Anthony W. Robins

Course: Urban Genealogy - Learn how to research New York buildings - Session No. 4
2015-02-24 18:00 (America/New_York) | Municipal Art Society, 488 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, 10022
Learn how to unearth detailed information about New York City buildings in four Tuesday evening lectures in February (3, 10, 17, 24) 6:00 to 7:45 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 25 years. Participants have included architects, engineers, building owners, preservation advocates, lawyers and landmarks commissioners and even a New York City detective.
Sponsored by the Municipal Art Society. Cost: $300 ($250 MAS members). Click here for more information, or call 1-212-935-3960.

SOLD OUT Tour: Manhattan's Art Deco Interiors
2015-02-22 14:00, 2015-01-04 14:00
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.
The phrase “Art Deco New York” generally conjures romantic images of Manhattan skyscrapers. But just as remarkable as the towers are their sumptuous interiors – which are also far more comfortable to visit on a cold winter’s day. On this tour, we’ll visit the publicly accessible interiors of half a dozen Deco marvels: the Daily News Building, the Chrysler Building, the Chanin Building, the General Electric Building, the Waldorf-Astoria, and the RCA (then GE, and soon to be COMCAST) Building at Rockefeller Center.

Course: Urban Genealogy - Learn how to research New York buildings - Session No. 3
2015-02-17 18:00 | Municipal Art Society, 488 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, 10022

SOLD OUT Tour: The Woolworth Building and its Lobby
2015-02-15 14:00, 2015-01-11 14:00 - 15:30, 2014-09-21 14:00 - 15:30, 2014-08-24 14:00 - 15:30 | 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: Urban Genealogy - Learn how to research New York buildings - Session No. 2
2015-02-10 18:00 | Municipal Art Society, 488 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, 10022

SOLD OUT Tour: The Woolworth Building and its Lobby
2015-02-08 12:00 - 13:30, 2015-01-11 16:00 - 17:30, 2015-01-11 12:00 - 13:30, 2015-01-04 12:00 - 13:30 | 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. And an article by David Dunlap in the New York Times that appeared New Years Day!

Course: Urban Genealogy - Learn how to research New York buildings - Session No. 1
2015-02-03 18:00 | Municipal Art Society, 488 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, 10022

CANCELLED (BLIZZARD) - TO BE RESCHEDULED Lecture: Art Deco New York – From the Chrysler Building to the Grand Concourse
2015-01-28 19:45 | Atria on Roslyn Harbor, 100 Landing Road, Roslyn, NY
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.
This lecture is sponsored by the New York State Council on the Humanities; free and open to the public.

SOLD OUT Tour: Art and Architecture of the Subway
2015-01-25 14:00
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.
From the beginning, the people who planned the subway’s construction considered it, in words actually written into the contract, a “great public work” worthy of attractive design. On this tour, we will ride the rails from the Battery to Midtown, and consider the three major phases of subway design: the original 1904 IRT, the Dual Contracts extensions of the ‘teens and the modernistic Independent Line that opened in 1932, with a peek at a ’70s redesign by Philip Johnson. Don’t miss the tour that CBS News called one of the five best art walks in New York! Note: You will need to bring a MetroCard worth at least three fares.

SOLD OUT Tour: Rockefeller Center
2014-12-28 10:00, 2014-12-25 10:00
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.
Rockefeller Center — New York’s urbane urban wonderland — is full of surprising history, remarkable art and stunning architecture. Conceived as a new home for the Metropolitan Opera, but built instead as Radio City, Rockefeller Center is a private real estate venture that has evolved into the public square of Midtown Manhattan.

Tour: The Woolworth Building and its Lobby
2014-12-21 14:00 - 15:30, 2014-11-16 14:00 - 15:30, 2014-10-19 14:00 - 15:30 | Woolworth Building, 233 Broadway, New York

Tour: Art Deco on the Upper Upper West Side (that’s not a typo)
2014-11-23 13:00
Reservations required. $25 ($15 for members of Landmark West!) Click here to register.
A meandering walk across the upper west tracts of the Upper West Side, from West 85th to 103rd streets, Broadway to Riverside Drive. We see work by such stalwart Manhattan Deco icons as Sugarman & Berger, Boak & Paris, and Harvey Wiley Corbett, as well as architects less well known for their Deco productions, including Emery Roth and Rosario Candela. Highlights include Roth’s Normandy Apartments and Corbett’s Master Apartments; the Broadway Fashion Building – four-stories of commercial space in a Moderne glass box; Joan of Arc Junior High School; Boak & Paris’s Midtown (now Metro) Theater; and one of Manhattan’s last surviving Horn & Hardart automat buildings, with splendid Art Deco terra-cotta. If you’ve taken my tour of Art Deco on Central Park West, and wondered what else might be out there closer to the Hudson, this is your chance to find out! For information: (212) 496-8110.

SOLD OUT Tour: Art Deco from Murray Hill to Gramercy Park
2014-11-16 10:00 - 12:30
Reservations required. $20 ($15 MAS members).
This walk through the east side of Midtown South includes an unusual collection of buildings, each different from the next. We have a surprising modernist apartment building among the genteel town houses of Murray Hill; Ely Jacques Kahn’s most impressive office building at Two Park Avenue (and another Kahn building that’s no slouch); a modernist hotel by Corbett, Harrison & MacMurray; a work by Edgar Brandt, the great French iron master; the iconic Empire State Building; an incomplete attempt by Metropolitan Life to capture the Empire State Building’s “world’s tallest” title; and a late Deco apartment building by George and Edward Blum. Information: 212-935-3960, or, to purchase ticket, click here.

