USA > New York > New York City > New York panorama : a comprehensive view of the metropolis > Part 21
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On the heels of the realistic commentators on social life came thgures experimental "modernists." In the year of the first exhibition of "Thf Ste Eight" Alfred Stieglitz had opened his "291 Fifth Avenue," which soo lalpe became a center of authentic novelty in art. In a long series of exhibe raph tions "291" brought under one roof the works of the European moderndu B ists, Rodin, Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, Picabia, Henri Rousseaupalis Picasso, Braque, Severini, and of the Americans, Marin, Hartley, Dovehow Steichen, Weber, Walkowitz and O'Keefe. Stieglitz himself was essentiallhe a committed to "spirit," a yearning vague enough to allow a broad rang Th of choice-from a photograph of the Five Points Clothing House: Thete Cheapest Place in the City to the passionate markings of the first Amer utur ican abstractionists.
The most memorable event in the American art world, the famousalan "Armory Show" of 1913, whose aim was to bring together everythingbad that was vital in modern art both here and abroad, arose from the current mod that flowed through "The Eight" and "291." The Association of Amerinde ican Painters and Sculptors which prepared the International Exhibition acol at the armory included seven members of the original "Henri Group." Intepti the American Section, alongside the works of the realists, Henri, Luk Lac and Sloan, and of the Impressionists, Glackens, Weir, Twachtman andreat Hassam, emerged the avant-garde canvases, watercolors and sculpture o Zora Karfiol, Lachaise, Walkowitz, Marin and Prendergast, as well as of theworl modernist forerunner Albert Ryder. The publicity, consisting mostly o.MAlfe abuse, which this exhibition received enabled the. New York public topof encounter for the first time, and to ridicule in its turn, the discoveries ofwhi post-Impressionism, Fauvism and Futurism.
Thus, arm in arm, modernism and realism in American art came intorear prominence during the second decade of this century. The modernistssan found in the museum, in machinery, in dreams and in reveries and in Wa mathematical relations the life which the realist sought in the street anckkiar the subway. The European masters of the American modernists had pur.Do sued the trail of art through antique, Oriental and primitive styles; they;acc had borrowed from Egypt, Persia, East India, China, Japan, Byzantium,ilthe from classical Greece as well as from savage Africa, Polynesia and the Oceanic Islands, from Mexico, Peru and the North American Indians.Fere The Americans, almost without exception, applied these teachings to con-Ibro temporary experiences. The structural delicacy of the watercolors of Dick-ito inson, Demuth and Marin; the mystical and sensitive landscapes and the allegorical nudes of Davies; the post-Impressionist, Cubist and Fauvist of
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me thures of Weber, Walkowitz, Kuhn and Karfiol; the mechanical designs E "Th Stella; the eclectic experimentalism of Morris Kantor and Samuel h soonalpert-these reflect the reality of our epoch no less than the photo- exhib loder ussea aphic factory scenes of Charles Sheeler or the night-life of Guy Pène u Bois. In spite of the differences and the polemics that were to divide alist and modernist schools in later years, the two movements thus Dovowed themselves at their inception to be two branches of a single stalk, ntialte art of the city, both in its local life and in its world-relations.
rang : Th Amer amou The analysis, historical and theoretical, to which the modernists sub- cted all art brought to sculpture a new point of departure. Cubism, uturism, and Fauvism had found in Negro and primitive figures a simple ad striking embodiment of the principles of rhythm, design, architectonic alance and significant relation of plane and mass. A new analytical acid thingad also been applied to the classics of Greece, Rome and Florence. The remodelings of Crawford and the Thorwaldsen school now seemed remote Amendeed from sculpture's essential aims. The rough-surfaced monuments of itionacob Epstein, an expatriate, evoked startling and often disturbing con- " Heptions of a kind not hitherto associated with the art of sculpture. Gaston Luktachaise's Figure of a Woman became a familiar example of modernist andreatment of mass, balance and subtlety of form-relations. William e oforach's more easily assimilable subjects achieved wide circulation. Others theyorking in the modern manner included Maurice Sterne, Robert Laurent, y calfeo Faggi, Elie Nadelman. Paul Manship made an academic utilization c tof modern archaeological research and produced a style of decoration s ofchich became a fashionable adjunct of architectural design. Jo Davidson xecuted portraits of the famous. Among the many sculptors of recent intorears whose work is worthy of attention are Mahonri Young the realist, istsusamu Naguchi, Ahron Ben Shmuel, Chaim Gross, Arthur Lee, Heinz in Warneke, Boris Lovet-Lorski, Harold Cash, Hunt Diederich, Reuben Na- andcian, Aaron Goodleman, John Flannagan, Marion Walton, Sonia Brown, ur-Dorothy Greenbaum, Duncan Fergusson. Especially interesting are the heyficcomplishments of the abstractionists Alexander Calder, John Storrs, and Im,the Russian, Alexander Archipenko.
