Row, together.

 

Emanuel Leutze’s masterpiece, the epic, iconic Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Observations.

Let’s just divorce ourselves from everything we know and describe what we see.

There are a lot of people in a kind of flotilla of small boats, in action and it seems moving in the same direction. 

They are lit from behind. By a star or the moon or whatever wisp of sun is breaching a cloudy sky.

It is cold. The figures are clad in heavy clothing, bundled, and are huddled against the wind with the exception of the two tallest central figures. More on those two central figures but for now, notice how they seem utterly unaffected by the temperature.

The body of water they are on is full of ice. They all struggle to move through it. In fact, notice all the oars move up to the right although they are apparently heading off in the direction the tall guys face, to the left. 

There is nothing ‘uniform’ about the characters in the first boat, certainly not their apparel. The three in the front: a coonskin hatted fellow, a Scottish tam-ed bloke, a person of color, earring-ed and wearing a leather fisherman’s cap. So, likely a trapper, a recent Scottish immigrant, and a New England cod fisherman, a typical occupation for a freed slave or Portuguese person of color.  

The two folks around the big guys: another trapper. And that’s another uniformed man on lookout.

Then we have a fellow in a blousy red tunic and rather luxurious hair. Wait. Is that a fellow? One more military-looking chap and then not one but two Charles Ingalls, very farmer-looking lads bookended by a fellow wearing a distinctly local satchel of the Delawarean Leni Lenape. Hmmm. Why is HE steering we wonder….

Notice that anything of the natural world is of a cool palette, while anything of the humans is warm, despite only being backlit by a sliver of a source. 

What I can’t convey here is the size.

The painting is absolutely staggering in proportion, approximately 12 x 20 feet, too large for any private collection.

Painted in 1850. Who could this be for? Who was the intended audience? Why paint a painting depicting an event that took place 75 years earlier? 

   

                       

  Let’s stir in the history we know. 

You like a good bet? By the bitterly cold Christmas of 1776, the American Revolution was not one. At all. Unless you were betting British. After 1775’s really rough start at Lexington and Concord (Oddsmakers gave the ultimate survival of America 99:1 odds, America the 1%) and a bad showing at Bunker Hill (Oddsmakers 95:5) it was the British fall at Ticonderoga and the birth of US patriotism with the signing of the Declaration of Independence mid-1776 that salvaged the movement at all. (Oddsmakers 78:22). But from August to November of 1776,  New York Harbor was swarming with the unparalleled British fleet, a navy as never before seen in any World let alone the New, brothers General Howe and the elder Admiral Howe, tag-teaming Viscounts,0 commanded a very professional army and navy respectively, with numbers swollen by German mercenary troops brought in for a quick final flourish of a finish and indeed together delivered a series of crushing blows throughout New York leading to the fall of NYC, demoralizing on every level, and the Continental Army chased clear across NJ into Pennsylvania. It’s no wonder people hate the Jersey Turnpike! 1777 was set to start with a 12% chance of an American victory by your bookie, down a full ten points from the high.

Washington, on the other hand, commanded an untrained force of ill-equipped uneducated immigrants whose languages were as varied as their uniforms. And conscriptions were running out faster than the deserters running only slightly ahead of them. For now.

It would take a game changer, NOW, to stay in the independence game or the hopes of a realized Enlightenment and the flame those brilliant minds ignited might die on that very cold Stille Nacht. That game changer is what we have depicted here on a fittingly monumental scale by our friend the very German very American Emanuel Leutze. Much more on him to come.

Christmas Day Washington and his troops  gathered on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River. They were planning to jump the 1500 Hessians encamped in Trenton  early the morning of the 26th and carry the day with a bit of on-the-fly guérilla warfare, American style. Two other outfits were to cross at two other points, but it says much about the weather, the river, the bitter icy cold that only Washington’s outfit made it across. (More likely on wide flat bottomed boats that used overhead ropes strung across a narrow stretch of river to pull themselves across.) So instead of 6,000 men, Washington would have to make due with his 2400 UN-delegate band of ragamuffins. His Christmas morale booster had doom written all over it.

