A new video of our book CENTRAL PARK NYC: An Architectural View

We are delighted to post this new video of our Rizzoli book, CENTRAL PARK NYC: An Architectural View. It runs two minutes and features numerous images, both our watercolors and photography old and new, that enrich the book's pages.

Enjoy.

Strawberry Fields

Following is an augmented excerpt of the chapter "Memorials and Monuments" from our latest book, Central Park NYC, published this past September by Rizzoli.

Yoko Ono, John Lennon’s widow, conceived Strawberry Fields as a living memorial to her slain husband and dedicated the site on what would have been the singer’s forty-fifth birthday, October 9, 1985. The two-and-a-half-acre informal garden occupies a sloping triangle of land at Central Park West and 72nd Street near the Dakota Apartments, the family’s residence and the site where Lennon was murdered on the evening of December 8, 1980. Ono worked with landscape architect Bruce Kelly and the Central Park Conservancy to transform the parcel into a Garden of Peace with plants donated by over 120 nations.

The garden, of course, is named after one of Lennon's most famous Beatles songs, Strawberry Fields Forever, a haunting psychedelic reminiscence of his childhood secret garden, the grounds of the Strawberry Field orphanage in Woolton, Liverpool. The iconic Imagine mosaic, a simple round set in the pavement at the heart of the garden, has become a shrine to Lennon’s memory, collecting notes, flowers and votive candles from his myriad fans, and it is the site of annual vigils to celebrate his birth and mourn his death.

Though often described as interpreting traditional Roman patterns, the design is actually far more expressive than this reading allows and alludes to Lennon's uniquely provocative pacifism and strongly Buddhist leanings and worldview. (Above, Lennon and Ono staging their famous bed-in for peace in Amsterdam in 1969.) IMAGINE, the title of Lennon’s famous 1971 peace anthem, holds the center of an abstracted lotus flower made of thirty-two radiating segments, the number of Buddha’s virtues. (Below, Buddha on the lotus throne.)

In Buddhist traditions, the fully opened lotus, rising above muddied waters, symbolizes enlightenment, and a white lotus connotes purity of mind and spirit. The duality of black and white represents matter and spirit, the mud from which the lotus blooms and the blossom of understanding. And finally, the flower signifies rebirth in a figural and literal sense, entirely appropriate to honor a musician who integrated Buddhist mantras into his music and Buddhist philosophy and a Buddhist worldview into his life.

Disarmingly simple, a single word centering an abstracted flower, Lennon’s memorial owes an enormous conceptual debt to Maya Lin’s revolutionary 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., which overturned traditional notions of a monument’s form and conceptual underpinnings.

However, the Imagine mosaic takes Lin’s abstraction a step further by renouncing three-dimensionality entirely and setting its single-word message into the earth, where it can be trod upon or reverenced—a wry and profoundly insightful evocation of Lennon’s humanity and spirit.

And finally, and as Buddha himself would have observed, there is nothing new under the sun and we find a remarkable conceptual precursor in the 18th-century French garden of Ermenonville, the Altar of Reverie—a simple cylindrical socle, artfully aged, inscribed with the invocation, "To Dream."

Celebrating Central Park NYC at Librarie Galignani, Paris

We're delighted to announce that Paris' premier bookstore, the august Librarie Galignani on the rue de Rivoli, will be hosting an evening celebrating publication of Central Park NYC on the fourth December--hélas by invitation only, but we hope if you have recieved your invitation that you'll join us then.

We will give a short talk about the book and Central Park, and then be available to sign copies. These are festive evenings that mingle current events and the love of books, and Galignani has created a wonderful authors' program that has made it a center of Parisian culture. Needless to say, we are honored and are looking forward immensely to the soirée.

Central Park NYC Exhibition at Didier Aaron, Manhattan

The New York Times T Magazine, 24 October 2013

This past month has been a very busy time as we launched our latest book, Central Park NYC, and prepared an exhibition of the watercolors illustrating that book at Didier Aaron, Inc. in Manhattan.

The eponymous exhibition opened on the 22nd with a private preview for the Woman's Committee of The Central Park Conservancy, and it was an ebuillant evening and a true pleasure to meet so many dedicated benefactors of the park. New York itself was as vibrant as we've ever experienced it, and it was an enormous pleasure to spend even such a short time in our former home.

