The General Electric Building, also known as 570 Lexington Avenue, is a historic 50-floor, 640-foot (200 m)-tall, skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, United States, at the southwest corner of Lexington Avenue and 51st Street). Originally known as the RCA Victor Building when designed in 1931 by John W. Cross of Cross and Cross, and sometimes known by its address to avoid confusion with the later GE Building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The building was deeded by RCA to GE before construction was completed.
It backs up to the low Byzantine dome of St. Bartholomew's Church on Park Avenue and shares the same salmon brick color. But from Lexington, the building is an insistently tall 50-floor stylized Gothic tower with its own identity, a classic Art Deco visual statement of suggested power through simplification. The base contains elaborate, generous masonry, architectural figural sculpture, and on the corner above the main entrance, a conspicuous corner clock with the curvy GE logo and a pair of silver disembodied forearms. The crown of the building is a dynamic-looking burst of Gothic tracery, which is supposed to represent radio waves, and is lit from within at night.
Read more about General Electric Building: In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the words general, electric and/or building:
“Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (17701831)
“Thats the down-town frieze,
Principally the church steeple,
A black line beside a white line;
And the stack of the electric plant,
A black line drawn on flat air.”
—Wallace Stevens (18791955)
“I love art, and I love history, but it is living art and living history that I love.... It is in the interest of living art and living history that I oppose so-called restoration. What history can there be in a building bedaubed with ornament, which cannot at the best be anything but a hopeless and lifeless imitation of the hope and vigour of the earlier world?”
—William Morris (18341896)