Independent Work and The Rainbow Room
Baum left Restaurant Associates to consult on his own, often working with Arthur Emil. His projects included developing the 22 restaurants in the World Trade Center, including Windows on the World at the top of the North Tower. His other projects included development of restaurants in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Hallmark Cards Crown Center in Kansas City, and Place Bonaventure in Montréal. In 1986, he opened his own restaurant in New York City called Aurora. It remained open for five years.
In 1987, after a two year $25 million renovation backed by David Rockefeller, Baum reopened the Rainbow Room in New York's Rockefeller Center. Baum also redesigned Windows on the World in 1996, a destination restaurant on the 107th Floor of the World Trade Center. During Baum's tenure, Windows on the World became the highest grossing restaurant in the world until its destruction on September 11, 2001.
Baum died on October 5, 1998, at the age of 78 due to prostate cancer.
Read more about this topic: Joe Baum
Famous quotes containing the words independent, work, rainbow and/or room:
“When the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and only then may it be a source of enchantment.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.”
—Daniel Barenboim (b. 1942)
“Captain, the man of skill, the expert
Leader, the creator of bursting color
And rainbow sortilege, the savage weapon
Against enemies, against the prester,
Presto, whose whispers prickle the spirit.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)