An American Renaissance Beaux-Arts Architecture in New York City
Phillip James Dodd Photography by Jonathan Wallen Foreword by Julian Fellowes
Contents
Foreword Julian Fellowes
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The American Renaissance Richard Guy Wilson
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Introduction
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Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House
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New York Public Library
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Grand Central Terminal
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Woolworth Building
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The Frick Collection
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Brooklyn Trust Company Building
328
Williamsburgh Savings Bank
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Otto Kahn Mansion
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Samuel Tilden House
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Cunard Building
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General Grant National Memorial
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Gould Memorial Library and the Hall of Fame for Great Americans
New York Life Insurance Company Building
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Woodlawn Cemetery
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The University Club
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Soldiers and Sailors Monument
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Appeal
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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Acknowledgments
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Joseph De Lamar Mansion
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Image Credits
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James Burden Mansion
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Selected Bibliography
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The Pierpont Morgan Library
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Index
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Foreword Julian Fellowes
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Opposite: The Fifth Avenue mansion of Henry Clay Frick is one of the most expensive ever built (see page 298), costing the equivalent of $85 million. Although Frick was accustomed to spending large sums of money to get what he wanted, he squabbled with his designers over almost every invoice.
n the history of the United States, the Gilded Age—a term first coined by Mark Twain—is associated with an era of unparalleled growth, prosperity, and cultural change, incorporating palaces in Newport, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and the creation of the modern metropolis that we now recognize as New York City. Spanning from the 1870s to the 1930s, this period is also fittingly referred to as the American Renaissance. It was an era of vast immigration from Europe, and with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, it represented a transition from an essentially rural society to an urban nation. Nowhere was this change more evident than in New York, where in the space of seventy years the city’s population exploded from 123,000 in 1820 to over two million in 1890. And just like in the Italian Renaissance some three hundred years earlier, New York was ruled by an elite, self-appointed group. These were the titans of American finance and industry, whose unprecedented power and limitless fortunes made them supreme in the land. Their very names, Astor, Carnegie, Frick, Morgan, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt, still reek of money. To this rich and select crew, it was not enough that the city merely be the nation’s financial capital; their collective dream was to create a new city, a new metropolis that would also become the nation’s cultural capital. Simply put, they wanted to create what historian David Gerrard Lowe refers to as a new Paris on the Hudson. To flaunt their recently acquired riches, influence, and power to the world they needed an architecture steeped in grandeur, full of historical reference, and dripping in embellishment. Enter the Beaux-Arts style. The Beaux-Arts style came to the United States, and in particular to New York, at precisely the right moment. Although the phrase is nothing more than the French for “fine arts,” it has come to identify a particularly monumental school of architecture that can be found in many of New York’s greatest landmarks. It is fair to say that these buildings have elevated themselves to become not just monuments located within New York City, but monuments of New York City. They were intended to be a testament to their age, to the bankers and industrialists who commissioned them, the architects who designed them, and the technological advancements of the day that allowed architecture to reach for the stars, both physically and metaphorically; they included the Grand Central Terminal, the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Woolworth Building, and numerous others featured in these pages. America has always turned to Europe for instruction in the arts, and much of the inspiration for many of the wonderful buildings featured in this book was sought from France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The great character that was
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The American Renaissance Richard Guy Wilson
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Opposite: Marking the intersection of Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and 22nd Street is the Fuller Building, renamed by an awe-inspired public as the Flatiron Building. Designed in 1902 by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, the baroque twenty-one-story early skyscraper took a mere nine months to construct and was referred to by critics as “Burnham’s Folly” and a “meager slice of cake.” Although never the world’s tallest building, its slender showstopping silhouette (which is just six feet wide at its narrowest) has made it one of the most recognizable buildings in the world.
