Scarsdale Adult School Catalog Spring/Summer 2025
Walking Tour: Art Deco NYC The Chrysler Building, the Waldorf-Astoria, and Rockefeller Center are among the hundreds of art deco monuments that helped create the image of New York City during the 1920s and '30s as the world’s modern metropolis. Coined in the 1960s to describe a style of French decorative arts, “art deco” now refers to almost anything from saltcellars to skyscrapers, produced anywhere in the world during the early decades of the twentieth century, using abstract, stylized floral, geometric, or streamlined design. In New York, art deco evolved through a series of Manhattan skyscrapers into the city’s chief architectural language, and then spread across the city in every other building type. Following a massive reawakening of interest in them during the 1970s, New York’s art deco buildings today survive as prized remnants of a distant yet modern past that still help define the city’s visual identity. ANTHONY W. ROBINS (see bio for “Art Deco's First 100 Years”). East 40s
East 50s Starting at posh Beekman Place, visit a handful of modernistic residences ranging from the former Panhellenic Tower, a redoubt for young professional women taking on the big city in the 1920s, to the fabulously wealthy River House, to the more modestly middle-class Southgate apartments. Pushing westward into the commercial heart of Midtown, visit the spectacular but lesser-known General Electric Building (originally built for RCA) and continue with the Waldorf-Astoria, New York’s preeminent skyscraper hotel. Close with a brief look at Rockefeller Center, midtown Manhattan’s urbane urban wonderland. Friday, May 30 • 10:00am-12:00pm • TBD in NYC • Course 13177 • $80 Central Park West Take a pleasant stroll along Central Park West for a closer look at the buildings that form Manhattan’s major residential skyline. See the great twin-towered skyscraper apartment buildings – the Century, the Majestic and the El Dorado – and other multi-colored jazz-age fantasies of high living overlooking the park. Friday, August 1 • 10:00am-12:00pm • TBD in NYC • Course 13179 • $80
This tour focuses on three of the finest deco monuments in Midtown: the Daily News Building by Raymond Hood (1929), the Chanin Building by Sloane & Robertson (1927), and the Chrysler Building by William Van Alen (1930). Also included are the former American Radiator Building (Hood’s first in New York), the artsy East 44th Street cluster of the Beaux-Arts Institute and Beaux-Arts Apartments (art deco in style despite the names), and a look at nearby Tudor City, a classic example of what the city was building just before art deco hit town. Friday, April 25 • 10:00am-12:00pm • TBD in NYC • Course 13176 • $80 Murray Hill to Gramercy Park Walk through the east side of Midtown South to discover an unusual collection of art deco buildings, each different from the next. View a surprising modernist apartment building among the genteel town houses of Murray Hill, Ely Jacques Kahn’s most impressive office building at Two Park Avenue and another Kahn building that is distinctive in its own right, a work by the great French iron master Edgar Brandt, the iconic Empire State Building, an incomplete attempt by Metropolitan Life to capture the “world’s tallest” title, and George and Edward Blum’s Gramercy House that features some of the most enjoyable art deco terra-cotta ornaments in the city. Friday, June 27 • 10:00am-12:00pm • TBD in NYC • Course 13178 • $80
www.ScarsdaleAdultSchool.org • (914) 723-2325
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