Art Deco NYC tour - Art Scenes

NYC

Art Deco

New York City would go under another transformation after WWI: the office towers reached new heights that could scrap the sky while the midtown factories and mansions where replaced by a new type of building, the railroad hotel; turning the big apple into the biggest most populated city of the world by 1925 — and today you can go back to the jazzy days of the Roaring Twenties and feel like Louis Comfort Tiffany for a day.

Time period: 1918-1940s

Movie/book: The Making of the MOB: New York City (2015) tv series/Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Soundtrack: Ella Fitzgerald/Louis Armstrong’s music

Fashion: pastel colors, a nice suit plus a Panama hat

Budget: 150$-2280$ (160$ for tickets to viewing decks 60-120$ for food 2000$ for shopping)

Distributed by The Port of New York Authority: Railroad Terminal Map of New York Harbour; NYC, 1942

This tour would take through the streets of midtown manhattan: where step-pyramidal office towers along a new type of building, the hotels, appeared in the horizon; and where around 30 theaters opened up creating the theater district of Broadway. The area is characterized by: art-deco architecture, “urban canyons” plus neon signs. After the WWI the dollar started replacing the British pound as the world currency reserve (thanks to JP Morgan’s Federal Reserve) and the United States went through an economic boom with NYC at the epicenter. During the Roaring 20s the city became the biggest most populated city in the world and the center of innovation and style in the western world (taking over Paris). African Americans from the south migrated to the Harlem bringing their instruments and creating a new type of music Jazz; plus a cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance with artist like Aaron Douglas ("father of African American art"), Jacob Lawrence and Laura Wheeler Waring as their main representatives. Women started revolting against the rigidity of the Victoria era by cutting their hair, showing her legs, and engaging in smoking, drinking and dancing to the new rhythm of the time — the Flapper (the first boss bitches) were born. The new gadgets of the machine-age (radio, cars, air planes, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, washing machine etc) gave designers the opportunity to experiment with new shapes inspired by the Paris International Exhibition of 1925; giving birth to the Art Deco Movement characterized by: streamlined forms, shinny materials, and geometric patterns. Even though the style appeared in Paris it was in New York (and the US as a whole) where it thrived, defining an era of technological progress. Art Deco will prevail after the dramatic Crash of Wall Street and it was during the Great Depression that the city saw the rise of some of its most iconic office towers: the Chrysler (1930), the Empire State Building (1931) and the Rockefeller Center Complex (1932 - 1939). The area in between the Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station saw an invasion of Railroads Hotels: super tall hotels intended to serve hundreds of guest that were staying in the city for a layover; with the Commodore Hotel as the earliest example in 1919 right next to Central Terminal. Other iconic art deco examples are: The New Yorker (1930) The Carlyle (1930), The JW Marriot (1931) and the Hotel Waldorf Astoria (1931) — the greatest of them all offering for the first time: 24-hour room service, in-room telephones, and private en-suite baths. The contemporary hotel was born and it will give what to the apartment building as some guest used them as permanent residence. The Art Deco era came to an end after WWII where the modern ideas of Europe migrated to the Americas. The tour suggests having breakfast insinde a historical bank, the Tiffany & Co flagship store, plus an art deco church in the morning; shopping at the Rockefeller Center, lunch, plus a Jazz show during the afternoon; and a cocktail plus the Empire State Building at night.