Art Deco architecture flourished in New York City during the 1920s and 1930s. The style broke with many traditional architectural conventions and was characterized by verticality, ornamentation, and building materials such as plastics, metals, and terra cotta. Art Deco is found in government edifices, commercial projects, and residential buildings in all five boroughs. The architecture of the period was influenced by worldwide decorative arts trends, the rise of mechanization, and New York City's 1916 Zoning Resolution, which favored the setback feature in many buildings.
The exuberant economy of the Roaring Twenties and commercial speculation spurred a citywide building boom. The size and sophistication of Art Deco ranged from towering skyscrapers to modest middle-class housing and municipal buildings. Colorful, lavishly decorated skyscrapers came to dominate the skyline of Manhattan before the Great Depression ended their construction. The Depression and changing tastes pushed the style to more subdued applications as it spread in the 1930s, becoming a style of choice for infrastructure projects and modern middle-class apartments in the outer boroughs.
A lull in construction during World War II and the rise of the International Style led to the end of new Art Deco in the city. After falling out of favor and suffering from neglect during the city's downturn in the latter half of the 20th century, the city's Art Deco has been reappraised. Among New York's most treasured and recognizable skyscrapers are the Art Deco Empire State and Chrysler buildings. Art Deco skyscrapers formed the core of the city's skyline for decades and influence modern construction. Many of these buildings are protected by historic preservation laws, while others have been lost to new development or neglect.
Background
American Art Deco has its origins in European arts, especially the style moderne popularized at the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, from which Art Deco draws its name (Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes). While the United States did not officially participate, Americans—including New York City architect Irwin Chanin—visited the exposition, and the US government also sent a delegation. Their resulting reports helped spread the style to America. Other influences included German expressionism, the Austrian Secession, Art Nouveau, cubism, and the ornament of African, Central American, and South American cultures. American Art Deco architecture would assume different forms across the country, influenced by local culture, laws, and tastes.
Art Deco came into style just as New York City was being rapidly transformed. An exploding population, flush economic times, cheap credit, and lax zoning combined to encourage a building boom. The real estate market was so frenetic that buildings that had stood for just a few years were regularly torn down for newer construction. New, larger buildings replaced multiple smaller structures on old lots. The amount of office space in New York City increased by 92% in the late 1920s.
Zoning regulations had major impacts on the design of buildings. The proliferation of ever-larger skyscrapers like the 40-story Equitable Building spurred New York City's passage of the US's first citywide zoning code, the 1916 Zoning Resolution. The regulations, intended to prevent tall buildings from cutting off light and air at street level, required buildings to "set back" from street level depending on the width of the street and the zoned area. After a building rose up and set back to cover 25% of the lot, the total height was unrestricted. The impact of the new regulations did not materialize until later in the decade, as American entry into World War I slowed construction.
Early buildings built to conform to the new codes did so unimaginatively—the Heckscher Building in Midtown (completed 1921) set back evenly like a stack of boxes as it rose—but more inspired interpretations of the law followed. A major influence on the resulting skyscrapers was Eliel Saarinen's second-place design entry for Chicago's Tribune Tower, considered a new style distinct from earlier Gothic or Classical architecture. Also influential were architect and illustrator Hugh Ferriss' series of speculative architectural illustrations exploring how to make buildings that met the zoning requirements. Ferriss' illustrations envisioned buildings as sculptural forms rather than simple boxes. Architect Talbot Hamlin described Ferriss' work as "a magic wand to set the American city architecture free from its nightmare [...] No longer was the high building apparently built by the mile and cut off to order, but it was composed break upon break, buttress on buttress. The possibilities of poetry entered in."
Precursors to the Art Deco skyscrapers that soon went up across the city were buildings such as Raymond Hood's American Radiator Building (1924), which was neo-Gothic in general style but featured abstract ornament that would characterize Art Deco. Another early transitional building was the Madison Belmont Building at 181 Madison Avenue (1924–1925), which featured traditional ornamentation and organization on upper floors, combined with Art Deco motifs on the lower floors. The Art Deco ironwork was provided by Edgar Brandt, who contributed the entrance gates to the 1925 Paris Exhibition. One of the first Art Deco skyscrapers was the New York Telephone Company Building, built between 1923–1927 and designed by Ralph Thomas Walker. Its muted color and ornament did not fully demonstrate the style that soon flourished across the city, but its massing and verticality were thoroughly modern and broke with established architectural styles.
