Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Apthorp and Heckscher Buildings


Above: top of the entranceway to the Apthorp Apartments, which occupy the full city block between West End Avenue and Broadway, and 78th and 79th Streets. Beyond the barrel-vaulted tunnels with their enormous wrought-iron gates is a spacious courtyard with a fountain. The Apthorp was built 1906-1908 by Clinton & Russell on land owned by the Astors.


Below: originally the Heckscher, now the Crown Building, 730 Fifth Ave. (southwest corner 57th St.); designed by Warren & Wetmore (architects of Grand Central Terminal), completed 1921. There is something about this shade of green combined with gold that I find very pleasing: associations with money, perhaps? This was one of the earliest buildings constructed after the City's 1916 Zoning Resolution restricted the height and shape of buildings. Augustus Heckscher Sr. (1848-1941) made his fortune in mining and real-estate ventures and donated the much of it to philanthropic endeavors, including the Heckscher Museum on Long Island and the Heckscher Foundation for Children (now El Museo del Barrio). The largest playground in Central Park and the only one included in the original Greensward Plan also bears the Heckscher name.




Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Memorial Day: Washington at Union Square, Bethesda Terrace, Irises


Top: Brown's Washington at Union Square (Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan, Essay 13) - finally, a good shot of the west side, taken on a cloudy day (no harsh shadows) and with a long enough zoom that I could back up so his arm doesn't cover his face.

Middle: Balustrades and arches at Central Park's Bethesda Terrace. The detail and the variation always amazes me.

Bottom: Irises from someone else's garden. (If I had a green thumb, it would be made out of patinated copper.)




















Thursday, May 24, 2007

Greenpoint Savings Bank & Williamsburg Bridge

















Above: Formerly the Greenpoint Savings Bank, now a branch of North Fork: I love the scaly roof. The building imitates ancient Roman architecture (in this case, the Pantheon), a favorite device ca. 1900 for implying that a bank was steady as a rock and would last for centuries. Manhattan Ave. at Calyer St., Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Below: On the one hand, it's nice to be able to walk across the Williamsburg Bridge without fearing it will fall into the East River - which seemed possible 10 years ago. On the other hand, the new pedestrian walkway is so fenced in that it's nearly impossible to take any photos except of the bridge itself.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Photos of Peter Cooper and 455 Lafayette

Lately I've been retaking sculpture photos in TIFF format, which brought me back to Saint Gaudens's Peter Cooper at Cooper Union (Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan Essay 10). At left is a view I never could have gotten with my old 3x optical zoom.

Many historians are vehemently opposed to change, but what studying history taught me is that change is natural, inevitable, and often a vast improvement. I like 455 Lafayette, the new building on the south side of Astor Place, which has been panned by the New York Times architecture critic. Not all buildings have to be composed of right angles. Not all of them have to neatly match whatever's already in the neighborhood. Not all curved surfaces need to be formed of custom-made curved glass rather than narrow, flat glass panes.

For a tidy summary on the hullabaloo over 455 Lafayette, see
http://nymag.com/realestate/vu/2006/17319/

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Photos of architectural details

In my travels around NYC I often carry a camera in order to take photos of sculptures. Sometimes I snap architectural details as well: once you learn to look, you start looking at everything. Occasionally I'll upload a few of my favorite recent photos here, at considerably reduced resolution. If you want to see more images or higher resolution, ask me. In time, I plan to offer such photos for sale on www.ForgottenDelights.com.
















Above: Sullivanesque capital from 11th St. in Manhattan (west of Broadway). Compare the Bayard Condict Building.

Below: 122-124 Milton St., Greenpoint, Brooklyn. 1889, architect Theobald Engelhardt. AIA Guide to NYC (4th ed.) p. 762, G15: "Brick and brownstone Queen Anne. The bracketed canopies over the entrances are lusty celebrations of entry" (!). I love the quality of the details and especially the spiderweb grills on the matching front doors. Are they original? I don't know - the brackets holding them certainly look old enough.




Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Horace Greeley on literature as a vocation


Horace Greeley, founder of the New York Tribune (est. 1841), was well known for his vehement opinions on everything from slavery and women's rights to unions, nativism and education. Here are his thoughts on books:

"It is a very common but a very mischievous notion, that the writing of a book is creditable per se. On the contrary, I hold it discreditable, and only to be justified by proof of lofty qualities and generous aims embodied therein. To write a book when you have nothing new to communicate, - nothing to say that has not been better said already, - that is to inflict a real injury on mankind. A new book is only to be justified by a new truth. If Jonas Potts, however illiterate and commonplace, has been shipwrecked on Hudson’s Bay, and has traveled thence overland to Detroit or Montreal by a route previously unknown, then he may give us a book – if he will attempt no more than to tell us as clearly as possible what he experienced and saw by the way, - which will have a genuine value, and which the world may well thank him for; and so of a man who, having manufactured charcoal all his days, should favor us with a treatise on burning charcoal, showing what was the relative value for that use of the various woods; how long they should be on the fire respectively; how much wood should be burned in one pit, and how the burning should be managed. Every contribution, however rude & humble, to our knowledge of nature, and of the means by which her products may most advantageously be made subservient to our needs, is beneficent, and worthy of our regard. But the fabrication of new poems, or novels, or essays, or histories, which really add nothing to our stock of facts, to our fund of ideas, but, so far as they have any significance, merely resay what has been more forcibly, intelligibly, happily, said already, - this is a work which does less than no good, - which ought to be decried and put down, under the general police duty of abating nuisances. I would have every writer of a book cited before a competent tribunal and made to answer the questions: “Sir, what proposition is this book intended to set forth & commend? What fact does it reveal? What is its drift, its purport?” If it embodies a new truth, or even a new suggestion, though it seem a very mistaken and absurd one, make way for it! and let it fight its own battle; but if it has really no other aim than to be readable, therefore salable, and thus to win gold for its author and his accomplices, the printer and the publisher, then let a bonfire be made of its manuscript sheets, so that the world may speedily obtain from it all the light it is capable of imparting."

I emphatically disagree with Greeley that all published books ought to be didactic: see the essays in Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan on Hale and Bryant, and more definitively, Ayn Rand's Romantic Manifesto. Of course millions of books have been and will be published that offer neither practical advice nor inspiration, but better to let the workings of the capitalist system punish those who perpetrate such works than have authors face censorship.

The bibliography and out-takes for Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan Essay 7 offer several other substantial quotations from Greeley's Recollections of a Busy Life (1868), plus an anecdote by Mark Twain and a pithy comment by William Cullen Bryant (OMOM Essay 22).
The image at the beginning of this post is by Thomas Nast, famed 19th-c. caricaturist; see the end of the Greeley bibliography for details.

Horace Greeley on literature as a vocation


Horace Greeley, founder of the New York Tribune (est. 1841), was well known for his vehement opinions on everything from slavery and women's rights to unions, nativism and education. Here are his thoughts on books:

"It is a very common but a very mischievous notion, that the writing of a book is creditable per se. On the contrary, I hold it discreditable, and only to be justified by proof of lofty qualities and generous aims embodied therein. To write a book when you have nothing new to communicate, - nothing to say that has not been better said already, - that is to inflict a real injury on mankind. A new book is only to be justified by a new truth. If Jonas Potts, however illiterate and commonplace, has been shipwrecked on Hudson’s Bay, and has traveled thence overland to Detroit or Montreal by a route previously unknown, then he may give us a book – if he will attempt no more than to tell us as clearly as possible what he experienced and saw by the way, - which will have a genuine value, and which the world may well thank him for; and so of a man who, having manufactured charcoal all his days, should favor us with a treatise on burning charcoal, showing what was the relative value for that use of the various woods; how long they should be on the fire respectively; how much wood should be burned in one pit, and how the burning should be managed. Every contribution, however rude & humble, to our knowledge of nature, and of the means by which her products may most advantageously be made subservient to our needs, is beneficent, and worthy of our regard. But the fabrication of new poems, or novels, or essays, or histories, which really add nothing to our stock of facts, to our fund of ideas, but, so far as they have any significance, merely resay what has been more forcibly, intelligibly, happily, said already, - this is a work which does less than no good, - which ought to be decried and put down, under the general police duty of abating nuisances. I would have every writer of a book cited before a competent tribunal and made to answer the questions: “Sir, what proposition is this book intended to set forth & commend? What fact does it reveal? What is its drift, its purport?” If it embodies a new truth, or even a new suggestion, though it seem a very mistaken and absurd one, make way for it! and let it fight its own battle; but if it has really no other aim than to be readable, therefore salable, and thus to win gold for its author and his accomplices, the printer and the publisher, then let a bonfire be made of its manuscript sheets, so that the world may speedily obtain from it all the light it is capable of imparting."