The following evening was the exhibition's general opening, and shortly after the New York Times T Magazine published this online review, with a gallery of six watercolors from ths show.

The exhibition at Didier Aaron, Inc. runs until November the 8th. The gallery is open from 10 AM to 5:30 PM, Monday to Friday, tel. 212-988-5248.

Central Park NYC: "redefines the coffee table book"

We are extremely pleased to announce that Rizzoli published Central Park NYC: An Architectural View this past Tuesday, September 10, accompanied by a review in that same day's edition of the New York Times.

From the Times review:

...in “Central Park NYC: An Architectural View” (Rizzoli, $75), the artist-authors Andrew Zega and Bernd H. Dams explore the park’s multitude of overlooked smaller structures, statues, benches and bridges.

Their original watercolors and photographs and revealing text redefine the coffee table book: More than just pretty pictures to be savored, these images will enrich and deepen the reader’s experience of the park.

We are delighted that the Times recognized and lauded the underlying rigor of this book. We should also point out that beyond the park's structures and ornaments, our true focus is rather upon the park's design, divided into thirteen chapters that examine important features, such as the Mall, Bethesda Terrace and the Belvedere, and others devoted to design elements, such as the park's monuments, its bridges and arches, its water features, and its rustic structures.

To peek inside, you can visit this link to the book's Amazon page, where you can access an interactive pdf with a shocking number of the book's pages put online for your perusal. While pasting the link, we were delighted to see that Central Park NYC has already reached the #1 position in Amazon's landscape architecture category, and horrified that only 2 copies remain in stock. Our thanks to everyone who made this possible!

We're back with a book: CENTRAL PARK NYC

We're back, and we've returned with a book—well for now, at least the publication date for a book.

We are delighted to announce that our publisher, Rizzoli International Publications, will publish Central Park NYC: An Architectural View in late September of this year. Central Park will be a large-format hardcover—a hefty 208 pages and 10 by 12 inches—with 61 of our own watercolors (good Lord, have we really painted that many?), augmented by 60 color and 55 black-and-white illustrations.

The volume surveys the architecture and history of Central Park, from its inception to the present day. Over the course of thirteen chapters, we examine the constituent elements of the park, the park's evolution, and the buildings, sculptures and ornaments that enrich this original template, crafted by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, for what became America's Greensward Revolution.

We are extremely proud of this book, our eighth, and know that it has much that is new to say about the how and the why of the creation of Central Park. An outgrowth of our exhibiton at Didier Aaron, Inc. celebrating the 150^th anniversary of the creation of Central Park, the book is also copiously illustrated with contemporary photography and archival documents and photographs. 

We have paid particular attention to the archival photo selection, wishing to surprise by "the shock of the old," as it were. Likewise, contemporary photographs come from a variety of photographers who have captured the park in stunning moments of beauty.

The men who built Central Park, photographed on Willowdell Arch in 1862.

 From left: comptroller Andrew H. Green, engineer George E. Waring, 

architect Calvert Vaux, gardener Ignaz Pilat, designer Jacob Wrey Mould, 

and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. 

We will be mounting an exhibition of the watercolors that illustrate the book at Didier Aaron, Inc. in late October and early November of this year, and will post with exhibition dates closer to the time of publication. 

For now, we simply wanted to announce that—after a long and productive hiatus, for which we still have several announcements before us to make—we have again returned to posting at NOTED, and that Central Park NYC is well on its way to publication—at last!

The Boundaries of Central Park

Begun in 1858, the construction of New York City's Central Park was largely completed by 1864, in the midst of the Civil War. The park below 102nd street was fully open by the end of 1863, the same year when the park's four northernmost blocks, from 106th to 110th streets, were finally acquired after a four-year delay.

The 65-acre parcel brought the park's final area to 843 acres. In the annexed northeast corner, work gangs transformed 12 acres of low-lying swampland into the Harlem Meer (above, dominated by the contemporary boathouse, officially named the Charles Dana Discovery Center). The rest of the area was landscaped with a wilder, craggier, more rugged æsthetic (below) than the pastoral landscape of the bulk of the park to the south: a design decision which—in the puritanical eyes of the fanatically penurious comptroller, Andrew Green—had the overriding merit of being delightfully inexpensive to build. 

