Anthony W. Robins

SOLD OUT Course: MASter Class - Researching the History of Buildings in New York City - Session No. 2
2019-02-12 18:30 (America/New_York)
Sponsored by the Municipal Art Society and the New York Landmarks Conservancy.
Reservations required – click here for details and registration, or call 212-935-3960. $375 ($300 MAS or Landmarks Conservancy members or students)
Learn how to unearth detailed information about New York City buildings in four Tuesday evening lectures in February (5, 12, 19, 26) at 6:30 p.m., plus one weekday morning field trip. The four evening sessions include: The Building: an introduction to the records of the Department of Buildings. The Client: weaving your way through deeds, directories, obituaries, Who’s Who, and local histories. The Architect: using standard texts, guidebooks, periodicals, the Avery Index, and Committee for the Preservation of Architectural Records publications. Miscellaneous Sources: using photograph collections, maps, New York City archives, libraries and historical societies, and early 19th century tax assessment records. Field Trip: Manhattan Department of Buildings, New York City Conveyance Records, the Municipal Archives and the Municipal Reference Library.
This annual seminar has been running for more than 30 years. Participants have included architects, engineers, building owners, preservation advocates, lawyers and landmarks commissioners and even a New York City detective.
AIA members are eligible for four AIA LUs upon completion of the course.

SOLD OUT Course: MASter Class - Researching the History of Buildings in New York City - Session No. 1
2019-02-05 18:30 - 20:00

TOUR: The Woolworth Building and its Lobby
2018-12-23 14:00 - 14:30, 2018-12-09 14:00 - 15:30, 2018-11-25 14:00 - 15:30, 2018-11-04 14:00 - 14:30, 2018-10-21 14:00 - 15:30, 2018-10-07 14:00 - 15:30, 2018-09-16 14:00 - 15:30, 2018-09-02 14:00 - 15:30 and 3 more dates | Woolworth Building, 233 Broadway, New York
Reservations required – click here.
Tour of the Woolworth Building lobby, closed to the public for more than a decade and now open again. The tour includes a detailed look at the building’s unmatched polychromatic terra-cotta exterior, and an in-depth exploration of the lobby and its wealth of ornament, including hidden corners and staircases — plus a special visit to the mezzanine level for an up-close view of its extraordinary mosaic ceiling. For more, see the blog post.

TOUR: Art Deco Central Park West
2018-10-24 10:00 - 12:00
Reservations required. Sponsored by the Scarsdale Adult School. Click here for information and registration.
Based on Itinerary No. 8 in New York Art Deco: A Guide to Gotham’s Jazz Age Architecture.
A pleasant stroll along Central Park West for a closer look at the buildings that form Manhattan’s major residential skyline. We’ll see the great twin-towered skyscraper apartment buildings – the Century, the Majestic and the El Dorado – and other multi-colored jazz-age fantasies of high living overlooking the park.

TOUR: Central Park as a Work of Art
2018-10-19 10:00 - 12:00
Sponsored by the New York Botanical Garden, Members Trips. (To take this tour, you must be a member of the Botanical Garden – click here for membership details.) Reservations required: call 1-718-817-8703, email membership@nybg.org, or click here (scroll down to find the tour) to register on-line.
Perhaps best-known of New York’s official “Scenic Landmarks,” Central Park offers New Yorkers refuge, recreation and rejuvenation; a temporary haven from a city of brick and steel, concrete and glass. And yet this park which delights us with its lakes and streams, wildflowers and grand open spaces, is almost entirely artificial, carefully designed right down to the hidden pipes feeding a rustic waterfall.

NYU - Five-session course - New York in the Jazz Age: Art Deco architecture from Tribeca to the Upper West Side - Session No. 5
2018-10-18 14:00 - 16:40
Sponsored by New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Education. Thursday afternoons, September 20 to October 18.
For information and registration, click here. Tuition is $465 for the full course.
This course traces the brash new style of art deco, which transformed New York into a modern metropolis. Follow the style’s impact on five Manhattan neighborhoods, mixing commercial with residential buildings. One walk covers the downtown neighborhoods of Tribeca and the Civic Center. Two more cover south Midtown: Murray Hill and Gramercy Park on the east and the Garment District on the west. A fourth looks at the upper edge of Midtown, from Bloomingdale’s on the east to 20th Century Fox on the west. And a fifth follows the transformation of residential architecture on the Upper West Side along Broadway and Riverside Drive. The course instructor is Anthony W. Robins, award-winning guide and author of New York Art Deco: A Guide to Gotham’s Jazz-Age Architecture (SUNY Press 2017), a winner of this year’s New York City Book Award from the New York Society Library.