It was under modernist influence that American folk art was rediscov- ns.fered, its best examples collected and exhibited, and its esthetic value on-brought into focus with the art of the world. Modernism, with its his- ck- torical perspective, found more to admire in the rudimentary but sound hejartisanship of a Pickett or Hicks than in the studiously elaborated graces ist of the Düsseldorf professionals.
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Since the Armory show and the annual exhibitions open to all artis incour of the Society of Independent Arts, the division between realism ar. contac
modernism has grown more conscious and more pronounced, though ¿ overlapping has been constantly visible in the majority of America
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artists. Extremists are rare in American art. Such artists as Georg, O'Keefe, Peter Blume, Francis Criss, Stefan Hirsch, Stuart Davis, Edwar other Hopper, Niles Spencer, Walter Pach lean towards formalism witho: fully discarding realistic elements. Marsden Hartley, Louis Eilshemiu Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Alexander Brook, Reginald Marsh, Andrew Dasbur and Ernest Fiene, Leon Kroll are romantics with varying modernist an Df a realist stresses. These main trends are expressed in the two most active ( the recently established art centers, the Whitney Museum of America
TI with Art and the Museum of Modern Art. As their names suggest, the Whitne emphasis is upon local tendencies and the American scene, while th act hon Modern Museum seeks out all manifestations, wherever they be found, t libi which the modernist spirit is attracted. In these two major divisions c 20th century art the two main currents in early American art, localisi esp and the foreign influence, reappear in a more mature form.
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The conflict between realism and modernism has brought about th organization of an "Abstract Group" and the establishment of collectior. sponsoring the non-representational in art. This difference of approac was also reflected in the debates concerning the new social art brough forward during the late 1920's and the 1930's. In connection with thi social art, the murals of Thomas Benton received a varied response an a new source of inspiration was contributed by Mexico in the murals o Orozco and Rivera. The rejection for political reasons of the decoratio. executed by the latter for Radio City led to bitter controversy.
Economic problems of artists produced novel events in New York Cit during the 1930's. Semi-annual outdoor shows established an informa art market in Washington Square. During the economic crisis which bega! in 1929, depressing art sales and stifling private patronage, artists organ ized themselves into the Artists Union to demand Federal support fo art. The Federal Works Art Project was set up in 1933 and later the Federal Art Project of WPA. The latter has brought vast changes in the art situation in New York. Its mural decorations of public build ings, its allocations of easel and graphic work, its art center and public exhibitions, its Art Teaching Department, the faithful copying of olc art objects by its Index of American Design division-all have servec to bring indigenous American art before an immense new public. It:
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icouragement of talent, through providing the means of subsistence and ontact with the public, has served to bring forward such excellent unger artists as Ashile Gorki, Philip Evergood, Gregorico Prestopino, Joe olman, Max Spivak, James Newell, Lucienne Bloch, Alfred Crimi, Louis uglielmi, William de Kooning, Joseph Pandolfini, Harry Gottlieb, and hers, as well as such sculptors and graphic artists as Eugenie Gershoy, nton Refregier, Hubert Davis, F. G. Becker. At present a number of tists' organizations, together with organizations of writers, musicians hd actors, support a Congressional measure calling for the establishment f a permanent Federal Art Project.
Thus the program of "The Eight," aiming to connect the activity of art ith the life about it, has continued, in changing forms, as a dominant ictor in the art of New York. The Artists Congress, a national organiza- on stressing the political and social values of art, holds frequent ex- ibitions in New York and sponsors conferences here to discuss the artist's esponsibilities in modern society and to protest against reaction and fas- sm. The city's public museums and private exhibition galleries provide le means for continual intercourse with the outside world of art. New ork City is no longer merely the chance birthplace or residential choice of dividual artists, schools and collections-it has become a national clear- g-house and a world-center of art.
