Anthony W. Robins

Tour: Art Deco Long Island
2016-09-11 09:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York)
Reservations required – click here for information and registration.
Just a few seats left for Sunday’s all-day bus tour of Art Deco Long Island, sponsored by the Art Deco Society of New York. We’ve found some amazing things: See a Ralph Walker telephone mini-skyscraper, rarely seen WPA murals in a volunteer fire house, a fabulous 1928 Deco high school, 1930s post offices, the newly renovated Suffolk Theatre (including reception and award presentation) – not to mention lunch at Jones Beach – and a 1930s antique car show! This Sunday, 9-11-16, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m

Tour: The Woolworth Building and its Lobby
2016-09-04 14:00 - 15:30, 2016-08-21 14:00 - 15:30, 2016-07-24 14:00 - 15:30, 2016-07-10 14:00 - 15:30, 2016-06-19 14:00 - 15:30, 2016-06-05 14:00, 2016-05-29 14:00 | 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.

Course (Columbia U.): Architecture and Development of New York City
2016-08-10 10:00 - 13:10, 2016-08-08 10:00 - 13:10, 2016-08-03 10:00 - 13:10, 2016-08-01 10:00 - 13:10, 2016-07-27 10:00 - 13:10, 2016-07-25 10:00 - 13:10, 2016-07-20 10:00 - 13:10, 2016-07-18 10:00 - 13:10 and 3 more dates
ARCHS4365: Summer session for-credit course at Columbia, but offered through the School of Professional Studies so open to students and others not currently enrolled at Columbia. See July 6th for details.

SOLD OUT Tour: Central Park as a Work of Art
2016-08-07 10:30 - 17:00
Sponsored by the Municipal Art Society. Reservations required ($20; $15 MAS members). To register, call 212-935-3960, or click here 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.

Tour: Art Deco on the Upper East Side
2016-07-17 10:30
Sponsored by the Municipal Art Society. Reservations required. To register, call 212-935-3960 or register on-line.
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 city’s best architects of the period, 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, by Harry Allen Jacobs; the elegant Carlyle Hotel; and apartment houses by Sloan & Robertson (of the Chanin Building), Horace Ginsbern (of the Park Plaza and other West Bronx wonders), Henry S. Churchill, and George and Edward Blum – the latter being among the very first Art Deco apartment buildings anywhere in the city.

Course (Columbia U.): Architecture and Development of New York City
2016-07-06 10:00 - 13:10
ARCHS4365: Summer session for-credit course at Columbia, but offered through the School of Professional Studies so open to students and others not currently enrolled at Columbia.
An on-the-ground introduction to the great American metropolis – the physical city – as it has evolved over the past three centuries. Libraries are overflowing with accounts of New York’s history, architecture and neighborhoods, but the city is best learned on the streets. In walks throughout New York we will learn how to read the cityscape, visiting such major monuments as Central Park and Grand Central Terminal, and such disparate neighborhoods as Times Square and SoHo, Flushing and the Lower East Side. We will study skyscrapers and Broadway theaters, tenements and cast-iron-fronted commercial buildings, and examine the various forces that created these places and caused them to evolve over time. We will discuss such topics as the impact of modern monuments, historic preservation, speculative development, and public and private plans and consider their various intended and unintended consequences. The course will be conducted entirely on the city’s streets.
Class meets Mondays and Wednesdays, 10:00 a.m. to 1:10 p.m. (except for the first week when, because of the July 4th holiday, it meets Wednesday and Friday) from July 6th through August 10th.
For more information click here. PLEASE NOTE: First class (July 6th) does NOT meet at Columbia – check CourseWorks for location.

Lecture (in Chicago): Art Deco New York – From the Chrysler Building to the Grand Concourse
2016-07-03 12:00 - 13:15
Reservations required. Sponsored by the Chicago Art Deco Society. Click here for information and reservations.
Art Deco today can refer to anything from saltcellars to skyscrapers, produced anywhere in the world during the early decades of the last century, using abstract, stylized floral, geometric, or streamlined design. 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 during the 1970s, New York’s Deco buildings today survive as prized remnants of a distant-yet-modern past that still helps to define the city’s visual identity.
This 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 like Radio City Music Hall.

Lecture and tour: Why So High: New York's Collection of "World's Tallest Buildings"
2016-06-14 10:00 - 13:30 | Pratt School of Continuing and Professional Studies, 144 West 14th Street , New York
Offered at Pratt Institute Center for Continuing and Professional Studies, Manhattan Campus (click here for more information and then click on “16/SU-PMPD-510-02”), or here for information about the Pratt Center, or here for the catalog listing – scroll half-way down that page).
During the 20th century, the title “world’s tallest building” ranked exclusively as a New York phenomenon until Chicago’s Sears Tower overtopped the World Trade Center. Today, that title has moved off shore, and New York vies merely for “tallest apartment building in the Western Hemisphere.” This course includes a lecture tracing the New York saga through the Trade Center, and considers the unexpected economic rationale of advertising value to the title-holders. We then visit perhaps the most beautiful of the group, the Woolworth Building, and conclude with a look at the newly opened One World Trade Center nearby. (3 AIA/LU’S, .3 C.E.U.’S)
Please Note: The tour of the Woolworth Building will be in the company of Helen Post Curry, great-granddaughter of Cass Gilbert, the Woolworth Building’s architect.
TO REGISTER: There is no direct link, unfortunately. To register, click here to go to the catalog, then click on the “Register Now” box in the upper right-hand corner of that page, enter “PMPD 510 ” in the box labeled “Course Code Number,” and press “Submit” at the bottom of that page. Then on the next page select the date you want, and click “Submit.”

