dizzypaean to the skyscraper, The Fountainhead, thatlooked like a Renaissance palace made of rub-ber and stretched to the height of forty stories.

In an unpublished autobiography quotedin Steven Ruttenbaums Mansions in the Clouds:The Skyscraper Palazzi of Emery Roth, the archi-tect admitted, It took years for me to forsakemy early love and to forget Renaissance palacesand Greek and Roman temples. In the Ritz,Roth was trying to accomplish the contradictorygoal of making the brand-new skyscraper form

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By t h e mid-1920s, architects wereno longer trying to disguise theirbuildings under layers of classicaldesign, but instead were looking for

new ways to show off the setback style. Rapp &Rapp wanted to display a form that had neverbeen seen before, at least outside of Meso-america. Their 33-story ziggurat in Times Square,then the tallest building on Broadway north ofthe Woolworth Building, is a fascinating transi-tion from classical revival to Art Deco styling.

Best known for their opulent, Neo-Baroque movie palaces, Rapp & Rapp designedthe crown of Paramount Pictures East Coastheadquarters for maximum show-biz impact.Eight pyramidal buff-brick setbacks, capped bysquat limestone obelisks, cascade down from aclock tower surmounted by a 19-foot-in-diame-ter glass globe, illuminated from within. The set-back below the clock faces is flanked by three-story-tall scrolls, making the whole look like anoverscaled desk clock. At night, the setbacks werespotlit to form the classic wedding-cake tiers of aNew York skyscraper floating above Broadway.

Art Deco and classical revival styles are notfully integrated in the Paramount. The presenta-tion of the jazzy crown is almost entirely frontal,so that from side angles it seems top heavy andalmost two-dimensional, like a theatrical proprather than an essential design element. The classical detailing of cartouches and low-reliefscrollwork in the crown are smooth and blank,almost vestigial, as if on their way to extinction.In contrast, the street level is completely classicalrevival in flavor, from the exterior sheath ofblack granite to the plaster rosettes in the small-ish, barrel-vaulted lobby. The Paramount repre-sents the dual persona of an office building in anentertainment capital: a sobersided workplace in the daytime, and an illuminated fantasylandby night.

The ornamentation reflects the glamour ofthe movie business. The globe symbolizesParamounts worldwide interests, and the power

[ 1 ] A 1926 ad for the Paramount promotes daylight-flooded space in the tower. [ 2 ] The fabled Paramount Theatersentrance and marquee are visible at left.

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Paramount Building1501 BROADWAY RAPP & RAPP, 1926

of its mediumlight. The glowing, 25-foot-in-diameter clock faces feature five-pointed stars,which surround the mountain peak in theParamount logo. It is not too much of a stretchto associate the mountain-like massing ofMayan architecture with the Paramount peak.The lively arts motif is carried through at streetlevel, where bronze relief masks of Comedy andTragedy are placed above the entrance, andbronze panels above the elevators show classicalfigures playing harps and bagpipes.

The illuminated, bowed canopy of the legendary Paramount Theater, where bobby-soxers swooned for Frank Sinatra, once stood onBroadway near the corner of West 43rd Street.The 10-story, triple-balconied space, where everymajor act from Benny Goodman to Buddy Hollyplayed, was gutted in a renovation in the early1960s to make offices, but the entrance is stillmarked by two bays of filled-in windows at thetop of the four-story limestone base. The glassglobe was restored in 1998, and plans are afoot toinstall a replica of the old theater marquee.

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Today, it is a bit difficult to comprehendthe impact of the Barclay-Vesey, which lookspebble-sized at the foot of the World TradeCenter. The year after it was completed, it wasgiven the Architectural League of New Yorksprestigious Gold Medal, the first modern designin the city to win the award. Raymond Hoodcelebrated: The modernist has always been theunderdog, but when a distinctly modern struc-ture like the new telephone building wins theLeagues gold medal of honor, his position andthat of the classicist has been reversed.

Wh i l e m o s t architects in thelate 1920s sported ever more fan-ciful crowns on their buildingslike bonnets in an Easter

paradeRalph Walker was more interested inthe 1916 Zoning Codes effect on a buildingsoverall massing. The outcome was the truest ful-fillment of the skyscraper theorist Hugh Ferrisssfebrile visions of buildings as mountain-likemasses. Le Corbusier liked the Barclay-Veseystreatment of surface, mass, and volume so muchthat he made it the frontispiece of his seminalbook Towards a New Architecture (1931).

