Art Deco in New York, six buildings from Park Avenue to 57th Street

Two streets hold most of it

Midtown Manhattan has the densest run of Art Deco anywhere, and most of it is within a rectangle you can cross in an afternoon: 42nd Street for the theatres and the Daily News, Park Avenue for the railroad buildings, Rockefeller Center in the middle, and 57th Street at the top. The walk below takes six buildings in order and stays between 42nd and 57th Streets. The whole route is 3.4 kilometres, and none of the legs is longer than a fifteen-minute walk.

The railroad’s own gateway

Start on Park Avenue at the Helmsley Building, number 230, finished in 1929 by Warren & Wetmore for the New York Central Railroad. It is 35 storeys of offices over a street: the avenue runs through two arches at its base, and the building closes the vista looking north with a gilded crown. It was built to say that the railroad owned this part of the city, and for a while it did.

A block east, at 42nd and Lexington, the Chrysler Building does the opposite: it claims nothing, it just goes up. William Van Alen finished it in 1930, and the crown of stainless-steel sunbursts is still the best piece of metalwork in the city. Look at the corners too: the four eagle gargoyles at the sixty-first floor are Chrysler hood ornaments enlarged to building size, and the terracotta friezes below carry hubcap and mudguard motifs.

Newspapers and a globe

Across from Grand Central, the Daily News Building (Hood & Howells, 1930) is a newspaper office that looks like a newspaper: vertical bands of white brick and dark stone, no ornament that does not come from the printing trade. The lobby keeps the revolving globe that made it famous, and the globe is worth the two minutes it takes to go in and look at it.

From there the walk goes north into Rockefeller Center. 30 Rockefeller Plaza (Raymond Hood, 1933) is the centrepiece: 70 floors of Indiana limestone, 260 metres, carved with low reliefs. the Top of the Rock observation deck on the sixty-seventh floor is the best view in the city if you want to see the Chrysler and the Empire State together. Next door, Radio City Music Hall (1932) kept Donald Deskey’s interior almost intact: the gold arcs above the stage open like a rising sun, and the auditorium still holds nearly six thousand people.

The walk ends at 57th Street

The last stop is the Fuller Building on East 57th Street, finished in 1929. It is a quieter building than the others, and a good place to finish: the ornament is in the spandrels and the entrance, not in a crown, and you can stand across the street and take it in whole.

The route, with the order of the stops and the distances, is on the Art Deco in New York walking tour page. Weekday mornings are best: the lobbies are open, the pavements are not yet full, and the light comes down 42nd Street from the east.