Panel: The Empire State Building at Eighty-Five
2016-06-09 18:45 - 20:00 | Cooper Union, Rose Auditorium, 41 Cooper Square, New York
Sponsored by the Art Deco Society of New York (ADSNY). Free, but RSVP required, on the ADSNY web site event calendar.
On June 9th, following a brief annual meeting, we will present the first ADSNY Icon award to the Empire State Realty Trust, in recognition of its ongoing stewardship of New York’s most famous landmark – which also happens to be one of the city’s great Art Deco skyscrapers (even if the architect wouldn’t have cared for that description).
Following the award – and a brief talk by a Trust representative – ADSNY is hosting a panel discussion on the building. Panelists include three well-known professionals with strong connections to the building: Frank Prial, Tony Robins, and John Tauranac, with moderator Tony Hiss. Frank Prial, of the firm Beyer Blinder & Belle, supervised the spectacularly successful restoration of the lobby ceilings. John Tauranac is the author of The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark. Tony Robins, formerly Deputy Director of Research and Director of Survey at the Landmarks Preservation Commission, wrote the LPC’s official designation reports for the building (click here for the exterior report, here for the lobby report). Tony Hiss is a long-time writer for The New Yorker, and author of The Experience of Place. Don’t miss this very special evening honoring a very special landmark!

Mini Course: Art Deco on the Upper West Side - Part 2
2016-05-23 10:00 - 12:30
Landmark West! is sponsoring a two-part series exploring the Art Deco Architecture of the Upper West Side. For more information and to register, click here.
Though Art Deco began in New York City as a skyscraper style, it soon spread to other building types. One walk along Central Park West (5/17) and a second along Broadway and Riverside Drive (5/23) offer a close look at the Art Deco buildings that helped create Manhattan’s major residential skyline. We will learn about many famous Upper West Side apartment buildings including the Century, the Majestic, and the El Dorado, as well as the Normandy and the Master Apartments. Other buildings included in the tour are the Broadway Fashion Building, four-stories of commercial space in a Moderne glass box; Joan of Arc Junior High School (once known as “the skyscraper school”); Boak & Paris’s Midtown Theater (now Metro Theater); and one of Manhattan’s last surviving Horn & Hardart automat buildings (with splendid Art Deco terra-cotta).
Approved for 5 hours of Real Estate Continuing Education Credit** All are welcome, whether or not you need continuing education credit!

**Participants will receive a New York State certification for 5.0 hours of study approved by the Secretary of State in accordance with the provisions of Chapter 868 of the Laws of 1977. You must attend both sessions to receive credit for the course.

Tour: Astoria Center of Israel, with Art Deco murals by Louis Pierre Rigal
2016-05-22 16:30 - 17:30 | Astoria Center of Israel, 27-35 Crescent Street, New York, 11102
Part of the Sacred Sites Open House Weekend sponsored by the New York Landmarks Conservancy, and co-sponsored by the Art Deco Society of New York. Free of charge, but registration required – click here to book. Doors open Sunday at 4:00 p.m, tour from 4:30 to 5:30.
Tony Robins will lead the tour of the building and its architecture, while art historian Joan Kahr will discuss Rigal’s murals.
Architect Louis Allen Abramson, a leader of the early-20th-century “synagogue center” movement, designed the Classic-Revival-style Astoria Center of Israel in 1925. An admirer of McKim, Mead & White, he later ascribed his early taste for Italian Renaissance-inspired design to “Stanford White’s Italian.” (You can read excerpts from Tony Robins’s 1980 interview with Abramson here.)
An unexpected treat in the sanctuary are the wonderful Art Deco murals added in 1929 by French artist Louis Pierre Rigal, who had exhibited at the 1925 Paris Exposition that gave us the name “Art Deco.” These are Rigal’s only known works in New York besides his much better known murals and mosaic at the Waldorf-Astoria in midtown.

Mini Course: Art Deco on the Upper West Side - Part 1
2016-05-17 10:00 - 12:30

Tour: Art Deco In Washington Heights
2016-05-15 13:00 - 15:00
Sponsored by the Art Deco Society of New York. Reservations required – click here.
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 & Goldhammer, Charles Kreymborg, and H. Herbert Lillien.
Two taller apartment buildings, by Boak & Paris, offer a more idiosyncratic take on the modernism of the 1930s. Our walk 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.
The tour includes visits to two interiors: the sanctuary of the Hebrew Tabernacle, and the lobby of 250 Cabrini Boulevard, one of the two Boak & Paris buildings. (Please note: space is limited.)

Jane's Walk New York: Help Find Art Deco in Your Own Backyard
2016-05-06 15:00 - 16:30
This year, the Art Deco Society of New York (ADSNY) is partnering with the Municipal Art Society to lead a “Jane’s Walk” event devoted to Art Deco architecture.
Come learn to recognize the special color, geometry and general whiz-bang jazziness of Art Deco architecture. We will consider the different aspects of this wonderful style as seen on half-a-dozen examples along Central Park West on the Upper West Side. Then we will send you off – to your own neighborhood, or any other you’d care to visit – to find as-yet-undocumented Deco buildings to add to ADSNY’s web-site Registry of Art Deco New York.
For more information, and to sign-up, click here.