The requirements for the 31-story towerwere unusual: it occupies an entire rhomboid-shaped block, and was built to accommodateoffice space for 6,000 workers and to be a centerof long-distance telephone switching equipment.As a result, the 52,000-square-foot base wasmuch deeper than other buildings of the time,because there was less need for natural lighting.

A square, 18-story tower is pivoted in rela-tion to the 11-story platform, which gives acorkscrew tension to the whole composition.The viewer is constantly presented with twoconflicting images of the building: an oblique-angled, lithic mass, and a flat, steel-supportedfaade with acute angles as sharp as papercreases. From the West Street front, the 17-storywings, angled along the baseline, seem shallowand precipitous, but this is belied by the cav-ernous depth of the light court. The massivelyarcaded Moorish-style pedestrian loggia thatpenetrates the thin Washington Street faade isso deep that it looks like a core sampling, almostan optical illusion.

The Barclay-Veseys key departure was topresent the skyscraper as an arrangement ofmasses. The faade is reduced to a surface ofshallow, buff-brick pilasters, a continuous wrap-ping for the volume it contains, the aestheticpromoted by Le Corbusier. But Walker was lessof a purist than his Internationalist counterparts;the Barclay-Vesey is playfully decorated with

[ 1 ] Elephant heads, pineapples, and sunflowers adorn the Barclay-Veseys crown.

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Barclay-Vesey Building140 WEST STREET RALPH WALKER, 1926

zoomorphic figures in machine-cast stone.Babar-like elephant heads gaze out from the cornices, and rams heads and pineapple topsdecorate the crown. American wildlife com-bined with flora and fauna from around theworld symbolize the companys role in long-distance communications. The landmarkedlobby is a splendid display of Art Deco decora-tion. At the center of the gilded ceiling panelsdepicting historical scenes is an image of theacme of technology in 1927: a stand-up Bell tele-phone with the earpiece hanging on a hook.

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No w t h a t the modernists heldsway over New Yorks skyline, archi-tects sought to overthrow theaxioms of Beaux-Arts design. Jazz

Age architects experimented with brilliant poly-chromy in reaction to what they saw as the ster-ile whiteness of classical revival. (Of course,Greek temples in their time were riotously color-ful; it was only the leaching effects of time thatmade them seem so pale.)

The architects for the headquarters of theFred F. French real-estate company looked backto mist-enshrouded Babylon for inspiration, notonly for its dazzling glazed polychromy and bolddecorative motifs, but for the jagged zigguratprofiles of its architecture. The developer FredFrench, who had a penchant for the occult,commissioned brilliantly colored terra-cottamurals for the crown of his 38-story office head-quarters, the tallest building on Fifth Avenue

[ 1 ] The slabs lateral orientation influenced later adjacent towers on Fifth Avenue. [ 2 ] The tower seems to incorporate aminiature skyline at its base.

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Fred F. French Building551 FIFTH AVENUE FRED F. FRENCH CO., H. DOUGLAS IVES, AND SLOAN & ROBERTSON, 1927

when it was completed. In low-relief faence,griffins face each other across a vermilion risingsun, flanked by golden beehives against a spring-green background. The symbolism was overt, asdeciphered by H. Douglas Ives, the in-housearchitect for the French Company: The centralmotif of the large panels on the north and southsides is a rising sun, progress, flanked on eitherside by two winged griffins, integrity and watch-fulness. At either end are two beehives withgolden bees, the symbols of thrift and industry.The panels on the east and west sides containheads of Mercury, the messenger, spreading themessage of the French Plan. (The image ofMercury, the god of commerce, was appliedwith almost superstitious abandon throughoutmidtown.)

A 17-story-tall slab, only two bays wide,rises straight from a multitude of small setbacksgrouped at its foot to a triplex penthouse, anunusual and visually distinctive interpretation ofthe setback envelope. Set on a lot only 79 by 200feet, the French Building was codesigned by Ivesand Sloan & Robertson, who also built theChanin Building, another thin slab set on abase. The russet-brick faade is richly trimmedin limestone and polychromatic faence at thecornices. The French Building is also one of thefirst Deco skyscrapers with a flat roof, anticipat-ing the look of Internationalist slabs. (The cap-ping sunburst mosaic may also be the worldsmost elaborate disguise for a water tower.)