hat is the American Renaissance? The buildings and monuments in this book dating from the 1870s to the 1920s illustrate a plurality of stylistic sources and approaches to design. From the Williamsburgh Savings Bank by George B. Post to the University Club by McKim, Mead & White, and from the monumental entrance façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Richard Morris Hunt to the Woolworth Building by Cass Gilbert, one is presented with many styles and approaches to design. This variety might be called eclecticism: no one style rules. The buildings range from a skyscraper with Gothic details to a classical dome or grand arches flanked by giant paired columns. A similar diversity exists with the wealth of decoration and ornament found in the University Club’s Pinturicchio-inspired murals by Henry Siddons Mowbray to the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House with Daniel Chester French’s Four Continents statues at the entrance and inside murals of automobiles and steamships added in the 1930s by Reginald Marsh. In addition to these public and commercial buildings, the book contains residences such as the restrained Italian Renaissance façade of the Otto Kahn mansion by C.P.H. Gilbert and J. Armstrong Stenhouse, which contrasts with the multilayered façade and the huge mansard roofs of the Joseph De Lamar mansion also by C.P.H. Gilbert. And then there are the memorials, such as Grant’s Tomb designed by John H. Duncan, which is largely based upon the Greek fourth-century B.C. Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. In contrast stands the mausoleum for one of the wealthiest families, the Belmonts at Woodlawn Cemetery by Richard Howland Hunt, which copies a sixteenth-century French Gothic chapel designed by Leonardo da Vinci. Underlying these differences, a common theme emerges of grandeur and drawing upon the monuments of the past. The message presented is that art and architecture make an impact and that New York was one of the centers of a new cultural civilization. The buildings noted above and the many others in this book are frequently lumped under the term “Beaux-Arts style,” but it should be emphasized that the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where some (not all) of the architects and artists studied, never taught a single style. The label Beaux-Arts style came into usage in the 1970s with reference to turnof-the century classicism. The teaching of architecture at the école and in American schools beginning with Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1865 (which copied the école) contained a historical and classical heritage since most architecture books beginning with Vitruvius and continuing with Palladio, Serlio, Ware, and many more were based on Greek and Roman classicism that was constantly being reborn (or “renaissanced”). Classicism is an approach with rules, not a style, and there exists
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WILLIAMSBURGH SAVINGS BANK
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Opposite: Although Tilden’s library was repurposed as the club bar, it retained its magnificent stained-glass domed ceiling. Above: John La Farge was responsible for much of the stained glass in the townhouse. He would introduce Louis Comfort Tiffany to the fundamentals of opalescent glass, and then spend the remainder of his life in a legal dispute with Tiffany over its patent.
enter the residence under a gazing bust of Michelangelo that was added in 2006 by artist Sergio Rossetti Morosini. Vaux reserved a unique feature of the façade for the first floor in between the bay windows. Here, within easy view of pedestrians, he designed a decorative panel and commissioned sculptor Samuel Kitson (1848–1906) to carve the portrait busts of Tilden’s favorite authors—Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, and Dante—along with Benjamin Franklin whom the former politician considered to be the quintessential American. In addition to Vaux’s work on the exterior, he oversaw a complete remodeling of the interior. The everyday entrance hall includes a handsome walnut-paneled wainscot, parquet floors, and an ornate Victorian staircase with an intricate fretwork balustrade. A stained-glass panel by John La Farge (1835–1910), that was originally part of the front door separates the stair hall from the front parlor rooms. These lavishly decorated salons are covered in well-worn dark-walnut paneling with elaborate wood-carved fireplace surrounds by Ellin & Kitson (operated by the brother of Samuel Kitson). Yet as striking as the wall treatments and furnishing are, it is the ceilings that led the modern architect Philip Johnson to describe the Samuel Tilden house as the most beautiful in the entire city. Crafted by La Farge, these ceilings comprise wood strapwork, with ornate woodcarved ceiling bosses, and a turquoise-blue glass tile that creates a mirror effect with shifting tones as light shines across it.
