Cities with the most Art Deco buildings
 

What city have the most Art Deco buildings

NYC.

and it's not even close.



chicago & detroit also have some fantastic deco tower collections as well, but nothing remotely close to the volume of NYC.

Los Angeles has many as well, just not necessarily in the form of highrises or skyscrapers.

Far Upper Manhattan and the West Bronx.

Pretty much anyplace that boomed in the 1930's will have art deco.

In the Bronx you can see art deco blgds. on the Grand Concourse from 149th street up to Mosholu Pkwy.

well, miami beach of course.

that's probably the most in comparison to the city as a whole.

and napier, new zealand is pretty famous for it too.

but lots of cities have great examples.

Yeah, I would guess the Grand Concourse and Ocean Drive have the most prominent art deco collections.

For Grand Concourse, you have miles of art deco, and thankfully almost nothing was lost during the decline era, because the Concourse never hit rock-bottom like nearby areas. Even in the worst years of the 70's and 80's, the Concourse was semi-respectable.

If you're an urbanophile, I highly recommend a walk up (or down) the Concourse. One of the best urban walks anywhere. The Jewish Park Avenue from the 1930's through the 1970's, and considered a step up from Manhattan back then.

eastern plains cities are a nice cluster of course, KC, OKC, and Tulsa...as a proportion of their pre-war built environment.

based on a lot of walking around for work, i believe there is only one open lot along the grand concourse. it is remarkably intact.

but although there is a lot of it, art deco does not dominate nyc as a whole as it does in the small art deco and tourist oriented cities mentioned.

and it doesn't stand out quite as it does in the small western towns, like with old deco theaters, nor as it does in los angeles being all scattered around out there.

I agree with this, been to all three cities . Tulsa was the most impressive in my opinion. It was a boom town in the 1920's due to oil production.

For what it's worth, Mumbai has the second largest number of Art Deco structures on earth. I believe the city at number one in that respect is New York.

In the US, meanwhile, New York is first, and Miami Beach is second.

In the US Southeast, though, Miami Beach is at number one and... Asheville... is second.

Interesting, where are these rankings from?

I was gonna say NYC has the most in terms of raw numbers, and it isn't really close. It certainly has the most art deco towers. But I actually think LA might have more art deco buildings overall if you consider all those small scale commercial buildings scattered all over the place. You don't really see art deco at that scale in NYC. There are entire retail corridors in LA lined with one and two story art deco storefronts. Thousands of them. Fairfax, Melrose, LaBrea etc are all full of art deco if you look closely.

I feel like outside of NYC this is harder to quantify than one may think, and will vary on specific definitions of art deco. While there are obviously unifying elements, there are significant geographical variants of the style.

For instance, Springs in South Africa - which is now part of the Johannesburg metro area - claims to have the second largest collection of small-scale art deco structures in the world, after Miami Beach. It was a gold mining boomtown that expanded massively during the 1920s / 30s (one of the largest cities in the country at one point), and virtually every structure that wasn't a single-family house was built in the deco style. The street pattern of suburbs were also heavily influenced by the City Beautiful movement. The central parts of the town aren't in great shape anymore, but a fair number of the buildings have been renovated.

http://www.theheritageportal.co.za/a...cos-love-child


South Africa actually has a larger proportion of deco structures than many places as the Great Depression never really affected construction to the same degree they kept building in a modified deco style well into the 50s. The latter examples generally look like this, and there are tons of them:

https://goo.gl/maps/DpxHmnZUxBFSj7K98

https://goo.gl/maps/T4hZNqGE69yYtxAb6

This may be true. There are tons of retail corridors from that era in NYC, but they seem to usually be Tudor-style, even when nearby apartment buildings are art deco. Stuff like this:

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7491...7i13312!8i6656

No one has yet mentioned Tel Aviv. Bogotá also had an impressive cluster of late (streamline) moderne buildings. I think any place building primarily with concrete in the 1930s-1950s gravitated toward the moderne. The highly decorated 1920s steel-framed moderne buildings, as seen in New York, Chicago, Detroit, downtown LA, and Tulsa, are not as numerous.

The New York Times, although I had the rankings wrong. Miami apparently has the world's largest collection of Art Deco, followed by Mumbai. Mumbai's Art Deco and Victorian Gothic structures, by the way, are protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

As far as the rankings in the Southeast, that's something that's been in Asheville's tourist literature for decades. Downtown Asheville is littered with Art Deco buildings, and several of the city's most prominent buildings including city hall and the high school, are Art Deco.

So that would put it at Miami as number one in the world and Mumbai as second, Miami as number one in the US and whoever, probably New York, at second, and Miami at number one in the Southeast, and Asheville as second.

Cool--thanks for the article about Mumbai!

I've heard that said about a number of cities, including Shanghai:

http://img.timeoutshanghai.com/20170...5032817457.jpg
http://www.timeoutshanghai.com/featu...-Shanghai.html

https://www.chinadiscovery.com/asset...und-768(2).jpg
http://www.timeoutshanghai.com/featu...-Shanghai.html

http://cms.timeoutshanghai.com/DotNe...5010616795.jpg
http://www.timeoutshanghai.com/featu...-Shanghai.html

https://admin.freetour.com/images/to...i-1930s-01.jpg
http://www.timeoutshanghai.com/featu...-Shanghai.html

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/7f/95...900d9110eb.jpg http://www.decopix.com/wp-content/up...-WP-1-of-1.jpg
https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/298433912777461246/

https://www.topchinatravel.com/pic/c...ncession-1.jpg https://archive.shine.cn/newsimage//..._515961_01.gif
https://archive.shine.cn/feature/Art.../shdaily.shtml



And once upon a time, Tokyo (most of which was destroyed in WWII however).

https://live.staticflickr.com/3072/2...4c0c6e42_z.jpg
https://www.flickr.com/photos/10232046@N00/2619760635

A fact that quite frankly makes my bowels quiver from sheer, unadulterated rage. My God, what was lost...