Fifth Avenue & 10th Street

Chasing the endless tangents of New York as I like to do I was brought back the other day to the Church of the Ascension.  It’s a spot that has always made me feel nostalgic for some reason, maybe for the simple fact that I used to pass by here several times a week in what already feels like my golden youth.  Though it’s more than that alone really: I think there’s something fall like about the building maybe; maybe the color of its brownstone ashlar, or that it kind of reminds me of an English country church, or maybe the fact that Fifth Avenue round here is developed on a scale that still gives a hint of its more cozy residential past.  You know, just trying to get home for supper before the sun goes down.  Sticking your hands in your pockets and turning up your coat collar as the church bells toll.

The particular tangent that brought me here was reading more about the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who I mentioned the last couple times around.  According to the American Institute of Architects, Saint-Gaudens designed the altar relief for the church in the 1880s – though the church itself makes no mention of him in their official history, and another source (ok, it’s Wikipedia) claims it was Saint-Gauden’s brother Louis who designed them.  Well honestly, who cares, cause it turns out this church is a mother load of new tangents anyway.  So let’s get a tangent hoppin!

The Church of the Ascension formed in 1827 as an evangelical Episcopalian congregation, with their first building (on Canal Street) co-designed by Ithiel Town (aka tangent number one, and hopefully someone we’ll return to someday).  When that building burned down in 1839 the congregation wasted no time in choosing a new site, on Fifth Avenue and 10th Street, and erecting the building that still stands today (the first one in the picture above).  That one was designed by none other than Richard Upjohn (tangent number two) and completed by 1841.  The English-born Upjohn, at the start of his career here, would go on to much fame for his Gothic Revival churches (like Trinity Church for example, probably his most famous), as well as much credit in general for sparking the Gothic Revival mania that would soon sweep the United States.  He was also the founder and first president of the American Institute of Architects in 1857, even if he was British.  His Church of the Ascension was purportedly the first church erected on the fairly newly laid-out Fifth Avenue.

The Church of the Ascension’s connection with some big names in architecture didn’t stop with Upjohn though.  In the mid to late 1880s they had the interior of the church redesigned by Stanford White (tangent number three), while Stanford’s architectural firm McKim, Mead & White (number four) – probably the premier firm of their day – redesigned the parish house next door.  It was during this remodeling that Augustus Saint-Gaudens would have been called in to create the altar relief, if he indeed was called in. (UPDATE: Just noted on the church’s website that they credit Louis Saint-Gauden with the work. Well phew, glad we got it sorted out and glad that little Louis got a little work thrown his way from time to time.)  More certain is the fact that a number of stained glass windows were designed by John LaFarge (yep, number five) as well as the massive mural above the alter, “The Ascension of Our Lord,” which is a pretty nifty looking piece.  I mean, you gotta love a good Jesus ascension, don’t ya?

The church could afford all this of course because they had a pretty classy clientele, if clientele is the word to use, with names like Astor, de Peyster, Belmont (of subway, and racetrack, fame) and Rhinelander.  The Rhinelander family – Julia and Serene Rhinelander specifically – gave the gift that allowed the interior to be “beautified” and sure, let’s go ahead and make the Rhinelander family tangent number six cause hell, why not?

Before the remodeling in the 1880s the biggest event to take place at the church was probably the marriage of then President John Tyler to his much younger second wife, Julia Gardiner (then 24 years old to Tyler’s 54).  Due to the age difference, the fact that Tyler was currently the President of the United States, and the fact that Julia’s father had recently died, the ceremony was performed very discreetly, with the news only being broken to the American public after the fact.  Julia Gardiner came from the wealthy Gardiner family, born and raised on her family’s privately owned Gardiners Island, off the eastern tip of Long Island, and one of the largest privately owned islands in the country.  In fact Gardiners Island is still owned by the Gardiner Family, as it has been for almost 400 years, making it the only American real estate still intact as part of an original royal grant from the English crown.  Talk about a tangent!  This is the kind of stuff that I go crazy about.  I was gonna say that President Tyler could be tangent number seven, but clearly Gardiners Island takes the cake.  I mean this might have to spawn a whole new series of exploration.  Island by Island?  Here I come.