Samuel Tilden House
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Gener al Gr ant National Memorial
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Placed between the columns and helping to define the peristyle are low bookcases designed by Stanford White (as are much of the furnishings in the clubhouse) that support classical busts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Plato. Yet, as beautiful as this room is, its role is merely that of an appetizer getting one ready for the main course. The astonishing library is a lesson in artisanship, geometry, ingenuity, and a perfect synthesis of architecture and painting. The vaulted space is divided into five bays with alcoves on each side. The central bay has a domical vault, while the bays either side have groin vaults. Each of the alcoves has its own intersecting barrel vault, leaving semicircular lunettes at the end of each alcove as well as at either end of the 100-footlong room. The vaulted ceiling springs from structural double-height bookcases crafted in English oak, each of which contains a tiny narrow staircase that leads to a bronze balcony above, and access to the higher shelves. Above the opening to each of these eight staircases is an ornate, carved niche containing a bronzed bust, while large arched windows along the south-facing West 54th Street façade flood the space with natural light. The University Club Library boasts a collection of over 100,000 volumes (the largest of any private club in the country), with 25,000 of those books on display in this fantastical space. From the get-go there was no budget to decorate the ceiling, and so McKim strategically had the ceiling painted a bare “unfinished” white, while he lobbied for the funding to complete the Pinturicchio-inspired murals that he so desperately wanted. His ploy worked when club member Charles T. Barney personally guaranteed the expense to fulfill McKim’s vision. With the funding in place, McKim engaged artist Henry Siddons Mowbray (1858–1928) and immediately dispatched him to Rome to study the mural paintings of Pinturicchio in the Borgia Apartments of the Vatican. Mowbray, who later worked with McKim on the Pierpont Morgan Library, spent two years in Rome meticulously documenting these frescoes, while also serving as the director of the American Academy, before returning to New York and his studio in Greenwich Village to complete his designs for The University Club. Consisting of the entirety of the walls and ceiling above the bookcases, the composition includes painted murals, ornamental moldings, and panels in gold relief. The lunettes at each end of the room depict Romance and History; while those on the north elevation depict Geometry, Arithmetic, Music, and Rhetoric, and are close copies of Pinturicchio. Other themes include the Old and New Testaments, as well as scenes from Greek and Egyptian mythology, rectangular panels referencing Literature, Art, Science, and Philosophy, and medallion portraits of Dante, Tasso, Virgil, Petrarch, Homer, Socrates, Goethe, and Shakespeare. The panels were finally installed in the fall of 1904, and immediately praised by all, including J.P. Morgan whom McKim brought to the unveiling as a way of tempting him to do something similar at his own private library. The last of the main stories is dedicated to dining, and like the others includes a central cortile. Unlike the others, though, this subdued oak-paneled vestibule is intentionally only a single story in height—to allow for a kitchen and then a musicians’ gallery stacked above, and more importantly to heighten the drama of entering the space beyond. The Dining Room, at 136 feet long by thirty-three feet tall is the largest room in the clubhouse, and one of the most impressive in the entire city. The English oak paneling instantly recalls the historic colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, while the elaborate ornamented and gilt ceiling is modeled after that at the Doge’s Palace in Venice. At either end of the room are beautifully turned fluted Ionic columns that screen end bays containing huge antique stone fireplaces. A tall attic, which accommodates the musicians’ gallery, elevates the double-height main space above the lower ceilings at the
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Recognized as one of the most gifted and versatile artists of the Gilded Age, the Egyptian-born Henry Siddons Mowbray (1858–1928) would receive private commissions from many of the leading protagonists of the era, and was a particular favorite of Charles McKim with whom he often collaborated.
Opposite: Crafted from English oak, the arched opening at the north elevation of the Dining Room features a series of lunettes depicting the campus of America’s oldest colleges. Mounted on the Ionic pilasters are wall sconces commissioned from Edward F. Caldwell, the premier designer and manufacturer of electric light fixtures during the Gilded Age. Page 116: The richly ornamented and gilt ceiling is based on a Venetian precedent, with the panels of the attic once displaying specimen animal heads. The giant chandeliers were based upon historic designs researched and sourced by Caldwell. Page 117: When the clubhouse was opened, the Dining Room was described by the Herald Tribune as having no equal in the United States. Divided into three sections, it occupies the entire West 54th Street side of the seventh floor.
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soldiers and sailors monument
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Upon the death of his father, Richard Howland Hunt (1862–1931) took on the responsibility of completing his commissions. He then went into partnership with his younger brother, Joseph, forming the architectural practice of Hunt & Hunt, where they continued their father’s legacy of working for many of the wealthiest families of the Gilded Age.
