Читать книгу Antiquity in Gotham - Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis - Страница 10

One cannot possibly chart every use of a Corinthian column, winged Victory, or temple-like bank in New York. Many ancient artistic and decorative motifs became so internalized in the vocabulary of American architecture that they ceased to reference antiquity and simply became American. This study is neither a site gazette nor a guidebook, although there is scope for a future project like that.³² Rather, the nine chapters take the reader on a tour of curated architectural examples of a specific building type or types that engage with and appropriate ancient architecture and examine the reasons behind this reception through time and space. These buildings serve as metonymic examples for the architecture inspired by antiquity. Each chapter is designed to stand alone, so that a reader can read them individually; as such, some repetition of key ideas and themes is necessary.

Chapter 1 examines the city’s innards and edges to explore how ancient architecture was appropriated in the infrastructure of New York City from c. 1800 into the early twenty-first century. The city’s defining grid pattern, the first major urban improvement in New York City, has its origins in the city planning of classical antiquity. New York’s Croton Aqueduct, the city’s next major infrastructure project, was clearly understood through the lens of its Roman predecessors, and the Murray Hill distributing reservoir was built between 1836 and 1842 using Egyptian-style architecture, in a proud nod to a civilization that was considered an exemplar of technological innovation. Moving downtown to the Manhattan Bridge, I argue that the arch and colonnade served the dual purpose of beautifying the Manhattan approach to the bridge and facilitating the flow of traffic. The chapter then examines the old Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central Terminal, perhaps New York’s most famous examples of the reinterpretation of ancient architecture, fashioning great twentieth-century transportation hubs on the model of Roman imperial baths. A bath house and a train station might seem a surprising pairing, but both need to circulate large numbers of people efficiently and to immediately communicate the power and prestige of their builders (a city or an emperor). Furthermore, as I and others have noted, the adaption of Roman bath architecture for train stations was in fact an apt and successful design solution that fulfilled functional, aesthetic, and symbolic needs.

Chapter 2 considers how Greek Revival architecture, drawing specifically on classical temples, was widely adapted for the civic, judiciary, and administrative—what might be termed public—architecture of early nineteenth-century Manhattan and Brooklyn to erect buildings meant to embody the political values of the new United States. The US Custom House, one of New York’s earliest and most important civic buildings, was modeled on the Parthenon. Its Grecian architecture embodied the ideals of the Greek Revival style and demonstrated that many of the United States’ first professional architects were learned men who used new archaeological publications to design their buildings. An exceptional example of civic architecture—New York’s first court-and-jail complex, nicknamed the Tombs—was built in an Egyptian style, again based on archaeological knowledge, providing a telling exception that illuminates the larger trends. At the end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, Roman architecture supplanted Greek and Egyptian temples as the favored model for public buildings. This is evident at the various court buildings at Foley Square; the new courthouse in Richmond, on Staten Island; and the colossal vaults and arched façade of the Manhattan Municipal Building—a development that, I argue, reflected the rise of imperial Rome in place of the Greek polis as the primary ancient political model for the United States, which now had an empire and global ambitions.

Trade, banking, and financial services have been emblematic of New York and its economy since the city’s founding, and in building impressive edifices for the city’s banks, stock exchanges, warehouses, and skyscrapers, New Yorkers have continually engaged with ancient architecture. Chapter 3 examines how the Greek temple served as the key reference for many financial buildings, as it did for civic architecture, in the early nineteenth century. In the late nineteenth century, these Greek models gave way to a preference for Roman forms that were used in an eclectic way with little regard for specific ancient models, as evidenced in such new creations as McKim, Mead & White’s Bowery Bank. In the twentieth century, ancient architectural elements could be found on skyscrapers—both at street level and on the lofty topmost stories. Turning to the Bankers Trust Building at 14 Wall Street and the Fred French Building on Fifth Avenue in Midtown, this chapter concludes by demonstrating how skyscrapers appropriated ancient architectural forms for the familiar reasons of their aesthetics and their lasting cultural appeal as symbols of strength and endurance—but did so in surprisingly divergent and original ways. As the appeal of the symbolic nature of ancient architecture waned in the early twentieth century, the principles of classical architecture continued to play an important and perhaps unexpected role in the design of some of New York City’s most important modernist, mid-twentieth-century buildings, including the Seagram Building.

Chapter 4 examines the museums, zoos, universities, and libraries that sprang up in New York as a signature element of the city’s surging cultural life in the nineteenth century, especially between 1865 and 1930. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and the New York Zoological Society (better known as the Bronx Zoo) were all established at this time. The trustees and directors of these new institutions, as well as of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (later rechristened the Brooklyn Museum), chose classical architecture for their buildings because it was felt to embody, in a readily recognized visual language, the scientific and educational ideals of these new institutions as well as the idea of an established intellectual tradition. By reinterpreting ancient forms for their new campuses, with Pantheon-inspired libraries at their cores, New York University and Columbia University asserted their status as elite universities. Likewise, Lewisohn Stadium, an amphitheater-inspired stadium, articulated City College’s academic ambitions. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the architecture and aims of public libraries in New York City.

