Gray, Christopher 1950-

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GRAY, Christopher 1950-

PERSONAL:

Born 1950.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Office—Office for Metropolitan History, 246 West 80th St., No. 8, New York, NY 10024. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Architectural historian, columnist, writer. Office for Metropolitan History, New York, NY, founder and director, 1975—. New York Times, "Streetscapes" columnist, 1987—.

WRITINGS:

Blueprints: Twenty-Six Extraordinary Structures, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1981.

Changing New York: The Architectural Scene, Dover Publications (New York, NY), 1992.

(Editor) Fifth Avenue, 1911, from Start to Finish in Historic Block-by-Block Photographs, Dover Publications (New York, NY), 1994.

(With David Stravitz) The Chrysler Building: Creating a New York Icon Day by Day, Princeton Architectural Press (New York, NY), 2002.

New York Streetscapes: Tales of Manhattan's Significant Buildings and Landmarks, research by Suzanne Braley, Harry N. Abrams (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to Avenue and House and Garden. Contributor to New York, Vendome Press, 1980.

SIDELIGHTS:

The author and editor of four books, Christopher Gray is a specialist on New York City architecture. Founder of the Office for Metropolitan History, Gray has also penned a weekly column, Streetscapes, for the New York Times since 1987, in which he details the history and architecture of the city, with a focus on Manhattan. Gray's columns also emphasize preservation policies and practices.

Gray's first book, Blueprints: Twenty-Six Extraordinary Structures, is not centered on New York, though some of the buildings, such as the Chrysler and Empire State Building, as well as the Statue of Liberty, are landmarks of the city. Gray includes blueprints for well-known landmarks—buildings and non-buildings—with brief descriptions and photographs of the actual structures. His eclectic list includes the White House, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Volkswagen Beetle, a few cathedrals, a dirigible, the Concorde, the Hoover Dam, the Pentagon, and even a lunar rover. Some of the fold-out blueprints are four feet in length in this "delightful compilation," as Philip Morrison described the offbeat book in Scientific American. For Paul Goldberger, reviewing the title in the New York Times Book Review, it was a "silly idea that yields an altogether enticing book." Goldberger went on to call Gray's work a "celebration of the blueprint" and to praise the "brief but clear description" accompanying each entry. A reviewer for the Village Voice found the collection "only half campy." The same contributor further noted that the "blueprints are of uneven beauty but great interest."

In 1992 Gray collected more than one hundred of his New York Times columns for the book Changing New York: The Architectural Scene, introducing and describing edifices such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Russian Tea Room, and sites from Park Avenue to Washington Mews in Greenwich Village. Helen Felice Pryor, writing in New Technical Books, praised the book as "lavishly illustrated with historical photographs." Gray narrows his focus to one street in New York with his 1994 Fifth Avenue, 1911, from Start to Finish in Historic Block-by-Block Photographs, which makes good use again of historical photographs of the creation of the heart of Manhattan.

Gray once more gathered a sampling of his New York Times columns for the 2003 New York Streetscapes: Tales of Manhattan's Significant Buildings and Landmarks. This time Gray culled 190 of the best-loved columns that appeared in the newspaper's real estate section weekly for fifteen years. Collected here are tales of famous and obscure sites and structures and of the people who inhabited them. Gray's choices range from the oldest bar in Manhattan to skyscrapers. Paula Frosch observed in a Library Journal review that Gray "writes with the loving eye of the city dweller and the profound curiosity of the newly arrived settler." A contributor for Publishers Weekly commented that Gray is surely "something more than an architectural historian," and praised the book's text as a combination of "elegant architectural writing" and "gossipy and historical anecdotes."