Fifth Avenue & 82nd Street

Sorry my many loyal and obsessive fans!  I want to try to post these more frequently but it’s been a busy couple of weeks: the hurricane, Obama winning the election (Obama!), the snowstorm, my local deli selling 24oz. Budlight Lime for only $1.60 which means you’ve got to buy as many as you can right now before they realize how cheap that is.  Anyway, I’m trying hard to get on target here.

One great thing about Obama winning is that I can continue to read about the daily and weekly minutiae of politics, which I really enjoy, without the despair of feeling like my country is being run by people with diametrically opposed values from mine.  I like getting up to read the paper – it’s not quite history (do you ever read yesterday’s paper?) so much as the dossier on a specific day, this specific day.  I like to see what I’m gonna find in there.  Though honestly?  I like getting up just to check the five-day weather forecast, the new temperature posted on the horizon.  “Into that from which things take their rise they pass away once more, as is ordained, for they make reparation and satisfaction to one another for their injustice according to the ordering of time.”  Wait a minute: is that what the five-day weather forecast makes me think?  What kind of pompous asshole am I?

I don’t know.  Anaximander of Miletus said that by the way, circa maybe 546 B.C. (I feel like Cormac McCarthy must have it taped above his writing desk.).  It’s funny to think of how many centuries the Greeks were studied and worshipped and referenced by such a large part of Western society and now it’s like “Wuuh?”  Instead we report about what people write on Twitter on the news ­– which I suppose is the modern version of what the Greeks called discourse.  I’m not the only one who finds that slightly scary.

Richard Morris Hunt must have known about the Greeks though.  He was considered the preeminent American architect of his day, or maybe the first great statesman of American architecture.  While a resident of New York City, it’s the unfortunate fact that very few of his NYC buildings still stand.  Among his demolished treasures were the New York Tribune Building (one of the earliest high-rise elevator buildings), Stuyvesant Flats (the first middle-class apartment building, or “Parisian flats” in the city), William Vanderbilt’s mansion on Fifth Avenue and 58^th St. and Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor’s house on Fifth Avenue and 65^th, which I briefly mentioned last time around; see I haven’t forgotten about the little tangent kick we’re on!  And see, I mentioned the Vanderbilts again!

Still what does survive of Hunt’s works are pretty impressive, perhaps none more so than the Beaux Arts Fifth Avenue façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of which Hunt was also a trustee.  He provided the original sketches for the Great Hall as well, finished after his death in 1895 by his son Richard Howland Hunt, and described by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) guide as, “the City’s only suggestion of the visionary neo-Roman spaces of the 18^th-century Italian draftsman and engraver Piranesi.”  Damn, I knew something was missing in this town.

Hunt was president of the AIA (after 1869) and worked hard to impose a kind of order and prestige on the architectural profession – for one by favoring trained architects over older craftsmen who had worked their way through the ranks: a distinction that tended to break down along class lines.  No surprises there; Hunt seemed to have an appropriately Greek notion of the importance, necessity and responsibilities of the aristocracy, like so many people of his day.  It was the whole idea of the Metropolitan Museum in fact: a place that simultaneously exalted the treasures and status of the wealthy while being presented as a civic gift to the masses (though built on public land with public money).  Still, it wasn’t all lip service.  As Joseph C. Choate said at its 1880 opening, the museum would be a force of good, that by its “diffusion of a knowledge of art in its higher forms of beauty would tend directly to humanize, to educate and refine a practical and laborious people.”  Now I’m not sure if the Greeks were about that kind of thing exactly – bettering the practical and laborious people – but the upper crust of the 19^th century surely were.  It’s cool; I can get behind it.  Well it’s better than just saying “Fuck em,” which is how I would summarize the current G.O.P. stance on things – and ain’t they supposed to be the party of the 21^st century’s upper crust?                                      

Fifth Avenue & 82nd Street

I’m back in New York City after a couple of weeks in Italy, marveling at how wide all of our streets feel. The reports are true; there’s nothing called Third Avenue in Europe. Or 14th Street. Compared to Rome, Park Avenue is like the god damn Grand Canyon! The Via del Corso, Rome’s main thoroughfare, is probably slimmer than Bleecker Street. But fair enough. The urban reality was different a couple thousand years ago (even a couple hundred). There was no such thing as city planning, for one thing. And most of the buildings that make up Manhattan today aren’t any older than the turn of the last century. You’re looking at a completely different use of space.

Of course, while the buildings might not be any older than a hundred years, the forms they use most often are. New York is full of examples of architectural revival, playing off of styles developed hundreds of years before. But I like how these second-generation movements become significant in their own right. Just as the actual Greeks can be placed in a specific place and time, so too for something like Greek Revival. Or the neo-classical Beaux-Arts style, which seemingly drew on almost everything that came before it, though I suppose there were some guidelines. Amongst other things, it emphasized the example of Imperial Roman architecture between the rule of Augustus Caesar and the Severan emperors. Oh boy, I love that type of distinction, really, and I don’t even know what the hell they’re talking about!

Beaux-Arts was a big deal in the United States between roughly 1885-1920, which lines up pretty well with the creation of the New York of the present day. A lot of prominent NYC buildings are in this style, including Grand Central Terminal, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The same goes for the mansion across the street from the Met, the Benjamin N. & Sarah Duke House on the corner of 82nd Street. This is some conspicuous wealth on display here, none the less so since you’ve got the Metropolitan as your next door neighbor. Now traveling in Italy was a reminder to me that rich folks have been around a lot longer than America (in size alone the Palazzo Pitti has this place beat for sure). But what strikes me as specifically American about the mansion is the fact that it was originally built on speculation – sold on the market to Benjamin Duke of the American Tobacco Company, only after it had been completed in 1901. It tells you a little bit about those times, in the Upper East Side at least, that a house like that could be built with the confidence someone would buy it. I can’t see a Florentine development firm saying the same thing about the Palazzo Pitti – “Ah, the Medicis will probably will take it. As soon as that shipment of Flemish wool comes in this town is going to be rolling in dough.” But hey, guess what? The Medicis did take it, after the Pitti family went broke and they had to sell it all away.

Benjamin Duke sold this house too, to his brother James in 1907, while James was waiting for the construction of his own mansion to be finished. It was, in 1912, and he moved in there, on Fifth Avenue & 78th Street; it’s now the graduate school of art history for NYU. It was James’ endowment to Duke University in 1924 that gave that school its name. Benjamin himself decided he would rather live at the Plaza Hotel. Then he changed his mind again and had a mansion built to order (no speculation this time) on Fifth Avenue & 89th Street. It was later torn down to make way for the Guggenheim. The Duke Mansion on 82nd Street stayed in the family though, even after being subdivided into apartments in 1985. It was only recently sold out of it, for $40 million, down from the asking price of $50 million, which had made it one of the most expensive townhouses ever on the market.

But what’s all that to me? This morning, my big decision was whether to eat the other half of my apple now, or to save it for later. It was a Fuji, which though developed in Japan, is a cross between two American varieties, the Red Delicious, and the 18th century Virginian Rawls Genet. I had the window open. There was a lovely breeze.

(Originally posted April 2nd, 2009 on Takethehandle.com)