Opposite: The giant limestone arches are decorated with egg-and-dart and leaf-andtongue moldings, the plaster-coated pedentives are paneled, and closely spaced brackets encircle the base of each dome. The original brackets, which were more elaborate and linked by swags, were changed during work in the 1930s. Page 144: Completing the symmetry of the Great Hall, a large arched opening on the second floor allows natural light into the windowless Grand Staircase, while openings either side allow ease of circulation between the two spectacular spaces. Page 145: Making up for the lack of embellishment inside the Great Hall, the corridor of columns alongside the Grand Staircase features a significant decorative sculptural program completed by Karl Bitter.
a tile vaulting system perfected during the Italian Renaissance. On the second floor a continuous balcony wraps the Great Hall, and from this vantage point the perspective of the saucer domes and intersecting barrel vaults are suggestive of the eighteenth-century capriccio etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Empty pedimented niches within the piers as well as the blank roundels above suffered the same fate as much of the exterior sculptural program. The floor comprises an aggregate of crushed marble pieces poured into sections and framed within yellow marble borders. On all four elevations the colonnade of Ionic fluted columns is repeated, through which access to the first-floor galleries in the north and south wings can be gained. Directly across the Great Hall from the front entrance, and through one of these colonnades, is the Grand Staircase that ascends to Vaux’s original galleries and the heart of the museum where the European Old Masters are still displayed. This spectacular staircase is the rival of any in the world. Either side, supported on a rusticated limestone base, is a screen of engaged Corinthian columns with arched openings in between. Carved in the spandrels either side of the arches are depictions of the heralds blowing their trumpets, as well as foliage comprising victory laurels, acanthus leaves, and oak branches. Above is a rather simple barrel-vaulted ceiling that directs your attention to the top of the staircase and through an arch to one of the museum’s prized possessions, the masterpiece The Triumph of Marius (1729) by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Unfortunately, Hunt did not live long enough to see his great masterpiece break ground—passing away suddenly aged sixty-seven on July 31, 1895. His wife, Catherine, who inherited his estate, including all the design drawings for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, insisted that her eldest son complete the work. While Richard Howland Hunt (1862–1931) had assisted his father in the design of the museum, the trustees felt that the thirty-three-year-old lacked the experience required to oversee such an important commission. A compromise was reached when Richard Morris Hunt’s old friend and former protégé George B. Post vouched for the young architect and offered his services in purely an advisory capacity. Together they faithfully adhered to the great architect’s design, and in December 1902 New Yorkers were finally able to marvel at the Great Hall. The completion of Hunt’s grand edifice ushered in a golden era for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1904 the great banker and collector extraordinaire John Pierpont Morgan was elected chairman of the board of trustees. Intensely competitive, Morgan would usher in a series of changes that would elevate the Met into the world-class museum that we now see. He lured away curators from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and what is now the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; he bequeathed over 4,000 pieces from his own estate (a legacy that is the backbone of the museum’s famous medieval collection); and he financed the excavations carried out by the museum in Egypt, where he kept a large dahabeah for cruising down the Nile. His example would lead, or guilt, other private collectors into making substantial donations to the museum. Morgan then tasked architect Charles McKim (who was in the midst of designing the Wall Street titan’s own private repository) to complete Hunt’s master plan for the museum. McKim was well versed in complex large-scale projects, and by then was used to working for the demanding Morgan. In truth, although Hunt’s new wing had added the ceremonial entrances of the Great Hall and Grand Staircase, it had not provided any much-needed gallery space. And so, despite McKim’s reverence for Hunt (which stemmed back to the original Vanderbilt Mansion on Fifth Avenue), the designer in him could not but help improve upon his predecessor’s master plan, inserting circulation corridors and skylighted atriums in between the galleries. Over the next twenty years
THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
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JOSEPH DE LAMAR MANSION