TOUR: SoHo Historic District
2018-10-14 14:00 - 16:00
Sponsored by the Municipal Art Society. Reservations required ($30, but $20 for MAS members). Click here for information and registration.
SoHo today is home to the world’s greatest trove of cast-iron buildings. Cast-iron architecture began as a mid-19th-century cheap imitation of stone, in which the glories of the world’s past could be offered in modern times in mass-produced, ready-to-build versions. But cast-iron soon developed into a remarkable technology expressive of the industrial revolution, capable of entirely new architectural effects. Threatened by a proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, SoHo was rescued from near obliteration in 1973 by designation as one of the city’s earliest historic districts. This tour considers the district’s original architecture as well as new Commission-approved additions.

NYU - Five-session course - New York in the Jazz Age: Art Deco architecture from Tribeca to the Upper West Side - Session No. 4
2018-10-11 14:00 - 16:40

LECTURE: The Twin Towers - Remembering the World Trade Center
2018-10-04 19:00 - 20:30 | Scarsdale High School, 2 Brewster Road, Scarsdale, NY, 10583, United States
Sponsored by the Scarsdale Adult School. For information and reservations, click here.
Now that more than a decade has passed since the disaster of September 11th, 2001, and a new World Trade Center rises on the site, we can begin to remember what the original was like — “a city-within-a-city” that housed 50,000 employees, and welcomed 80,000 to 100,000 visitors every day to its Twin Towers, briefly the tallest structures in the world.
Based on the book Classics of American Architecture: The World Trade Center, this lecture reviews the story of its creation, post-World War II Downtown redevelopment, the origins of the Trade Center concept, the search for an architect, the evolution of the design, the urge to build the world’s tallest buildings, the engineering feats required for the towers’ construction, and the critical response. It is offered as a reminder of a more innocent time, when the Center stood as a symbol, certainly, of hubris, wealth and power, but also of the conviction that in New York, Americans could do anything to which they set their minds.

NYU - Five-session course - New York in the Jazz Age: Art Deco architecture from Tribeca to the Upper West Side - Session No. 3
2018-10-04 14:00 - 16:40

TOUR: SoHo, the World's Cast-Iron Capital
2018-09-28 10:00
Sponsored by the Scarsdale Adult School. Reservations required – click here for information and registration.
Marvel at the world’s greatest trove of cast-iron buildings in this guided tour through the streets of SoHo. Cast iron began as a mid-nineteenth century cheap imitation of stone, in which the glories of the world’s past could be offered to American merchants through that most modern of marketing tools, the sales catalog — in mass-produced, ready-to-build versions. But cast iron soon developed into a remarkable technology expressive of the industrial revolution and modern America, capable of entirely new architectural effects. Tour highlights include cast iron recreations of Venetian palaces on Broadway, French style Mansard roofs on Greene Street, and the audaciously original metallic creations of New York’s Victorian commercial architects. The tour also incorporates SoHo’s more recent history, including the impact of the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, designation as a New York City Historic District, the changing economics of light industry, and the fashions of the art world.

NYU - Five-session course - New York in the Jazz Age: Art Deco architecture from Tribeca to the Upper West Side - Session No. 2
2018-09-27 14:00 - 16:40

TOUR: Washington Heights Art Deco
2018-09-23 14:00 - 16:00
Sponsored by the Municipal Art Society. Reservations required – click here. ($30; $20 MAS members)
High up on a hill, its streets lined with modest but attractive six-story Art Deco apartment houses, Washington Heights has more in common with West Bronx neighborhoods just across the Harlem River than with the rest of Manhattan. Many of the same architects who worked on the Grand Concourse also designed apartment buildings on or near Fort Washington Avenue – we will see work by Horace Ginsbern, Jacob Felson, Israel Crausman, Miller and Goldhammer, Charles Kreymborg, and H. Herbert Lillien. Two taller apartment buildings, by Boak and Paris, offer a more idiosyncratic take on the modernism of the 1930s. This walk with Anthony W. Robins will also include a one-story taxpayer, and one of the city’s few frankly Deco subway entrances. But the star attraction is the Fourth Church of Christ, Scientist (now the Hebrew Tabernacle of Washington Heights), one of perhaps a dozen or so Art Deco houses of worship anywhere in the city.