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 & 64th Street

All right people, I think I’m actually going to stick with my regimen, as promised, and see where a tangent from my last post might take us.  Who knows what nuanced, layered connections we may find; what dives into the depths of meditative fancy; what skittering flights along the wild byways of the past  (hey, I’m just like Sebald!)  Although in truth I’m inevitably just gonna write about a building – it’ll be made of stone or brick or metal, maybe have a copper cornice or something, no bigs.  It’s still exciting isn’t it?

We know the architectural firm of Warren & Wetmore built Grand Central Station (their masterpiece) as well as Chelsea Piers, the Con Ed tower on 14th Street and the New York Yacht Club.  But what else did they build?  I have to warn you, the answer is going to involve a lot of rich people, and the slightly less rich people that worked for them.  That’s okay; that’s largely the story of New York’s development….this shit costs money, ya know?

And if you’re speaking about money the Astor family is a good place to start.  We still hear about these guys today.  The founder of this dynasty, John Jacob Astor goes back a ways – even further back than Vanderbilt; in fact he was the first millionaire in the United States, making his money in the fur trade (specifically beaver fur) back when that was all the rage.  The family fortune and bloodline was carried on by Astor’s second son, William Backhouse Astor, who himself had two sons: John Jacob Astor III and William Backhouse Astor Jr.  (I’m picking up on a theme of recurring names here).  John Jacob Astor III would go on to be the wealthiest family member of his generation – actively involved in growing his fortune.  William Jr. was more content to just enjoy the good life, apparently spending a lot of time aboard his private yacht (considered the largest in the world at the time) and standing mostly aside while his wife reigned supreme over New York’s high society.

His wife, Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor (who I’ve mentioned before), came from an old-money New York Dutch family herself, and was known in her time simply as “the Mrs. Astor.”  Her first home (with her husband) was on the present site of the Empire State Building, though it was initially torn down to build the Astoria Hotel, at which point Mrs. Astor moved to Fifth Avenue and 65th Street, in a house designed by Richard Morris Hunt (today the site of Temple Emanu-El) .

A few years later a house was constructed for her daughter Caroline Schermerhorn Astor (again with the recurring names) and son-in-law, Marshall Orme Wilson, just around the corner on 64th and Fifth Avenue, and designed by none other than Warren & Wetmore.  The house, finished in 1903, is massive (by my apartment’s standards at least): 65 feet wide and 5 stories tall, with an amazing blue slate mansard roof replete with five perfectly ornate occuli (them little round windows).   Since 1950 it’s been known as the New India House: the current seat of the Consulate General of India.  Now were the Astors connected to India itself in anyway?  There’s a good chance, given that enough money tends to make you connected with everything, in a certain sense.  And Marshall Orme Wilson’s son may have been a diplomat himself, to Haiti, so that’s a little bit of a connection I guess.  It seems like once you start on this kind of thing, there’s a connection everywhere; it can even get a little tiring.  We don’t have to keep doing it, do we?   I mean, even Sebald probably took a break sometimes, I’d guess; you know: just took a little walk or something, watching the leaves change, thinking about the past.

Fifth Avenue & 44th Street

In addition to trying to show how everything’s connected (does that sound a tad ambitious, hehe) I’ve also come to see these writings as a kind of incidental catalog – a tiny way to make some order out of the endless and overlapping stimulus and artifacts, people and history that make up New York; a way to keep it all straight.  I often think that I should be a bit more systematic about it all: actually make lists and follow them; of neighborhoods for example, or skyscrapers or churches or certain types of buildings, certain architects or influential New York persona.  But the whole point of life I think is that it isn’t systematic; that one can casually pick up some bits of knowledge as one goes along, to be returned to or forgotten as one needs – a catalog made on the run.  That’s how it seems to really work in practice at least, and practice is reality, and reality is fun.  Well is it fun?  Most of the time.

Cornelius Vanderbilt is one of those New York persona I’ve had in mind, since touching upon him when writing on Grand Central Station.  Following the path of his life would bring you in touch with a lot of the city.  Vanderbilt’s life (as biographer T.J. Stiles notes) spanned “the presidency of George Washington through the days of John D. Rockefeller.”  Born on Staten Island in 1794, the pugilistic capitalist made his fortune in steam boats during the laissez-faire days of Jacksonian Democracy, before making an even epically huger fortune in shipping (specifically to California during the gold-rush) and railroads.  He stopped going to school at age 11, and though literate was never much of a speller.  He married his first cousin and had 13 children with her.  When she died late in his life he apparently married another cousin, 43 years his junior.  He was worth over $100 million upon his death in 1877, a record amount at the time, and left almost all of it to just one son.  (Daniel Day Lewis would probably love to play this guy…and he’d only have to shave off his Lincoln beard and keep the muttonchops).