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ot all of the tycoons of the Gilded Age were rags-to-riches stories. John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) was born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, the heir to two of New England’s most prominent families. His father had already made a name for himself in banking and groomed his son for a career in international finance. The young Morgan started his training by working at the London branch of his father’s merchant bank, where he was taught to save his money and avoid risk at all costs. Yet despite this privileged upbringing, Morgan was not one to be merely content nor avoid risk. America was in an era of unparalleled industrial and economic growth, an era of opportunity, a new renaissance. Morgan pictured himself as a new Medici merchant prince, with the ambition and determination to conquer the financial world. Over the next fifty years he would build the family fortune into a colossal financial and industrial empire focused on reorganizations and consolidations, gaining the nickname “The Napoleon of Wall Street.” His process of creating a monopoly through the elimination of competition and the maximization of profits (by slashing the workforce and reducing their wages) became known as “Morganization”. He began by reorganizing and restructuring the railroads. He then saw the potential in what many people thought was just a fad— the electric light. He invested close to everything with Thomas Edison and the Edison Electricity Company, and by 1892 had forged a deal to create one of America’s largest corporations: General Electric. Among his other varied business interests was the shipping company that controlled the White Star Line. As a major investor, he commissioned his own personal suite and promenade deck on board the newly constructed luxury liner Titanic. In 1901 Morgan took the lead in the consolidation and merger of the Carnegie Steel Company, buying out Andrew Carnegie, and creating history’s first ever billiondollar corporation: U.S. Steel. For brokering the deal Morgan’s syndicate received a commission of $62 million in the new company’s stock, which nowadays would represent over $1 billion. As profits soared, the average worker in one of these steel mills earned barely a dollar a day. Unlike many of the other so-called robber barons, Morgan chose not to flaunt his wealth and success in the usual manner. While the Vanderbilts showcased their vast wealth by building the largest and grandest mansions of the day—The Breakers (1895) in Newport, the Biltmore Estate (1895) in Asheville, and Hyde Park (1898) on the Hudson— Morgan instead chose to live in a brownstone in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan, on the corner of 36th Street and Madison Avenue. He looked down at those that flaunted their new-found wealth. Public shows of extravagance were not how families built on old money lived. Rather, Morgan concentrated on his philanthropic efforts. It was not enough that New York be the financial capital of America, it also had to be its cultural capital. This would be Morgan’s goal, his legacy, to transform New York into a cultural global metropolis. By the turn of the century he was America’s greatest patron of the fine arts, and the driving force behind the rise of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, serving as president and donating extensively from his own collection—a collection that rivaled any in the world. Morgan had started collecting art while touring Rome at the age of nineteen. It was the start of a love affair that would continue throughout his life, although the bulk of his collecting would not start until after the death of his disapproving father in 1890. To aid Morgan in his pursuit was Lord Joseph Duveen (1869–1939). With showrooms in London, Paris, and New York, Duveen was the most prominent art and antiques dealer of the Gilded Age, with a client list that boasted America’s most prolific collectors
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Referred to as the Napoleon of Wall Street, John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) was the single most powerful financier of the Gilded Age. He was also America’s most consequential collector of art, manuscripts and objets d’art, many of which were later bequeathed to numerous cultural institutions.
Lord Joseph Duveen (1869–1939) was a purveyor of European antiquities that he shrewdly transported across the Atlantic to sell to a newly affluent American clientele, famously goading them with, “You can get all the pictures you want for fifty thousand dollars apiece. But to get pictures for a quarter of a million dollars each, that wants doing!” Page 180: In the East Library, Henry Siddons Mowbray painted frescoes within a tinted glass backdrop depicting the principal categories of the book collection—Science, Astronomy, Tragedy, Comedy, Painting, Poetry, History, Music, Art, and Architecture. Opposite: The exterior of the library is constructed from solid blocks of marble without the use of mortar. The only other building in New York to employ this complex and costly construction technique is the Greek Revival Federal Hall on Wall Street, built sixty years earlier in 1842.