Lecture: Why So High - The saga of building the world's tallest buildings
2014-11-06 10:45 - 23:45 | JCC on the Palisades, 411 East Clinton Avenue, Tenafly NJ, 07670
Since the ill-fated Tower of Babel, mankind has been powerfully attracted to the idea of buildings rising into the clouds. The Empire State Building and the Sears Tower still rank among the world’s tallest and most famous buildings, while the latest contenders for the “world’s tallest” title rise close to a quarter mile into the sky. In the 20th century, it was the American skyscrapers of New York and Chicago that regularly pushed the limit — the pre-World- War-I Singer Building, Metropolitan Life Tower, and Woolworth Building; the 1920s battles culminating in the Chrysler and the Empire State Building; and the post-World War II World Trade Center and Sears Tower, along with a dozen or more also-rans.
The destruction of the World Trade Center, the rise of its replacement, and the continuing phenomenon overseas, have focused worldwide attention on such monuments, raising the question: why so high? Was it strictly dollars and cents? Or was something more at play? The development of steel-cage construction and elevators, rising real-estate values, and the economics of proximity, all helped create the skyscraper — but none of these factors seem to have required the vast heights reached by the most famous. How could a strict, hard-nosed business proposition like constructing an office building produce skyscrapers too tall to make economic sense?
This illustrated journey across a century and a half of the race to the top pays special attention to the design and construction of the Trade Center. The lecture is part of a program called “JCC University.” Call Kathy Graff at 201-408-1454 for cost and registration information.

Tour: Margot Gayle's Tribeca - A Victorian Society New York New-Member-Orientation Walking Tour (so join up!)
2014-10-19 10:00
This tour of Tribeca, focusing on its many cast-iron wonders, is offered to newly minted members of the Victorian Society New York (the local chapter of the Victorian Society in America) which was founded in 1966 in the West 9th Street kitchen of legendary preservation advocate Margot Gayle. Without Margot’s efforts, Tribeca might not be the protected historic neighborhood it is today. Though the tour is by invitation only, there’s a simple way to cadge an invitation: join Victorian Society New York!
I first led a tour of cast-iron architecture in Tribeca in the late 1970s, as one of the volunteer guides for Margot’s “Friends of Cast-Iron Architecture.” This walk retraces the steps of that tour, with special focus on the work of James Bogardus – one of Margot’s special interests – as well as facades cast by D.D. Badger’s Architectural Iron Works, the only major 19th-century iron foundry whose catalog still exists. For more, see the article in Panorama, the chapter’s newsletter, describing the tour as given in November 2011.
For more information, and to sign up, see the VSNY web site.

SOLD OUT Tour: Art Deco Central Park West
2014-10-05 14:00 - 16:30
Reservations required. $20 ($15 MAS members)
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. For information: 212-935-3960, or, to purchase ticket, click here.

SOLD OUT Tour: Art Deco in Queens
2014-09-28 13:00 - 17:00
Art Deco in the borough of Queens – a bus tour sponsored by the Art Deco Society of New York. Watch this space for further details!

Lecture: Art Deco New York - From the Chrysler Building to the Grand Concourse
2014-09-14 15:00 - 16:00 | Quogue Library, 90 Quogue Street, Quogue (Long Island), 11959
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.

Tour: Landmarks battles in Midtown
2014-09-07 14:00 - 16:30
Reservations required. $20 ($15 MAS members).
Midtown Manhattan has seen more than its fair share of landmark battles. On this walk, we consider the landmark rationale and battle history of the Villard Houses/Palace Hotel (one of the earliest battles), St. Bartholomew’s Church (with issues of church/state conflict), Lever House (one of the new breed of modern landmarks), and Grand Central Terminal (whose landmark status was finally upheld by the Supreme Court).
For information: 212-935-3960, or to purchase ticket, click here.

SOLD OUT Tour: Art Deco on the Upper Upper West Side (that's not a typo)
2014-08-17 10:00 - 12:30
Reservations required. $20 ($15 MAS members)
A meandering walk across the upper west tracts of the Upper West Side, from West 85th to 103rd streets, Broadway to Riverside Drive. We see work by such stalwart Manhattan Deco icons as Sugarman & Berger, Boak & Paris, and Harvey Wiley Corbett, as well as architects less well known for their Deco productions, including Emery Roth and Rosario Candela. Highlights include Roth’s Normandy Apartments and Corbett’s Master Apartments; the Broadway Fashion Building – four-stories of commercial space in a Moderne glass box; Joan of Arc Junior High School; Boak & Paris’s Midtown (now Metro) Theater; and one of Manhattan’s last surviving Horn & Hardart automat buildings, with splendid Art Deco terra-cotta. If you’ve taken my tour of Art Deco on Central Park West, and wondered what else might be out there closer to the Hudson, this is your chance to find out! For information: 212-935-3960, or click here for a direct link to sign up for the tour.