Or perhaps that is exactly what the exceedingly clever Mr. Washington wanted us to think. But that Christmas of 1776, he was not playing any reindeer games.  It was indeed perhaps the last time assumptions were ever made in war. It was assumed Washington would take the holiday. It was assumed he’d never try to make such a perilous crossing. In the dark. It was assumed someone wound see their red noses coming a mile away on the nine it took to march inland. But the outlooks who assumed the holiday took the night off themselves. All of those assumptions cost the crown their empire and more immediately, spelled misfortune for the Hessians, 22 of whom were killed, 900 of whom were captured, the balance für die Berge fliegen, a good lot blending into the landscape and becoming de facto Americans. (Never assume mercenaries will fight your cause with your gusto.) Washington lost two men. To exposure. But what he gained…

Almost all of his men re-enlisted and as word spread of this very American victory, recruits began to pour in. Soon, a major victory at Saratoga would convince the French that America was a cause célèbre and their financing, their recognition of sovereignty, and their generals turned a war of isolation into a conflict with international implications, a world war, really, and although the struggle would slog on through another six bloody, awful years—the misery of Valley Forge and the horrors of the prisoner ships were still on the menu don’t forget—we would almost certainly have never become a country and a beacon of liberty, had not George Washington, with wingmen James Monroe and Nathanael Greene, the fighting Quaker, inspired the dispirited, unified the un-uniformed, kicked the crap out of the ice and some Krauts (war always opens that racism door…) and fanned what seemed the last ember of freedom’s fire into a roaring blaze—against all odds.

So what compelled a German American German to spend two years of his life painting that fulcrum’s moment in 1851?

                           

Crossing the Delaware. The artist.

Emmanuel Leutze was born in 1815 in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany, a small city northwest of Munich in the lovely southern region bathed by the Danube called Bavaria. But by 1825, the waters of the Delaware and a new world were at his doorstep instead. Seeking political asylum, presumably during the Napoleonic Wars,  Emmanuel’s sparents were early entrants through young America’s portals of Immigration and after a brief stint in Fredericksburg, it was in Philadelphia they planted themselves. 

Emmanuel was not the best student but his knack for doodling blossomed into a talent for drawing and when his father took to his deathbed from cancer, young Emmanuel honed his skills in portraiture, selling miniatures for five bucks a pop. The age before photography did not mean an age without narcissism and Emmanuel did well enough to support himself and study with John Rubens Smith, one of America’s premier illustrators of our early urbanscapes. Smith’s paintings of Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore are some of the most accurate resources as documents of early 19th Century America. Hmmm. Capturing the lay of the land. File that. Smith encouraged Emmanuel to exhibit and one of his works, Portrait of a Lady, led to some critical recognition and enough orders to fund formal study. He chose the Kunstakademie (Art Academy) in Düsseldorf, and in 1841, at the age of 24, set sail for Europe.

Of course, off to the homeland makes sense. But Düsseldorf is 300 miles north of Schwäbisch Gmünd and in 1841, no high speed rail is making that close. It wasn’t going ‘home.’ We’re not sure why he chose the Kunstakademie, and by we’re not sure I mean I’m not sure. I looked and looked. Suffice to say for now the painting would certainly look different had he chosen some other school and its prevailing aesthetic. 

And for now let me clear this up a bit. When speaking of Germany, ‘Germany’ exists more as a concept in 1841 than anything else. As a matter of fact, if you want your head to spin, watch the video I’m posting in the comments section about Central Europe’s borders from 1789 (Hmmm, 1789. File that.) to the present. It’s easier to keep up with the Kardashians. (But you see where all those delicious words for little kingdoms and duchies come from, Bohemia,Thuringia, Saxony, Pomerania, etc.). In 1841, Germany is pulling itself back together after Napoleon tore through the joint and toppled no less than Charlemagne’s flipping Holy Roman Empire, then set his beady greedy little Corsican black eyes on Russia. In winter. You know the rest. If you don’t, let’s just say in colder weather? He was no George Washington. And—granted along with some solid civil law—he left seeds of unrest everywhere in his wake. It was harvest time in Europe.

O come o come Emmanuel to Düsseldorf in Westphalia, one of the 39 states that make up the loose and troubled North German confederacy, an autocracy developing into the wobbly Kingdom of Prussia, broiling with dangerous ideas but bathed by the mighty Rhine. It seems you fancy rivers. 

                   

The Enlightenment. 

We left Leutze hesitant, holding his conte crayons and standing on the verge of the Kuntzakademie in Düsseldorf. (If you ever want to affect a German accent, hit that umlaut in Düsseldorf and you sound like you carved a cuckoo clock this morning.) Let’s unravel the entire human history that brought him to this threshold. In four paragraphs.

