Ferriss, Hood, and a Century of Art Deco

Village Preservation’s recently released A Century of Art Deco Storymap features some 40 outstanding examples of the beloved design style. Among those historic structures — most of which still stand in Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo — are two structures that are decidedly not Art Deco. Rather, we honor two of their past residents, both of whom were key in making the style so essential to our cityscape both 100 years ago and today: Hugh Ferriss and Raymond Hood.

Hugh Ferriss

A resident of 35 East 9th Street, Hugh Ferriss was perhaps best known as the master draftsman of the early 20th-century American metropolis whose drawings helped New Yorkers envision their city’s future.

Ferriss began his architectural drafting career in 1912, working for Cass Gilbert, architect of the Woolworth Building, among other landmarks. Three years later, he chose to work free-lance as a delineator (an artist who renders other architects’ designs usually for promotional or planning purposes), but his initial commissions were for magazine illustrations and ads. In the early 1920s, he developed a unique style using chiaroscuro, an effect that relies on heavily contrasted light and shadow, to create his depictions of buildings and streetscapes.

In 1922, in collaboration with architect Harvey Wiley Corbett, Ferriss created a massing study to explain the relatively new 1916 zoning law of New York City. The  first of its kind in the nation, the ordinance regulated building use and area, imposing height and setback limits that became hallmarks of Art Deco skyscraper design. In 1929 Ferriss published his masterpiece, The Metropolis of Tomorrow, which included some of his finest drawings that became the most iconic and influential architectural images of the period. The tome deeply influenced the burgeoning architectural style with stripped-down geometric forms and kinetic opposition of verticality and horizontality that were a hallmark of such Art Deco structures as the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center.

While at 35 East 9th (which was designed by Corbett), Ferriss’s practice and stature continued to grow, bringing his skills to such large projects as the 1939 New York World’s Fair and the United Nations Headquarters. He passed away in his Greenwich Village home in 1962.

Raymond Hood

One of New York City’s most spectacular but not well-known examples of Art Deco is the American Radiator Building, across the street from Bryant Park at 40 West 40th Street. Clad in black brick with gold accents to appear afire as an ad for its owner, the structure marked “a new trend in skyscraper design,” the Landmarks Preservation Commission wrote in its 1974 designation report, “with its bold cubic massing of forms — often associated with the Art Deco style — and its freedom from the Beaux-Arts classical details that had previously encumbered in New York City skyscrapers.” 

The building was a significant commission for architect Raymond Hood, who went on to become “perhaps the 20th century’s greatest molder of the skyscraper form,” according to architecture critic Paul Goldberger writing in The New York Times. Yet just a few years prior to designing the American Radiator Building, he was barely surviving as an architect on very small jobs. His lucky break came by way of the restaurant at 144-146 Bleecker Street.

In 1883 or 1884, Placido Mori opened his eponymous Italian restaurant at the location, originally built as two row houses in 1832. In 1920, Mori befriended the 40-year-old still-novice architect, gaining enough confidence in him “to let him have his meals on the cuff when his pocket proved empty,” wrote Hood biographer Walter H. Kilham, Jr. “Mori had picked him as a winner. As he said at the time, ‘He must be a genius — he eats so much.’”

Mori also gave Hood the job of designing a new facade for the pair of row houses, adding a row of Doric columns across the ground floor and imitation Federal lintels; the restaurateur also let him live in a small apartment on site. Every Friday, the “Four Hour Lunch Club” met there, eventually becoming an institution among architects, drawing in regulars Hood, Joseph Urban, Ely Jacques Kahn, and Ralph Walker, as well as guests like Frank Lloyd Wright and artist Tony Sarg.

Hood’s rise to fame was sadly all too brief; he passed away in 1934, just 10 years after the American Radiator Building. In that time, he was at the center of Art Deco design in Manhattan (the Daily News Building, the McGraw-Hill Building, and Rockefeller Center), in Brooklyn and Queens (Rex Cole refrigerator showrooms) and nationally (the Chicago Tribune Tower, with John Mead Howells). Hood, Goldberger wrote in 1984, was “an architect with a clear, consistent vision of what the skyscraper and the city should be, and, at a time when we seem to throw buildings into the city with little sense of what kind of overall environment they are making, Hood’s dreams are as relevant as his built works.”

Learn more about Art Deco in our neighborhoods via our StoryMap, and explore other maps on local architectural and cultural history via our website.