E. 42nd Street: Frieze, Mr. Chanin!

As I mentioned in my previous post on the Chanin Building, there is an elegant brass frieze that circumnavigates the top of the first floor. The frieze is meant to depict evolution. It starts on the south end of the Lexington Avenue side with amoeba, but runs out of evolutionary steam at the west end of the E 42nd Street side with birds. I'm not complaining; it's still impressive. 

The photo in that post didn’t give a really good sense of the the frieze, so here is a closeup, taken at the corner of E. 42nd and Lexington. The building in the background with the blue panels is the Socony-Mobil Building, a 1950’s skyscraper about which I’ll have more to say soon.