The Four Seasons, New York 1970s

Originally created by celebrated graphic designer Alan Fletcher, this quartet of trees representing spring, summer fall and winter was the logo of the famous Four Seasons restaurant at 52nd and Park Avenue in New York City.

The design was said to represent constant renewal, exceptional service and natural beauty throughout the year, and the idea of seasonal change was also implemented at the restaurant.

Four times each year, menus, printed on hand-made textured Mulberry paper, would get makeovers, waiters would wear new uniforms and decorative flowers and ficus trees would be matched to each season.

Opened in the Seagram building in midtown Manhattan in 1959, the restaurant’s strikingly modernist interiors were designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson.

Features included a 20-foot-square, white Carrara marble pool in the restaurant's Pool Room and gold-dipped brass-rod sculptures by Richard Lippold suspended over the bar and mezzanine of the Grill Room.

There were paintings by Jackson Pollock and Joan Miró; a giant Picasso stage curtain; and tableware designed by L. Garth and Ada Louise Huxtable.

The extravagant Four Seasons also set a new bar for American fine dining. ‘Both in décor and in menu, it is spectacular, modern and audacious,” the New York Times restaurant critic Craig Claiborne wrote, two months after its opening.

The fabled culinary and architectural shrine became known for its powerful clientele – the term ‘power lunch’ was invented for the city’s prime movers who went to the Four Seasons to see and be seen.

Credit for the term is attributed to writer Lee Eisenberg, who, in a 1979 Esquire article titled ‘America’s Most Powerful Lunch,’ decoded the seating plan for the Grill Room as a carefully orchestrated daily maneuver to accommodate New York’s biggest egos.

The New York Times called its clientele:” a vision of Manhattan as the nerve center of the postwar era: a nexus of talent, money and ambition.’

The Four Seasons closed in 2016 after the new owner of the building declined to renew its lease. The Four Seasons re-opened at a new location on 49th Street in 2018 but failed to capture the excitement of its previous incarnation and closed permanently in 2019.

 The Picasso Curtain (or Le Tricorne), which hung in the original restaurant is now on display at the New York Historical Society.