nine-house row, developed in 1832, these twenty-seven-foot-wide houses are unified by a colossal screen of Corinthian columns. Even in their diminished and decaying state—the marble is simply melting—these are still the most important looking houses in New York, and a great inspiration to a certain kind of architect. Since five are missing, I am left with one nagging question: Where—oh where—are the great columns? The American Wing at the Met should certainly display one. NEW YORK SCHOOL OF APPLIED DESIGN FOR WOMEN. All the way up
the director of the Morgan Library & Museum, Bill Griswold. We focused on the library, which was designed by Charles Follen McKim in 1902. Morgan took a step back from the florid Beaux-Arts excesses of Whitney Warren, who had designed the New York Yacht Club under Morgan’s patronage just two years before. Rejecting Warren’s very French proposal, Morgan commissioned this rather academically correct, utterly balanced, and harmonious Palladian set piece. Griswold is rightfully excited to see the results of the planned restoration of this building’s great interiors, which were recently covered by the financial press as the site of Morgan’s marathon meetings to salvage our financial system, almost exactly one hundred years before the troubles of 2008. The rooms, among the most important historic interiors in the country, include marble, mosaic, tapestry, brocade, fresco, and wood, which will be cleaned, refurbished, and provided with state-of-the-art lighting. Original elements, long stored in the basement, such as the heroically-scaled temple lantern that hung at the entrance to the East Room, will be simply dusted off and re-hung—though it’s probably more complicated than I make it sound. Closing in June, the McKim building, the historic center of the Morgan Library & Museum complex, will reopen in the fall to great fanfare. GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL. Though we only stopped in on the way to the Oyster Bar, and avoided the temporary exposition on the history of eyewear in Vanderbilt Hall, we did pause long enough in the main concourse to admire the vaulted ceiling. When the ceiling was complete and ready for paint, the architect, Whitney Warren, told the
to that stretch of Lexington that is home to Indian and Pakistani restaurants, we came upon the grandest schoolhouse ever built in our city. This stout, Ionic temple could be a secret pagan society, but was actually designed by Harvey Wiley Corbett in 1908 for the artist Ellen Dunlap Hopkins, who used her ample checkbook to establish a school for women in art and architecture. Casts of the frieze of the Parthenon, a popular model for students of art at the turn of the twentieth century, band the base of the building’s plinth. THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM. We walked up a few blocks to 36th Street and Madison, where we were greeted by
This page, from top: Grand Central Terminal—an architectural gem of Manhattan, and home to the great Oyster Bar; the entrance to the New York Yacht Club, built by Whitney Warren in 1902; the exterior of 78th Street that this writer considers “a masterpiece.” Opposite: students at the Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America, possibly the most important institute of its kind in the nation.
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the Harry Rogers Wintrhop house, an eccentric 1930s house on East