The Frick garden is saved

Wonderful news for all who love the unique ambiance of The Frick Collection and its delightful Russell Page garden: The museum has announced today that it is abandoning its ambitious expansion plans, designed by Davis Brody Bond. The additions would have subsumed Page's elegant garden beneath a massive, six-story-plus addition (seen to the right of the entry in the above rendering) that also would have overwhelmed the original two-story, Louis XVI-style Frick residence, the heart of the museum, and left it a mere appendage.

The press release states that the Frick will regroup and develop a new expansion plan, and that the second-floor—once family rooms but today executive offices—will be converted to exhibition space. Having visited and dined in these rooms several times, we can attest that they will make excellent additions to the museum's exhibition space, though the executive staff will lose a magnificent perk and be forced from the old Frick residence.

The statement reads:

The Frick remains committed to furthering its mission by attaining its goals, among them having additional space for the display of works of art, including galleries on the historic second floor of the mansion, dedicated classrooms for education programs, updated facilities for the care of our art and research collections, and better public access between the museum and the Frick Art Reference Library. We also plan to improve visitor amenities in general while offering equal access for visitors with disabilities. At the same time, preserving the unique residential character and intimate scale of the Frick will remain our top priority.

Well, no one can argue with that—at least until we see the new plans. Part of the solution should be to rein in ambitions and ponder how best to enhance the Frick while ensuring that it remains what it is—the best small museum in the world, with an accent on small. Does the Frick truly need to expand both its mandate and its facilities to so great an extent as first proposed? Or will expansion destroy this unique house museum? After all, the Frick is a house, albeit a grand one, and to ensure success in this venture, those guiding it must not lose sight of that fundamental, defining fact. Logic and moderation counsel that the Frick should maximize its existing assets, purchase or lease administration space adjacent to the property and seek creative and judicious rationalization of the built fabric it already has.

In the meantime, we can all rejoice that Page's oasis of verdant civilization has been spared from New York's relentless redevelopment mania. The Frick is unique and should be thoughtfully preserved; after all, what other building in New York can boast its own front yard bordering Fifth Avenue and Central Park?

Help Save the Rizzoli Bookstore in Mahattan

The Rizzoli Bookstore and its iconic Beaux-Arts home at 31 West 57th Street in Manhattan has been slated for demolition to make way for luxury high-rise apartments.

We ask everyone concerned for historic preservation to take a moment to sign the petition here to ask the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission to reconsider its ruling and to designate the 109 year-old structure and its sumptuous interiors as a deserving landmark--how could such a worthy building not already be landmarked?--for future generations.

 

 

 Prior decisions have been reversed but time is of the essence, and every voice does indeed count to bring enough public pressure to bear to save one of New York's most beautiful literary landmarks from the wrecking ball.

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."

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.

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.  

Ooh la la! Le Met goes Louvre

Tiens! Dis donc. Just a few weeks ago, posting on the absurdity of planting the Eiffel Tower, we'd taken aim at the Met as well for the shabby way it has (mis-)treated its monumental beaux-arts façade, using it as a glorified laundry-line since the days of Thomas Hoving.

Clearly others have been thinking the same thing as well, most important among them the person writing a check for the $60-odd million it will cost to renovate the 4-block-long strip of the Museum's Fifth Avenue street frontage: the 0.01% of the 1%, multigazillionaire David Koch.

Pandering to barely conceivable wealth, the NY Times article leads you to believe that Koch was the one who had the Eureka! moment, after he'd seen the renovated fountain at Lincoln Center, and that the project sprang from his imagination like Venus from Saturn's brow.

Apparently not quite. The Times also reported (below the fold, of course) that Emily Rafferty, the Met's president, had been looking for a donor for years. And years. (Echoes of Saint Simon, who wrote how the Sun King's architect, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, always planted an obvious error in his plans so that Louis XIV could point it out, and then he would profess astonishment that he himself had not seen it and praise the king for his penetrating eye, thereby leading him wherever he wanted. Plus ça change...)

So, thank you Mr. Koch for the check, thank you Ms. Rafferty for your persistence and evident fund-raising skills. And what exactly does one get for $60 not-nearly-as-big-as-they-used-to-be ones these days?

