Introduction by Carol Willis

NEW YORK IS AN ART DECO CITY—indeed, the Deco city—as Richard Berenholtz shows us in his opulent photographs. Its Deco identity is projected in a big way: skyscrapers. The Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and Rockefeller Center were crowning achievements of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and remain the dominant celebrities of the midtown skyline. Deco lobbies, theaters, jazz bars, restaurants, and details also hide and surprise at eye level across the city.

The text infuses the pictures with the astonishing energy of the time. Cab Calloway arrived before the George Washington Bridge was built and ferried across to join the great jazz swell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley's words emerged from its relentless vitality, Ayn Rand both mirrored and was influenced by its monumentality, lyricists like Lorenzo Hart turned "Manhattan into an isle of joy."

In architecture, "Deco" burst forth at full scale around 1925, when an expanding economy and a surging stock market stimulated an unprecedented exuberance on every level, cultural and commercial. Immigration fueled New York. Artists, musicians, writers, builders, and architects found a home in the city's incredibly diverse population and influences of every kind invaded its activities. Everything was possible in New York. No more gothic "Cathedrals of Commerce" or layer cakes of classicism: architects and titans of industry embraced the modern. The world's most modern metropolis suddenly seemed raring to look the part.

The New York style was eclectic, translated from many sources, but in particular, the influential 1925 Paris fair, the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs et Industrielles, where Beaux Arts classicism met cubism and abstraction and, in effect, created a middle-ground modernism. Other European influences, such as Viennese design and German Expressionist architecture, placed an emphasis on rich surface decoration, color, and dramatic lighting. The emphasis tended to be on walls with visual weight and architectural forms that seemed like sculpted masses—an aesthetic wildly geometric and filled with mythic and contemporary symbols from ancient gods to electricity. As buildings rose, praise for art, industry, science, workers, and commerce found its way into murals, mosaics, sculptures, ceilings, and walls. American modernism of the Deco era married simplified mass and rich ornament.

Richard Berenholtz captures these qualities in his sumptuous studies of Deco New York's fundamental forms and decorative details. He zooms in on the tops of towers, highlighting the faceted pyramids that seem carved out of solid stone or composed of thick bricks or terra-cotta panels. He revels in the telescoping circles of stainless steel in the Chrysler's crown and the radiating wings that buttress the Empire State's mooring mast. Close-ups of the most monumental forms find their counterpart in his enlargement of areas of decoration such as metal grilles, light fixtures, ornamental friezes, or thematic sculptural programs. He finds his quarry on facades, in lobbies, in plazas, elevators, and smoking rooms. New York is a Deco technicolor treasure hunt. Add to that the saturated hues of sunset skies and ultramarine nights, and the photographer, a master of the panorama, gives us a city where the romance of past styles remains an indelible presence.

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