The park's designers and the remaining seven commissioners not involved in the war effort then turned their attention to properly defining the park's boundary with the city. The park borders and its main gates were seen as the crowning element to their triumphant construction campaign, but the question of their materials and form became mired—yet again, as had many prior such questions—in an economic, æsthetic, political and class battle.  

Enter Richard Morris Hunt (above), the first American architect to study at the École des Beaux-arts and who, beside his talent, had the brilliant foresight to launch his career by having himself born to the wealthy and influential Hunt family of Vermont. His grandfather had been lieutenant governer of Vermont, his father Jonathan was a representative in the New York State legislature and partner in a prominent Manhattan law firm and his brother-in-law, Charles H. Russell, just happened to be a park commissioner. 

Then in his late thirties, Hunt stood at the outset of an illustrious career which would be crowned by commissions for the main facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, and he was already a prominent society architect, designing Loire Valley châteaux on Fifth Avenue and in Newport for Marquands, Vanderbilts, Belmonts and Astors. (Below: 660 Fiifth Avenue, the residence of William K. Vanderbilt.)

With the park's chief landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, in self-imposed exile in California and his partner Calvert Vaux reduced to a unsalaried consultant's role after both resigned in May of 1863 in the face of Green's maneuvers to displace them by radically expanding his powers as comptroller, commissioner Russell was able to induce the rump board to approve his brother-in-law's designs for four elaborate, beaux-arts entrance plazas for the southern border of the park in April 1864. (Below, Hunt's design for Fifth Avenue at 59th Street, with the site of the Plaza Hotel occupied by a transplanted Tuileries Palace.)

Hunt, quite naturally, saw his designs as "elegant and appropriate" mediators between the city's built fabric and the park, and an ally promoted them in the New York Post (with no mean rhetorical flourish, even for a florid age) as a means to transform the park into "one great open air gallery of Art, instead of being, as some dreamers fancy it, a silent sketch of a rural landscape caught up and enclosed within the raging tumult of a vast metropolis."  

Comptroller Andrew Green, though a peculiarly nineteenth-century Puritan version of a megalomaniac, was nonetheless a profound admirer of the talents he had displaced and considered Olmsted and Vaux's Greensward plan as something of a holy vision—to the point where he stated in his memoirs, dictated to a spinster neice (one must chuckle at the clichéd Victorian perfection of that situation)—that he himself had largely been responsible for it. Thus Green was not particularly enamored of Hunt's bombastic (and expensive) plazas and, since he was now running the show and (grudgingly) paying the bills, he delayed their execution in favor of completing construction of the Harlem annex.

Green's delay allowed Calvert Vaux (above)—himself no slouch when it came to cultivating influential New Yorkers and the press—to mount a counter campaign to induce the commissioners to renounce Hunt's project. Playing the egalitarian card, Vaux characterized the design as anti-democratic and "continental" and conceived for the "panjandrum," not the common man.

To deadly effect, he likened Hunt's plazas to the antechambers of Versailles: "the imperial style presumes that people wait, wait and hang around, and provision is made for clients, courtiers, subordinates and laqueyes" (sic) to cool their heels in suitable splendor. He went on to say that the average New Yorker did not need such airs, and exclaimed, "How fine it would be to have no gates" in the park at all, and "to keep open House and trust all always."

Hunt's plazas, doomed as much for their massive cost as for their obvious æsthetic clash with the park's pastoral simplicity, were eventually shuffled aside, though Hunt exhibited his drawings at the Academy of Design in 1865 to force the issue, to no avail. The question of the form of the park's actual enclosure then came to the fore. Several commissioners admired the spiked iron fences enclosing Parisian parks but Olmsted, quoting Ruskin, noted that "An iron railing always means thieves outside or Bedlam inside."

After "six months of serious trial" and despite the large economies an iron fence offered, Vaux finally dissuaded the commissioners from adopting an "iron cage" in favor of a low stone wall that would allow the pedestrian's eye "to roam at will" over the landscape inside. Today, these rusticated brownstone boundary walls, cast green with moss (above), are as comfortingly familiar to New Yorkers as chrome-yellow taxis.