I emphatically disagree with Greeley that all published books ought to be didactic: see the essays in Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan on Hale and Bryant, and more definitively, Ayn Rand's Romantic Manifesto. Of course millions of books have been and will be published that offer neither practical advice nor inspiration, but better to let the workings of the capitalist system punish those who perpetrate such works than have authors face censorship.

The bibliography and out-takes for Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan Essay 7 offer several other substantial quotations from Greeley's Recollections of a Busy Life (1868), plus an anecdote by Mark Twain and a pithy comment by William Cullen Bryant (OMOM Essay 22).
The image at the beginning of this post is by Thomas Nast, famed 19th-c. caricaturist; see the end of the Greeley bibliography for details.

Saturday, May 5, 2007

The Progress of Modern Art & Modern Theory

In "19th-Century French Painting and Philosophy" (The Objective Standard, Fall 2006), I argued that the ideas that made works by Matisse and Picasso acceptable by the early 20th c. had been gaining adherents throughout the 19th century, because traditional artists did not have a sound theoretical basis on which to argue against the subjects and styles of the avant-garde. This confusion and defeat came to mind when I began to compile the bibliography and out-takes for Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan Essay 6, on John Quincy Adams Ward's Washington at Wall St. The Armory Show of 1913, with works by Picasso, Duchamp, and Kandinsky, is generally cited as the introduction of Modernist European art to the United States. (See Theodore Roosevelt's disparaging but accurate comments.) Even before the Armory Show, however, some American sculptors were anxious about current trends in sculpture. In a memorial address for Ward (d. 1910), Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., (1868-1953), art critic and long-time professor at Princeton, commented:
Both men [Ward and Winslow Homer] cultivated the robust and masculine order of design, both quietly ignored the current shibboleth that a work of art must be precious in every detail; both, I take it, would have scorned the cosmetic theory that surface has a value irrespective of the thing expressed. [Probably a crack at Rodin.] … Such an art presupposes discipline, clearness of aim, self-knowledge on the part of its creator. It is not my purpose to appraise Ward's singularly even and meritorious production. It seems to me to have a high and especial value in view of prevailing notions that hysteria and the artistic temperament are convertible terms. Ward's life and purposeful well-balanced work are an effective protest against the fallacy that the life artistic ranges between overt melodrama and inward tragedy. (John Quincy Adams Ward, Memorial Addresses Delivered Before the Century Association, Nov. 5, 1910 [New York: for the Century Association, 1911], pp. 2, 5-6)
Although representational art continued to sell to conservative collectors, by 1925, F.W. Ruckstull, whose allegorical figure of Phoenicia stands third from the right on the cornice of the Customs House at Bowling Green (Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan Essay 4), and whose Wisdom and Force flank the entrance to the Appellate Court at Madison and 25th St., felt impelled to commence his 500-page Great Works of Art with the statement:
Anarchy reigns in the world of art today. The cause is: 'Modernism.' … Let the Reader carefully examine, and reflect over, some works of art illustrated in Figures 1 to 8 [by Brancusi, Picasso, Matisse and others], the result of the inflicting upon the world of one foolish fad after another. He will observe a gradual drifting away from the normal to the abnormal. And, strange to say, every inventor of one of the weird fads which these things represent, has been backed up, as Tolstoy said, by some casuistic 'new theory' of art, of some pretentious critic, to justify its production and its infliction on the public, to the bewilderment and weakening of the present and succeeding generations. (p. v).
In one of my favorite books on 20th-c. art, The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe describes with characteristic exuberance how the relationship between theory and the visual arts had progressed by the late 20th c.:
All these years I, like so many others, had stood in front of a thousand, two thousand, God-knows-how-many thousand Pollocks, de Koonings, Newmans, Nolands, Rothkos, Rauschenbergs, Judds, Johnses, Olitskis, Louises, Stills, Franz Klines Frankenthalers, Kellys, and Frank Stellas, now squinting, now popping the eye sockets open, now drawing back, now moving closer - waiting, waiting, forever waiting for … it … for it to come into focus, namely, the visual reward (for so much effort) which must be there, which everyone (tout le monde) knew to be there. […] All those years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well - how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not 'seeing is believing,' you ninny, but 'believing is seeing,' for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text. (p. 6)
If a painting or sculpture requires that one know a theory in order to understand it, it does not function as visual art. Few of those who stop to admire Ward's Washington have any idea when it was made or what philosophical and esthetic principles were espoused by Ward. There is no need for such knowledge: Washington bears its own message, visually rather than verbally. The bibliography and out-takes for Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan Essay 6 appear on the Forgotten Delights website.