http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/ny...l?ref=nyregion
Overhead, a Lobby Is Restored to Old Glory
Bill Mensching of EverGreene Architectural Arts under an Empire State Building mural. It is a reproduction of an original that was covered in the 1960s.
By JAMES BARRON
September 22, 2009
Every day, people walk into Grand Central Terminal and look up at the vaulted ceiling over the main concourse, with its star constellations and zodiac signs. It helped make the station “a triumphant portal to New York,” in the words of one of its architects, Whitney Warren.
People who walked into the Empire State Building have done their looking up outside, craning their necks to see the top, 1,250 feet above the street. As they made their way to the observation deck, they had little reason to look up in the cathedral-like lobby.
Now there is something to look up at. The ceiling in the lobby has undergone a $12.5 million renovation that has brought back two shiny Art Deco murals that disappeared from view in the 1960s. They are to be unveiled on Wednesday.
The murals were left to deteriorate more than 35 years ago after being covered with white plastic panels and fluorescent light fixtures, which were the latest things for office buildings in those days.
Anthony E. Malkin, the president of Malkin Holdings, which owns the building, said the lobby had become “a real letdown,” in contrast with the lobbies of two other famous skyscrapers of similar age, the Chrysler Building and 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Mr. Malkin wanted the lobby to be more of a triumphant portal than a utilitarian passageway for tourists on the way to the observation deck and workers on the way to their offices.
So
as part of a $550 million project to upgrade the entire building, Mr. Malkin and a team of architects and designers set out to make the lobby as impressive as it was when the building opened in 1931. Frank J. Prial Jr., an architect with Beyer Blinder Belle who worked on the lobby restoration, said the idea was “to take the most famous building of the 20th century back a few steps to prepare for the 21st.”
That made the murals a priority. Like the mural on the ceiling in Grand Central Terminal, the ones in the Empire State Building show the sky. But this sky was imagined when the building was on the drawing board in the 1920s, when assembly lines were humming and people dreamed of the ultimate symbol of the machine age: the car.
The sun and the planets on the ceiling look like gears and wheels and cogs.
“It’s like you’re looking inside a watch,” Mr. Prial said, albeit a giant watch. The murals cover more than a third of the square footage of a football field. Bill Mensching, a vice president of EverGreene Architectural Arts, which copied the originals, said they had 15,000 square feet of aluminum and 1,300 square feet of 23-karat gold leaf.
Because the original murals, designed by an artist named Leif Neandross, were damaged, reproductions were installed. Mr. Mensching said more than 50 artists, site painters and installers worked on them.
Despite the Wall Street crash in 1929, the murals’ design was unchanged for the building’s opening. The result, Mr. Malkin said, was a ceiling that “is not trying to find hope in the depths of the Depression — it was created before that. You don’t have that labor and toil and struggle feeling that you have in Rockefeller Center.”
In the 1960s, large acrylic panels showing eight wonders of the world were installed at eye level in the lobby: the seven wonders in the history books and — no surprise — the Empire State Building.
The panels were completed in 1964, in time for the World’s Fair, and remained in the lobby until last year, when the renovation team put them in storage. Mr. Prial said they would eventually be put in a ticketing area on the way to the observation deck. They were replaced by marble panels from as far away as Italy and as close as a warehouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The panels’ colors and patterns are strikingly similar to that of the original marble in the lobby.
Two other changes have made the lobby more faithful to the building’s original plans. The clock over the information desk in the Fifth Avenue lobby was replaced by what was originally called for: an anemometer, which measured wind speed where dirigibles were supposed to dock.
And then there are the two chandeliers beside the pedestrian bridges. They differ from the chandeliers shown in early photographs; those were taken out in the 1960s.
The new ones, based on the original plans, were fabricated by the successor to the company Neandross worked for when he designed the murals.
Why were the chandeliers that were planned never installed? “Our theory,” Mr. Prial said, “was they were in a hurry, they had to open, and they ran out and got two chandeliers.”
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