NYU - Five-session course - New York in the Jazz Age: Art Deco architecture from Tribeca to the Upper West Side - Session No. 1
2018-09-20 14:00 - 16:40

LECTURE: Art Deco New York: The Architects Speak
2018-09-13 18:30 - 20:30 | Center for Jewish HIstory, 15 West 16th Street, New York, New York, 10011
Sponsored by the Art Deco Society of New York. Click here for details. ($50; $35 for ADSNY members)
We explore the work of three of the architects who helped transform the face of New York City in the 1920s and 30s with the colorful and geometric designs we now call Art Deco–and we hear the architects describe their buildings in their own words.
The great Art Deco skyscrapers–the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building–were designed by socially prominent architects, often of old New York stock. But a generation of Jewish architects and builders–new to the profession and often new to the country–helped spread the Deco style across the more modest, but also more numerous, middle-class landscapes of the city, from the Garment District to the Grand Concourse. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I had the good fortune to meet and interview three of those architects and recorded the interviews.
The three architects––Israel Crausman, Louis Allen Abramson, and Marvin Fine––came from varying backgrounds. Fine, of the firm of Horace Ginsbern, had a sophisticated architectural education at the University of Pennsylvania; Abramson apprenticed to a famous older architect, took a few extension courses at Columbia, and then went out on his own; while Crausman was a self-taught builder. Fine designed the first Deco apartment house in the Bronx; Crausman designed many Bronx apartment houses on and off the Grand Concourse; Abramson designed notable Horn & Hardart Automats, as well as restaurants in the Longchamps chain.

LECTURE (in Chicago): Art Deco Metropolis - the jazz age architecture of New York City
2018-08-15 18:00 - 19:30 | Roosevelt University, 425 S. Wabash Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, 60605
Sponsored by the Chicago Art Deco Society. For further information and to register, click here. ($15 CADS members, $20 guests)
The Chrysler Building, the Waldorf-Astoria, Rockefeller Center– these are among the hundreds of Art Deco monuments that during the 1920s and ‘30s helped create the image of New York City as the world’s Modern Metropolis. In New York, Art Deco evolved through a series of Manhattan skyscrapers into the city’s chief architectural language. Following a massive reawakening of interest in them during the 1970s, New York’s Deco buildings today survive as prized remnants of a distant yet modern past that still help define the city’s visual identity.
The lecture covers the great skyscrapers of architects Raymond Hood, William Van Alen, Ely Jacques Kahn and Ralph Walker, including the Daily News, Empire State, Irving Trust, General Electric, American Radiator, Barclay-Vesey and RCA Buildings. It then traces the adaptation of this “skyscraper style” through apartment buildings on the Bronx’s Grand Concourse, airport terminals at LaGuardia, the Central Park West residential skyline, automated midtown parking garages, diners, hotels, department stores, banks, and theaters.

TOUR: Art Deco on the Upper East Side (Itinerary No. 10)
2018-08-05 14:00 - 16:00
Reservations required. Sponsored by the Municipal Art Society. $30 per person ($20 for MAS members). For information and registration, click here.
The Upper East Side—Manhattan’s Gold Coast—maintains an aura of conservative respectability, and perhaps as a result never attracted as much Art Deco flash as its counterpart on the west side of Central Park. Nevertheless, tucked among the Beaux-Arts town houses and sedate neo-Georgian apartment buildings, the neighborhood has some remarkable examples by some of the best architects, including an apartment house by Raymond Hood (built for the owner of the Daily News); one of Manhattan’s very few Art Deco town houses; the elegant Carlyle Hotel; and apartment houses by Sloan & Robertson, Horace Ginsberg. and George and Edward Blum—the Blums having designed some of the very first Art Deco apartment buildings anywhere in the city.

TOUR: The Woolworth Building and its Lobby
2018-07-29 14:00 - 15:30

TOUR: Art Deco Central Park West (Itinerary No. 8)
2018-07-29 10:30 - 12:30
Sponsored by the Municipal Art Society – reservations required ($30 per person, $20 for MAS members). Reservation and registration details click here.
A pleasant stroll along Central Park West for a closer look at the buildings that form Manhattan’s major residential skyline. We’ll see the great twin-towered skyscraper apartment buildings – the Century, the Majestic and the El Dorado – and other multi-colored jazz-age fantasies of high living overlooking the park.

TOUR: Art Deco architecture in Midtown Manhattan
2018-07-12 10:30 - 13:00
Sponsored by the Scarsdale Adult School. Information and registration, click here.
What would Manhattan be without its Roaring Twenties modernistic art deco skyscrapers? East 42nd Street, Midtown Manhattan’s major boulevard of art deco skyscrapers, is home to Raymond Hood’s red-and-white striped Daily News building (which starred as the Daily Planet in the Superman movies), and the one and only Chrysler Building, once the world’s tallest, whose architect, William Van Alen, was called the Ziegfeld of his profession. A few blocks to the north, the spectacularly geometric General Electric Building stands just a block away from the more sedate but still iconic Waldorf-Astoria. The walk concludes with a look at midtown’s miraculously urbane urban wonderland, Rockefeller Center.
