The Art Deco GE Building with Silver Arms and Electricity Bolts

The General Electric Building, also known as 570 Lexington Avenue, rises as a 640-foot-tall octagonal brick tower designed in the Art Deco style with Gothic Revival ornamentation. Designed by John Walter Cross of Cross & Cross, the structure was intended to blend with the low Byzantine dome of the adjacent St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church. To achieve this harmony, the building uses the same brick coloring and architectural terracotta decoration, featuring brick in orange, tawny, and buff colors that create the impression of a rich bronze color from a distance.

Construction began in 1931 when the project was originally commissioned for RCA, a subsidiary of General Electric. Midway through construction, RCA moved to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, and the building was conveyed to General Electric. GE maintained its headquarters at 570 Lexington Avenue between 1933 and 1974 and retained ownership until 1993, when it was donated to Columbia University. The building's facade features elaborate masonry and figural sculpture, including a clock on a corner pier with the cursive GE logo and a pair of disembodied silver arms holding bolts of electricity.

The building contains 50 stories, including 46 office floors and four mechanical floors. The tower features elaborate Art Deco decorations of lightning bolts showing the power of electricity, while the crown includes Gothic tracery touched with gold to represent electricity and radio waves. Each of the four 50-foot-tall figures in the crown depicts a deity with "forked lightning" above them. Designated a New York City landmark in 1985 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, the building remains a prominent example of the firm's shift toward Art Deco styling.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons