Cast iron (1850s–1880s)
Before steel-frame construction, cast iron allowed manufacturers to create elaborate, classically-ornamented facades quickly and cheaply — the iron was cast in moulds and bolted together rather than carved. SoHo's cast-iron district is the largest surviving concentration of this building type in the world. Look up rather than at shop-window level: the ornamentation is above the modern signage.
Beaux-Arts (1880s–1920s)
Grand Central Terminal is the defining New York example — vast, ceremonial, designed to make you feel the weight of civic life. The New York Public Library's main branch on 42nd Street, the US Custom House in Lower Manhattan, and dozens of bank buildings across the city follow the same vocabulary: classical symmetry, stone, and monumental scale applied to secular civic purposes.
The first skyscrapers (1890s–1930s)
The Flatiron Building (1902) was an early demonstration that a steel frame could support a building on an absurdly narrow triangular plot. The Woolworth Building (1913) was the world's tallest for 17 years. The Chrysler Building (1930) and the Empire State Building (1931) represent the peak of Art Deco skyscraper design — the Chrysler's eagle gargoyles and radiator-cap finial are among the most specifically New York things in the city's skyline.
The International Style and postwar (1950s–1970s)
The Seagram Building on Park Avenue (Mies van der Rohe, 1958) set the template for the glass-and-steel curtain-wall office tower that spread across the world. The Lever House across the street (1952) was among the first. Lincoln Center (1960s) assembled a full campus of modernist performance venues around a central plaza — ambitious, controversial, and still the city's cultural anchor.
Contemporary (1990s–present)
The World Trade Center complex, rebuilt after 2001, includes One WTC and the September 11 Memorial pools, the latter a genuinely moving work regardless of how you feel about the surrounding buildings. Hudson Yards added a cluster of new towers to the Far West Side that represent contemporary corporate architecture at its most polished and its least distinctly New York.