Wall of Fame
Monkey Bar
In addition to the iconic simian theme near the entrance, the Monkey Bar (co-owned by *Vanity Fair’*s editor, Graydon Carter) is known for Edward Sorel’s 2009 revamping of the main dining room, with caricatures of larger-than-life personalities from the 20s and 30s. Pictured, clockwise from left, are a young John Barrymore, holding the head of an old John Barrymore; jazz and big-band-era greats Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Rudy Vallée, and Duke Ellington; composer and instrumentalist Bismarck “Bix” Beiderbecke; and Irving Berlin, who observes George Gershwin with admiration and a touch of envy.
Old King Cole Bar
The mural of Old King Cole, in the eponymous New York lounge at the St. Regis Hotel, was painted by Maxfield Parrish in 1906. In it, John Jacob Astor IV, who originally commissioned the artwork for his Knickerbocker hotel, is depicted as the king. But the motif isn’t as reverential as it sounds. As St. Regis’s bartenders will gladly tell you, the king has just passed gas, and his attendants—all of which bear Parrish’s likeness—are amused or offended accordingly.
New York State Supreme Court
Crowning the rotunda of the state supreme-court building on Centre Street is Attilio Pusterla’s mammoth classical frieze from 1936, *The History of Law, *which celebrates important events in legal history, starting with Assyrian times. He and a team of assistants painted 300 figures directly into the plaster of the six 30-foot-high lunettes.
Palio Bar
Completed in 1986, Neo-Expressionist painter Sandro Chia’s bold, 128-foot-long depiction of the Palio horse race in Siena, Italy, decorates the Palio Bar on West 51st Street.
Rockefeller Center
A detail from Rockefeller Center’s imposing 5,000-square-foot ceiling mural, Time, in which a Colossus holds a log that suspends two scales, symbolizing the past and the future. It was painted by José Maria Sert in 1937 after Diego Rivera quit his work on a wall mural below it.
Rockefeller Center
Sert’s American Progress replaced Diego Rivera’s fresco, which was destroyed after Rivera refused to remove an image of Vladimir Lenin from his depiction of a May Day parade. He’d painted the mural into wet plaster—a traditional fresco technique—so workers had to chop away at it with axes. In 1937, Sert provided a less controversial treatment, an allegory of America being built by noble workmen.
The cover of Murals of New York City: The Best of New York’s Public Paintings from Bemelmans to Parrish.
George Washington High School
The Evolution of Music, a social-realist frieze painted by Lucienne Bloch, a disciple of Diego Rivera, in 1938, still enlivens a high-school music room in Washington Heights.
Café des Artistes
Howard Chandler Christy, who was a tenant at the Hotel des Artistes on the Upper West Side, painted titillating murals for the café on the building’s ground floor reportedly in an effort to increase clientele and prevent the restaurant’s closure during the Depression. (It closed in 2009.) *The Fountain of Youth, *left, is from 1934.
