U.S. journalist and commentator Alistair Cooke once described New York City as “the biggest collection of villages in the world.” The island of Manhattan and its neighboring boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx are home to hundreds of distinct communities with familiar names such as Brooklyn Heights, Coney Island, Brighton Beach, Prospect Heights, Greenwich Village, SoHo, Little Italy, Chinatown, Lower East Side, Harlem, Flushing and Gramercy Park.

Collectively, the five boroughs offer hundreds of museums and galleries, along with scores of concert halls, schools of art, music and acting, and a diversity of architectural styles including art deco, neoclassical, Romanesque Revival, Italianate, Queen Anne, Federal and Greek Revival, to name a few. Reflecting on everything New York has to offer, American novelist Thomas Wolfe observed, “Culture just seems to be in the air, like part of the weather.”

In upper Manhattan, visitors can stroll in Central Park, visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art with its neoclassical façade and see the Whitney Museum of American Art representing the Brutalism style of architecture and the American Museum of Natural History designed in Romanesque Revival. Midtown Manhattan is home to Rockefeller Center and consists of multiple structural styles, The Empire State Building and Chrysler Building with their Art Deco detailing and the United Nations Headquarters appropriately designed in International Style. In addition to the neoclassical Statue of Liberty, lower Manhattan features the Financial District, Greenwich Village, SoHo and Chinatown.

Families with children will find plenty to keep them occupied in Brooklyn’s New York Aquarium, Botanic Garden, Prospect Park Zoo and Coney Island. In the borough of Queens, the New York Mets’ Citi Field ballpark, which is loosely modeled on Ebbets Field, is a popular summer destination for National League baseball fans.

For American League fans, the new Yankee stadium in the Bronx is designed to mimic the look and feel of the team’s original stadium where 26 World Series championships were celebrated. The 53,000-seat open-air ballpark features a granite and limestone exterior modeled after the original stadium when it opened in 1923, prior to being remodeled in 1970. The $1.3 billion ballpark required more than 8,000 tons of architecturally exposed structural steel to be protected by a Tnemec coating system consisting of Series 90-97 Tneme-Zinc, a zinc-rich polyurethane primer; Series 1075U Endura-Shield II, an aliphatic acrylic polyurethane; Series 27 F.C. Typoxy, a polyamide epoxy tie-coat; and Series 394 PerimePrime, a micaceous iron oxide and zinc-filled polyurethane primer used for touch-up work on bolts. Nearly 8,000 gallons of primer and more than 12,000 gallons of intermediate and finish coatings were required to complete the Yankee stadium project, according to Tnemec Coating Consultant Phil Gonnella.

Within walking distance of Yankee Stadium is the 4.5-mile-long Grand Concourse, which was called “one of the great boulevards of the world” by Daniel Libeskind, who won the competition to be Master Plan architect for ground zero and the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan. The boulevard is lined with hundreds of art deco and art modern-style buildings, including the former residence of New York Yankee slugger Babe Ruth. A dominant feature of the Grand Concourse is the Bronx County Courthouse, built in 1933 during the Depression in a style that combines modern massing with neoclassical elements.

Today, the Bronx County Courthouse is designated as a New York Landmark and is listed on the New York State and National Registers of Historic Places. A Tnemec fluoropolymer coating system used to renovate the bronze window casings on the historic building included a primer coat of Series F.C. 27 Typoxy, a topcoat of Series 1078 Fluoronar Metallic, a high-solids fluoropolymer, and a finish coat of Series 1079-0763 Metallic Clearcoat, an aliphatic acrylic polyurethane. More than 30,000 square feet of the courthouse were coated. “They were looking to duplicate a metallic golden bronze appearance and they wanted something that was long lasting,” noted Gonnella. “Getting permits to work on a government building and erecting the scaffolding for this project was expensive, so they wanted a coating system that would last as long as possible.”

The Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) is the mayoral agency responsible for protecting and preserving New York City’s architecturally, historically and culturally significant buildings and sites. Since its creation in 1965, LPC has granted landmark status to more than 27,000 buildings in New York City’s five boroughs.