That  we, as human beings, evolved one step out of the food chain left us a luxury no species had enjoyed certainly to the extent we do: Time. We have time to pause. And in the infinity of a pause we held a mirror up to ourselves and a telescope in our longer arm and saw ourselves in the universe, gloriously contemplative, coupled with the curiosity we inherited.  The world used to happen to its creatures. For better or worse, we could change the world. And the power of that knowledge led to a great respect for the dignity of each of us, based not on some archaic right of progeny but by what each of us brought to the table. The overwhelming logic of that notion seemed collective in its first full-flowered realization, Ancient Greece. And while Rome put the whole program on steroids and gave up a few milestones in human philosophical achievement to pave the Apian Way, they did move the ball forward. 

But Ides beware, the history of democracies is littered with hard-fought rights tossed back with hardly a care to those for whom power is the goal. And the light of Greece and the fire of Rome burnt themselves out as we plunged into one of the most bloody, fearful, plague-ridden miserable epochs in human history, absolute monarchs sitting on capricious haphazard thrones while the masses toiled in serfdom, hopeless save for the quick exit. Life expectancy was 25 years for a serf.

It is a testament to the capital T Truth of the loftier human efforts towards dignity and liberty and freedom that they persist in small movements that gain momentum and once again express themselves in the Body Politic. And although pockmarked with undulations, that was the next great arc of the human condition beginning with, of course, the Arts of the Renaissance, whose sublime beauty and inherent truths were the prototypes for scientific explorations and an optimism fueled by civility and a wealth that brought the life expectancy up to 35! That wealth consolidated itself though, and with a only few exceptions like the Dutch merchant class, not in the people but those very few people who conveniently claimed God chose them to lead, the anointed who sat their fat fannies on purple cushions and hoped for demanding sons whose entitlements were breathtaking. All in the family, these dynasties remain powerful to this day on a number of persistent thrones into which even an Oprah interview can’t throw a wrench side wise.

This would not stand though. This would not stand the construct, the very anatomy of the human brain whose trillions of sparkling synapses were working out better ways every day and exponentially. The next great movement in human history would challenge the seemingly impenetrable old order in ways that resonate with consequences to this very day. 

If the Renaissance taught us proportion, sensation, this next epic chapter would teach us perspective, perception. It’s fathers, standing on the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus and Ptolemy, would author the empirical blueprints of humanity and our relationship to the stars. And they were starry, Isaac Newton, John Locke, David Hume, Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Thomas Paine, they shown as if lit from within these enlightened. The world was giving birth to the Age of Enlightenment. And it would be a very difficult labor. 

                            ++++++++

Something’s in the air: Springtime or

The Age of Revolution, the worldwide phenomenon stretching from 1789 to the mid 1800s has its roots in 1760s Colonial America. A direct outgrowth of The Enlightenment, the Declaration of Independence is perhaps the most enlightened rational sound steady stable document ever produced. It simply but thoroughly lists the reasons a separation was not so much necessary as it was inevitable. Its truths are empiracle and indisputable. It reads without malice nor cries for redress or retribution. There would be no regicide, the British Monarch was not the issue.  It reads easily: Time to go.

Of course nearly every word, every bit of punctuation fell to scrutiny and debate,  the particular needs of the sprawling thirteen colonies were just as sprawling, varied and unique. And that was the easy part. Fighting the war, acquiring international recognition and ambassador posts, crafting a confederacy, creating an economy, scrapping that to write another inspired masterpiece, the US Constitution and to set this ship sailing battered and broke as it was. What made it work was that despite having vastly different oars, everyone was rowing in the same direction: Get the United States of America afloat.

Sparks across the sea did fly and settled first in France. But their Revolution was out for blood, rivers of it and rolling heads, the slicing sound in the sluice at la Place de la Concorde separating the French glitterati from us and from themselves. What emerged though was the revelation the French were slightly ambivalent about the titular head of their government, their country, well their empire, was it kingdom? The Republic!

After Napoleon’s defeat a host of European uprisings and skirmishes erupted in almost every region of the continent. At stake were the thrones of Europe. And the rise of the Middle Class. And no area was more ripe for revolt than the Duchies around Düsseldorf. The Spring Uprising of 1848 breaks out in pocket putsches throughout Prussia for two years and all around the eyes and ears of Emmanuel Leutze.

Leutze is in full favor of the manifestos backing these uprisings. Representative governments, fair wages, prison reforms, and an all-around respect for the rich, and the poor, and the bulging middle bourgeoisie. But, as you recall, there is no “Germany” in 1848, just 39 states with very different expectations from a Revolution. It seems impossible to make any significant gains or to take on the spectre of the Kingdom of Prussia without some sense of common purpose. What metaphor might prove handy he wondered, the young boy turned artist who’d grown up in young America, America’s cradle in fact, in Philadelphia on the Delaware River near a narrow stretch in particular?

