ALTON BROWN REFRIGERATOR PIE

Midtown East, Manhattan


The General Electric Building, constructed in 1929-31 to create a highly visible image for the fledgling RCA Corporation, has a significant place in the history of architecture in New York City. Designed by the firm of Cross & Cross in the Gothic mode of the Art Deco style which is both symbolic and expressive of the function of the building, this tower is a major example of Art Deco architecture. The massing and articulation of the building, shown through the use of ornament and color, is remarkable and laudable; not only does this treatment illustrate the breadth of the Art Deco, but it also gives the General Electric Building exemplary status. Moreover the building is the successful culmination of the Cross & Cross firm's efforts to develop a coherent and cohesive articulation for tall office buildings.

The Site
The General Electric Building is constructed on the northwest portion of the block bounded by 50th and 51st Streets, Park Avenue on the west, and Lexington Avenue on the east, at the southwest corner of the intersection of 51st Street and Lexington Avenue. In 1867 Frederick and Maximilian Schaefer began to assemble lots at the western end of the block, and in 1878 they constructed the F. & M. Schaefer Brewery complex.

Lots 10 and 11 on the southeast corner of the block were deeded to Saint Patrick's Cathedral in 1880. But only in this century did the block become a desirable location, a transition enabled by two major factors. In 1903 the Grant of Rights in Streets from the City of New York to the New York and Harlem River Railroad and the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad Companies was recorded, a right of way that literally created Park Avenue as a grand boulevard and initiated a great development surge in this area.? Indeed, the block took on a very different tone when in 1914 the entire Schaefer tract was sold to Saint Bartholomew's Church, the third and present site of this prominent Episcopalian congregation.

Only in 1929 did the Bartholomew Building Corporation, acting for RCA, purchase what would become the General Electric Tower site. By the end of 1929 the Bartholomew Building Corporation had acquired a large parcel from Norko Realty Company and Julian Tishman & Sons, Inc., and two 51st Street lots from the Nichols Holding Co. A building permit was filed for Bartholomew on December 17, 1929.

Construction for the 560-foot high building began on May 3, 1930. Only a month before, the existing brownstones had been demolished.^ Erection of the building's skeletal steel frame and concrete floor arches continued throughout the summer.

But RCA's negotiations to move to Rockefeller Center, then in the planning stages, had begun even in late 1929 . On January 13, 1931, the formal transfer of the tower — Bartholomew Building Corporation's lease to RCA and ten days later a conveyance from Bartholomew Building Corporation and RCA to General Electric Realty and Utilities Corporation — was recorded.The tower was completed according to the designs of Cross & Cross, the following December.

The Design of the General Electric Building
In the General Electric Building all of the disparate features which characterize the tall office buildings of Cross & Cross are brought together in one splendid exercise in the Art Deco style. It was as if the designers in the "tall office building department" had been waiting both for the imprimatur of a style, the Art Deco, through which their rich imagery, the so-called proto-Deco, could coalesce and for the opportunity to translate this imagery into an appropriate built form. The symbolic signature of golfer and Mercury keystones, the roundels of Morris and Fulton, the musicians and medals, the wiverns and window hoods, anchors and dolphins, and helmeted herms, culminate here in an iconography tailored to RCA: bolts and flashes crackle from the building's surface and mysterious personifications emerge from within its verticality. Likewise the handsome brickwork, from the Revillon diaper to the parapets of the Central Hanover Bank buildings, here reach an apogee not to be repeated by Cross & Cross.

General Electric, like the City Bank Building, is a tall, eight-sided tower, articulated with piers and recessed spandrels, rising from a base which completely fills the relatively small site. The major material of the building's exterior is brick. In fact, three different colors, orange, buff, and a tawny color similar in shade to the bricks used in the fabric of Saint Bartholomew's Church, are laid in American bond with narrow joints but randomly, to create the allusion of yet an overall fourth color, a rich bronze. However, it was specified, even stressed, throughout the drawings that rounded brick be used on all corners that are not right angles.30 Second only to the brick, terra-cotta is used extensively. Where originally a tawny limestone had been specified for all the spandrels, copings,

"Better Homes and Gardens"
July 1957