Architecture sights in New York City
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Grand Central Terminal
Completed in 1913, Grand Central Terminal – more commonly, if technically incorrectly, called Grand Central Station – is another of New York’s stunning Beaux Arts buildings, boasting 75ft-high, glass-encased catwalks and a vaulted ceiling bearing a mural of the constellations streaming across it – backwards (the designer must’ve been dyslexic). The balconies overlooking the main concourse afford an expansive view; perch yourself on one of these at around 5pm on a weekday to get a glimpse of the grace that this terminal commands under pressure. It’s quite amazing how this dramatic space evokes the romance of train travel at the turn of the 20th century while also enduring …
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Woolworth Building
Cass Gilbert’s magnificent 60-story Woolworth Building was completed in 1913. At 792ft, it was the tallest building in the city – and the world – until the Chrysler Building surpassed it in 1930. It’s designed in a neo-Gothic style meant to emphasize its height and constructed of masonry and terra-cotta over a steel frame. At its dedication, the building was described as a ‘cathedral of commerce’ – though meant as an insult, FW Woolworth, head of the five-and-dime chain store empire headquartered there, took the comment as a compliment and began throwing the term around himself. Today the building houses mainly offices, and visitors are not allowed into the building (thou…
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Harrison Street Houses
Built between 1804 and 1828, the eight townhouses on the block of Harrison St immediately west of Greenwich St constitute the largest collection of Federal architecture left in the city. But they were not always neighbors – six of them once stood two blocks away, on a stretch of Washington St that no longer exists. In the early 1970s, that site was home to the Washington Market, a wholesale fruit and vegetable shopping complex. But development of the waterfront – which resulted in the construction of the Borough of Manhattan Community College and the Soviet-style concrete apartment complex that now looms over the townhouses – meant the market had to move uptown and the hi…
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Empire State Building
Featured prominently in almost a hundred Hollywood films over the years, the Empire State Building – actually a very glorified office building – is the most famous member of the New York skyline. It’s a limestone classic built in just 410 days (using seven million hours of labor) during the Great Depression, at the astounding cost of $41 million. Located on the site of the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the 102-story, 1472ft-high (to the top of the antenna) Empire State Building opened in 1931 after the laying of 10 million bricks, installation of 6400 windows and setting of 328,000 sq ft of marble. The famous antenna was originally meant to be a mooring mast for zeppeli…
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St Peter’s Church
Greek fever spread through the US in the 1820s as Americans linked the populist presidency of Andrew Jackson with ancient Greek democracy. Architects and builders who had never set foot in Greece cribbed designs from pattern books. Churches and public buildings dressed up like Greek temples with tall columns supporting a horizontal entablature and a classical pediment. Two of the best are still standing. The gray granite St Peter’s Church, built in 1838, replaced the first Roman Catholic church in the city, erected in 1785 and destroyed by fire. The white-marble1842 Federal Hall National Memorial (26 Wall St), originally the US Customs House, is now a museum.
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Seagram Building
Architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, who left Europe in the early 1930s, brought the vision and know-how of the avant-garde German Bauhaus to America. Architecture that rejected the past, it imagined future cities of functional glass towers. The Seagram Building, 1958, designed by Mies van der Rohe, a stunning amber glass and bronze slab, is set on an open plaza. Van der Rohe, given an unlimited budget, produced a masterpiece of the International Style. Cheaper glass towers that followed didn’t measure up.
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Church of the Ascension
In the 1840s, pagan Greek Revival architecture was abandoned for the spiritual Gothic, reaching toward the heavens and echoing English and French church architecture of the late Middle Ages. Richard Upjohn jump-started the Gothic Revival in New York with his Church of the Ascension, 1841, a square-towered English country church faced in brownstone. Architect Stanford White gathered a group of artists in 1888 to redecorate the interior with paintings, sculptures and stained-glass windows.
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Edward Mooney House
The red-brick Edward Mooney House, New York City’s oldest townhouse, was built in 1785 by butcher Edward Mooney. The blend of Georgian-Federal architecture has housed a store, hotel, billiards parlor and Chinese social club, and today it’s a bank.
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Cable Building
NoHo’s Beaux Arts Cable Building was built by famed architects McKim, Mead and White in 1894. Originally used as the power plant for the Broadway Cable Car (the nation’s first), it features an oval window and caryatids on its Broadway facade. Today it houses the Angelika Film Center, a massive Crate & Barrel store and various offices.