In 1866 the board issued a proclamation, stating: "The construction of the Park has been easily achieved because the industrious population of New York has been wise enough to require it, and rich enough to pay for it."

"To extend to each citizen a rightful welcome," the board named the park's four principal entrances along Central Park South to honor the people themselves: the city's "Artisans," "Artists," "Merchants" and "Scholars." 133 years later, in 1999, the Central Park Conservancy finally saw to it that simply inscribed stone markers (above) were inset into the boundary wall to identify each entrance.

The USS Maine Monument, Central Park

Remember the Maine! To Hell with Spain!

The USS Maine was the US Navy's second pre-dreadnought battleship (with the USS Texas); these warships were the first in the US fleet to dispense with the full masts of Civil-War-era ironclads and rely entirely on advanced, coal-fed steam boilers for propulsion. Both warships were built in response to the alarming naval might of Brazil, which had commissioned several battleships from Europe, most notably the imposing Riacheulo, delivered in 1883. As a result, Brazil stood far and away as the dominant sea power in the Americas in the 1880s.

The Maine and the Texas were the first modern warships built in the United States, at a time when the country lacked sufficient technological prowess and industrial infrastructure to bring such an ambitious project quickly to fruition. Planning and specifications were drawn up in the early 1880s; Congress authorized construction in 1886 and the Maine's keel was finally laid down in the Brooklyn Naval Yard in 1888; construction took nine years (3 years alone were wasted waiting for the steel armor plate to be produced from one of Andrew Carnagie's companies), and the ship was finally commissioned in 1895, entering active service the year following.

With nearly 15 years between conception and actual service, the Maine was flagrantly obsolete upon delivery. Its en échelon main guns, cantilevered out over the hull, were already found to be ineffective by European navies years before it had entered service; its ramming bow was a quaint leftover from a prior epoch of naval warfare dating back to Roman triremes, its heavy armor had been superceded by innovative lightweight armor, and it had neither the firepower to face true battleships nor the requisite speed to serve as an effective cruiser.

In short, the Maine was the offspring of a white elephant and a sitting duck.

Enter colonial Cuba and its uprising against Spain

In January of 1898, less than two years after entering active service, the Maine was ordered to Havana harbor as a show of American might during the Cuban War of Independence. Weeks later, on the evening of 15 February, a massive explosion ripped through the forward third of the ship and the Maine sank within moments, taking with it 266 crewman. 

In the words of Captain Charles D. Sigsbee:

I laid down my pen and listened to the notes of the bugle, which were singularly beautiful in the oppressive stillness of the night... I was enclosing my letter in its envelope when the explosion came. It was a bursting, rending, and crashing roar of immense volume, largely metallic in character. It was followed by heavy, ominous metallic sounds. There was a trembling and lurching motion of the vessel, a list to port. The electric lights went out. Then there was intense blackness and smoke. The situation could not be mistaken. The Maine was blown up and sinking.

The fore-ship, torn by the massive explosion, sank nearly instantaneously; the stern, where Sigsbee's cabin was located, settled more slowly. Neighboring ships immediately launched rescue parties to search for survivors. "Chief among them," Sigsbee noted, "were the boats from the Alfonso XII. The Spanish officers and crews did all that humanity and gallantry could compass."

The Maine's wreck was coffer-dammed in 1911 and a Naval inquiry held, and a second forensic inquiry was conducted by Admiral Hyman Rickover in 1974. Both definitively documented that the cause of the Maine's destruction was not a Spanish mine or bomb but the detonation of the forward gun magazines. 

Rickover's enquiry attributed the detonation to the spontaneous ignition of highly volatile bituminous coal (which the US Navy had recently adopted as fuel as opposed to slower, cleaner burning and far less volatile but more expensive anthracite coal) in the bunker abutting the forward gunpowder magazine. A spark or heating from the coal fire traversed the bulkhead and ignited the gunpowder in the adjacent magazine, dooming the ship. However, the actual cause of the explosion is still a subject of debate and may never be satisfactorily resolved for history.

