Trump Parc

When it was erected in 1930 as the Barbizon Plaza Hotel, this structure was noted for its flamboyant and unusual top. In describing the emergence of a luxury hotel district around the southeast corner of Central Park in their excellent book, "New York 1930, Architecture and Urbanism Between The World Wars" (Rizzoli, 1987), Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins wrote that while "the Central Park South hotels were less resolved architecturally and more troubled economically," "the best of the group was the Barbizon Plaza designed in a Modern Classical vacoulary by Lawrence Emmons, architect and decorator working with Lloyd Morgan and Murgatroyd & Ogden, as general architects." "The building rose from a bulky street-defining mass to a comparatively slender tower crowned by a hipped roof covered with small glass tiles set on their edges in narrow ribs of reinforced concrete. By day the tiles shimmered in the sunlight;' at night, the Barbizon Plaza's all-glass pinnacle transformed the tower into a prism of light. According to the Architect tests proved that a 'mellow phosphorescent glow duplicating the texture of moonlight' could be achieved by the lighting system, which consisted of a 'series of flood lights placed inside the glass walls of the tower playing their rays inward to an arrangement of seried windows,'" they continued. Their book includes two photographs of the Barbizon Plaza with the described roof and they indicate that it curved in from its side pillars and culminated in a flat, albeit colorful and light-emanating roof. Back when it was the Barbizon, scenes from Raging Bull were filmed here.