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Flatiron Building
Built in 1902, the 20-story Flatiron Building, designed by Daniel Burnham, has a uniquely narrow triangular footprint that resembles the prow of a massive ship, and a traditional, Beaux Arts limestone facade, built over a steel frame, that gets more complex and beautiful the longer you stare at it. Best viewed from the traffic island north of 23rd St between Broadway and Fifth Ave, this unique structure dominated the plaza back in the skyscraper era of the early 1900s. Images of the Flatiron that were published before its official opening – many thanks to the fact that this was also the time of the first mass-produced picture postcards – aroused a buzz of curiosity around…
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Metropolitan Club
As well as Gothic, another new architectural style invaded New York in the mid-19th century, evoking links with great wealth and power, based on the imposing palazzi of the Italian Renaissance. McKim, Mead & White designed private hangouts fit for the Medici, such as the Metropolitan Club.
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University Club
As well as Gothic, another new architectural style invaded New York in the mid-19th century, evoking links with great wealth and power, based on the imposing palazzi of the Italian Renaissance. McKim, Mead & White designed private hangouts fit for the Medici, such as the Metropolitan Club (1 E 60th St), 1894, and the University Club, 1899.
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Chanin Building
Beloved art deco took hold in the 1930s, as architects turned away from history, creating unique buildings, configured with setbacks, required by new zoning laws, and decorated with original ornament. The Chanin Building , 1929, by Sloan and Robertson, took the lead with its wedding-cake silhouette, exterior decoration of exotic plant forms and sea life, and singular lobby.
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AT&T Building
Rebelling against glass boxes, architects in the 1980s had a brief fling with vintage styles. Philip Johnson, who designed the pink granite AT&T Building, 1984, now headquarters for Sony, borrowed from three eras, producing a giant Romanesque Revival base and Chicago skyscraper-style midsection, crowned by a neo-Georgian pediment.
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Singer Building
One of the post–Civil War cast-iron buildings that gave this area its ‘Cast-Iron District’ nickname. This one used to be the main warehouse for the famous sewing-machine company of the same name.
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AIA Center for Architecture
A wonderful guide published by the AIA Center for Architecture provides details on what seems like all the city’s architecture, block by block. Architecture buffs should not be caught in the streets without one.
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Chrysler Building
An art-deco masterpiece designed by William Van Alen in 1930, this 1048ft-high skyscraper, just across the avenue from Grand Central Terminal, has been widely named since its opening as a favorite work of architecture by laypeople and aficionados alike. The building, constructed to be the headquarters for Walter P Chrysler and his automobile empire, reigned briefly as the tallest structure in the world until superseded by the Empire State Building a few months later. Fittingly, the facade’s design celebrates car culture, with gargoyles that resemble hood ornaments, radiator caps and thatched-steel designs, all best viewed with binoculars. The 200ft steel spire (known as t…
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Haughwout Building
The garish Staples store has a fascinating history: it’s located in the Haughwout Building, the first structure to use the exotic steam elevator developed by Elisha Otis. Known as the ‘Parthenon of Cast-Iron Architecture, ’ the Haughwout (pronounced how- out) is considered a rare structure for its two-sided design. Don’t miss the iron clock that sits on the Broadway facade.
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Dime Savings Bank
You can walk into the gorgeous 1908 Dime Savings Bank building, currently a Chase bank, and get a glimpse of its Corinthian columns of red marble and bronze light fixtures.
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New York Times Tower
A sleek addition to the skyline by Renzo Piano Building Workshop. The ceramic tube-draped glass changes colors depending on the shifting light throughout the day.
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Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
This new academic building, designed by architect Thom Mayne, is a bold and twisting hunk of metal wrapping around a grand and sweeping staircase.
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Hearst Tower
Norman Foster’s soaring stack of glass triangles is a gorgeous LEED-certified (‘green’) tower in the heart of Midtown.
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IAC Building
The milky, opaque waves of glass of this beauty, designed by Frank Gehry, wake up an unremarkable stretch of the West Side Hwy.
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Perry Street Towers
Richard Meier’s celeb-filled, minimalist, transparent Perry Street Towers sit perched at the edge of the West Village.
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