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Monday, March 1, 2021 Hon. Sarah Carroll, Chair The NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission 1 Centre Street, 9th Floor New York, NY 10007 Dear Chair Carroll, We, the undersigned, urge the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) to act with decision and haste to designate the one-of-a-kind modernistic lobby of the former McGraw-Hill Building, at 330 West 42nd Street, an interior landmark. As noted in the 1981 LPC designation report for the Empire State Building, the lobbies of New York’s most iconic Art Deco towers, including the McGraw-Hill Building, are a continuation of the modern Art Deco design utilized on their landmarked façades:

The series of skyscrapers constructed in midtown, including the Chrysler, Daily News, McGraw-Hill, Chanin, RCA (now GE), Fuller, and Empire State buildings helped introduce the new modernistic Art Deco style to urban America, and their modernistic towers defined midtown's characteristic look for the next several decades. The lobbies of these buildings, major public interior spaces serving as a welcome to the office floors, continued the modernistic design of their towers, and a number of highly decorative lobby spaces were created…Less pointedly symbolic, the McGraw-Hill Building's lobby continued the blue-green and gold metal tubes of its entranceway into its green-walled interior, as many other modernistic towers carried their design into their lobbies. All these were designed as grand entrances to buildings with highly idiosyncratic physical presences in the skyline.

When the LPC designated the building's façade in 1979, the designation report called out the alternating blue-green steel bands separated by silver and gold colored metal tubes that adorn the ground floor façade. Similarly, the 1989 nomination of the building to the National Register of Historic Places described the building’s most notable feature as “the polychromatic streamlined ground floor on West 42nd Street.” This distinctive ornamentation, which epitomizes the Streamline Moderne style, curves into the main entrance of the building and is seamlessly carried into the vestibule and lobby, where the alternating bands are complemented by enameled steel panels of vivid emerald green. The lobby is so clearly a continuation of the building’s façade that if the LPC and the National Register of Historic Places deem the exterior worthy of Landmark designation, the lobby must also carry the same level of importance. As its atmospheric interior so clearly continues the exterior design, it seems clear that the building's preservation is incomplete without the protection of the building's original lobby. As described in the building's LPC designation report, its design is "the product of the gradual shift in architectural taste from the machine-age abstract decorativeness of the Moderne, or Art Deco style, to the corporate-age utility of the International Style, and of the constantly innovative and growing architectural genius of Raymond Hood.” That description applies equally to the building's lobby. Along with the McGraw-Hill interior's significance for Streamline Moderne and International Style architecture and design, the 1980 modifications to the lobby, necessary to accommodate air-conditioning, add another level of significance to the space as a Postmodern design. These sympathetic additions were made by world-famous interior designer Valerian Rybar and his partner Jean-Francois Daigre and are so harmonious and integral to Hood’s 1931 interior, that they are indistinguishable from the original and most visitors have no idea that Rybar’s ceiling elements are not original

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Monday, March 1, 2021 Hon. Sarah Carroll, Chair

The NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission (continued) to the room. Postmodernism is undergoing a broad revival of interest, but is currently underrepresented in LPC designations. Both the original interior elements and the Postmodern modifications are remarkably intact and in fine condition. Together, they are more than sufficiently expressive of the coherence of the building’s architectural design intent; they are inseparable from it. The interior, of course, is publicly accessible, as required for designation as an Interior Landmark. The McGraw-Hill lobby embodies the highest ideals of its time in built form. It is an American masterpiece of the Streamline Moderne and International Style and is globally recognized as a key monument in the history of world architecture. Without landmark protection, a major twentieth-century interior space will be renovated out of existence, diminishing in turn the protected exterior. The authors of the AIA Guide to New York describe the McGraw-Hill Building's lobby as "an extraordinary remembrance of Carrera (opaque) glass, stainless steel and elegant lights.” We entreat the commissioners to keep this important building as visually stirring as originally intended by granting the full protections of the New York City Landmarks Law to the McGraw-Hill Building’s Lobby––the world’s irreplaceable, astonishingly polychromatic, Emerald City extravaganza. Sincerely,

John Arbuckle President DOCOMOMO US New York/Tri-State

Simeon Bankoff Executive Director Historic Districts Council

Kent Barwick President Emeritus Municipal Art Society of New York

Barry Bergdoll Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History Columbia University

Deborah Berke, FAIA, LEED AP Dean Yale School of Architecture

Andrew Berman Executive Director Village Preservation

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James Biber, FAIA Biber Architects

Rosemarie Haag Bletter Professor of 19th and 20th-Century European and American Architecture and Theory CUNY, Graduate Center

Michelle H. Bogart Professor Emeritus of Art History Stony Brook University

Jean-Louis Cohen Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture New York University Institute of Fine Arts

Catherine Croft Director Twentieth Century Society, UK

Gillian Darley President Twentieth Century Society

Justin Davidson Classical Music and Architecture Critic New York Magazine

Jay DiLorenzo President The Preservation League of New York State

John Morris Dixon Editor-in-Chief Progressive Architecture (1972-1996)

Andrew Dolkart Professor of Historic Preservation Columbia University School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

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Martin Filler The New York Review of Books

Kenneth Frampton Ware Professor Emeritus Columbia University GSAPP

Paul Goldberger Contributing Editor Vanity Fair

Elizabeth Goldstein President The Municipal Art Society of New York

Roberta Brandes Gratz Former Landmarks Preservation Commissioner

Edwin Heathcote Financial Times, UK

Julie V. Iovine Architecture Columnist The Wall Street Journal

Karrie Jacobs Contributing Editor Architect Magazine

Blair Kamin Chicago Tribune Architecture Critic (1992-2021) Contributing Editor, Architectural Record

Professor Carol Herselle Krinsky New York University

Jeffrey A. Kroessler President City Club of New York

Phyllis Lambert Founding Director Emeritus Canadian Center for Architecture

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Alexandra Lange Architecture and Design Critic, Historian

Christopher W. London President Naumburg Orchestral Concerts

Katherine Malone-France Chief Preservation Officer National Trust for Historic Preservation

Jayne Merkel Architectural Historian, Critic, Journalist

Dietrich Neumann Professor of the History of Modern Architecture and Urbanism Brown University

Jorge Otero-Pailos Professor and Director of Historic Preservation Columbia University GSAPP

Robert M. Rubin Architectural Historian and Preservationist

Inga Saffron Architecture Critic Philadelphia Inquirer

Kate Wagner Architecture Critic McMansionHell, Curbed Contributor

Oliver Wainwright Architecture and Design Critic The Guardian

Meghan Weatherby Executive Director Art Deco Society of New York

Carol Willis Founding Director The Skyscraper Museum

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Anthony C. Wood Founder & Chair New York Preservation Archive Project

Thomas Collins Co-founder Alliance to Save the McGraw-Hill Lobby

Theodore Grunewald Co-founder Alliance to Save the McGraw-Hill Lobby cc: State Senator Brad Hoylman

Assemblymember Richard Gottfried Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer Council Speaker Corey Johnson Jesse Bodine, District Manager, Community Board 4 Peg Breen, President, Landmarks Conservancy Bill Higgins, Higgins Quasebarth