With its bronze lobby motifs patternedafter the Gate of Ishtar, the French Building wasthe most literal interpretation yet of Manhattanas a Babylon on the Hudson. Kneeling oxendecorate the capitals of the revolving door. Thebas-relief bronze panels of the elevator doorsdepict a bricklayer against a background of pyra-mid-topped, setback towers and a bare-breastedwoman holding aloft an architects model of asetback building. Fred French did not considerit grandiose to compare himself to the fabledbuilder Nebuchadnezzar II by building a

Babylonian tower in his own name. As theinscription of the original Ishtar Gate reads: Ihung doors of cedar adorned with bronze at allthe gate openings. I placed wild bulls and fero-cious dragons in the gateways and thus adornedthem with luxurious splendor so that peoplemight gaze on them in wonder.

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by frozen-fountain motifs in cast stone. Thecrown features an open arcade that resemblesbubbles in the corona of a fountain, but the cor-nices of the setbacks are starkly undecorated,except for a slight battering, a development thatwould in turn influence Hoods Daily NewsBuilding. The surface of orange brick is wonder-fully responsive to the qualities of New Yorklightsharply etched in the morning andwarmly lambent at sunset. Recessed spotlights inthe crown add a touch of Gothic mystery atnight. A more recent addition of a glassed-inrestaurant, the Top of the Tower, complicates thelast setback at the twenty-sixth floor, but theoriginal outlines can still be determined.

[ 1 ] A low annex, left, sets off the Beekman Tower from neighboring buildings.

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Beekman Tower(originally Panhellenic Tower) 3 MITCHELL PLACE JOHN MEAD HOWELLS, 1928

Jo h n m e a d h o w e l l s power-fully vertical Beekman Tower is the linealdescendant of Hood & Howells ChicagoTribune Building and Hoods American

Radiator Building, fused with Eliel Saarinensastylar entry for the Tribune competition. The23-story tower jumps straight from its three-storybase in a series of unbroken piers.

Prominently situated on a corner siteagainst an open sky, the setbacks seem to taperinto lofty distances. The impact of the silhouetteis striking for the buildings relatively low height.Square windows with plain spandrels are setbehind deep reveals that look as if they havebeen gouged into a clay surface with a paletteknife. From oblique angles, the windows disap-pear entirely, so that the whole structure seemsto be composed of blind masonry piers. TheBeekman is a fulfillment of Harvey WileyCorbetts prediction that under the new zoningcode the architect would become a sculptor inbuilding masses, and of the artist Hugh Ferrisssvision that buildings were meant to be crudeclay for architects.

As with Hoods American RadiatorBuilding, the shafts chamfered corners make theeye read the orange-brick faade as a continuoussurface. At the same time, monolithic framingpiers at the cornerswindowless except for asingle bay on the beveled angleadd to anappearance of stone-like solidity. The tower isset in from the corner by a curious three-story,four-bay ell that connects it to an inconspicu-ous, similarly styled 10-story wing so that themain tower appears to be freestanding.

Originally called the Panhellenic Tower,the building was designed as an apartment hotel and clubhouse for female college graduateswho were members of Greek letter societies.Symbolic Greek letters are embedded in thebase. It now functions as a suite hotel, with 12.5-foot-deep tower rooms encircling the cen-tral elevator core. Ornamentation is reduced toround-headed windows in the base, surmounted

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lawns, and privacy. The apartments were rentedon the concept that midtown office workerscould now walk to work rather than commute.

The styling of red brick trimmed withterra-cotta ornament on four-story limestonebases softens the blunt outlines of the towersand brings them down to a human scale. Themullioned windows are small-paned, withstained-glass insets, lending a fantasy air to thewhole. From the distance, roofline sculptures ofunicorns and lions holding stiff pennantsenliven the silhouette.

Whatever the limitations of historicism,Tudor City functions wonderfully as a neighbor-hoodat days end, kids Rollerblade on thenearly private, dead-end street of Tudor CityPlace, and the pleasantly landscaped, handker-chief-sized park is used by bench-sitters and dogwalkers at all hours. There are many proprietaryeyes upon the street, in Jane Jacobss phrase,from shopkeepers to restaurant diners and theflow of residents, one of the key elements thatmake a neighborhood safe. The complex has asmall-town feel, with its own tiny post officeand ZIP code, and a half-timbered, Tudor-stylechurch, the Church of the Covenant, at the footof the Woodstock Tower.

