A gleaming Streamline Moderne lobby of New York City’s original McGraw-Hill Building is under threat of a renovation that could obliterate its historic character. Architect Raymond Hood, who designed some of the very finest, awe-inspiring Art Deco skyscrapers of the era, created the lobby as a perfect entrance statement that fit with the McGraw-Hill’s bold, blue-green exterior.

The exterior of the 1931 building at 330 West 42nd Street is a designated New York City landmark. However, the interior is not protected. Now the Art Deco Society of New York, preservationists, and city residents who cherish this one-of-a-kind lobby are advocating for its preservation. One has filed a request for evaluation of the building lobby to the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), urging the commission to designate the interior lobby as a landmark. This would prevent the building’s owners from gutting or irreparably altering it as part of a current renovation. The building will remain a combination commercial office and retail space. The Art Deco Society of New York has also spearheaded an online petition drive calling upon the LPC to legally protect the lobby, which the Society terms “an architectural masterpiece,” before it is lost forever.

The McGraw-Hill publishing company broke ground for a new headquarters in 1930, completing it in 1931 at the height of the Great Depression. It was a time of audacious design and construction in New York, and the 35-story skyscraper that Hood designed for McGraw-Hill was one of the boldest and best of the lot. It evoked strong responses as many embraced it while others saw it as over-the-top. The exterior features horizontal bands of more than 4,000 metal-framed, double-hung windows. This horizontal window arrangement alternates with bands of glazed blue-green terra-cotta brick. Hood opted to crown the top with the company name, McGraw-Hill, in distinctive, boxy letters, 11 feet high, specially crafted of handmade hollow terra-cotta bricks.

The lobby is a seamless continuation of the vibrant exterior entranceway on West 42nd Street: It has wide bands of blue and green, separated by gold and silver metal tubes. The main and elevator corridors are finished off with striking green enameled-steel walls.

Singular Genius

When he reflected on his work, Hood kept a focus on his attunement to his client’s needs and to utility. Ultimately, however, he was also an unmistakable artistic genius whose impact was unparalleled. As Paul Goldberger wrote in a 1984 article in the New York Times, “If there is any architect whose career proved that idealism need not be at the expense of pragmatism, it was Raymond Hood, perhaps the 20th century’s greatest molder of skyscraper form.”

330 West 42nd Street
Photo: Paul Houle, Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.0

Hood experienced far from a quick rise. Educated at Brown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Ecole does Beaux-Arts, Hood designed in relative oblivion until, at age 41, he and John Mead Howells won the international architectural competition for the Tribune Tower in Chicago in 1922. While his works and design genius incorporate much more, his fame flourished in just over a decade, particularly as the architect of four skyscrapers in New York: the American Radiator Building (1923-24), the Daily News Building (1929-30), the McGraw-Hill Building (1930-31), and the RCA building at Rockefeller Center. He was a guiding force on the Rockefeller Center team at the time of his death, on Aug. 14, 1934, at age 53.

When news surfaced in recent weeks of the uncertain future for this irreplaceable space, preservationists and architecture lovers became alarmed and set into motion a rapid effort to save it. Word of the threat first arose on Feb. 9 via Twitter, where preservationists Lloyd Bergenson and Ted Grunewald posted images of the intact lobby and a rendering Bergenson had shared that is reportedly an early rendering of an interior space. At the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s hearing that afternoon, in which the LPC considered alterations that the owner plans to make to the exterior, preservationists expressed opposition to any plans to destroy the interior lobby during a renovation.

In his statement at the hearing, Grunewald, who has immense art and architecture expertise and has led successful preservation campaigns, captured what is at stake if the owners demolish the lobby. Grunewald first encouraged the commission members to look at a “before and after” rendering he had shared on Twitter, with the “before” showing the intact lobby and the “after” a rendering of a bland off-white redone space. He recalled the 1978 description of the lobby by Fred Papert, a former Municipal Art Society president, in New York magazine, as “gold and silver and green. If Fred Astaire had worked in an office building, this would have been the one.”

Photo: Artisan Books & Bindery, Tumblr

Grunewald put the building in context. The McGraw-Hill space, Grunewald said, is one of the most splendid of New York City’s Art Deco lobbies, as he ticked off just over a handful of others by name. Moreover, Grunewald said, the lobby “is considered one of the very finest examples of Art Deco in the world.”

Those wanting to see the lobby preserved were not mollified by comments from the owner’s consultant and architect at the hearing. Bill Higgins, cofounder of Higgins Quasebarth & Partners, a consultant on the renovation, said, “we recognize the character and quality of the lobby,” adding the project would seek to have a “harmonious combination of new and old.” Several LPC commissioners indicated an openness toward considering a landmark designation or urged the building representatives to be sensitive to the lobby’s unique character.

The LPC has received a request for evaluation of the building lobby as an interior landmark, and “will carefully review the materials submitted,” an LPC spokesperson confirmed Wednesday. When evaluating potential landmarks, the LPC studies several factors, including architectural, historical, and cultural significance, and the level of integrity of the original design (defined as the degree to which the historic character, design, and building fabric are intact).

In his remarks to the LPC, Grunewald warned of seeing another amazing New York City space fall victim to “Apple store fever,” a nod to the same-size-fits-all minimalism that we see in so many interiors now.

#EMERGENCYHISTORICPRESERVATIONALERT@ArtDecoSocNY now has a petition online calling upon @NYCLandmarks to extend legal protection to the lobby of Raymond Hood's 1931 #McGrawHill Bldg.

Please urge the LPC to schedule a designation hearing without delay!https://t.co/yi3SoOZx3a pic.twitter.com/hwsFT0KDKL

— Theodore — Six — Feet — Apart — Grunewald (@TedGrunewald) February 11, 2021

The lobby at 330 West 42nd Street is anything but. The building’s daring style and color scheme convey lively energy, still evident after 90 years. Hood explained the color scheme as “Dutch blue at the base, with sea green window bands, the blue gradually shading off to a lighter tone the higher the building got, until it finally blends into the azure of the sky.” This vivid flow of color carries through the entranceway into the lobby and the interior, for which, as Frank Gale wrote in the New York Herald-Tribune, experts had studied two shades of green, “a combination believed to give the maximum of rest to the eyes of office workers” (LPC Landmark Designation Report, Sept. 11, 1979). Having walked through the lobby and by the McGraw-Hill Building countless times over many years, I’ve often felt that it all somehow provides a spring in my step when taking it in. If architecture is “frozen music,” as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, then this skyscraper and its lobby are fluid swing.

The coming days will reveal if there is a chance to landmark the lobby so that this character remains whole. As Grunewald has said, “the ball is in the Landmarks Commission’s court.”

Learn More, Take Action

Explore the architecture of Raymond Hood.

Raymond Hood and the American Skyscraper – David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University

Raymond Hood’s New York Skyscrapers – The Art Deco Society of New York

Sign the online petition.

Save the Art Deco Lobby of the McGraw-Hill Building – The Art Deco Society of New York