                 

Finishing the hat. Dotting the i’s. Simmering the soup. Crossing the Delaware, together.

Armed now with a lot of background and our initial close examination of the painting, let's make soup. 

Emmanuel Leutze studies only one year at the Kuntzakeademie Düsseldorf but its influence informs nearly every brushstroke of his from then on.  In 1842, the Akademie is known for fostering a kind of subdued naturalism, and you see that in Leutze’s understated palette, and his extraordinary attention to detail. Just look at a close up of that ice. It is I feel a reaction to the fiery Romanticism, the mysteriousness and emotional heights and chasms that swept Europe with Beethoven and not inconsequentially, Napoleon. Look at the painting. There is tension and drama, but it is not coming from the tranquility and the realism of the icy morn, excellent and fair.  

It is from his mentor Akademie Direktor Fredrich von Schadow that Leutze borrows the heart. 

 

A generation earlier Von Schadow followed many of his colleagues to Rome both to study and gain commissions painting the apartments of German consulates to the Vatican. They became enamored with a kind of Middle Ages aesthetic of spirituality in art, and the style they brought back to Germany garnered them the nickname, the ‘Nazarenes.’ Put a pin in that. 

In 1842, two big events. One:  Leutze makes his own journey to Rome, passionately studying the works of Titian and Michaelangelo.  You can smell them all over this Crossing. And two: Leutze paints his first masterpiece, Christopher Columbus before the Council of Salamanca, one of six count em SIX paintings he'll create bearing the weight of the reputationally-challenged explorer. The attention this group painting received—it hangs in the Louvre today for heaven's sake (his better Columbus before the Queen hangs in the Brooklyn Museum, come!!!) —sealed Leutze’s lot as a working artist.  

Not being much of a student, you’ll recall, he never finishes his studies at the Akademie, but falls in love with one Julianne Lotner, marries, and settles down in Düsseldorf for the next 15 years. 

FUN FACT: Emmanuel and Julianne welcome a son one day in November, 1847. Eugene Harry Cozzens Leutze, who, much like his father, is born in Germany and moves with his parents to America one day. One day, he gets an appointment to the US Naval Academy. From Abraham Lincoln. He is aboard the famed Monticello during the Civil War and the famed Monterey during the Spanish American War, the day one day, in the Philippines with Admiral Dewey, he’s there for the capitulation of Manila. One day, he is promoted to Rear Admiral. To honor his memory, one day in 1942, the destroyer USS Leutze is launched. And one day, the main parade ground at the Washington Navy Yard is named for him. The son of the man whose legendary painting depicts one of the first naval operations in American history became an Admiral in the US Navy. Something to think about one day, this Monday (just seeing if you’re paying attention.)

As a German American German with some time on his hands, he attracts a niche market of visiting American tourists, ex-pats, and American art students studying in Germany. Put a pin in that.

He also passionately flings himself into the political climate and finds him fully sympathetic towards the progressive movements swirling around him.

We have a German American German naturalist painter who lived in Philadelphia with a spiritual bent and an encyclopedic knowledge of Italian Baroque masters living in pre-revolutionary Prussia in need of a singularity of purpose, an artist who already has a reputation as adept at group paintings. Oh. And easy access to any number of eager American models. 

Soups ready. 

                   

Together, we cross the Delaware

In 1849, the March Revolution of 1848 splintering around him, Leutze sets his brush to a major canvas. 

Washington Crossing the Delaware is to be seen by a population, not over someone’s  sofa. It is to be seen by a population whose purpose is floundering, whose moment in history when you break it down might have thwarted TWO world wars. It will have to be big. As must be its message. Look at this boatload of the miscast, this Benetton ad of the cross section of the New World. They row together. The farmers have different dreams than the trappers. The odds are entirely stacked against them. Row together. They can’t even talk to each other, many of them. No one understands the Scottish guy despite his constant guttural protestations he’s speaking English. But they can taste something in the cold air. Just row together. In a land where a freed slave shares a boat with two future Presidents of the United States, a woman backing them up and being guided by a native, anything is possible. If they’ll just row together. It is the land of possibility that is the goal. The goal simply stated in this work of art? Let’s row together, in the same direction to get there.  E pluribus unum.

Technically, Leutz infuses it with biblical proportion.  That strange light we talked about? It comes from within the painting, from Washington almost, a Michaelangelo mountain of a man, who not incidentally had died exactly 50 years ago that year, here, the only figure in full profile, ready for the coin, E pluribus unum thank you very much. The odd angle of the oars we mentioned given their direction? The oars in the bow are pointing towards Washington, the oarsmen in the stern are pulling towards him, the man so driven by purpose he seems oblivious to the immediate obstacles like the horrendous weather let alone those ahead like the nine mile march on the other side with only 1/3 of the men he’d counted on to take on professional soldiers (from—oh that’s right! Germany!) This giant (and he was at 6’2”in 1776, giant) radiates confidence. 

