Rockefeller Center

30 Rockefeller Plaza, completed in 1933, is the limestone heart of the Art Deco complex that Rockefeller built in the depths of the Depression — a slab tower of clean setbacks rising above the sunken plaza and the row of flags that ring it.

Photographed May 2013. The flags line the foreground while the tower climbs in unbroken vertical lines to the sky. In black and white the Deco rhythm of the setbacks reads as pure design — the optimism of the 1930s built in stone.