THE PIERPONT MORGAN LIBR ARY
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Although the plan of the library adheres to the general layout recommended by Billings in his Terms of Competition, it is nevertheless executed with a panache that was the hallmark of Thomas Hastings’s designs. From the moment a visitor steps off the sidewalk they are orchestrated on a dramatic journey—much like an unfolding novel. The plan may be functional, but the architectural progression throughout the interior, with anticipation mounting at every turn, is nothing short of spectacular. An everchanging palette of materials and details is emblematic of this experience, gradually getting more refined as one approaches the final destination of the third-floor Main Reading Room. The imposing main lobby, named Astor Hall as a condition of the merger, is one of the great spaces in the city. Encased entirely in marble, the room measures more than seventy feet long, forty-four feet wide, and thirty-four feet tall. The walls and vaulted ceiling are a lustrous white Vermont Danby marble, and the floor has an alternating pattern of Italian Carrara, Giallo Siena, and French Hauteville marble. The space is divided into three arched bays at the east and west, and two arched bays at the north and south. At the east and west the arches cut into the barrel-vaulted ceiling, with each bay framed by Doric columns (with carved bees incorporated into the design). The self-supported vault ceiling. The self-supported vault contains panels framed with carved ornamentation, including acanthus, guilloché, rosettes and fruit, and flower swags. At the east elevation, and opening onto the Fifth Avenue entrance portico, the bays are infilled with arched windows and pedimented doorways. Opposite at the west elevation, the arched bays provide access at the first floor to a corridor that runs the entire length of the building opening to windows at either end. Leading to the Map Room, DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room, and Gottesman Exhibition Hall, the corridor has moldedplaster coffered ceilings that have been faux painted to appear carved from wood. Two symmetrical self-supporting marble staircases, reminiscent of the grand staircase at the Paris Opera House (1875), are pushed to the side behind the piers, and accessed through the bays at the north and south. Each staircase contains a niche with an integrated bench on the landing, before ascending to the second-floor mezzanine that overlooks Astor Hall. After Hastings’s death, his wife Helen commissioned Frederick MacMonnies to model a marble bust, which with the blessing of the trustees was placed in the niche at the south staircase. Her generosity did not extend to a matching bust of Carrère. From the second-floor mezzanine two parallel flights of marble staircases rise past light courts in the center of the building, through arched openings with splayed voussoirs, and open to a spacious rectangular hall oddly named the McGraw Rotunda. This grand space has the same bay configuration of Astor Hall, but rather than the starkness and monumentality of the first floor it is richly finished with an abundance of classical ornamentation. The two arched bays to the north and south lead to corridors and the staircase. The three arched bays to the east and west feature blind openings either side of entrances to the Edna B. Salomon Exhibition Room and the Bill Blass Public Catalog Room. These entrance surrounds are carved from Rogue Jasper marble from France, which extends to the baseboard within the space. The floors are again French Hauteville marble, but this time delineated with an inner band of red Champlain marble from Swanton, Vermont. The walls are paneled in French walnut, with the arched bays separated by pairs of carved fluted Corinthian pilasters. Above the fauxpainted entablature is a magnificent barrel-vaulted ceiling that rises seventy feet above the floor and extends beyond the space, terminating at large thermal windows at the north and south. The faux-painted and gilt vault is divided into a variety of panels separated by borders containing double guilloché with acanthus.
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Page 247: Magnificent candelabrum are placed either side of the doorways in the rotunda. The base and shaft are carved from marble and include ox hooves, bucranes, dolphins, and acanthus. The bronze tops were cast by the Gorham Ornamental Bronze Company and include lion heads at each arm. Inside gatefold: For the mural within the vaulted ceiling at the McGraw Rotunda, Edward Laning chose to depict the story of Prometheus stealing fire from the Gods of Mount Olympus and gifting this knowledge to humankind to create science and culture. Opposite: Set high on the wall above the bookcases, the fenestration in the Main Reading Room recalls that of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (1851) in Paris—a building that both Hastings and Carrère would have been familiar with from their time at the École des Beaux-Arts. Pages 250–51: The configuration of the ceiling panels was inspired by that at the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran (1735) in Rome. The decorative painting and gilding was completed by the Klee-Thompson Company on scaffolding once the plaster moldings had been installed.