Leutze has every element in this sprawling enormous painting drawing our eye to this singularity. If it is a masterpiece, for me, it lies at the very least in his extraordinary composition. 

While there is no direct evidence Leutze ever physically encountered Rembrandt’s masterpiece and only nautical painting, one must assume he had, given his education and the way he so thoroughly references its magic. While the visceral intensity and immediacy of The Storm on the Sea of Galilee is inherently more dramatic, a terrifying wave upending their boat and ripping the sail in half, Rembrandt heightens the moment using very similar compositional tools: an ambiguous light source creates a stunning portal, although here the light pulls our eye to an apostle. It is his angle and every other in the work that pulls us to the ethereal figure, lit from within at the stern and the only the only figure in full profile, a calm in the storm, the gentle Christ, confident and caring. It is that move Rembrandt forces on our eye, from apostle to Christ—raise your hand if you did it, I see all your hands up—making us active kinetic participants in the drama, that gives him the edge here, and why nobody ever beats Rembrandt. And the master had one other trick up his sleeve. Twelve apostles and Christ. Thirteen. Who is that fourteenth man, the man where Leutze seats Major Nathaneal Greene? It’s a self-portrait of Rembrandt, looking directly at us, the only one in what feels like a confessional, his testament to a very human crisis of faith to which we can all relate. It is a genius work and if Leutze were to stand on anyone’s shoulders, there are none better.

SAD FACT: I would invite you all to Boston so we could encounter Rembrandt’s masterpiece together, but it was stolen there from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 and these 31 years later still remains lost to the world. Such a tragedy.

SIMILAR FACT: So too, fickle Fate might have robbed us this shared moment and twice. Leutze finishes the work in 1850 and shortly afterwards it is damaged in a fire in his studio. So he paints an exact version as a ‘safety’ that is shipped to NYC and exhibited in 1851 where some 50,000 people clamor for tickets. (His third smaller version hung in the White House from 1979 until recently and now hangs in the Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona.) The first work was restored and acquired by the Kuntshalle Bremen where if all things, it was destroyed by Allied bombers in 1945. It is the second exact iteration by the artist’s hand that hangs at The Met in an exact replica of the original’s magnificent gilded frame, topped with an enormous crested  eagle and crafted from one of the world’s first photographs, by Matthew Brady, the first Presidential photographer.

And finally.

Earlier I went on about our emergence from the food chain. The uniqueness of that position manifests itself  not only in the contemplative nature of humans but in our active purposeful creation of what we call culture as well. There are many ways to describe culture, but for our purposes let’s call it the expressions of what we value, the representations of our truth, the reality of our journey. 

There is only so much real estate set aside to memorialize these objet d’art our better prophets produce. So as I’ve told all of you when we got to The Met, if something finds it’s way to a wall there, bet your bottom dollar a species-wide consensus has been reached about it: What lies before you is a masterpiece. Of truth. While you are free to agree or not, pause to consider.

The truth Emmanuel Leutze expresses was specific to his moment in history. Its intended audience failed to consider its very real implications. That it finds an audience in 1851 America, on the verge of tearing itself apart in the worst crisis of our Republic, the Civil War, speaks to the power of that truth. 

Beyond Leutze’s stunning summoning of his talents, his taming of pigment, of light, of composition, his deference to the history of culture that precedes him, it is this truth that hurtles through time, transcending history to speak to us so specifically in this moment and why this painting sprung to my mind to gather all of you and discuss it: As a nation this gift of The Enlightenment, our Democratic Republic is under attack. From outside forces that would see us fail. And their method is to get in our boat and make us fight one another breaking our common purpose. Remember that. These fights are not of our creation. We all still harbor the same goals. And individual freedoms if our nation is to continue mean we must relent to one another, in good faith. Because we are all in the same boat. Let us row. Together.

NYCs never were builts

“Steel is a man-made material. We don’t know what may happen to it 100 years down the line. It may just all start collapsing.“

Those were the parting words of my very brilliant and exhausted roommate my sophomore year in college, looking up from his desk bleary-eyed, having not slept for two days. I had already finished finals and was going home for the summer. He had another week of exams in our univerity’s challenging civil engineering department.

