New York Transformed: The Architecture of Cross & Cross Hardcover - 2014

Media reviews

“Eliot and John W. Cross were the perfect patrician designers. They put their Ivy League and Beaux-Arts connections into play in 1907, and quickly gained a practice in discreet townhouses, clubs, country houses and jewel-like banks. But the sumptuous illustrations also show an unexpected aspect of their career in the late 1920s, as they developed a specialty of flashy skyscrapers in devoutly modernistic style. The photographer for the book, Jonathan Wallen, took spectacular close-ups of the spiky, vibrating tower [the RCA Victor building] that show things you’d never imagine from the street: incised brickwork, explosive medallions, chevrons and stylized, masklike faces. The RCA Victor building gives the Chrysler Building a run for its money.” —The New York Times

“Visitors snap photos of Tiffany's windows on New York's Fifth Avenue every day, but how many look up at the dignified 1940 building that rises above? The office towers, banks, luxury apartment houses, and country estates built by architect brothers John Walter and Eliot Cross hide in plain sight, frequently upstaged by showier modernist neighbors. New York Transformed draws the spotlight back to the work of these forgotten masters, from Mayfields, an idyllic 1921 New Jersey mansion that became the home of future designer Sister Parish (who termed the house 'perfection'), to the 'great symmetrical palazzo' of One Sutton Place South in Manhattan (1926). Proof that these traditionalists had a wild side can be found the fantastical gothic effigies atop their 1931 General Electric skyscraper.” —Elle Decor

“Before New York was a city of international billionaires hiding ill-gotten gains in spindly glass towers, it was the skyscraper capital of the world, a city striving to reach high and scratch an indelible image of its ambition, worldliness, and cultural solidity right onto the sky. In New York Transformed, Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker make tangible the energy and verve of the moment when the patrician architect-developers Cross & Cross helped create that magical, magnetic Metropolis. Imbued with a keen understanding of the links between feeling and building, identity and masonry, the wants of mere men and the needs of mankind, their latest book is as important as it is compelling.” —Michael Gross, author of 740 Park and House of Outrageous Fortune

“Pennoyer and Walker bring the versatile Cross Brothers to life and shine a spotlight on their many handsome—sometimes dramatic—New York buildings. Many may know them from the dazzling GE Building on Lexington Avenue. But I was surprised that so many of my other favorites, from City Bank Farmers Trust Company and 41 Broad in Lower Manhattan, to the Links Club and Tiffany's, were Cross and Cross designed. What a welcome addition to any architecture buff's library.” 
—Peg Breen, President, The New York Landmarks Conservancy
 
“What a delightful surprise! A practicing architect who's not only interested in history but writes it. Architect Peter Pennoyer and historian Anne Walker's new book on Cross and Cross resuscitates an architectural firm that strode the fertile territory between the traditional and the modern, providing a valuable lesson for architects today.” 
—Donald Albrecht, Curator of Architecture and Design, Museum of the City of New York

Citations

• Library Journal, 04/01/2014, Page 86