New York Public Libr ary
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A
nyone who has played the board game Monopoly is familiar with “Rich Uncle Pennybags,” later renamed “Mr. Monopoly,” the diminutive dapper mascot with a moustache, morning suit, and top hat. The inspiration for the iconic character was no other than Otto Hermann Kahn, an investment banker of unrivaled skill, a bon vivant of legendary charm, and perhaps New York’s most influential patron of the arts during the Gilded Age. Otto Kahn (1867–1934) was born into an established German-Jewish family—albeit non-practicing—who studied French and English instead of Hebrew. He quickly gained a reputation as an astute banker, first in his native Germany and then in London, before immigrating to New York in 1893. Within three years he had joined the renowned banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., one of the major financial houses of the day, and married Addie Wolff, the daughter of the firm’s senior partner. Rising through the ranks to later become the senior partner himself, Kahn was known as the preeminent authority in the cutthroat world of railroad underwriting and financing, and in particular became a valued adviser and financier for Edward H. Harriman and his Union Pacific Railroad. An astute businessman, Kahn speculated and invested in his clients’ business ventures, and in the process amassed a huge personal fortune. Such was Kahn’s success that Kuhn, Loeb & Co. (later to be absorbed by Lehman Brothers in 1977) grew to become the nation’s second-most powerful private investment bank—second only to the House of Morgan. Kahn was extremely competitive, and when it came to building not even J.P. Morgan could rival Kahn’s collection of homes—famously stating “It’s a sin to keep money idle.” Saturday mornings were devoted to golf on his own eighteen-hole course at his 443-acre Long Island estate. If he hit into a bunker he would have the bunker removed; if he hit wide of a green he would have it repositioned for the following Saturday’s round. The centerpiece of this vast estate was the 109,000-square-foot Oheka Castle (an acronym of Kahn’s first, middle, and last names), the second-largest private house ever built in America. Completed in 1919, it was primarily used as a summer retreat where he hosted lavish parties. The grand French château by architects Delano & Aldrich (who both learned their craft in the office of Carrère and Hastings) was designed to outshine the other luxury estates nearby. With plans in hand for a castle, and a villa in Palm Beach (that shared the same name) Kahn now turned his attention to building a grand Manhattan palazzo. In 1898 Andrew Carnegie had made the bold move up to East 91st Street from his old brownstone mansion, and strategically bought up the entire surrounding area, placing strict covenants and restrictions on the lots of land so he could personally control the development of the neighborhood and protect his own home from unwanted commercial encroachment. As the northward immigration of wealthy families continued, Carnegie gradually sold these lots to those that he deemed worthy neighbors, such as the Burdens and Hammonds. Carnegie must also have liked Kahn, as in June 1913, the Scotsman sold him his prize parcel of land—an oversized lot measuring 145 feet by 100 feet— located on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and East 91st Street. Kahn knew the area well. In 1906, Felix Warburg (another of the partners at Kuhn, Loeb & Co.) had built his own mansion (now the Jewish Museum) one block north. Warburg’s architect, and that of several other mansions on Millionaires Row, C.P.H. Gilbert was hired, but only to assist British architect J. Armstrong Stenhouse in the design of what became the last of the great Fifth Avenue mansions of the Gilded Age. Although Stenhouse (1863–1931) had exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, little is known about why he, and not one of New York’s established architectural firms, was awarded this much sought-after commission. Yet despite his relative obscurity Stenhouse designed what is now considered the quintessential Italian Renaissance palazzo in New York.
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An American Renaissance: Beaux-Arts Architecture in New York City
Otto Hermann Kahn (1867–1934) was a renowned investment banker and a lifetime supporter of the arts. His patronage of the Metropolitan Opera and the Hollywood silver screen is legendary, as well as his support for struggling artists, who he housed in a rooftop pavilion atop his mansion.
Page 342: A theatrical spiral staircase connected Kahn’s private sitting room on the third floor with the Gothic reception room on the floor below where he would greet his frequent guests. Opposite: Located on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 91st Street, the palazzo (which is modeled on the Papal Chancery in Rome) overlooks both Central Park and Andrew Carnegie’s former mansion, which is now the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Pages 346–47: Carved into the first-floor footprint is a discretely placed porte-cochère that allowed Kahn and his famous guests to enter the house without being accosted by passersby.