Vanderbilt’s wealth (if not his cultured respectability) allowed him to become an early member of the New York Yacht Club – founded in 1844 by John Cox Stevens.  Stevens was the eldest son of Revolutionary War colonel John Stevens, the one-time owner of almost all of present day Hoboken.  Colonel Stevens and his second son Robert Livingston Stevens where sometime allies, sometime rivals of Vanderbilt – running steamship lines out of New Jersey and up the Hudson.  Robert L. Stevens was also president of one of the earliest railroads in the country: the New Jersey based Camden & Amboy Railroad, which began running in 1833.  That same year saw the Hightstown rail accident: the earliest recorded train accident involving the death of passengers (2 killed when the train de-railed).  Vanderbilt himself was on board and almost lost his life when his lung was punctured in the crash.  It didn’t stop him from riding railroads though, or buying railroads, or racing his steamboats against his rivals.

The New York Yacht Club was founded with racing in mind too, though specifically the more patrician-worthy sail-boat type of racing (their schooner America won the first America‘s Cup in 1851, for which the trophy was then named).  The Yacht Club’s first home was in Hoboken, on land donated by Stevens, changing locations through the years (Staten Island, Mystic Connecticut) as their membership grew.  They didn’t build their current clubhouse on West 44th Street until 1899.  The Beaux-Arts building, replete with some pretty impressive nautical decorations, was the first building designed by Warren & Wetmore (responsible for Chelsea Piers and the Con Edison tower by Union Square), the same firm that would go on design the exterior of the current Grand Central Station.  Grand Central Station: the depot for the various rail-lines Vanderbilt himself owned.  So there you go, right back to old Cornelius again….that same reminder that maybe anyone’s personal history can be a proxy for the greater history around them, although it probably helps if you were the richest person in the country.   But who knows, maybe I’ll stick with this awhile and see where Vanderbilt’s tangents take me.  Yeah, let’s get all systematical!

Fifth Avenue & 90th Street

In my last post I mentioned the Fifth Avenue mansion of department store impresario A.T. Stewart, erected on the corner of 34th Street & Fifth Avenue.  Completed in 1870, the three-story French Second Empire style home stood just opposite Caroline Astor’s residence – basically ground-zero for New York’s high society.  Thirty years later that social center had moved about twenty blocks north, chased out by encroaching commerce.  In 1896 Caroline Astor, refusing to retire from public life, moved into her new mansion on Fifth Avenue and 65th Street.  The northern limit of fashionable society seemed to hold at about the  East 70s.

So it was quite a leap in 1898 when Andrew Carnegie purchased the two-block lot on Fifth Avenue between 90th and 92nd Street.  The area, which had been known as Prospect Hill, was dubbed “The Highlands,” because of its remote location.  It was exactly the type of space that Carnegie was looking for.  A self-professed hater of “ostentatious living,” he requested that his architects build him, “The most modest, plainest and most roomy house in New York.”  The end result was his Georgian style, 64 room mansion, set within a yard of almost 30,000 square feet (Caroline Astor’s yard by contrast held about 100).  The mansion stood between 91st and 92nd Street, with the lot north of 92nd Street intentionally left undeveloped, so as not to spoil the view.

But Carnegie didn’t purchase the lot just south of his house, and for years, in what must have been one of the more jarring contrasts in the city, it housed a row of billboards and a tiny run-down lemonade stand.  Maybe Carnegie stopped by for a drink from time to time.  Maybe he stared out his window and dreamed about the day that he could tear it down.  His chance came in 1917, when a sign was posted on the property, “For sale – without restrictions.”  The “without restrictions,” was particularly troubling, meaning that the new buyer could erect whatever type of building they liked.  Carnegie purchased the lot for over $1.7 million, ensuring that his property wouldn’t be encroached on by a tall apartment building.  It remained undeveloped for seven years after his death, in 1919.