I’m always reminded of that day when I look at Raymond Hood’s architecture, particularly his sumptuous American Radiator Building hugging the leafy southern shore of Bryant Park, and for you midwesterners, his triumphant Tribune building in Chicago. 

Buildings such as these are the transitional skyscrapers, those first towers to boldly pierce the clouds with a confidence slightly undermined by design elements that reached backwards rather then forwards, perhaps to quell the nervous denizens below, perhaps to quiet whatever portentious voice like that of my roommate’s singing “Steel‘s still new, don’t sleep!”

Slathered in stone, topped with temples, gothic, gilded, and redundant twice over, these buildings almost any from 1900-1929, seem to beg polite invitation to the gatekeeper gods of the stratosphere.

Somehow Raymond Hood slept well enough to break free from that need to look over his shoulder and went on to produce one of the most stunning examples of urban architecture in his 30 Rockefeller Center, virtually defining the New York City skyline in the late 30s to the end of the 20th Century. His clean lines, his sparing use of materials and the efficient spaces they carved out of the sky are my favorite examples of what I find to be the otherwise chunky clunky and dizzingly so Art Deco. In doing so he ushered in the international movement and what we’ve come to think of as modern architecture.

His theory became for architecture what Einstein was never able to accomplish in physics: Capable of withstanding a combined aesthetic in a city in the edge of unpredented growth and ripe for renewal. 

Of course, history Intervened as it will do, and New York City entered into a period of decline in the 1970s and 80s that saw the population plateau and the need for major urban planning dwindle.

But in the heady days of Mr. Hood’s optimism it was clear to him that we were running out of room on this tiny island of Manhattan. And that the boroughs soon would become home to hundreds of thousands and millions of more New Yorkers. There are renderings from this period that show at least 20 more bridges connecting Manhattan to its neighbors. And perhaps for those city dwellers who could not commit to a choice between living in say,  Manhattan or Brooklyn, Raymond Hood designed a series if these ‘bridge apartment houses’ where one might find themself living not on the river but over it.

Never built. But with technology available at our fingertips today some artist have come up with some pretty compelling images of what that might have looked like. Or does in a parallel universe...

September 10th, 2020

I said to a friend and colleague just the day before yesterday, “I can’t believe I’ve lived through two unlikely epochs in NYCs long, storied, successful  history of it to see tourism utterly collapse. Again.”

As remarkable as that is, upon reflection I realized what a selfish thought, admonished and roundly by the chorus of the thousands of souls lost to both tragedies: I’ve lived.

As have you, dear reader. And while we may feel pangs of guilt about that, and the tsunami of sadness that, rogue in nature, will take us out, level us, triggered by never the same words, a nearly reminiscent blue sky, the cry of the mother denied her son being taken off life support in April that wrent my psyche in two like the curtain in the temple, no sometimes reaching for a Snickers bar will set me off. This I don’t mind. I am glad to be made mindful of our loss, personal and collective, that makes me and us less than we might have been.

That is the lesson for me this year in my annual September 10th rumination. It has been suggested this global crisis has finally turned the page on the horror of that day at the World Trade Center, that these lovely children around us are maneuvering finally in a post 9/11 generation. I believe there is truth to that having watched time lessen the impact year after year on my younger and younger charges I brought to Lower Manhattan. It had been so much the focus of experiencing NYC for us trying to teach them, as the need waned in each successive crop of Eighth 

As an exercise lately, I try to imagine framing NYC to a hypothetical group of tourists that day in whatever part of a future they may return. We will inevitably demarcate the pre- and post-COVID city, and September 11th will become ancillary to that larger story. 

Except for it’s good lesson  that fuels whatever larger story takes hold: Life wants to live. And those that lose that tether need to see it in our eyes who carry the sadness, the memory and the joy of those who have moved on.

More magic.

Griffith Thomas was perhaps the most prolific American architect of the mid-19th Century, partnering during the early part of his career with his father Thomas. 

Yes. Thomas Thomas.

NYC was Griffith’s most fertile playground and while many of his most stylish if not lavish concoctions like the legendary Hotel Fifth Avenue have been lost to the ages, a dozen still delight the eye, including the Astor Library (now the Public Theatre) and my perennial favorite, the Arnold Constabile Mercantile Exchange.

His contemporary, the fabulously wealthy stockbroker Robert Mortimer, procured Thomas’ services for an office building design in what is today the Flatiron District. In 1860, however, this was a residential neighborhood in flux. Nearby lived the Jeromes and other antebellum wealthy New Yorkers. Postwar fortunes would dwarf the prewar’s and the money marched up the island of Manhattan. As such, the 1862 Mortimer Building was the first erected oh the neighborhood solely for commercial purposes.