Tudor City literally turns its back on theenvirons of the East River. The walls facing theriver on First Avenue are blank brick with win-dows only for stairwells because the originalview of Manhattans abattoirs was unsightly and,in summer, malodorous. In the late nineteenthcentury, the neighborhood was notorious for itscriminal gangs, and was nicknamed CorcoransRoost. The gang leader, Paddy Corcoran, ismemorialized in a Gothic inscription above theentrance of the central Tudor Tower.

[ 1 ] Tudor Citys landscaping creates an intimate urban enclave. [ 2 ] Historicist detailing gives a domestic feel to the threecentral towers. [ 3] Many faces of the 20s: the Daily News and Chrysler Buildings seen from Tudor City.

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Tudor CityEAST 40TH TO EAST 43RD STREETS, BETWEEN FIRST AND SECOND AVENUES H. DOUGLAS IVES, 1928

De v e l o p e d b y the Fred F. Frenchreal-estate company, Tudor City wasthe first residential skyscraper enclavein the world. Ensconced on a natu-

rally occurring bluff overlooking what was thenNew Yorks slaughterhouse district, the five-acresite comprises seven apartment buildings, withfour 10-story apartments flanking a phalanx ofthree central 22-story towers on the east side.The Woodstock Tower, an apartment hotel onEast 42nd Street, is the tallest at 32 stories.Overall, the complex was built to house 2,200families, but the scale is right; the buildings areneither overwhelmingly tall, nor are there toomany of them.

French succeeded in luring middle-classresidents to the gritty east midtown area bydressing up his high rises in the familiar garb ofTudor styling, which bespoke history, tradition,and comfort. Tudor was an apt symbol for themiddle class because the era represented a shiftfrom medieval living to the pleasures of domes-ticity. The style had a strong hold on the publicimagination in the 1920s, with private enclavessuch as Pomander Walk (which was actually pat-terned after the stage sets of a play of the samename) being built on the Upper West Side.Tudor styling was also popular in newly emerg-ing suburbs, and carried associations of trees,

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Paired allegorical figures in limestone bythe German sculptor Henry Kreis flank the column bases, dramatically interrupting thebalustrade at the second-story cornice. A bare-torsoed athlete holding a discus and a hard-hatted workman resting on his sledgehammerrepresent Sport and Industry; a jester in a foolscap and a gloom-ridden tragedian depictComedy and Tragedy; a musician with a lyreand a statue in classical armor stand for Musicand Art; and a bearded man with an iron hand-press and a cowled woman with two owls standfor Printing and the Sciences. The adorable owlscould have flown straight off the SecessionExhibition Building in Vienna (1898) by JosephMaria Olbrich, who was one of Urbans teachersin Vienna.

The sculptures are a fascinating example ofhow neatly modern classical motifs overlaidclassical designs: the figures robes are cut inlightning-like zigzags, and the deeply flutedcolumns terminate in streamlined Greek urns.Here was a style that was unified and contempo-rary and did not directly evoke the past. Themost direct influence of the Hearst Building canbe seen in the base of the Empire State Building,which also features a heroic colonnade of lime-stone pilasters and three-quarter-round columnsflanking the main entrance. In both buildings,the pillars do not suggest support, but ratherepic scale, and add volume and the visual inter-est of light and shadow to the base.

Joseph Urban and the European modernclassicists brought a boldly theatrical sensibilityto American architecture. The streamlined statueson the Hearst Building even resemble their dis-tant stylistic cousin, the Oscar statuette.

[ 1 ] Metamorphosis in metal: Norman Fosters steel-and-glass tower takes shape above Joseph Urbans 1928 base.

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Hearst Magazine Building(originally International Magazine Building) 959 EIGHTH AVENUE JOSEPH URBAN, 1928

ADDITION, NORMAN FOSTER, 2005

No r m a n f o s t e r s work withBuckminster Fuller is evident in the geodesic-shaped panels of hissteel-and-glass, chrysalis-like

2004 addition to the base of Joseph Urbans plat-form, left unfinished in 1928 because of somebad real-estate investments by WilliamRandolph Hearst. The height of the 42-story,496-foot tower is disguised by massive girdersthat exaggerate the x-bracing of a tall buildingand provide exciting contours. A clerestorybetween the Art Deco plinth and the towermakes a bold postmodern composition.

