The Vertical Ambition: A Neighbourhood-by-Neighbourhood Guide to New York's Art Deco Architecture

New York built itself into the sky during one extraordinary decade. Between 1924 and 1934, the city produced a skyline that has never been surpassed for sheer romantic audacity — towers of limestone and terra cotta, crowned with eagles and sunbursts and lightning bolts, rising out of the Depression as though optimism were a structural material.

Art Deco, as it arrived in New York, was not a style of restraint. It was a competition. Architects and their patrons raced each other skyward, ornamenting their buildings with Babylonian friezes, Aztec geometry, and machine-age chrome as if to prove that beauty and industry were not in contradiction. Many of these buildings were briefly the tallest on earth. All of them were intended to be remembered.

What follows is a neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood guide to the buildings that make New York the greatest Art Deco city in the world. Look up. Then look closer.

Financial District & Tribeca

Barclay-Vesey Building

140 West St · 1927 · Ralph Walker

Where it begins. The Barclay-Vesey Building is widely considered the first true Art Deco skyscraper in New York — which is to say, in the world. Ralph Walker's design introduced the language that would dominate the next decade: setback massing, ornamental stonework that references nature without imitating it, a verticality that feels earned rather than merely tall. The building rewrote what was possible, and the city spent the following years proving it.

Western Union Building

60 Hudson St · 1930 · Ralph Walker

Walker returned three years later with something even more refined. The Western Union Building is clad in nineteen distinct shades of brick — a gradient from warm ochre at the base to deeper terracotta above — that gives the tower a quality closer to painting than construction. The landmarked interior repays the effort of getting inside. One of the most quietly extraordinary buildings in Lower Manhattan.

70 Pine Street

70 Pine St · 1932 · Clinton & Russell

At 952 feet, 70 Pine Street was once the third-tallest building in the world, and its needle-like Gothic-inflected crown is still one of the most recognisable silhouettes in the Financial District skyline. The building has since been converted to residential use, meaning people now sleep in what was once a monument to corporate ambition. There are worse fates for a skyscraper.

40 Wall Street

40 Wall St · 1930 · H. Craig Severance

For a matter of days — a matter of days — 40 Wall Street was the tallest building in the world. Then the Chrysler Building's spire was raised, and the title vanished. The story has the quality of a fable about hubris, which is perhaps why it is told so often. The building itself, with its Dutch lantern crown and limestone setbacks, is magnificent regardless of the competition it briefly won and immediately lost.

One Wall Street

1 Wall St · 1931 · Ralph Walker

Walker's third and perhaps most sumptuous contribution to this list. The lobby of One Wall Street — a spectacle of red and gold mosaic that covers every surface in geometric Byzantine excess — is among the most breathtaking interiors the city possesses. The building is now condominiums, which means the lobby is technically a residential amenity. If you can get inside, do.

20 Exchange Place

20 Exchange Pl · 1931 · Cross & Cross

Less famous than its neighbours, 20 Exchange Place rewards those who look up. The limestone crown is richly sculpted, dense with ornament that reads differently at different distances — crude grandeur from the street, intricate craft up close. The building makes a case for architecture as a form of patience.

Midtown East & Grand Central

Chrysler Building

405 Lexington Ave · 1930 · William Van Alen

If you had to choose one building to represent the entire Art Deco movement — its confidence, its glamour, its complete refusal to be sensible — it would be this one. The Chrysler Building's stainless steel crown, with its overlapping sunburst arches and eagle gargoyles leaning out from the corners like chrome grotesques, remains the most purely thrilling thing in the New York skyline. Van Alen designed it to be seen. It has not stopped being seen in nearly a century.

Chanin Building

122 E 42nd St · 1929 · Sloan & Robertson

Across from Grand Central, the Chanin Building announces itself at street level before you ever look up. The base is encircled by René Chambellan's terracotta friezes — stylised flora and fauna, waves of organic ornament — executed with a specificity and vitality that few buildings of any era can match. It is the building that most rewards a slow walk around the outside before you enter.

Daily News Building

220 E 42nd St · 1930 · Howells & Hood

The building that gave Superman his newsroom. The Daily News Building's bold vertical striping — dark brick and white spandrels alternating up the full height — is a graphic statement as much as an architectural one, and Hood's design is said to have inspired the fictional Daily Planet's headquarters in ways the original editors apparently found flattering. The lobby, with its enormous rotating globe beneath the floor, is worth a visit on its own terms.

