NEW YORK ART DECO: A Guide to Gotham’s Jazz Age Architecture
Click here for amazon.com
Click here to read the introduction
Click here for the “Art Deco resources” page on this web site
Watch the book talk at the Skyscraper Museum:
Honors:
Listed as one of the twenty-five best books on New York City History by Brick Underground
Winner of a 2017-2018 New York City Book Award from the New York Society Library
Reviews:
Kathleen Murphy Skolnik in the Chicago Art Deco Society Magazine
Curbed.com: “New York’s most iconic Art Deco buildings, mapped”
Robin Grow in Spirit of Progress
Manhattan Book Review
Anthony C. Wood in the Journal of the Art Deco Society of New York
6sqft.com
Amazon.com customer reviews (click here, then scroll down)
The Book
Finally! The Art Deco guidebook Tony Robins has been working on since the early 1980s….
Of all the world’s great cities, perhaps none is so defined by its Art Deco architecture as New York. Yet this is the first guidebook to the Deco wonders of the great American metropolis.
It’s based on the walking and bus tour itineraries I’ve developed over the past 30 years, the majority of them for the Art Deco Society of New York, of which I was an early member, and on whose Board I currently sit.
The book includes an introductory essay describing the Art Deco phenomenon, followed by eleven walking tour itineraries in Manhattan—each accompanied by a map designed by legendary New York cartographer John Tauranac—and a survey of Deco sites across the four other boroughs. Also included is a photo gallery of sixteen color plates by nationally acclaimed Art Deco photographer Randy Juster.
Words of praise for the book:
Andrew Scott Dolkart, author of The Row House Reborn: Architecture and Neighborhoods in New York City, 1908–1929
“With the publication of New York Art Deco everyone, from the city explorer to the armchair reader, can now experience Anthony Robins’s dynamic Art Deco walking tours. Robins not only discusses the city’s famed Deco skyscrapers, but also identifies the spectacular but little-known Deco gems spread across the city. This book is a must for those who love New York and thrill to Art Deco architecture.”
Christopher Gray, author of the former New York Times Streetscapes column
“The Art Deco style fits New York like a glove, from the skyscraping Chrysler Building to the little, eye-popping Lane Theater on Staten Island, and nobody knows it like Anthony Robins. If you thought you knew Art Deco—as I did, before I read his New York Art Deco—then buy this book and be surprised.”
Tony Hiss, author of In Motion: The Experience of Travel
“A wonderful, warmhearted, exceptionally knowledgeable and detailed guidebook that takes you firmly by the hand along fifteen thoughtfully planned itineraries through New York’s most exuberant and optimistic architectural heritage—those much-beloved Art Deco skyscrapers, apartment houses, shops, and theaters that stand out as the showy orchids and magnificent birds-of-paradise of the city’s building stock. Anthony W. Robins’s New York Art Deco is an essential introduction to hundreds of structures that are, as the book says, ‘waiting impatiently for you to visit.’”
Barry Lewis, architectural historian
“Buy this book, take a few wonderful walks around the entire city (discovering some fine New York neighborhoods you probably have never been to), from the Grand Concourse and Washington Heights’ treasure trove of Deco to the Chrysler Building to Flatbush in Brooklyn, and ask yourself, do all those new glass towers in Manhattan leave you as delighted as Art Deco’s confections, whether seven stories or seventy? That generation knew how to make buildings that you really want to live in, work in, and walk by. Thank you, Anthony Robins, for giving us the keys to that kingdom.”
David Garrard Lowe, author of Art Deco New York
“Anthony Robins’s New York Art Deco fills a void in the design library of New York. Well organized by itineraries that begin at the very tip of Manhattan and work their way into the other four boroughs, it is filled with invaluable information on the monuments of Art Deco and French moderne structures whose design perfectly expresses the streamlined era when speed and movement were celebrated. This is a must-have book for every lover of Art Deco, whether you are a New Yorker or a visitor from New Zealand.”
Jules Stewart, author of Gotham Rising: New York in the ’30s
“Anthony W. Robins has produced what will surely stand as the definitive guide to New York City’s Art Deco architecture. The book is an authoritative as well as entertaining tour de force, drawn from the author’s encyclopedic knowledge of the subject.”