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he Gilded Age was a time of unparalleled prosperity, growth, and construction. Some of the city’s finest architectural masterpieces had very short life spans as they were replaced with bigger, grander, and more profitable buildings. Nowhere was this architectural carousel more prevalent than on the streets surrounding the vibrant Madison Square Park, where in the span of just thirty short years the neighborhood transformed from one of handsome brownstones and churches, to the city’s “downtown” area brimming with department stores, entertainment venues, restaurants, and hotels, before finally settling down as a corporate hub filled with skyscrapers. At the turn of the twentieth century the thronging Madison Square area was the equivalent of Piccadilly Circus in London. It was also home to a superb architectural pantheon of buildings that had rarely been seen before. At the east of the square stands the diminutive Appellate Division Courthouse (1899) that features a compilation of exterior sculpture by Daniel Chester French, Karl Bitter, Edward Clark Potter, Philip Martiny, and Frederick Ruckstuhl. Immediately to the south of that once stood Stanford White’s magnificent Madison Presbyterian Church, which when built in 1906 was considered one of the finest buildings in the city. Yet a mere thirteen years later it was demolished to make way for a sixteen-story office building, which in turn was demolished ten years later to make way for the planned 100-story Metropolitan Life North Building (1950). The stock market crash of 1929 quashed those plans, and instead only thirty stories were built, resulting in its squat unfinished appearance. Next to that, at the southeast corner of Madison Square is the fifty-story Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower designed by Napoleon LeBrun. Modeled after St. Mark’s Campanile in Venice this was the tallest building in the world when it was built in 1909. In the 1960s it underwent a misguided facelift that stripped much of its beautiful ornamentation, leaving the building somewhat sterile. To the south, facing the square, is Daniel Burnham’s iconic 1902 skyscraper, the Fuller Building, better known to all as the Flatiron Building. Completing this impressive list of architectural treasures are the two buildings that have both occupied the same northeast corner of the square, on a city block made famous by one of New York’s most notorious murders. The first of these buildings was completed in 1890 as the replacement for a large train depot owned by the Vanderbilt family that had been leased to, and repurposed by, legendary showman P.T. Barnum into a makeshift hippodrome named Madison Square Garden. Financially unsuccessful, the land and the building were sold to a consortium comprising J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John Jacob Astor IV, James Stillman, Darius Ogden Mills, and Stanford White. Not only was White an investor, he was also the impresario and architect for this new entertainment venue. Stanford White’s design for what has become known as Madison Square Garden II was a Beaux-Arts masterpiece with more than a smattering of Venetian and Moorish influences. Constructed from buff-colored Roman brick, the structure was flamboyantly decorated with an abundance of ornamental terra-cotta, which hinted at the fantastical wonders within. Its principal space was the largest arena in the world, providing permanent seating for 8,000 people and floor space for thousands more. It hosted popular events, such as the Westminster Kennel Club Show, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and the rival circuses of Barnum & Bailey and Ringling Brothers. In addition to this amphitheater, there was a 1,500-seat, Louis XVI–decorated concert hall, the largest restaurant in the city, and a screened open-air roof garden that staged extravagant cabaret entertainment on humid summer evenings. The rooftop also led to the building’s crowning glory, a soaring thirty-two-story tower modeled after La Giralda (1198) in Seville, Spain.
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While the extravagant Stanford White (1853– 1906) was undoubtedly the most notorious architect of the Gilded Age, he was also one its most visionary and versatile designers, responsible for the Metropolitan Club (1894), the Washington Memorial Arch (1895), and the demolished Madison Square Presbyterian Church (1906–1919). A creative whirlwind, he would often blow into the office late in the evening, in between social engagements, to give a draftsman a design that he had sketched on a napkin over dinner.
Page 370: A polished brass balustrade, which integrates a handsome illuminated subway sign, leads down to the subterranean station. The decoration on the stanchion includes two barking dogs on either side of a flaming brazier. Opposite: Inspired by the spire at Salisbury Cathedral (1320) in England, the distinctive crowning roof of the New York Life Insurance Company Building has been a conspicuous part of the Manhattan skyline ever since its completion.
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The Images Publishing Group Reference Number: 1280 Text © Phillip James Dodd 2021 Photography © Jonathan Wallen 2021 (exceptions are noted in the Acknowledgments and Image Credits, see pages 404–6) Frontispiece: A detail inside the Louis XIV–style ballroom of the James Burden mansion (see page 166). Page 4: Figures offer grain and fruit to a romanticized depiction of Labor, in one of two murals at the Woolworth Building (see page 278). Page 6: The library at The University Club, looking west towards Siddon’s portrayal of History (see page 94). Page 402: A subterranean tunnel wraps the foundation wall of the Gould Memorial Library (see page 74). All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
Title: An American Renaissance: Beaux-Arts Architecture in New York City // Phillip James Dodd ISBN: 9781864706819
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