Common elements The buildings that would later be described as Art Deco shared common elements. The setback laws resulted in sculptural buildings with long, uninterrupted piers rising between columns of windows and decorated spandrels. These choices were made to emphasize the height of the buildings, a choice mimicked even on much shorter buildings built across town. New York's architects were at the forefront of using new materials, including synthetics like Bakelite and Formica plastics, as well as Nirosta, a corrosion-resistant steel alloy that made exterior metal on skyscrapers more feasible. Where stainless steel was too expensive to use, aluminum's declining price and lighter weight made it a common choice for interior and exterior usage. Other favored materials were multicolored terra cotta, limestone, and glass brick. Even when traditional building materials were used—marble, wood, brick, bronze—they were combined in novel ways, intending to shock and delight.
Architectural historian Rosemarie Haag Bletter described the most pronounced element of Art Deco as its use of "sumptuous ornament". The most dynamic elements were reserved for entrances and at the tops of buildings, with multiple materials combined to form dazzling colors or rich textures. Sometimes the buildings were shaded—using darker-colored materials at the base, and then gradually lightening towards the top—to increase the building's visibility. Art Deco buildings in the city were also richly appointed inside and out with reliefs, mosaics, murals, and other art. Allegorical depictions—such as beehives of industry on the Fred F. French Building, personifications of virtues at Rockefeller Center, or figures portraying industry and the arts at the International Magazine Building—were common decorative elements. The entries and lobbies of these skyscrapers often drew direct influence from the painted sets and stages of theaters, with framing like hanging curtains. Elaborate ironwork blended with decorative frosted or etched glass.
Art Deco in New York became intrinsically linked with commercial architecture. Its focus on rich ornamentation appealed to commercial patrons who wanted an "acceptable" modern style. These developers in turn gave architects a permissive mandate to create in the style, as long as the end result was not too shocking. The buildings rose to the height where the cost of added space equalized with the commercial value of that space. The emerging style was contemporaneously called the "vertical style", "skyscraper style", or simply "modern", with the characteristic look of setback buildings leading to them being called "wedding cake" buildings. Architect Ely Jacques Kahn commented in 1926 on the emerging style that his brethren were creating with their buildings:
[It] is so characteristic of New York that it would be more logical, by far, to call it a New York Style. [...] Decoration becomes a far more precious thing than a collection of dead leaves, swags, bull's heads and cartouches. It becomes a means of enriching the surface with a play of light and shade, voices and solids. [Today's ornamental forms] respond to the bulk and simplicity of the skyscraper itself.
The demand for Art Deco buildings was such that even architectural firms known for more restrained, classical designs adopted the new style. Cross & Cross's main practice was for discreet townhomes and banks, but in the late 1920s, they produced modern skyscrapers such as the RCA Victor Building. The 50-story skyscraper turned Gothic tracery into stylized lightning bolts. Another conservative firm that moved to modernistic designs was Walker & Gillette, whose best-known Art Deco building in New York is the Fuller Building. Buildings already being constructed were sometimes appended with Art Deco flourishes; the Paramount Building at 1501 Broadway (1926) had an Art Deco clock tower appended to a Beaux-Arts base. These buildings were constructed either as headquarters for established and emerging companies, or else speculative projects where the money would be drawn from renting out the space in the new building.
The design of speculative buildings was chiefly driven by maximizing rentable space, whereas corporate buildings served as advertisements for the corporations themselves—spending money not for direct financial gain, but what architect Timothy L. Pflueger termed "special architectural appeal". Even with these corporate projects, however, the owners often lent space to smaller businesses and treated them as real estate investments. The look of the buildings often echoed the business conducted there; the RCA Victor Building's wave motifs represent the power of radio, while the Chrysler Building had ornamental touches of radiators and hubcaps representing the automobile company. The McGraw-Hill Building, New Yorker Hotel, and Daily News Building feature their names in prominent signage or embedded into the facade. Because the true shape of the building was often hard to grasp for a street-level observer, many skyscrapers featured miniature versions of themselves as part of their ground-level decoration.
In the Financial District and downtown Manhattan, the skyline was quickly transformed by the proliferation of Art Deco high-rises. The New York Telephone Company Building was decorated with motifs derived from Aztec designs, and the lobby featured a vaulting ceiling with frescoes detailing the history of communication. Other notable Art Deco skyscrapers in downtown include the Irving Trust Company Building (1929–1931), designed with a "curtain" exterior and Hildreth Meiere-produced mosaics in the interior; 120 Wall Street (1929–1930), with a wedding-cake form and a red granite and limestone base; and the City Bank-Farmers Trust Building (1930–1931), featuring abstract heads along the facade looking down at street level, and bronzed doors featuring transportation methods. The final skyscraper built before World War II in the Financial District was 70 Pine Street, completed in 1932. It featured unique double-deck elevators servicing two lobby floors, designed to maximize the profitable space of the small plot.