Nonetheless, it was a beauty. And ran the length of the block. One of the first to embrace the neo-Itanlianate, its classic proportions, its symmetry, its sultry, earthy palette were everything that continues to bring us back to the Palladian, everything utterly delightful and soothing in substantial architecture. It’s three full facades are a primer in lintels, pediments, and ogees, its row of arched windows a further nod to the Romans, and its cast iron ground floor something of a capitulation to the modern. In 1862, the whole affair must have appeared to magically float on its airy glassy base. (The 1912 addition of a sixth floor doesn’t quite work without ruining it.)

It was home the first offices of the American Institute of Architects, one Griffith Thomas first presiding, to upscale jewelers, dry and goods dealers, makers of elixirs, and to the newest most fashionable, most thrilling business to dot the landscape, the mystical magical photographers.

The Mortimer Building weathered many wars beyond the one in which it was born, a devastating fire, and the war-torn years when its neighborhood fell into decline. But after a recent decades-long stint as Restoration Hardware, its next chapter is perhaps its very most magical: the new Harry Potter retail flagship is set to open next summer. 

The community board however just nixed the Potter request to post an enormous dragon outside...

The boy in the window.

Pictured in this photograph is a lovely home that sat, still but no longer, on the shore of leafy fashionable Union Square. The fashion tells you it was taken some time ago. The fashion’s dark palette may further indicate the mood—the kind of national grief our country had not yet encountered.

This was the day lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed, the day the cortège winding its way from Washington DC to Springfield, Illinois and bearing the catafalque of the the first US President to be assassinated found itself in New York City. It found itself amid the hushed, cowed, war-addled, grief-stricken crowds lining its route here in lower Manhattan. It found itself under the window of a terrified six year old little boy.

He sits here above the red arrow indicating his presence, the first US President to have witnessed the funeral of one of his predecessors.

Theodore Roosevelt was the first from his storied wealthy Dutch merchant-class old American monied family tree to fall from the family business and, oddly, up, up into the heights of public service. We owe so much to him and the legacy his family left us, here in NYC, in these United States, and in the world at large. One wonders how much of that legacy can be traced directly to this very solemn shocking moment captured arbitrarily in one of the world’s very first photographs.

A mobster, a moll, and Mae at the Hotel Harding.

I was walking across 54th Street yesterday, stopped at 205, snapped a photo, and recalled a friend of mine had once moved into an apartment here some twenty years ago. I recall he was paying 1100.00/month. I recall recoiling at the price. Today 1100.00/month would be a steal. Especially as I know a bit more about the building.

Opened in 1902 as the Hotel Harding at a cost of over half a million dollars (over $20 million today), 205 West 54th Street was the most expensive hotel built in midtown at the time. Its two-story base of rusticated Indiana limestone rose around a monumental entrance of four pilasters topped with a Juliet balcony and an arcade of Romanesque windows, a centerpiece that echoed itself up the red brick and limestone trimmed facade. The ninth story was topped with a deep heavily articulated cornice and the tenth and eleventh were set in a mansard, the eleventh boasting eight richly dormered oversized windows.

I do not write from history. Its facade is perfectly preserved.

Like most of its contemporaries, it was both a transient and residential property. And its unique position on Planet Earth was perhaps partly responsible for the equally unique cast of characters who called it home.

Oweny Madden grew up nearby in the worst of the Irish slums of Hell’s Kitchen. He ran with a gang called The Gophers and was not afraid of a fight. In and out of prison most of his young life, he was released from Sing Sing in 1923 just as Prohibition was in as full a swing as Swing.

His buddy Larry Fay was running a speakeasy out of the basement of the Harding called Club Intime. Larry needed some muscle to keep the likes of tougher gangsters, particularly Dutch Schultz, at bay. Oweny, the man not afraid to use a fist, a pistol, a Tommy gun, or a bomb, was his man. In a secret distillery on 26th Street, Oweny brewed a bathtub beer he named for himself and Madden’s was the gold standard of the Jazz Age. Oweny Madden was the real life Gatsby. And soon, the Intime was the most popular speakeasy in a city full of them, perfectly situated as it was in a basement of a beautiful building between the kitchen called Hell and a glittering district of Theatre.