Yellow Journalism

Of course this forensic science was carried out far too late to satisfy William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, who were in a frenzied war for domination of New York's lucrative daily newspaper market. The infamous era of corrupt, manipulated, exaggerated and patently false reporting known as "yellow journalism" reached its sordid apex with their jingoistic, frenzied dispatches, detailing non-existent cannibalism, torture and war atrocities committed by Spain against Cuba—all in an effort to drag the United States into war against Spain in a bout of newfound American expansionist brinkmanship.

Hearst managed to outdo even Pulitzer in audacity, and famously sent his star delineator, Frederick Remington, to Havana to document Spanish atrocities. After several uneventful weeks, Remington cabled Hearst, "There is no war. Request to be recalled." Hearst wired back, "Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war."
 

Hearst was true to his word. In the weeks following the Maine disaster, his New York Journal often devoted eight or more pages a day to the tragedy and speculated wildly about Spanish duplicity. Pulitzer rivaled Hearst in war mongering (though privately he said that "nobody outside a lunatic asylum" believed the Maine had been sabotaged by Spain). Nor were the country's lesser editors to be underestimated in their jingoism, and together the "yellow press" stoked a groundswell of war fervor with editorials demanding vengeance for the sinking of the Maine and the defense of American honor.

The rest, as they say, is history.

The USS Maine Monument was also a Hearst publicity vehicle, just as the Spanish-American War had been "his" war, and he browbeat his readers with a relentless subscription campaign, underpinned by his own donations—even though the proposed monument had no official site and was shunted from location to location until finally accepted for the Merchant's Gate of Central Park, facing Columbus Circle at Central Park South.

The monument itself was designed by Harold Van Buren Magonigle, a student of Calvert Vaux (Frederick Law Olmsted's assistant in designing Central Park) and an apprentice in the august offices of McKim, Meade & White. Magonigle made a name for himself designing beaux-arts monuments—he also authored the McKinley memorial in Canton, Ohio and the Liberty memorial in Kansas City, Missouri—and the Maine Monument was certainly his most elegant, successful design.

The massive, chamfered pylon evokes ancient Egyptian temple architecture, and the various beaux-arts sculptural groups embellishing the scheme were executed by Attillo Picirilli and his atelier, an Italian stonemason and master carver who emigrated from the famed Carrara quarries in Tuscany to New York, whereupon he and his sons dominated sculptural stonework in New York for decades.

The wonderful gilded bronze sculptural group atop the pylon, Columbia Triumphant (our watercolor appears as this post's first illustration), is unfortunately virtually impossible to view clearly from any angle, one of the design's major flaws. Nonetheless, the group—reminiscent of that crowning Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, the triumphal Quadriga of St Mark's Square in Venice, and the ancient tradition of celebratory sculpture crowning victory monuments that stretches back to the triumphal arches of Imperial Rome—is superbly conceived and masterfully executed, and was reportedly cast from bronze recovered from the Maine's own main batteries. 

The allegorical eagle prow (seen above in our watercolor profile elevation) is quite remarkable as it encapsulates and predates Art Deco by a full decade. The other allegorical sculptures are of equal quality and none of them have a hint of the saccharine or the substandard about them, in either their conception or their execution. 

In all, the USS Maine Monument is a masterfully executed memorial, but unfortunately it seems we have become perfectly indifferent to the beaux-arts aesthetic today. Consequently, it ranks among the most-overlooked and under-appreciated architectural and sculptural ensembles to reside in the heart of Manhattan.  

Elegant Trash

Sometimes, all too rarely for most of us, you have an Eureka! flash of inspiration and a wonderful insight is handed you. One of our favorite watercolors, New York City Trash Basket (created in 2003 for our exhibition Central Park at Didier Aaron, Inc. in Manhattan) was one such moment and we wanted to share the image and the story behind it here—if only to prove that we are after all contemporary artists, despite occasional protestations to the contrary!

We created a number of life-sized elevational watercolors for the Central Park show (here is a link to the NY Times review), the largest among them being well over a yard long or high. The idea behind the show was to make an æsthetic departure from our detailed historical elevations: to render objects and architectural details in the park with our usual attention to realism while presenting them at the scale of contemporary art. (Below, a life-sized one-point perspective of a marble vase at the Mall in the gallery.)

