MCGRAW-HILL BUILDING
330 West 42nd Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues
MAY 25, 1936. ABBOTT FILE 130

The iconoclastic McGraw-Hill Building, designed in 1930 by Raymond Hood, housed the publishing firm's corporate headquarters and its printing presses. The building's bare-bones functionalism defied conservative architectural taste, and its decorative setbacks and blue-green terra-cotta surface offended orthodox modernists. Abbott's photograph shows the McGraw-Hill Building rising above the industrial neighborhood in which it was situated. The quaint El station in the foreground forms a dramatic contrast to a building conceived as a symbol of twentieth-century modernity.

With the decline of Times Square in the 1970s and the construction of the sprawling Port Authority Bus Terminal, McGraw-Hill abandoned the skyscraper for more conventional offices on Sixth Avenue; the building now has landmark status.

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