1 Monday, March 1, 2021 Hon. Sarah Carroll

Monday, March 1, 2021 Hon. Sarah Carroll, Chair The NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission 1 Centre Street, 9th Floor New York, NY 10007 Dear Chair Carroll, We, the undersigned, urge the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) to act with decision and haste to designate the one-of-a-kind modernistic lobby of the former McGraw-Hill Building, at 330 West 42nd Street, an interior landmark. As noted in the 1981 LPC designation report for the Empire State Building, the lobbies of New York’s most iconic Art Deco towers, including the McGraw-Hill Building, are a continuation of the modern Art Deco design utilized on their landmarked façades: The series of skyscrapers constructed in midtown, including the Chrysler, Daily News, McGraw-Hill, Chanin, RCA (now GE), Fuller, and Empire State buildings helped introduce the new modernistic Art Deco style to urban America, and their modernistic towers defined midtown's characteristic look for the next several decades. The lobbies of these buildings, major public interior spaces serving as a welcome to the office floors, continued the modernistic design of their towers, and a number of highly decorative lobby spaces were created…Less pointedly symbolic, the McGraw-Hill Building's lobby continued the blue-green and gold metal tubes of its entranceway into its green-walled interior, as many other modernistic towers carried their design into their lobbies. All these were designed as grand entrances to buildings with highly idiosyncratic physical presences in the skyline. When the LPC designated the building's façade in 1979, the designation report called out the alternating blue-green steel bands separated by silver and gold colored metal tubes that adorn the ground floor façade. Similarly, the 1989 nomination of the building to the National Register of Historic Places described the building’s most notable feature as “the polychromatic streamlined ground floor on West 42nd Street.” This distinctive ornamentation, which epitomizes the Streamline Moderne style, curves into the main entrance of the building and is seamlessly carried into the vestibule and lobby, where the alternating bands are complemented by enameled steel panels of vivid emerald green. The lobby is so clearly a continuation of the building’s façade that if the LPC and the National Register of Historic Places deem the exterior worthy of Landmark designation, the lobby must also carry the same level of importance. As its atmospheric interior so clearly continues the exterior design, it seems clear that the building's preservation is incomplete without the protection of the building's original lobby. As described in the building's LPC designation report, its design is "the product of the gradual shift in architectural taste from the machine-age abstract decorativeness of the Moderne, or Art Deco style, to the corporate-age utility of the International Style, and of the constantly innovative and growing architectural genius of Raymond Hood.” That description applies equally to the building's lobby. Along with the McGraw-Hill interior's significance for Streamline Moderne and International Style architecture and design, the 1980 modifications to the lobby, necessary to accommodate air-conditioning, add another level of significance to the space as a Postmodern design. These sympathetic additions were made by world-famous interior designer Valerian Rybar and his partner Jean-Francois Daigre and are so harmonious and integral to Hood’s 1931 interior, that they are indistinguishable from the original and most visitors have no idea that Rybar’s ceiling elements are not original 1 Monday, March 1, 2021 Hon. Sarah Carroll, Chair The NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission (continued) to the room. Postmodernism is undergoing a broad revival of interest, but is currently underrepresented in LPC designations. Both the original interior elements and the Postmodern modifications are remarkably intact and in fine condition. Together, they are more than sufficiently expressive of the coherence of the building’s architectural design intent; they are inseparable from it. The interior, of course, is publicly accessible, as required for designation as an Interior Landmark. The McGraw-Hill lobby embodies the highest ideals of its time in built form. It is an American masterpiece of the Streamline Moderne and International Style and is globally recognized as a key monument in the history of world architecture. Without landmark protection, a major twentieth-century interior space will be renovated out of existence, diminishing in turn the protected exterior. The authors of the AIA Guide to New York describe the McGraw-Hill Building's lobby as "an extraordinary remembrance of Carrera (opaque) glass, stainless steel and elegant lights.” We entreat the commissioners to keep this important building as visually stirring as originally intended by granting the full protections of the New York City Landmarks Law to the McGraw-Hill Building’s Lobby––the world’s irreplaceable, astonishingly polychromatic, Emerald City extravaganza. Sincerely, John Arbuckle Barry Bergdoll President Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History DOCOMOMO US New York/Tri-State Columbia University Simeon Bankoff Deborah Berke, FAIA, LEED AP Executive Director Dean Historic Districts Council Yale School of Architecture Kent Barwick Andrew Berman President Emeritus Executive Director Municipal Art Society of New York Village Preservation 2 James Biber, FAIA Gillian Darley Biber Architects President Twentieth Century Society Rosemarie Haag Bletter Justin Davidson Professor of 19th and 20th-Century European Classical Music and Architecture Critic and American Architecture and Theory New York Magazine CUNY, Graduate Center Jay DiLorenzo Michelle H. Bogart President Professor Emeritus of Art History The Preservation League of New York State Stony Brook University Jean-Louis Cohen John Morris Dixon Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Editor-in-Chief Architecture Progressive Architecture (1972-1996) New York University Institute of Fine Arts Andrew Dolkart Catherine Croft Professor of Historic Preservation Director Columbia University School of Architecture, Planning Twentieth Century Society, UK and Preservation 3 Martin Filler Julie V. Iovine The New York Review of Books Architecture Columnist The Wall Street Journal Kenneth Frampton Karrie Jacobs Ware Professor Emeritus Contributing Editor Columbia University GSAPP Architect Magazine Paul Goldberger Blair Kamin Contributing Editor Chicago Tribune Architecture Critic (1992-2021) Vanity Fair Contributing Editor, Architectural Record Professor Carol Herselle Krinsky Elizabeth Goldstein New York University President The Municipal Art Society of New York Jeffrey A. Kroessler President Roberta Brandes Gratz City Club of New York Former Landmarks Preservation Commissioner Phyllis Lambert Edwin Heathcote Founding Director Emeritus Financial Times, UK Canadian Center for Architecture 4 Alexandra Lange Architecture and Design Critic, Historian Robert M. Rubin Architectural Historian and Preservationist Christopher W. London Inga Saffron President Architecture Critic Naumburg Orchestral Concerts Philadelphia Inquirer Katherine Malone-France Kate Wagner Chief Preservation Officer Architecture Critic National Trust for Historic Preservation McMansionHell, Curbed Contributor Jayne Merkel Oliver Wainwright Architectural Historian, Critic, Journalist Architecture and Design Critic The Guardian Dietrich Neumann Professor of the History of Modern Architecture and Meghan Weatherby Urbanism Executive Director Brown University Art Deco Society of New York Jorge Otero-Pailos Carol Willis Professor and Director of Historic Preservation Founding Director Columbia University GSAPP The Skyscraper Museum 5 Anthony C. Wood Founder & Chair Theodore Grunewald New York Preservation Archive Project Co-founder Alliance to Save the McGraw-Hill Lobby cc: State Senator Brad Hoylman Thomas Collins Assemblymember Richard Gottfried Co-founder Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer Alliance to Save the McGraw-Hill Lobby Council Speaker Corey Johnson Jesse Bodine, District Manager, Community Board 4 Peg Breen, President, Landmarks Conservancy Bill Higgins, Higgins Quasebarth 6 .

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