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IX. ARCHITECTURE
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WHAT American has not desired to ascend to the top of the Empireco State Building, or stand on the footwalk of the Brooklyn Bridge? High 1 on his vantage point on the bridge, the wind blowing a metallic whistlehar through the wires above, the boats far below his feet, he looks throughwhe the mighty network at those towers of Manhattan, still higher than him I self, the most awe-inspiring of all architectural views afforded by thetot modern world. Below the towers, the shore is fringed with docks, thexp ocean vessels-chiefly freighters on this side-delivering cargoes thatgre explain the strong odor of coffee and spice that blows from the waterfrontlhe warehouses. It is not the "immense tremor" of the open ocean that sur cce rounds us here, but the busy motion of the quiet harbor, so shut in as tobeli appear like a lake. Far off on the horizon to the southwest, beyond thela Statue of Liberty, is the graceful arc, dimly visible, of the Bayonneeni Bridge, connecting the largest of New York's islands except Manhattarmi to the New Jersey mainland; on the opposite side of the Brooklyn Bridge the and in close proximity to it are the other famous "East River" bridges : fra far from beautiful, some of them, but all brutally business-like andthe immense, their feet not in fresh water but in salt. They dwarf, as if from less another world, the bridges of the other river cities such as Florence oring Paris or London. Looking at Manhattan itself, one sees the second sky- far scraper cluster at midtown: the Empire State Building slightly off to thelfre left, the Chrysler Building's fountain-like pinnacle to the right, the broaden slab of the R.C.A. Building of Rockefeller Center remotely visible in the the distance, while numerous less famous structures serve to fill out the group. be
But even as his eye sweeps this view at the magnificent portal of New jac York, the judicious visitor is aware that not all is splendor. The great downtown skyscrapers do not simply rise from the water's edge. In frontbut of them, especially to the north of the bridge, is a great low nondescript the area, block after block of shabby brick dwellings whose sides are covered of with fading patent medicine signs, an area like eroded debris at the footac
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a cliff-the notorious New York East Side. If one leaves the bridge to alk these streets, one is confronted again and again by the kind of view at shocked the world when a German architect photographed it and put in a book: the sight of the unmitigated meanness of the tenements nacked against the very walls of the "cathedrals of commerce." This is he example of the many kinds of abrupt contrast that are far more truly aracteristic of New York than the selected magnificence that appears in le Sunday papers. More than any other American City, New York pitches igh against low, rich against poor, the elegant against the squalid. All apiraccur juxtaposed, with scarcely a buffer and rarely a disguise.
Hig The energy, the brutality, the scale, the contrast, the tension, the rapid istlange-and the permanent congestion-are what the New Yorker misses ugthen he leaves the city.
him The study of the almost volcanic eruption of New York's skyline should theot be pursued without a word of caution. Almost anyone can glibly theexplain the skyline in terms exclusively economic. The narrow island, the that reat influx of population, the consequent scarcity of land, and as a result ronthe towering buildings-thus runs the argument that is almost universally sur Accepted. Accurate as far as it goes, it has misled countless people into s thelieving that a skyscraper was always the result of a simple calculation theh profit and loss. The development of New York is actually far more nnsenigmatic. Without digressing into a sociological or economic essay, we tarlight barely mention a few factors slurred over by this simple account ; dge es: he fact, for example, that the giant buildings occupy only a very small raction of the land actually available, and that, right into the depression, andthere was a tendency to move offices into fewer, taller buildings, occupying omless and less of the land that was available, meanwhile leaving surround- oring areas in financial straits. Again there is the fact that New York pays ky- the Dad the up. ar less than an "economic" share of many essential services; for example, reight is lightered across the harbor without charge but at great expense, nd if these and other items had been charged against the city in advance, he net profitability of New York's congested building habits might have been called into serious doubt, and this without even mentioning the ewIncredible costs of such items as building the subways.
eat The point is not that economic explanations of the skyline are wrong, ontbut that taken by themselves they are incomplete. The business nature of ipt he town is to be far more completely understood if we know the nature edof its history. In this historic past, three successive powerful impulses potlucted on New York. Like a series of great waves, they drove the vessel
204 ARCHITECTURE always in the same course. Any major force that might have diverted th 99 el
city from its single-line development seems to have been lacking, or t have just touched and then passed the city by.