Chapter 5 steps inside mansions and rowhouses to look at the many colorful and eclectic ways that domestic architecture in nineteenth-century New York took inspiration from ancient architecture and interiors. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the use of the Greek Revival style in private homes allowed homeowners to express the patriotic ideals of the young nation. During the Gilded Age in New York City, opulent Pompeian rooms became popular in the palatial residences of America’s newly minted millionaires, allowing the robber barons of the era an opportunity to display their wealth and status. The Greco-Pompeian music room of Henry G. Marquand is a case in point to understand how these fanciful, ornate rooms were created—and, moreover, how they tacitly navigated new cultural tensions. In the late nineteenth century America’s middle class embraced art and furniture inspired by antiquity, in mass-produced forms and quantities, to display their social aspirations and their desire to emulate the very wealthy. The chapter ends with a look upward again, to the tops of apartment buildings, where the use of classical decorative elements in the twentieth century was the latest reinterpretation of ancient forms in domestic architecture.

Chapter 6 examines the “lobster palaces,” restaurants that flourished in the roaring years between 1890 and 1920 as favorite spots for New York’s fast set to socialize and indulge in the conspicuous consumption of food, women, and wine. Murray’s Roman Gardens and the Café de l’Opéra stood out for their ebullient appropriation of ancient art and architecture in their décor, creating over-the-top dining experiences for the wealthy. The opulence and luxury of imperial Rome, Ptolemaic Egypt, and the ancient Near East, I argue, offered highly original—and culturally valid—models for the pleasure pavilions of the unabashedly wealthy. It is no accident that aspects of antiquity such as luxury, exuberant hedonism, and the attractions of empire, which had been seen as problematic at the start of the nineteenth century, were now embraced. Vast fortunes had been created in the wake of industrialization, and the United States now had an empire, which its optimistic new patricians believed would be exempt from decline.

Green-Wood (1838) and Woodlawn (1864) cemeteries are two of the most influential—and loveliest—rural cemeteries in the United States. Neo-Antique tombs were very popular with the established elite and the nouveau riche that dominated the upper spheres of the United States’ economic, cultural, and social worlds, and in Chapter 7 I explore the web of reasons behind the fashions that followed New Yorkers to their graves. An ancient temple in a bucolic setting appealed to an aesthetic sensibility informed by decades of Romanticism, but formal reasons are not to be overlooked: Mausolea often copied classical or Egyptian temples, which were exceptionally well suited to a tomb, as a temple’s cella was easily translated into a space for burials. Furthermore, in a country whose churches, courthouses, and banks had been dignified with columns and pediments for almost all of its young history, interment in such a tomb signaled that one belonged to the social elite. For specific examples, this chapter peers into the tombs of John Anderson, Jay Gould, Henry Bergh, Jules S. Bache, and others.

From the late nineteenth century onward, columns and Roman-style arches were erected to commemorate veterans, prominent Americans, and historical figures. Chapter 8 argues that the arches and columns that became popular monuments at important physical intersections in late nineteenth-century New York allowed New Yorkers to celebrate not just specific personages or events but also, more broadly, the history and grandeur of their city. The Washington Square Arch and the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch in Brooklyn are examined as case studies. For the elites that ran the city, monuments, along with their inscriptions and artistic programs, provided highly visible public sites to promote approved ideologies and to “educate” the city’s new immigrants about important moments in and versions of American history. At the same time, the potency of grand classical forms was recognized by nonelite immigrant populations, as demonstrated in this chapter’s analysis of how different populations in New York City participated in the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas in 1892, with a specific focus on the column erected by Italian Americans to celebrate the explorer.

While there were clear patterns in New Yorkers’ appropriation of ancient architecture, there were also buildings that engaged with ancient architecture in unique ways. Chapter 9 shows how the fluidity and diversity of ancient architectural forms—their abundance and adaptability—allowed for their use in a broad scope of buildings ranging from churches, like St. Peter’s Roman Catholic church on Barclay Street in Manhattan, to Sailors’ Snug Harbor, a retirement community on Staten Island, both of which used Greek architecture. Private clubs and lodges, like the Pythian Temple, where ancient architecture was reinterpreted, are also considered, as are public baths. Together these examples demonstrate the almost limitless and lasting appeal of ancient architectural forms and their ripeness for reinterpretation.

The conclusion reviews the themes of the book, examines the declining popularity of ancient architecture and decorative motifs in New York in the 1920s, and summarizes the book’s key arguments. Additional vistas open up as other avenues for further inquiry are considered. And now, please come join me on this journey as we venture from the tomb-lined, leafy Appian Way, one of ancient Rome’s main thoroughfares, to Broadway, New York’s Great White Way.