Lexington Avenue and 44th Street

This bas-relief panel (showing some sort of ancient figure holding a truck) is just one of the Art Deco ornaments, among an odd assortment, decorating the Graybar Building. I didn’t get a shot of the iron rats, climbing up the mooring lines, but here’s a good one. There’s not much information online about this building (not even a Wikipedia entry), though I did find a few nuggets of explanation in this New Yorker piece from 1933, which begins, “We feel morally obliged to look into all the odd little mysteries of the city.” From it, I learned that the Graybar’s “whole façade is somewhat Assyrian,” that “the entrance hall is Moorish,” that albatrosses and bulls also appear on the building, and that the rats are the result of the architects’ decision “to strike the maritime note somewhere in the decorations” (what with New York being a seaport and center of transportation).