New York from the very beginning was devoted single-mindedly t ite commerce. It was superbly situated for a port. The Hudson had mad New York the chief outlet of the West and permitted it to surpass Phila ha delphia in population even before the completion in 1825 of the Eri Canal. No religious oppression affected the Dutch who founded Ner Amsterdam, to render them philosophic or to put them under the leader ship of learned parsons like those who established the Puritanic cultur be in New England. The Dutch spent their energy on developing trade.
Next, the port of New York developed into a manufacturing center o This was largely due to a second stroke of luck: vast coal deposits wer found highly accessible in nearby Pennsylvania. Labor came in a grea Cou wave from Europe. The effect of industry piled on commerce was cumu Eri lative, and cumulatively utilitarian. dec
Immediately after the Revolution and at the beginning of this nev industrial expansion there occurred a brief episode that might have broad ened the city's permanent nature. New York became the national capital But before the city's outlook and planning could adapt themselves to th new situation, the seat of the Federal Government was moved elsewher and the comprehensiveness of viewpoint and breadth of planning tha might have ensued yielded once more to the one-sided attitude of th lit market. The results will be clearly seen expressed in the city's street plar -and its lack of park plans.
Finally, the effect of its combined trade and industrial leadership was to give New York dominance in finance. Hereafter the metropolis wielded new power which permitted her to be ruthless even in the face of geog raphy, and to call this ruthlessness "strictly economic." The river and the port had produced trade; the coal and the labor combined with the trade had produced industry; the two together had created the dominating power of money, its influence reaching like radio across all physical bar 5 riers and helping to rivet together a purely business culture that piled the profits and the buildings higher and higher in the same places. The psy chology of the people was profoundly influenced by the history of the place; and that, as we shall see, has had quite as much to do with the architecture of present-day New York as have land values. If, in the course of the headlong development of the city, a New Yorker withou hesitation tears down a historic Vanderbilt mansion for the sake of erect
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, a block of stores, his action in refusing to be diverted is more eloquent the historical tradition and culture of New York than the mansion elf. Again, New York began to regulate the shape of tall buildings only er they had already transformed many of the streets into permanently less canyons, whereas Boston laid down in advance regulations against hat were considered excessive building heights; which showed the effect historical tradition rather than the relative chances of profit and loss the two cities.
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Of the New Amsterdam period, the architectural remains are few. The itch fort stood with its center at about the site of the present Custom puse, the Governor's House being inside the fortifications. Wall Street rives its name from having run along the north wall or rampart hastily ected against the English. Of the little Dutch town with its two-hundred- d houses not a trace remains. The houses of Dutch origin still standing thin the present boundaries of New York are those that were outlying im houses, chiefly in the western sections of Long Island and on Staten and.