We particularly sought subjects that would translate into graphic images with an immediate visual impact, and when we came across one of these iconic wire-mesh trash baskets while scouting the park—as former New Yorkers, it is as evocative of Manhattan as one of Proust's madeleines—we had one of those ahah! moments.

Measurements and photos were duly taken and back in Paris the drawing was plotted out and rendered and, despite the unanticipated scale of the effort those few words gloss over (it seems always to be the case), the results did not disappoint. (The original watercolor is over a yard high, so do imagine an image exactly as big as the real thing.)

For the gallery etiquette we wrote:

Overlooked and overflowing, bent and abused and often obscured by black plastic liners, the ubiquitous New York City trash basket is found throughout Central Park. The minimalist geometry of its design embodies the dictum that form follows function and strikes the eye particularly by what is absent. The simple wire skein defines the void it surrounds and generates elegant geometry reminiscent both of Paolo Uccello's famed Renaissance explorations of perspective and the Op Art movement. And certainly the Warholian subject also evokes Pop Art. It comes as a slight shock that such beauty harbors Manhattan's refuse.

More prosaically, the watercolor depicts the Standard Expanded Metal Waste Basket, model #MO5539500 black, designed in the early 1980s by Corcraft Products of the NY State Department of Corrections and manufactured by the female inmates of the Albion state prison. Later, vertical re-enforcement bars were added as the mesh had a tendency to squash over time from the baskets being tossed back in place from the backs of sanitation trucks (as New Yorkers with windows facing the street all know, this basket-toss is best done at dawn).

Once we'd hung it among the other watercolors in the gallery, the Trash Basket became the mascot of the exhibition and was purchased by the New-York Historical Society for their permanent collection. In 2009 it was included in their exhibition, Drawn by New York, and we were bowled over to find that it had been hung at the very end of the enfilade of galleries, the culmination point of six centuries of works on paper depicting New York.

Today, this trash basket has been almost entirely replaced by a new, uglier design that nonetheless better survives the rigors of hanging out day and night on NYC street corners. But we are happy to report that new examples this classic design are still to be found within the park itself, the last bastion of elegant trash.

II. The Central Park Obelisk

At 71 feet tall and weighing 244 tons, the Central Park obelisk, commonly known as Cleopatra's Needle, was one of a pair carved from pink Aswan granite and originally erected before the temple of the sun in the sacred city of Heliopsis (the city of the sun, known as On to ancient Egyptians), for Pharaoh Thutmosis III in 1443 B.C. Some two centuries later Ramesses II ordered its flanks carved with hieroglyphs commemorating his military victories. With the collapse of dynastic Egypt and the abandonment of Heliopsis, the obelisks, long toppled, were re-erected by the Romans at Alexandria before the Caesarium during the reign of the Emperor Augustus in 12 B.C. Already worn by time, the obelisk's base was stabilized by bronze rods, dissimulated by sculptures of crabs at each corner and engraved with the date of the obelisk's erection and the name of the Roman engineer who supervised the work.

With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, a group of influential New Yorkers led by William H. Hurlbert, editor of the New York World, and backed by the rail magnate William H. Vanderbilt, openly began to militate that the United States be offered the "gift" of an Egyptian obelisk. Their case of European obelisk-envy only intensified in 1877, when the English engineer John Dixon undertook the removal of the fallen Alexandrian obelisk—a gift to England dating from 1819 to commemorate Lord Nelson's victory in the Battle of the Nile. (After a near-disastrous sea voyage, the fallen obelisk was erected at Victoria Embankment, London in 1878.) Dixon, sensing profit to be made from the New York clique, informed Hurlbert that he could demount and ship the remaining obelisk from Alexandria to New York for the sum of £15,000.

Vanderbilt quickly agreed to the sum but the deal soon hit a fatal snag when the Khedive Ismail Pasha indicated that the obelisk in question was not Dixon's to sell and that any negotiations were to be undertaken by the government of the United States and not private parties. Nonplussed, Hurlbert contacted William Evarts, the US Secretary of State, and Henry G. Stebbins, former Congressman, President of the New York Stock Exchange and the then Parks Commissioner for the City of New York, and arranged with them to begin negotiations with the Khedive through the offices of the State Department. The negotiations, headed by Judge Elbert Farman, US Counsel General to Egypt, dragged on through the winter but the Khedive eventually relented to the removal of the Alexandrian obelisk in May 1878.

