Architectural Digest Video Compilation

My Midtown architecture tour remains my best seller, so I know that there are a lot of architecture lovers coming to my site. Welcome!

The magazine/website Architectural Digest has been doing a series of videos over the last few years, featuring architects + experts exploring some of NYC’s most impactful landmarks. After watching their excellent new video on the Chrysler Building today, I thought it might be worth compiling here some of the best in that series. Enjoy!

1. The Chrysler Building:

2. Rockeller Center:

3. Grand Central Terminal:

4. The New York Public Library:

5. The Plaza Hotel:

Bonus 1: Breaking down common NYC apartment styles:

Bonus 2: The Architecture of the NYC Subway

What's THAT building?

When I do tours in lower Manhattan, I always discuss the very famous landmarks that we pass. But I also get many other questions about the less-than-famous, but still striking and important, buildings we pass along the way. Here's a collection of some of these interesting buildings, with photos taken on my walk yesterday:

Photo 1: The Manhattan Municipal Building (today, formally known as The David N. Dinkins Municipal Building), completed in 1914 on plans by McKim, Mead & White. This building is just a block northeast of City Hall. After the 1898 consolidation of the five boroughs, it became clear that the now much, much larger city needed more space for its growing government. At 40 stories high, it is a rare municipal skyscraper. It was constructed at the end of the nationwide City Beautiful movement, which pushed for grand civic architecture: beauty not only for its own sake, but also to create moral and civic virtue among urban populations. The statue atop the building is known as Civic Fame.

2: The E. V. Haughwout Building stands out among the many buildings of the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District. Built in 1857, it originally housed Eder V. Haughwout's fashionable emporium. What the building is most famous for is having been the home of the world's first passenger elevator when it opened, a hydraulic lift designed by Elisha Graves Otis (it was powered by a steam engine in the basement). At just five stories, the building hardly required an elevator, but Haughwout knew that people would come to see the new novelty, and stay to buy his goods. In modern times, the building housed an Artists & Fleas location on the ground floor, with offices above.

3: 240 Centre Street, as the old signage on the building reads, was formerly the headquarters of the New York City Police Department (from 1909 to 1973). Much like the Municipal Building, after consolidation, the city required a bigger HQ for its police. After the police moved downtown, the building became a landmark, and was eventually converted into luxury condominiums in 1988. Recent sale prices in the building range from $1.6M last year for a 1-bedroom to $27.9M for a 5,500 ft² penthouse in 2017.

4: This famous corner building is the financial district (at 56 Beaver St) is best known as the home of Delmonico's. The original Delmonico's opened in 1827 in this area, before eventually moving to this famous corner, where it gained a nationwide reputation. This current building came decades later. Delmonico's is credited with being one of the first American restaurants to allow patrons to order from a menu à la carte (ordering individual dishes), as opposed to table d'hôte (a prix fixe menu offering that had previously been the norm). The corner building also shows the landmarked colonial-era street pattern of this part of Manhattan. Due to its look, it is nowadays often mistaken as the building used for the facade of the fictional The Continental hotel in the "John Wick" movies which is actually a few blocks north on Beaver Street...

5: 1 Wall Street Court, also known as the Beaver Building, was once the home of the New York Cocoa Exchange... and in the "John Wick" films is a hotel for assassins run with strict rules by its manager, Winston. The building dates back to 1904. Most of the building today is residential, with restaurant space on the main floor. Most of the interior scenes (and roof scenes) for the Continental were shot elsewhere-- from the old Cunard Building to Rockefeller Center -- or on sets.

6: 32 Avenue of the Avenues, also known as the AT&T Long Distance Building, is an Art Deco telecommunications building completed in 1932. The building has two twin antennas on the roof. No longer owned by AT&T, it has several high-profile tenants today, including several of the city's top FM radio stations. It is in Tribeca, at the intersections of 6th Ave, Lispenard St, and Beach St. Like many Art Deco buildings, its landmarked lobby features gorgeous murals and mosaics.

7: 33 Thomas Street, formerly known as the AT&T Long Lines Building, is the Brutalist cousin to the previous building, and was completed in 1974. It is said to be one of the most secure buildings in America, and was designed to be self-sufficient with its own gas and water supplies along with generation capabilities and protected from nuclear fallout for up to two weeks after a nuclear blast. It is still a secure telecommunications building, with many rumors for years about other uses, leading to pop-culture depictions ranging from the obscure 1979 film "Winter Kills" to episodes of "The X-Files" and "Mr. Robot" in modern times. Modern exposes peg it as the likely location of a NSA mass surveillance hub codenamed TITANPOINTE.

8: The "Jenga Building" is what locals have dubbed this Tribeca residential skyscraper at 56 Leonard Street. Completed in 2017, it was designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, which described the design inspiration as "houses stacked in the sky." With most modern residential skyscrapers adopting fairly uniform designs, the unique architecture of this building has helped it stand out amidst an increasingly crowded skyline (you can its much taller neighbor to the south-- One World Trade Center-- in this shot). Recent sales price have ranged from $2.975M for a 1-bedroom to $21.5M for the 5,252 ft² top penthouse on the 57th floor.

