The RAND Art Deco team in front of one of the scavenger hunt "finds": The Waldorf Astoria Hotel.
All of you New York City Art Deco fans, here’s a pop quiz to test your knowledge. Identify the following buildings:
- This residential cooperative was built in 1929 but its starring role in a 1984 movie made it a New York City pop-culture icon and is now often referred to by the film’s name.
- This famous hotel has a secret train platform in its basement that was once used by such VIPs as President Franklin D. Roosevelt to allow them to secretly enter and exit.
- This building’s curtain wall is made of 90% glass, as well as metal and terra cotta, and it was erected long before metal-and-glass curtain walls became an architectural fashion.
(Answers at the end of this post.)
The above clues were among the 60 given to my RAND colleagues and me and 74 other teams on a scavenger hunt co-hosted by the Art Deco Society of New York and Open House New York on August 9. Not only did the teams get elegantly designed T-shirts, but we also had the opportunity to explore the city on a beautiful Saturday—albeit in a mad rush to find the answers. What architecture geek doesn’t love the cool shiny elegance (and occasional wackiness) of Art Deco?
By the contest rules, each team had to be photographed with all of its members together in front of each “find,” so splitting up was not a viable option. RAND’s merry band, which included me and my trusty RAND colleagues Eugene Bush, Lynne Funk, Albelisa Kemp, and Esin Pektas, got our feet wet with a few easy-to-identify buildings in Midtown, including the Waldorf Astoria, the Chrysler Building, and the Chanin Building.
Deco Fortress: Herman Ridder Junior High School in the Bronx.
We then headed up to the Bronx to try to find the six clues there, relying on Albelisa’s familiarity with the Grand Concourse from her work on a RAND project. The buildings we saw were beautiful—with incredible metal doors, terra cotta, and mosaics—but our favorite discovery of the day was the Deco fortress, Hermann Ridder Junior High School, which none of us had previously known.
Once back in Manhattan, it was an adrenaline-fueled dash to identify the last 10 sites and scramble to get to them and take our photo before the 5:00 PM deadline. Some of our final finds were the Beacon Theater and then, courtesy of Lynne’s expert parking-in-a-pinch skills, the McGraw-Hill Building and several clues in Rockefeller Center, including Radio City Music Hall and the bronze gilded statue of Prometheus in the lower plaza in front of 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Time did not permit us to to to Queens or Brooklyn, so unfortunately we did not get to chase down the clues in those boroughs. On the plus side, it’s wonderful to know there is such an embarrassment of Art Deco riches throughout the city!
After the scavenger hunt was over, we headed uptown to enjoy complimentary snacks and wine on the terrace of the Museum of the City of New York with the other Art Deco teams as we waited for the winners to be announced.
So, how did our RAND Deco team do? We were pleased to have scored 62 points, well above the overall average of 40 points and not too far behind the second and third place teams, who scored in the mid 70s. Congratulations to the winning team, the Deco Raters, who left the rest of the field in the Art Deco dust with an amazing 99 points. We are already plotting strategies for improving our score next year!
How did you do on the pop quiz? Here are the answers:
- 55 Central Park West, a.k.a. the Ghostbusters Building. We got this one.
- The Waldorf Astoria. We also got this one, as did many other teams. It was the most correctly identified .building.
- Broadway Fashion Building (on the corner of West 84th Street). We didn’t have a clue on this clue!
For details on the scavenger hunt, visit Open House New York’s website. To see photos of some of the buildings the RAND team identified, visit us on Instagram.