After a year's planning, the obelisk's arduous year-long transport was supervised by Lieutenant Commander Henry Gorringe, a U.S. Navy engineer. Gorringe began the delicate task of lowering the obelisk in early August of 1879 but suspended the operation for two months due to local protests and legal challenges—no doubt in large part incited by the large American flag that had been raised atop the crated monolith—which required Consular intervention to quell. Once lowered by fulcrum—with an uncontrolled drop that thankfully did no damage—the obelisk was slid into the hold of the drydocked steamer Dessoug through an opening in its hull. The ship set sail June 12, 1880, arriving in New York July 20th. Another seven months were required to transport the obelisk across Manhattan to Graywacke Knoll behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art where, with great pomp, ceremony and speechifying, it was re-erected upon its original base on January 22, 1881 in the presence of Secretary of State Evarts and a crowd of 10,000 extremely chilled spectators.

The obelisk's saga created a press frenzy in New York, and as noted in an earlier post, over 9,000 freemasons paraded up Fifth Avenue in a celebration simply to mark the laying of the cornerstone of the obelisk's foundation by the Grand Master of Masons of the State of New York. However, before any heated editorializing about the relative merits of Madison, Union or Herald Squares, Columbus Circle or elsewhere could be mounted, the self-appointed site selection committee—Hurlbert, Gorringe and the artist Frederick Church, who was enlisted in an effort to paper over the fait accompli rubberstamping Vanderbilt's wishes—announced its decision to little joy but that expressed by the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to which the Vanderbilt family were major donors. Vanderbilt, owner of the New York Central Railroad (with its notoriously murderous Manhattan tunnel) and the world's richest man, would gain lasting infamy for saying, "The public be damned!" the following year.

The obscure site, an open greensward some yards behind the Museum, was a truly spectacular misplacement of this outstanding ancient monument and ranks as the greatest wasted opportunity for civic embellishment in the city's entire architectural history. With breathtaking hubris and offering appallingly flimsy justifications for the choice, Gorringe wrote, "In order to avoid needless discussion of the subject, it was decided to maintain the strictest secrecy as to the location determined on." He noted that the prime advantage of the Knoll was its "isolation" and that it was the best site to be found inside the park, as it was quite elevated and the foundation could be firmly anchored in bedrock, lest Manhattan suffer "some violent convulsion of nature." Indeed.

The Old Bandstand, Central Park

Though most of our subjects are French, this is not exclusively so. In October of 2003 we opened the exhibition Central Park at Didier Aaron, Inc. in Manhattan. For that show, we painted what must be one of the most exotic structures ever to be built in the park—or in all of Manhattan for that matter: the Musician's Pagoda on the Mall, known fondly to generations of New Yorkers as “the Old Bandstand.”

Frederick Law Olmsted, the park’s designer and first Superintendent—and someone not usually given to such flights of fancy—originally envisioned a floating pagoda-cum-music pavilion moored in the Lake off Bethesda Terrace. Detailed plans for the floating pagoda were drawn up in 1862 by his assistant Jacob Wrey Mould but Olmsted then settled upon a prominent site on the Mall promenade at the northern end of the famed elm alley, the park's great open-air "cathedral."

Mould, an English-born architect in the Ruskinian vein who was Olmsted's chief designer, had enormous influence over the esthetics of the Park's structures. A quintessential Victorian esthete, Mould loved exoticism, polychromy and foliate ornament, and his masterwork, Bethedsa Terrace, offers all three in abundance.

His initial design for the floating pagoda was hardly altered in execution on land and is incontestably his most outlandish design for the park. The hexagonally planned, cast-iron pavilion featured wildly eclectic details—classical Greek anthemia on its base and a lyre at its crown, along with a Schinkel-inspired grid of stars covering its golden dome—and was clothed in what Mould vaunted was “a hell of color”—a folly in the truest sense and an unexpected splash of Orientalist opulence in nineteenth-century Manhattan.

The pagoda became one of the park’s most familiar landmarks and its weekend, summertime concerts were a focal point of the city's civic life from the post-Civil War era until the promise of the Naumburg Bandshell precipitated its destruction in 1922.