Architecture

Great Neck Plaza offers some distinct examples of historic building types and styles, reflecting both building trends and builders’ tastes. For example, throughout the Village we can see the English influence on architecture and planning, whether it be through its garden apartments, Tudor Revival-style buildings, or the use of anglicized building and street names. Garden apartments were an outgrowth of the Garden City Movement in England during the late nineteenth century and are characterized by mid-rise apartment buildings incorporating landscaped gardens into their plans. William R. Grace, a local and prolific real estate developer, was fond of English-style buildings, as were many of his contemporaries.

An equally popular style found in Great Neck Plaza is Colonial Revival, which has its roots in our Colonial past and has had many iterations since it was first revived at the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876. Some of the hallmarks of the style include red brick walls, wood or stone trim, double-hung multi-light windows, and gabled or gambrel roofs. By the early twentieth century, the style began incorporating features from Federal- and Georgian-style architecture, including symmetrical facades, pedimented and/or columned porticoes, paneled entry doors with fanlights and sidelights, Palladian windows, splayed window lintels, and gable-front dormers.

Community Church of Great Neck, 2 Stoner Avenue

Community Church (rt): Alfred Hopkins, architect, 1955

Community House (lt): Frederick Ackerman, architect, 1924

Despite having been built thirty years apart, this church and parish
hall offer a cohesive example of a New England church complex
designed in the Colonial Revival style.

Other styles represented in the Village include Neo-Classical and Art Deco, with Neo-Classical informed by Classical elements and Art Deco informed by geometrical designs. The Neo-Classical style, which was a less ornate and more streamlined style than the flamboyant Beaux Arts style from the late nineteenth century, emerged during the early twentieth century as a prevailing style for public and commercial architecture. Art Deco rose in popularity during the 1930s until it was supplanted by a derivative style known as Moderne by the end of the 1930s. Whereas, the Art Deco style often employed polychromatic materials such as brick, stone, terra cotta, and metal, the Moderne style typically employed monochromatic walls covered in stucco and accentuated by stucco or metal banding and porthole windows, evoking a passenger liner.

Great Neck Trust Company, 51 Middle Neck Road

Architect Unknown, c.1919-1929

The Great Neck Trust Company embodies the elegance and restraint
of the Neo-Classical style as applied to a bank building.

New York Telephone Building, 90 Barstow Road

Architect Unknown, 1929

The New York Telephone Building is a provocative exemplar of Art Deco design, incorporating ornamental brickwork and an unconventional standing-seam copper roof decorated with dormers accentuated by chevrons.

10 Grace Avenue

Manoug Exerjian, architect, 1947

Ten Grace Avenue is a distinct example of a multi-tenanted commercial building designed in the Moderne style with its multiple streamlined elements (curvilinear wall, display windows, canopy, eave) and porthole windows.

By the mid-twentieth century, Modernism with its dictum of “form follows function” became the signature style of corporate America. Most widely imbued in the International style, this architecture largely consisted of high-rises sheathed in glass curtain walls set within grids of steel. For retail buildings, the International style appropriated Classical forms in abstracted ways, characterized by low- and mid-rise buildings featuring stucco walls alternating with glass curtain walls and minimal ornamentation. 

Benjamin Thompson and Paul Dietrich, The Architect’s Collaborative, Architect, 1961

This pioneering American Postwar bank, designed in the International style, features a modern gloss on the Greek temple with drive-thru access.

Beyond these recognized styles, Great Neck Plaza also features some highly distinctive eclectic buildings incorporating more than one style that were designed and built during the early- to mid-twentieth century. In some cases, they are also situated on unconventional lots that contribute to their distinct sense of place beyond their eye-filling architecture.