Looking west across the lower tip of Manhattan island, this photograph (top image) --taken by the Fairchild Aerial Survey Company--captures the upward thrust of skyscrapers that made New York the most celebrated city of the Jazz Age.  The older Singer and Woolworth buildings are joined by newer structures designed in accordance with the 1916 zoning ordinance.  This landmark planning legislation required tall buildings to fit within an "envelope" meant to preserve light and air access to the streets below.  Rather than curtail creativity, the law inspired a generation of architects to create "ziggurat" skyscrapers that became a hallmark of the Art Deco period. The top mural, located in the New East vestibule, is dedicated to the memory of James Murray Webb (1908-2000), Professor Emeritus of City and Regional Planning at UNC Chapel Hill.  Webb was a gifted architect and urban planner, and one of the department's founding faculty. Over the course of a fifty-year career, he helped build Carolina's planning program into one of the strongest in the United States.  A plaque in his honor describing the Manhattan photograph is mounted beside the mural.     Reproduced from Thomas J. Campanella, Cities From the Sky: An Aerial Portrait of America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2001). Original print courtesy of the Department of Geography Air Photo Archives, University of California, Los Angeles.
	(above) Looking west across the lower tip of Manhattan island, this photograph captures the upward thrust of skyscrapers that made New York the most celebrated city of the Jazz Age.
	(above) This photograph, taken in March of 1941, looks out across still-rural   western Long Island, New York, a landscape on the verge of transformation   into sprawling suburban tracts.
	(above) Mexico City's great central plaza--the Zócalo--is photographed here in April, 1929.  At the center of the image is the baroque and neo-classical Cathedral Metropolitana,  begun in the 16th century.