Photo Credit: Roving Rube. Viewpoint: 41st St. east of 5th Ave.; 3/01/02 4:53 PM.

Notes (Roving Rube): This unusual black brick tower was designed by Raymond Hood in 1923, and designated a New York landmark in 1974. It was Hood's first NYC building of a brief 12-year career which began at age 40 and was cut short by illness.

The American Radiator Company hired Hood to design their corporate headquarters partly because he was the surprise winner of the Chicago Tribune competition, but also because he had previously "eked out a living" designing radiator covers for them.

"He excelled at monumentalizing what was inherently nonmonumental, at creating commercial monuments that were symbols as well as working environments ... As the editors of Architecture wrote in 1925, the building's 'very atmosphere [is] symbolic of its function -- the black of the main structure suggesting a huge coal pile, and the gold and yellow of its higher points the glow of flames of an unbanked fire.' ...The president of the American Radiator Company [said] that his new building was worth at least 'one hundred thousand dollars in free publicity' ... 'What is that black and gold building?', one asks as one sees it. The American Radiator Building, is the answer.

(Source: New York 1930)

Not knowing that the ARC also built furnaces, the Rube interpreted the gold caps at the top as being like those things like you see on old steam radiators.