Installed at the door was one Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan. Born in Waco, her place of birth and larger than life demeanor earned her the honorific for which she was mostly known: Texas. Texas Guinan. Texas had been a silent film star, a producer, a working gal, if you will, and graduated to, let’s say, an entrepreneur. So oily was she from the law she survived dozens and dozens of attempts to shut her speakeasy down, and so snappy was she with a quip, she was an inspiration for perhaps my favorite fictional New Yorker, one Bugs Bunny. When Texas walked into a room you knew it. You heard her. You heard her yell her trademark greeting: Hello Suckers!

Texas and Oweny sat on thrones over a kingdom of Broadway stars, major politicians, distinguished authors, Gilded Age scions, rum runners, punks, and thugs. The two were meant for each other. And deserved each other. They drove one another crazy. It was amour fou, fever love, and had they not other outlets for their rage, like the murder of Dutch Schultz, IN the Intime, they might have killed each other.

Living upstairs at the time was another pistol with a lip, one Mary Jane West. You know her as Mae. Texas and Mae were birds of a feather and of course Oweny fell for her dubious charms as well. Out of love he produced her Broadway play and out of love they fell, both landing in the clink for its dubious title and subject: Sex.

Mae then fell and fell hard for Oweny’s bag man, a smooth talking hoofer with a head of slicked back black hair, one George Ranft. Until he was known as George Raft.

All of them would head up to Texas’ rooms for a string of seances, attended as well by Vanderbilts, a Whitney or two, Norma Shearer. Drunk on Madden beer, they’d chat with another black haired and slicked back screen idol, dearly departed as he was, one Rudolph Valentino.

The Great Depression was depressing and all this jazzy fun would finally come to an end. Harassed to no end at the Harding, Oweny and Texas took their ball and went to Harlem to run the Cotton Club and promote boxing on the side, the glittering stars followed the sun to Hollywood, and the Harding’s fortunes fell with the city’s in the dark last quarter of the 20th Century.

But no fortunes last, even poor ones.

Today the Albamarle, as it has been rechristened, never looked better. And a smallish one bedroom apartment is presently on the market for $620K.

And I think it would go for a lot more if potential buyers had but a shadow of a whisper of a clue as to the fast-talking glittering glowing brawling biting bombed and bombing ghosts roaming its halls and waiting for the next scheduled seance to air their century-old grievances.

Il Campanile di Madison Square, a closer look.

The Metropolitan Life Clock Tower on the eastern shore of Madison Square  Park took the crown of tallest building in the world in 1909. It would wear it until 1913 when the Woolworth Building snatched it away. The lessened Met Life Clock Tower had other bragging rights left, though. Most obviously, it stands as a more than loving nod to the famous and famously rebuilt Bell Tower in Venice, erected in its recognizable form in the Renaissance of the 1500s, damaged many times and the last major rebuild after an utter collapse at the beginning of the 20th Century.

And The Met Life Tower was not the only building to turn to Venice for inspiration. Just feast your eyes.

Early in the game, in the 1600s, the Slovenian town of Piran and the Croatian town of Rovinj gave us very true likenesses.

From there the design fanned out across the globe. Seattle has one. 

Toronto has one.

The Brisbane City Hall in Australia, the Town Hall in Kiel Germany, 

the Daniels & Fisher Tower in Denver, the Campanile in Port Elizabeth- South Africa, 

 
















Sather Tower at the University of California, Berkely,

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 



















the right-hand bell-tower of St. John Gualbert in Johnstown, Pennsylvania,

 even another one in NYC at 14 Wall Street. 



























But a not so secret secret. The Venetians themselves stole the design from the 12th Century Bell Tower at Forli! 
























Still, it is the Campanile in Venice that delights the most. The bulk is a simple shaft with brick work that gives the building a fluted appearance. The bells are housed in a kind of majestic Venetian loggia topped with a cube two of its faces graced with the winged lion, symbol of Venice, and two others with Lady Justice, the female personification of the Queen of the Adriatic. A slender pyramid arises out of that and the Angel Gabriel perches above it all welcoming the world with his horn.

It is in all the copies that one appreciates the height of proportion achieved in Venice, to the extent that I’ve always been a little disappointed at our best effort in the arena. The Met Life Tower always looked a little bulky to me.

Turns out? Take a closer look. The original building had a slenderer column of a rise. 


Look at the photo on the right, taken in 1911, particularly where the loggia section begins. You can see how much the bottom of the loggia is protruding much farther than it seems to today.










In 1960, the tower was “fattened up” to give it more redundancy and exude more power as a corporate symbol. Perhaps that was effective. But the first version of the building was better aesthetically, and historically, truer as it was to its parent a world away.


Finally, let's take a closer look at the top. It’s hard to get up there. And, surprise, it literally gave itself a crown for tallest building in the world it was those four years over a hundred years ago.