Art Deco buildings in New York City: the 25 to see, from the Chrysler Building to the Bronx, and a walking order

Architecture · 4 September 2026

New York has more Art Deco than any city in the world because its boom came at exactly the right time: the zoning law of 1916 required tall buildings to step back as they rose, the money of the 1920s built them by the hundred, and the style of the Paris exposition of 1925, brought over by émigré craftsmen and American architects, gave their setbacks, spires and lobbies the zigzags, sunbursts, chevrons and gilded metal that mark the decade before the Depression ended it. The Chrysler Building is the summit, the Empire State Building the biggest, Rockefeller Center the largest ensemble, and there are some 300 others, from the banks of Wall Street to the apartment houses of the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, many with lobbies open to anyone who walks in. Below: why the city, what to look for, the buildings by district, the lobbies, a route for a day, and the arguments, with the style explained in Art Deco architecture and its rival in Bauhaus architecture.

Why New York, and what to look for

The Equitable Building of 1915, a 40-storey block that cast a seven-acre shadow, provoked the Zoning Resolution of 1916, the first in America, which limited the height of a building's street wall to a multiple of the street's width and required setbacks above it, with a tower of any height on a quarter of the lot; the architect Hugh Ferriss drew the "envelope" the law allowed as a stepped mountain in 1922, and the ziggurat skyscraper was born. At the same time the Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs of 1925, which the United States declined to enter because it had "no modern design", was reported in every magazine, and New York's architects, Ely Jacques Kahn, Ralph Walker, Raymond Hood, William Van Alen, Sloan and Robertson, Schultze and Weaver, took its geometric ornament and applied it to the setback tower, while immigrant metalworkers, mosaicists and sculptors, Edgar Brandt, Hildreth Meière, Lee Lawrie, René Chambellan, made the details. What to look for: the setbacks; the vertical piers rising past the windows to a crown; brick in patterns and terracotta in colours; spandrels, the panels between windows, cast in metal with chevrons, sunbursts, zigzags and stylised plants; entrances framed in bronze, nickel and black granite with lettering in the style; lobbies of marble, murals, and elevator doors of inlaid metal; and on the top, a spire, a lantern or a stepped crown lit at night. Art Deco architecture of New York City.

Midtown East

• Chrysler Building, 405 Lexington Avenue (Van Alen, 1930). The masterpiece: 1,046 feet, the stainless-steel crown of seven arches with triangular windows, the eagle gargoyles at the 61st floor and the hubcap frieze at the 31st, from Walter Chrysler's cars; the lobby, open to visitors, is red Moroccan marble and amber onyx under Edward Trumbull's ceiling mural of transport and the building itself, with elevator doors of inlaid wood in a lotus pattern; the Cloud Club at the top is closed.
• Chanin Building, 122 East 42nd Street (Sloan and Robertson, 1929). Across the street, 56 storeys of buff brick with a bronze band of sea creatures at the base and René Chambellan's reliefs of the "City of Opportunity" in the lobby, with radiator grilles of the same, one of the best lobbies in the city.
• Daily News Building, 220 East 42nd (Hood and Howells, 1930). White brick and dark vertical stripes with no crown, Hood's step toward modernism, and the lobby with its giant revolving globe under a black glass dome, the Daily Planet of the Superman films.
• General Electric Building, 570 Lexington (Cross and Cross, 1931). A slender tower of orange brick whose Gothic-Deco crown of lightning bolts and radio waves stands behind St Bartholomew's church, the best crown in Midtown after Chrysler.
• Waldorf-Astoria, 301 Park Avenue (Schultze and Weaver, 1931). The hotel that moved from the Empire State site, 47 storeys with twin copper-roofed towers, and a lobby of nickel bronze and the 1893 clock; closed for restoration to 2025.
• Fuller Building, 41 East 57th (Walker and Gillette, 1929). Black granite base and white above, with Elie Nadelman's figures over the door and a lobby floor of mosaic showing the firm's earlier building, the Flatiron.
• Empire State Building, 350 Fifth Avenue (Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, 1931). Its Deco is quiet, in the aluminium and chrome-nickel spandrels, the lobby's marble and the 1930s murals of the wonders of the world restored in 2009, and the mast; the story is in Empire State Building facts.

Rockefeller Center and the West Side

• Rockefeller Center (1930–39). Fourteen buildings by a committee of architects led by Raymond Hood on three blocks between Fifth and Sixth Avenues and 48th and 51st Streets, the largest private building project ever, begun in the Depression and paid for by John D. Rockefeller Jr.; 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the RCA Building, is the 850-foot slab with Lee Lawrie's "Wisdom" over the door, José María Sert's murals in the lobby (replacing Diego Rivera's, destroyed in 1934 for its Lenin), the Rainbow Room and the Top of the Rock; Paul Manship's gilded Prometheus over the sunken plaza and the rink, Lawrie's Atlas on Fifth Avenue, the Channel Gardens, the International Building, and Radio City Music Hall (1932), with the largest indoor theatre in the world at 6,000 seats and a Donald Deskey interior of Bakelite, aluminium and murals that is the best Deco room in America.
• McGraw-Hill Building, 330 West 42nd (Hood, 1931). Blue-green terracotta with horizontal bands, Hood again turning toward modernism, with a lobby of green and gold; the crown carries the name in Deco letters.
• New Yorker Hotel, 481 Eighth Avenue (Sugarman and Berger, 1930). The stepped brick mass with the red sign, 43 storeys, Tesla's last home.
• Film Center Building, 630 Ninth Avenue (Kahn, 1929). Kahn's lobby of coloured terracotta and brass in Aztec zigzags, the most exuberant in the city.
• Bryant Park Hotel, formerly the American Radiator Building, 40 West 40th (Hood, 1924). Black brick with gold terracotta on the crown, "a burning coal", the first Deco tower in the city, painted by Georgia O'Keeffe.

