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.
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