Pretty much what the Louvre got a decade ago (less the glass pyramid, the upscale underground shopping mall, and Dan Brown and Tom Hanks). The planning was done by the Philadelphia-based landscape design firm OLIN, who have also renovated other important Manhattan public spaces, Bryant Park and Columbus Circle.

To paraphrase another of Saint Simon's anecdotes, this one when Louis XIV asked Le Notre what he thought of Hardouin-Mansart's work in the gardens of Marly, "Hire a landscaper and you get a landscape." Gone are those triste 70s lozenge-shaped fountains stranded amid acres of pink granite, like the pompous afterthoughts they were. We now will have, as of 2014, two large, square I.M. Pei/Louvresque fontaines flanking the steps before the William Morris Hunt main façade, and beyond them pairs of square bosquets of untrimmed London plane trees with seating beneath, just as you'd find in the Tuileries gardens.

Fronting the outer McKim, Mead & White end pavilions, which project farthest toward Fifth Avenue, we get long allées of iconic clipped lindens redolent of the Champs-Elysées and the gardens of Le Notre. And we get café seating with rollout awnings just like you get all over Paris (though you'll probably be tasered if you try to smoke while sipping your Chardonney there).

We don't want to quibble here—after all, who doesn't like a tree?—and we rather like the bustle that will result from the shoe-horned fountains and bosquests-cum-food courts, and are amused by the provocation of Descartean plotted, poodle-clipped and tortured trees appearing in Manhattan, but must note that the allées are far too close to the buildings (well, truth be told everything is far too crammed and far too close to the buildings, but hey, it's New York). Clearly though, this idea of disengaging important public monuments from their surroundings is about as dead as classical architecture itself, and we doubt that even Mr. Koch is wealthy and influential enough to buy and raze the four blocks facing the Met to Madison Avenue (Park would be ideal) and get the job done right. He shouldn't feel too badly though; even the Sun King was forced to content himself with a rump front yard for the Louvre, unable to dislodge some very stubborn clerical holdouts in the church of St-Germain l'Auxerrois.

Hopefully the Met will also take another cue from the Tuileries and not max out on the Au Bon Pain kiosks but also find a few appropriate spots for public sculpture as well.

Curiously, and against all current French practice, the Met wishes to encourage use of secondary entrances accessible at the plaza level. This flies in the face of French logic, which holds that the larger and more important the public building and the greater the attendance, the fewer entrances should be open because only two security guards can be afforded in the operating budget, though massive amounts can be spent on the design of monumental doors that will never be used.

(Below, the Opéra Bastille's grandiose entrance 20 minutes before the opening curtain, and the Louvre's solution of how to enliven its vast inner court.)

If the architect has for some reason included more than two doors, as is often the case, they are best condemned with these plastic chains (approved by the fire inspectors, apparently as they will quickly melt in case of a serious conflagration), and visitors are to be herded with bicycle-stand barriers, neither of which any public building in Paris worth its sel de mer can ever have enough of.

If the Met really wants to go the whole nine metres here, we'd highly recommend they close off the main stairs with a few dozen yards of plastic chain and route all visitors via a makeshift labyrinth through any random entrance they see fit, chosen in a weekly lottery held by their maintenance staff.

At night, the Met's façade will now be lit by low-energy LED lights, instead of spots from across the street, just as in the Louvre's stunning Cour Carrée. All in all, a consummately pleasant, coherent and inviting plan that will turn the Met's Fifth Avenue frontage into the world's longest sidewalk café.

Unfortunately, Mayor Bloomberg has refused the Met's proposal to flood Fifth Avenue in the 80s and replace the M4 bus with MTA-run bâteaux-mouches.

No mention is made of gendarmes on roller blades or motionless street mimes or roving bands of fiercely cool fashionistas or bad accordian interpretations of Piaf or even if Woody Allen will be lurking about, but surely these necessary if minor clichés will not be forgotten to ensure the Met's complete francophilic transformation.

We'd only point out one inexcusable faux pas that gives the whole game away: those ridiculously suburban foundation plantings, pasted against a classical limestone façade that runs nearly ¼ mile long.

Tellement américain.