Photo Credit: Mark Lentz. Viewpoint:2nd Avenue and 51st St., looking west; 01/13/02 12:58 PM.

Notes (Roving Rube): The G.E. Building rates as architectural historian Francis Morrone's favorite New York skyscraper, and in his handy Architectural Guidebook to New York City, he elaborates on its verticality:

Cross and Cross [the architects] did everything they could to make the shaft slender and soaring, including chamfering its corners and creating a crown of open tracery & one of the most distinctive skyscraper crowns in the world.