Perhaps it is just as well. The town houses as we see them on the old ips were the familiar trim Dutch houses as found in Holland itself, often th the characteristic stepped gables turned toward the street. The out- ng houses, on the contrary, gradually evolved a character all their own, isting in New Netherland but nowhere else in the world, a type we Il Dutch Colonial. Its two chief earmarks are its diminutive size and the ndsome roof that was gradually developed to curve outward, forming overhang protruding well beyond the wall. The Dutch, says Miss Bailey her admirable monograph on these houses, had less use for the upper garret floor than the English; and when they began to use a gambrel myof they sacrificed bedroom space to achieve a handsomer and steeper affof line. la 1 he de
The oldest known example in the city is the Schenck-Crooke House, at st Sixty-Third Street and Mill Avenue, Brooklyn, set in a lane in a little llow behind Public School 236. The steepness of the plain gable roof evidence of its great age. The overhang, as often happened, is said to .ve been added later, and so were the sloping dormers. There remains hchanged the unusual inside framing, built shiplike with curved timbers id an arch-like inverted frame; for the Schencks were shippers as well
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206 ARCHITECTURE
as millwrights and built a dock in the adjoining Mill Basin. Scholars Cm find a number of other Dutch houses of historic interest ; the casual visit would probably prefer a visit on Staten Island to New Dorp, where thi charming examples exist close together. The oldest is the Britton Cotta in New Dorp Lane, now belonging to the Staten Island Historical Socie
te simply and neatly built of random fieldstone; the plain gable roof, ho hei ever, is scarcely typical, having an unusually flat slope and no overha: at all. Another is the so-called Lake-Tysen House, a larger example th most, built probably 1720-40, with the typical Dutch gambrel roof (t graceful overhang is supposed to have been added later) and the typic three chimneys. The plan is characteristic: a wide central hall with tv rooms on each side. A charming house is the Lakeman-Cortelyou-Tayl House, though its gambrel is of the New England type-two equal se tions instead of a short nearly horizontal one at the top and a long o on the side. Still another excellent composition is the Stillwell-Peri: House, 1476 Richmond Road, Dongan Hills, really two houses separate occupied for 100 years, the older part dating from about 1680, the fro ts from about 1713. In Brooklyn, the Lefferts Mansion in Prospect Pa furnishes a precedent for "Hollywood Dutch," the deep curve being ca ried through the whole lower leg of the gambrel instead of being confin to the overhang. The Lott House and the Remsen House show the earlic diminutive, thick-walled, small-windowed and steep-gabled constructie of their older wings in contrast to the full development of the lat period, at the end of the 18th century.
"Dutch Colonial" continued to be built long after the English occup tion, for the Dutch and English inter-married and lived peaceably side Ife side. A very handsome late example is the Dyckman House, at Broadw: and 204th Street. This was not built until 1783, at the end of the Rev lution. Carefully restored, it is now a city museum. It displays the charr. ing use the Dutch made of varied building materials. The front wall brick; the end walls are uncoursed fieldstones in heavy mortar; and tl gables are covered with wide clapboards.
The Dutch imprint on the city remains chiefly in a line of distinguishe families and in the realm of tradition, rather than in buildings. Nam survive-the Bowery, which was the road leading past the chief farm bouwerie of the Dutch West Indies Company; Coenties Slip, whic according to legend is a compound evolved from the names of the Dark and Joan of New Amsterdam, Coenrat and Antye's Slip; Spuyten Duyvi which memorializes Trumpeter Anthony Corlear's watery bout with tl
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vil; Pearl, Beaver, Vesey, Hague, and John Streets, Maiden Lane "'Madde Paatje) and others. The stoops of the houses, splendidly apted to the early New Yorker's living habits, had their origin in Dutch wland building customs; it was not the fault of the Dutch that in the er brownstone houses the stoops were carried over from mere habit and eir earlier purpose completely misunderstood. Of this, more will be said the discussion of the average New Yorker's dwelling quarters.
English Colonial houses go back to a fairly early date. High on a mound erlooking the sea at the southern end of Staten Island in Tottenville ands the Billopp or Conference House, erected by Captain Christopher illopp in 1677 on an early patent from the Duke of York. Quite as mple as the Dutch houses, its lines are nevertheless English, standing gher and more openly to the air. In this house on September 11, 1776, enjamin Franklin, John Adams and Edward Rutledge met Lord Howe id rejected his demand for unconditional surrender of New York. An- ther Colonial house, Fraunces Tavern, dating from 1719 and still in use a restaurant, at the southeast corner of Pearl and Broad Streets, earned s fame at the end of the Revolutionary War, when Washington was anquetted in the large second-floor room and there took leave of his ficers. Of New York's later and larger Colonial mansions, the country ouses are the ones that remain: Alexander Hamilton's "Grange," the Van ortlandt House, and the Jumel Mansion built in 1765-the last-named or its scale and detail and for its exceptionally delicate and effective two- oried portico.
ederal New York
After the Revolution came an. episode that might have changed the ntire history and appearance of the city. New York, a small city in what ras then considered the most beautiful setting on the continent, was chosen he nation's first capital. It was in this connection that L'Enfant remodeled he Federal Hall (on the site of the present Subtreasury Building on Wall Street ), where Washington was inaugurated as first President; and that Government House, a stately porticoed mansion long since destroyed, vas built on State Street, in the vicinity of the present Custom House, or occupation by the President. When the Government was moved, first o Philadelphia and then to Washington, this building was converted into customs house.
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