9: A look up at "houses stacked in the sky" at 56 Leonard.

10: This gorgeous landmark is right across the street from our first building, at 31 Chambers Street. The gorgeous Beaux Arts building was completed in 1907 as the Hall of Records, and today is The Surrogate's Courthouse. The building today also houses the city's Municipal Archives in the basement, which is open to the public. There are dozens of sculptures on the facade, including eminent figures from the city's past, such as Peter Stuyvesant, DeWitt Clinton, David Pietersen De Vries, and mayors Caleb Heathcote, Abram Stevens Hewitt, Philip Hone, Cadwallader David Colden, and James Duane. The building has (in this guide's opinion) one of the most gorgeous lobbies in New York City.

That's it!

Anyone have a favorite building in lower Manhattan?

The Art Deco Treasures of The Bronx

Here at Custom NYC Tours, we are always looking for unique, new tours to help people explore New York City. One of our more popular regular tours is our Art Deco & Architecture Midtown Landmarks tour (available many weekday mornings each month). So we created another tour to help people discover one of the city’s best pockets of art deco architecture, in a place they wouldn’t expect… The Bronx.

In the early 20th-century, French immigrant Louis Aloys Risse dreamed of a grand boulevard running through the Bronx, to be modeled after the Champs-Élysées in Paris. The “Grand Concourse”, as it became known, stretches over four miles (6 km) in length, south to north. The area experienced a population boom after the subway opened nearby in 1917. Going into the 1930s, it became the largest concentration of art deco buildings in New York. But they weren’t the skyscrapers of Manhattan that we associate with NYC art deco… they were gorgeous apartment buildings built for the area’s growing middle class families. Famed art deco architects like Horace Ginsburn and Emery Roth built mile after mile of those amazing buildings, most of which still stand today in protected historic districts. There are other types of gorgeous buildings of this era there as well, from the Bronx County Court House further south up to the (former Loew’s) Paradise Theater up by Fordham. The area has had its up and downs over the last century, but the grand architecture remains, as new waves of families have filled these beautiful buildings.

Interested in discovering more about the history & development of the Bronx, and seeing its amazing landmarked architecture? Contact us to arrange your own private art deco adventure… just blocks from Yankee Stadium!

Victorian Flatbush, Brooklyn

Time Out New York magazine listed our popular tour of Victorian Flatbush, in Brooklyn, as one of “10 fascinating architecture tours in NYC”. We were honored to be included there, and hope you will join us sometime to see why it was spotlighted as a unique NYC experience.

Flatbush itself is one of the original six towns of the formerly-independent city of Brooklyn, dating back to the Dutch colonial era. Remnants of this heritage are seen on the tour, including one of the city’s oldest cemeteries. After Prospect Park was built in the 1860s (back when much of Flatbush was still farmland), developers took notice of the potential for new neighborhoods in Flatbush. Just south of the park, starting the 1880s, several developers worked to build a wealthy suburb that would be different from the brownstone & row-house trend of the rest of Brooklyn. Instead, they aimed to build a more suburban neighborhood, filled with huge homes and mansions, private sporting clubs, all within walking distance of this new park (and a short train ride away from the beaches of southern Brooklyn). Thus was born “Victorian Flatbush”.

Half of these developments across the area were destroyed in the 1930s to make way for middle-class apartment complexes, but several historic districts preserve its more picturesque and historic parts.

Recently, the Brooklyn real estate blog Brownstoner published some unique, birds-eye view photos of the area as it had grown, circa 1907. These are great shots, and experts on this neighborhood’s history will spot some unique finds in the photo, which I’ll spotlight here.

In this large, panorama shot, on the upper right, I’ve circled a pedestrian bridge across the railroad tracks (today the tracks are used by the NYC subway). This bridge was placed along the most scenic road— Albemarle— to connect one end of the Victorian neighborhood to the other. Today, the rail tracks largely (with a few exceptions) mark the dividing line between the preserved section of the neighborhood and the post-1930s section. The bridge was demolished about 40 years ago, to meet the angry demands of the wealthy mansion-dwellers to better separate themselves from the working-class populations starting one block over. You can read the fascinating history of this rail line, and the forgotten bridge here.

The Brownstoner article also includes a close-up of the area near that bridge, the intersection of Albermarle and Buckingham Roads:

Circled by me there is a mansion that no longer exists. It was built by developer Dean Alvord as his personal new home. He had decreed that, after his death, the home be razed and the land donated to the community for common use. Today, the lot is the home of the Flatbush CommUNITY Garden. If you look at the site today, the driveway and the foundation of the home are still intact, but otherwise it remains a (now membership-only) community garden.

Want to see all of these sites, and the larger neighborhood, as they look today? Take a look at the slideshow of images on our listing page for our Victorian Flatbush tour, and see our calendar of public tour dates. We can also do this as a private tour on many other dates.

Come see gorgeous suburban blocks, Victorian-style mansions, and history in central Brooklyn!