Still in Style

Art Deco celebrates its centennial this year. Art & Antiques’s DAVID MASELLO examines the effect the movement first had on him in Chicago and how it affects him still in his long-adopted city of New York where the style is omnipresent.

Bullock’s Wilshire, now Southwestern Law School, in Los Angeles
Photo by Antoine Taveneaux

It’s one of Chicago’s most alluring sites: the limestone facade of the Chicago Board of Trade Building as it fills the southern end of LaSalle Street. The 45-story, zig-zagging, multi-tiered building, completed in 1930, stands as one of the handsomest structures in the Loop, the downtown area so named for the El trains that circumnavigate the locale in a giant oval. The dignified, even rakish, Art Deco edifice fascinated me as a boy growing up in and around Chicago, so much so that I wanted to work inside the building as a teenage messenger on the trading floor, during summer breaks in high school.

While I professed a quasi-desire to work in the financial industry that took place within, what I discerned early on is that it was really all about my desire to work in the building—to occupy it during the day and be immersed in its Art Deco splendor. And when I got a job doing exactly what I had hoped for, I was able every morning during the summer months of my junior and senior high school years to whoosh through the revolving doors into the echoing three-story-high lobby to work as a floor messenger, carrying buy-and-sell orders to brokers. The task was both exciting and dreadful, working with the company’s brokers who shouted and gesticulated madly with hand signals as they negotiated the futures prices of corn and wheat, oats and oil and other commodities. They were rough and tough guys, smart about finance, but short on manners and nuance. I was surprised by their collective alpha-male crudeness and harshness. But how exciting it was to ride the El into the Loop every day from Evanston, enter that monumental building and don the required jacket that qualified me as an employee, someone able to enter the hallowed trading floor. From there, I could gaze up to the tourists looking down from a visitors’ perch; I was one of their intended sites.

Empire State Building Interior, New York

Now that I have lived in New York for more than 40 years after college, I recognize that the buildings that inspire me most in the city, the ones where I always feel a rush of enthusiasm when entering, are those built during the Art Deco era, which ran roughly from 1925 to the onset of World War II. Indeed, this year marks the 100^th birthday of the movement known as Art Deco. The style was launched in Paris on April 28, 1925, at the Exhibition internationale des artes deoratifs et industriels modernes, and it is hard to believe that the aesthetic that is so seemingly distant from what prevails now is something that occurred really not so long ago—and was part of everyday life then. After all, one of my late mother’s college friends is soon to turn 100 herself, and she performs still as a cabaret singer here in New York. She was born the same year Deco became a phenomenon (though the actual term was not coined until the 1960s).

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