General Electric Building

570 Lexington Ave · 1931 · Cross & Cross

Cross & Cross built 20 Exchange Place with carved limestone; here they worked in terracotta and designed a crown that looks, from the right angle, like a burst of electricity frozen in stone. The lightning bolt motif that runs through the tower's upper ornament is so literal it should be absurd. Somehow it isn't. It is one of the most jubilant pieces of architectural theatre in Midtown.

Waldorf Astoria

301 Park Ave · 1931 · Schultz & Weaver

The Waldorf Astoria opened as the tallest hotel in the world, and its twin towers — visible from much of Midtown — are still one of Park Avenue's defining landmarks. The landmarked interiors, currently undergoing a long restoration, represent the full vocabulary of 1930s hotel grandeur: bronzework, marquetry, ballrooms of extraordinary proportion. Its history is dense enough to constitute a city unto itself.

Graybar Building

420 Lexington Ave · 1927

The Graybar Building has one advantage that no other building on this list can claim: it is physically connected to Grand Central Terminal, meaning you can walk between them without encountering the outside world. This is, in New York, a meaningful luxury. The building is also quietly handsome, with its terracotta ornament and muscular setbacks making a low-key case for a style that its neighbours tend to shout.

Beekman Tower

3 Mitchell Pl · 1928 · John Mead Howells

Originally constructed as a residential club for women with college degrees — a designation that tells you something about 1928 — the Beekman Tower is a slender, elegant setback tower in the Art Deco manner that has aged into quiet distinction. It stands near the East River, slightly apart from the Midtown throng, and rewards the walk to find it.

Midtown & Fifth Avenue

Empire State Building

20 W 34th St · 1931 · Shreve, Lamb & Harmon

The Empire State Building was the tallest building in the world from 1931 to 1970, which is nearly four decades, which is an almost incomprehensible record. But the building's hold on the imagination has never really been about the numbers. It is the silhouette — limestone setbacks pulling cleanly upward to the mooring mast at the crown — and the symbolism, and the fact that it was built in fourteen months by 3,400 workers during the Great Depression. It is simultaneously the most famous building in America and, somehow, still genuinely worth looking at.

American Radiator Building

40 W 40th St · 1924 · Raymond Hood

Hood's masterpiece of corporate branding: a tower of black brick with a gold-ornamented crown, designed to suggest both a radiator and a flame, facing Bryant Park on one side and the New York Public Library on the other. Georgia O'Keeffe painted it in 1927. It is now the Bryant Park Hotel, which means you can sleep inside a building that a major American painter found worth depicting. The exterior has not been improved upon.

Fred F. French Building

551 5th Ave · 1927

The polychrome terra cotta crown of the French Building is one of the most eccentric and magnificent in Midtown — Babylonian in reference, with winged griffins, beehives, and sunrise motifs executed in gold, blue, and orange against the stone. It is an argument for ornament as a form of civic generosity: the street-level pedestrian receives the full extravagance of the design whether they are looking for it or not.

Fuller Building

595 Madison Ave · 1929 · Walker & Gillette

Black-and-white mosaic panels flank the entrance to the Fuller Building in a way that feels both bold and precise — graphic design applied to architecture, decades before the language existed for it. The building is home to several significant art galleries, which is an appropriate use for a structure that understood the visual argument from the start.

2 Park Avenue

2 Park Ave · 1928 · Ely Jacques Kahn

Kahn's 2 Park Avenue is the loudest building on this list, in the best possible sense. The polychrome terra cotta that sheathes the building's upper floors — vivid orange, cobalt blue, and yellow, arranged in geometric patterns of almost Art Deco-psychedelic intensity — makes every other tower on the avenue look like it is not trying. The building seems absolutely sure of itself. It always has.

Midtown West & the Theater District

30 Rockefeller Plaza

30 Rock · 1933 · Raymond Hood

The anchor and soul of Rockefeller Center — itself the greatest Art Deco urban ensemble ever built — 30 Rock is Hood's most assured achievement: a tower of austere Indiana limestone, vertical to the point of abstraction, that manages to be both monumental and welcoming. The Top of the Rock observation deck offers what is arguably the best view in Manhattan, with the Empire State Building and the park both visible in the same sightline. The lobby murals by José Maria Sert are worth a separate visit.

