Ziegfeld Theatre, ca. 1927. Constructed in 1927 by architect Joseph Urban, the Ziegfeld Theatre was the William Randolph Hearst-funded brainchild of Florenz Ziegfeld. Urban had also been a set designer for the Ziegfeld Follies in the 1910s and as a movie designer for Hearst's production company in the 1920s. The theatre was owned and managed by Ziegfeld until his death in 1932, at which point it became a movie theatre. In 1943 theatre impresario, showman and lyricist Billy Rose purchased the building for his productions. He remained successful in this location for about a decade but business declined in the mid 1950s, likely due to its location further uptown than the popular theatre district. Rose leased the space for filming television shows starting in 1955, and reopened it a Broadway theatre for a brief stint in 1965. He also purchased some adjacent lots in the hopes of selling to a developer. He died in 1966 and his estate did just that. A skyscraper was built on the site, which from 1969 until 2016 included a single screen movie theatre called "The Ziegfeld." The 1927 theatre was a gorgeous Art Deco limestone building with a bowed facade decorated with classically based ornamentation rendered in Deco and modernist forms. The large oval shaped auditorium, which sat 1660 patrons, was topped by a colorful mural of overlapping medieval, biblical, and literary scenes on the ceiling.

Art Deco architecture flourished in Europe and the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. Spurred by the 1925 Paris exhibition Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes which boasted over 16 million visitors, structures such as the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building began dotting the New York City skyline. The following are photos from MCNY's collection that struck me as particularly beautiful in their exemplification of Art Deco architecture.