Downtown

• 70 Pine Street (Clinton and Russell, 1932). The tallest downtown until 1970, 952 feet, a slender brick spire with a glass observation lantern and a model of the building over each entrance; converted to apartments, the lobby restored.
• One Wall Street (Walker, 1931). The Irving Trust Company's limestone tower with a facade like curtains, and the "Red Room", a banking hall of red and gold mosaic by Hildreth Meière, reopened as a public space after the 2023 conversion.
• 20 Exchange Place (Cross and Cross, 1931). The City Bank Farmers Trust tower, 741 feet, with giant heads of "the giants of finance" at the 19th floor setback and a lobby of nickel bronze.
• Bank of New York, 48 Wall Street, and 40 Wall Street (Severance, 1930). The 927-foot loser of the height race with the green pyramid roof, now the Trump Building.
• Barclay-Vesey Building, 140 West Street (Walker, 1927). The New York Telephone Company's tower, the first Deco skyscraper, with a lobby of murals of the history of communication and bronze bells; damaged in 2001 and restored.
• Cities Service and the Downtown Athletic Club, 20 West Street (1930). The stepped brick tower with the Heisman Trophy's home, now apartments.

The boroughs and the apartment houses

• Grand Concourse, the Bronx. Four miles of Deco apartment houses of the 1930s, brick in patterns with corner windows and mosaic entrances, the largest concentration of Deco housing in the country: the Fish Building at 1150 with its fish mosaic, 888 Grand Concourse with its gold lobby, the Bronx County Courthouse, and Loew's Paradise theatre.
• Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower, 1 Hanson Place, Brooklyn (Halsey, McCormack and Helmer, 1929). The 512-foot clock tower, the tallest in Brooklyn until 2009, with a banking hall of mosaics and a 40-foot ceiling, now apartments.
• Central Park West. The twin-towered apartment houses of Emery Roth and Irwin Chanin: the Century (1931) and the Majestic (1930) by Chanin, the San Remo (1930) and the Beresford by Roth, in a Deco that shades into classicism, and the Eldorado (1931).
• Queens and Staten Island. The Chrysler-like Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia (1940), with James Brooks's "Flight" mural; the Paramount Theatre in Staten Island; the 1939 World's Fair's survivors in Flushing Meadows.
• Theatres and shops. Radio City, the Paramount in Times Square (the sign), the Beacon on Broadway (1929, intact), Loew's Valencia in Queens, the Paradise in the Bronx, the Kings in Brooklyn (restored 2015); Bloomingdale's on Lexington (1930) and the former Bonwit Teller, whose reliefs Trump destroyed in 1980.

The lobbies and a route for a day

Lobbies open to the public without a ticket, in office hours and with a nod to the guard: the Chrysler Building, the Chanin, the Daily News, the Fuller, the Film Center, the McGraw-Hill, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the Empire State (through the observatory entrance), 70 Pine, One Wall Street's Red Room, and 20 Exchange Place; Radio City by tour. A walking day: start at Grand Central, do the Chanin and the Chrysler on 42nd and Lexington, the Daily News and the GE Building, walk west on 42nd to the New York Public Library and the American Radiator, up Fifth Avenue to the Fuller on 57th and back down to Rockefeller Center for the afternoon and Top of the Rock at sunset, when the Chrysler and the Empire State light up; a second day downtown, from the Barclay-Vesey to Wall Street and up to the Woolworth, with the subway to the Grand Concourse or the Williamsburgh tower if there is time. The Art Deco Society of New York runs walks and lists the buildings, and the Municipal Art Society's tours of Grand Central and Rockefeller Center are the best hour each.

Versions and theories

• New York invented Art Deco. Paris named it and the 1925 exposition defined it; New York built the most and the tallest, and the setback skyscraper is its own contribution, which Paris did not have.
• The Chrysler eagles are gargoyles. They are ornaments, of stainless steel, modelled on the 1929 Chrysler radiator cap; they spout nothing.
• The Depression killed the style. It ended the boom in 1931; Rockefeller Center was built through the Depression, and the style softened into Streamline Moderne and the 1939 World's Fair before the war ended it.
• Rivera's mural is under Sert's. It was chiselled off in February 1934 after Rivera refused to remove Lenin; he repainted it in Mexico City, where it is.
• The Waldorf's lobby clock came from the 1893 fair. Yes, from the Chicago Columbian Exposition, made for the first Waldorf and moved with the hotel.
• Deco is the city's real style. The Landmarks Commission has designated most of the buildings above since 1978, after losing the Bonwit Teller reliefs; the 1980s tried to copy it and could not.

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