At that point the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest came looking for a new location.  The church, standing on Fifth Avenue and 45th Street, had been founded by Civil War veterans in 1865 as a memorial to all those killed in that “terrible conflict.”  Carnegie’s widow Louise agreed to sell the lot across the street, at the discounted price of $1 million, with the stipulation that the land would be used (through 1975) exclusively for a Christian church, of a height no greater than 75 feet (okay, I have to admit this story might be apocryphal, but it’s a good one).  The first service was held there in 1929, although the intention was to continue carving the facade to match the church’s Neo-Gothic style.  The stock market crash of that same year forced a change of plans however – without decorative carvings, the streamlined and slab-like  exterior took on a modernistic, Art Deco appearance that was highly admired.

In the early seventies the Carnegie Corporation donated the Carnegie mansion and property to the Smithsonian; since 1976 it’s housed the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum.  Prior to that, Louise – who was over twenty years younger than Andrew – lived in the house until her death in 1946.  You gotta wonder how lonely she got there: just her and 64 rooms.  Although she still spent her summers in Skibo Castle, which by the looks of it is even roomier.  Skibo Castle is in the actual Highlands, in Scotland, a bit more remote than Fifth Avenue and 90th Street.   A summer there might have you longing for the cramped and cozy NYC life, full of lemonade and churches.

(Originally posted May 14th, 2010 on Takethehandle.com)

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)

5th Avenue & 25th Street (Brooklyn)

I’m not one to think about death too often. Are you surprised? Call it a product of my environment — I don’t exactly live a life out on the front lines. I’m more of a burrower myself. Although I’ve always thought that I would make a fine man for reconnaissance. Because I’m pretty good at hiding, and I can run away real fast. I’m speaking literally here: just try and catch me. Metaphorically it’s not like that at all. Metaphorically you can run, and you should run, a shit load, but you can’t run away from anything. It’s just no fun. Try running towards some stuff instead. Same goes for hiding. You got a tree of troubles? Don’t go get lost in there — you got to turn around and nip it in the bud. Just nip it in the bud old friends! Only healthy shit grows. You can pretty much ignore the rest of it.

Alright, alright, it grows and then it dies, and so it’s left for someone else to think about it; someone who’s living. I find that I’m someone who’s living. I actually find that all the time. And so I think about it — I think of all the things amongst us that have died. I mean the cultural, the physical, the remnants of these other worlds now gone that have some echo, still, within our own. You see some 19th century mausoleum built in the style of a Roman shrine whose deity fell out of human mind’s two thousand years ago. Or shit, you just watch Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet.” These feelings are all around us.

On 5th Avenue and 25th Street, in Brooklyn, you’ll find the entry gates to Green-Wood Cemetery. It’s an arresting spot, especially if you happen to go by it in that purple, snow-lit hour before total dark. It’s great how snow can pad the air itself and color what we otherwise would think of as an empty space. It changes the acoustics of perception. You know what I’m saying, all you winter haters? Where else you gonna find something like that? But yes, I will admit, it does make things pretty slippery. I was skidding and sliding all over the place! And sure, I certainly was drunk as well; that didn’t help things any. But really, how could you not be?

These gates were built in 1861 in a Gothic Revival style, although the cemetery itself has been around since 1838. A colony of monk parakeets live in the center spire. The story goes that they escaped from Idlewild Airport in the 1960s, sometime before it changed its name to JFK. Green-Wood Cemetery was very popular as a walking park and picnic spot all through the 1850s, and it was influential as a model and an inspiration for the creation of Central Park, around the time when people decided that they didn’t want to hang out in graveyards anymore. Eating lunch amongst the tombstones — surely there’s some significance in that. Though I suppose in a certain sense we’re still doing that exact same thing today.

The other evening I was waiting for the subway and from somewhere down the platform I could hear a lone trumpeter playing the theme from “The Godfather.” And it was like that all over again. I wasn’t sure just where my own life started, new, separate from everything I have inherited. I didn’t want to know. I felt just then I was in love the way they must have been back in the early 60s: Dylan hopping on the A train with his guitar case in his hand. One other time I took a train alone to the ruins of an ancient Greek colony in Italy, and when I got out at the station I was the only person there — walking down the long dirt path, with those giant gates laid out in front of me. It was the morning and the summer and I felt just like the Greeks must have when they decided to invent the world. There was something there inside me. It was me, and it was something else, and it was something else entirely. And yeah, I thought, all right my friend, I think I’ll call you Zeus.  We’re gonna do this thing together.

(Originally posted Jan. 23rd, 2009 on Takethehandle.com)