Joseph Urbans platform gave New Yorkersone of their first looks at what would later betermed the Art Deco style. Deco is actually arubric that jumbles together many styles, fromthe streamlined modern classicism of the 1925Exposition des Arts Dcoratifs et IndustrielsModernes in Paris to the moody lighting anddisorienting angles of German Expressionismand the more abstract experiments of theWiener Werksttte and of the work of CharlesRennie Mackintosh.

Best known in New York for his uncom-promisingly modern design for the New Schoolfor Social Research (1931), Urban was the fore-most representative of the Viennese designschool of the Wiener Werksttte. When his artsand crafts shop in New York failed, Urbanworked as a set designer for Hearsts extravagantsilent film epics such as When Knighthood Was in Flower (1922), which cost an unheard-of $1.5 million and made a star of Hearsts para-mour, Marion Davies.

The Hearst Magazine Building was meantto be the flagship of a vast entertainment com-plex near Columbus Circle. The six-story lime-stone base with four massive engaged columnsruns along the block-length Eighth Avenuefaade between West 56th and West 57th streets,and is a charmingly literal interpretation of theaspirations of the Hearst empire in theater andcommunications.

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Th e c h a n i n s astylar silhouettewas influenced by Eliel Saarinen, but itsdecorative motifs are straight out ofAyn Rand. The 56-story towers blunt-

buttressed crown became a symbol of NewYorks crushing modernist drive, as seen in pho-tomontages by the Russian artists EliezerLissitzky and Aleksandr Rodchenko. The buff-brick, limestone, and terra-cotta tower is a fasci-nating synthesis of skyscraper styles. The giantlimestone buttresses at the base and crown are aconcise reference to the skyscrapers stylistic ori-gins in the Gothic cathedral. At the same time,the 680-foot-tall shaft that rises uninterruptedfor 22 stories above a series of shallow setbacks isessentially the Internationalist slab form thatwould predominate after the war. The thinnessof the slab on the corner site as viewed fromuptown or downtown creates a classic Art Decosetback silhouette, a two-in-one solution that isechoed in Raymond Hoods McGraw-HillBuilding and Rockefeller Center. The crown,reverse-lit at night so that the buttresses arethrown into shadow and the recesses are illumi-nated, is a realization of the Expressionist fantasies of architects Bruno Taut and PaulScheerbart.

[ 1 ] The Chanins original fixtures are well preserved. [ 2 ] A revolving electric turntable once moved commuter busesunderneath the Chanin. [ 3 ] Modern times: clocks were always a central feature of public spaces.

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Chanin Building122 EAST 42ND STREET SLOAN & ROBERTSON, 1928

Irwin S. Chanin, a prominent developerwho was also involved in the theater, explicitlystated the theme of his eponymous office build-ing to be the mise en scne for the romanticdrama of American business. Built as leaseableoffice space, the Chanin Building had many the-atrical touches: a private, double-height 200-seattheater in silver and black on the fiftieth floor;and a jazzy, orange-and-white-tiled Egyptianbath with brass fixtures and etched glass showerpanels, which Chanin delighted in showing tovisitors. In the lobby, bronze frames surroundingthe shop entrances part like proscenium curtains.An underground bus terminal featured an elec-trically operated revolving platform.

The Chanin presents itself as the pinnacleof creation. A bronze frieze at street level depictsthe evolution of life from sea to land and ulti-mately to the air in the form of flying birds.Flight, and by association the skyscraper, wasnow the ultimate symbol of modernism. Bas-reliefs of flying birds on the elevator panels wel-come passengers to their skyward journey. An18-foot-high, terra-cotta frieze of giant-scaledDeco foliate patterns that wraps around thefourth floor of the faade proclaims that this is abuilding of the twentieth century. The gor-geously wrought French Deco lobby, designedby Jacques Delamarre and with bronze reliefsand grilles by the architectural sculptor RenChambellan, depicts New York as the City ofOpportunity and tells the story of the rise ofIrwin Chanin. According to one contemporarycritic, the theme was to show the mental andphysical processes by which an individual inNew York City may rise from a humble begin-ning to wealth and influence by the power of hisown mind and hands, with allegorical figuresrepresenting Enlightenment, Vision, Courage,and Achievement along with Endurance,Activity, Effort, and Success.

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LO O M I N G O V E R the sedate, four-story Greek Revival flats ofWashington Square, One FifthAvenues tapering, setback silhouette

represents the ascendancy of the Art Deco stylein the popular imagination. Sophisticated NewYorkers no longer needed the trappings of thepast to feel at home in the twentieth century.

In One Fifth Avenue, the shadow brickpiers