Radio City Music Hall

1260 6th Ave · 1932

The largest indoor theater in the world when it opened, and still one of the most spectacular interiors anywhere. Donald Deskey's design for the hall's interior is Art Deco at full operatic scale: sunburst chandeliers descending from an arched ceiling that evokes a sunset at sea, murals by Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Stuart Davis, a grand foyer of mirrors and chrome. Radio City Music Hall makes the case that a theater can be a work of art before any performance begins.

McGraw-Hill Building

330 W 42nd St · 1931 · Raymond Hood

Hood's third entry on this list is also his strangest. The McGraw-Hill Building replaces the conventional vertical emphasis of Art Deco with emphatic horizontal banding in blue-green terra cotta — an industrial, almost streamlined effect that anticipates the Moderne style of the following decade. The Architectural League called it the best-looking building in New York in 1931. It remains genuinely unlike anything else on the street.

New Yorker Hotel

481 8th Ave · 1930

The New Yorker Hotel is enormous — 2,500 rooms at opening — and its stepped Art Deco silhouette still dominates the blocks around Penn Station. But what makes it legendary is its most famous long-term resident: Nikola Tesla lived out his final years in rooms 3327 through 3329, dying there in January 1943. The hotel has been restored and is active again. The rooms in question are not museum spaces, but the building carries the weight of that history in every corridor.

The Brill Building

1619 Broadway · 1931

Not the most architecturally ambitious entry on this list, but among the most historically saturated. The Brill Building was, through the 1950s and 1960s, the nerve centre of the American popular music industry — Carole King, Neil Sedaka, Leiber and Stoller, Burt Bacharach all worked in its small offices, writing songs that became the soundtrack of the century. The building is a reminder that Art Deco civic ambition and cultural production were happening simultaneously, in the same rooms.

Starrett-Lehigh Building

601 W 26th St · 1931

Technically Streamline Moderne rather than strictly Art Deco, but the distinction feels pedantic in the face of the building's sheer visual force. The Starrett-Lehigh occupies an entire city block in Chelsea, its façade a continuous ribbon of horizontal windows and curved glass corners that makes it look like a great ocean liner that has run aground on 26th Street. Originally built for freight — with freight elevators large enough to drive a truck into — it now houses studios, tech offices, and design firms. The bones are indestructible.

Central Park West — The Four Twin-Towered Coops

Central Park West is, per linear foot, the most concentrated display of residential Art Deco in the world. Between 1929 and 1931, four twin-towered apartment buildings rose along its length, each competing with the others in scale, ornament, and ambition, each now among the most coveted addresses in the city.

The Majestic at 115 CPW and The Century at 25 CPW were both designed by Irwin Chanin and completed in 1931, their towers flanking the park's northern and southern ends respectively. The San Remo at 145 CPW, designed by Emery Roth, is perhaps the most recognisable of the four, its paired Roman temple lanterns visible from most of the park. 55 Central Park West, the most geometrically austere of the group, achieved a particular cultural immortality as the building used for the climax of Ghostbusters. And slightly further north, El Dorado at 300 CPW — also Roth, also 1931 — completes the sequence with setback towers that seem to grow out of the stone as naturally as anything in the city.

Taken together, these buildings define what Central Park West looks like in the mind's eye. They are monuments to the idea that the best address in New York should look like it knows it.

Harlem

369th Regiment Armory

2360 5th Ave · 1933

The 369th Infantry Regiment — the Harlem Hellfighters — was one of the most decorated American units of the First World War, spending more continuous time in combat than any other American regiment. They were not permitted to serve alongside white troops; the Army sent them to fight under French command instead. They came home to Harlem and received a ticker-tape parade up Fifth Avenue. The armory built in their honour in 1933 is a New York City Landmark: a fortress of brick and terra cotta that stands as both civic architecture and memorial. It is the building on this list that carries the heaviest history, and it carries it without flinching.

Art Deco New York is not a museum. These buildings are offices and apartments and hotels; people pass through their lobbies every day without looking up. The argument of this guide is that they should. The decade that built these towers believed, with everything it had, that beauty was worth the effort. Look up. It still is.