All hail the Municipal Building.

The City Beautiful movement was an urban planning model that swept the US in 1890, a response to the overcrowding of tenements and the burgeoning skyscrapers of NYC and Chicago especially. Its proponents heralded a return to classicism and studied French and Italian Renaissance architecture at L'École des Beaux Arts in Paris. They hoped that a beautiful city would promote civic pride and civic virtues, and lend order to the chaos of unprecedented population growth. Marking the end of this movement was the construction of NYCs Municipal Building.


New York City incorporated all five boroughs in 1898. Overnight, the city grew five times over and was desperate for the office space to keep this megapolis running smoothly. After coming in second place in the international competition to build a new Grand Central Terminal, the firm of McKim, Meade and White won the commission this time around and proposed a 40-story tower. It is pictured here going up and completed in its early years.

When I cross Chambers Street, this new Colossus never fails to catch my breath and capture my imagination. Built rather like a Roman Column in three phases, base, shaft, and capital, this building incorporates French and Roman Imperial elements: An 'Arch of Constantine" flanked by a colonnade announces the entrance, a Guastavino-tiled vaulted ceiling, an echo of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, leads to a subway station, the first building to incorporate a subway station in its design. A U-shaped facade soars up to the pinnacle. 

At the top, a multi-drummed tempietto rises in stages of Corinthian columns leading the eye to a 25-foot gilded statue, Civic Fame, the third largest statue in Manhattan and the highest. Surrounding the tower are four other gothic-like turrets representing the four other boroughs being tied to Manhattan.

It is a magnificent building, copied the world over, and particularly badly in the former Soviet Union where Josef Stalin, having stolen the design on a trip to NYC, had no less than seven of them built, known as the Seven Ugly Sisters. But whenever I pass ours, or on the few occasions I've had to go in, I feel particularly proud to be a New Yorker. The City Beautiful movement weaves its spells on me and my civic virtue exactly one hundred years later.

Breanne's Pick at The Met:

Ugolino and His Sons, modeled ca. 1860–61, executed in marble 1865–67

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (French, 1827–1875)

Saint-Béat marble

Ugolino, a traitor to Pisa, was banished to die of starvation with his sons and grandsons. In this haunting, dramatic, gut-wrenching sculpture by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, we see the torment in the father's face and features as his sons plead for him to eat them. Perhaps most disturbing, Ugolino seems to be considering it, so painful is his predicament.

Michaelangelo is all over this piece, as Carpeaux was a great student of the genius' work. Notice the perfect anatomy, the muscles, veins, sinews, all contracting in agony. Notice, too the oversized hands and feet, decidedly and purposely out of proportion as vessels of emotion.

To learn more of Ugolino, read Dante's Inferno.

To learn more about this sculpture, visit The Met's extraordinary website:

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/67.250

A very old tradition.

The first NYC St. Patrick's Day parade was held March 17th, 1762, fourteen years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.


It was held on lower Broadway in 1762 by a band of homesick Irish ex-patriots and Irish military serving with the British Army stationed in the American colonies in New York City. This was a time when the wearing of green was a sign of Irish pride and was banned in Ireland. The parade participants reveled in the freedom to speak Irish, wear the green, sing Irish songs and play the pipes to Irish tunes that were very meaningful to the Irish immigrants who had fled their homeland.

For the first few years of its existence, the parade was organized by military units. After the war of 1812, the Irish fraternal and beneficial societies took over the duties of hosting and sponsoring the event. Originally, the Irish societies joined together at their respective meeting places and moved in a procession toward Old St. Patrick's Cathedral in Lower Manhattan on Mott & Prince Streets where the Archbishop of New York would address the crowd before revelers dispersed to celebrate.

Around 1851 the individual societies merged under a single grand marshal and the size of the parade grew sharply. This was when the "Irish" 69th Regiment began to lead the marchers and the Ancient Order of Hibernians became the official sponsor. In the early 90's, the Parade was attacked for its traditional values and in the resulting law suites the organizers rights were up held all the way to the US Supreme court. These attacks continue today. In 1992 the National AOH directed all AOH organizations to form separate corporations to run events such as the Parade. The Parade is run today by members of the AOH under a separate corporation, St Patrick’s Day Parade Inc.

It is considered the largest parade in the world.

New Tork City gone wrong. (As my typo is thematic, I'm keeping it.)

Granted, how do you make a bus terminal look cool, but this is an epic fail. After decades of repurposing and redesigning, we are still left with this eyesore on 42nd Street. The use of windows on the first two floors may have been '70s chic, but they are terminally filthy with 5,000 buses driving on top of them every day. Every time I pass it, which is every day, I think, "Wow, it looks like a crane fell on top of an ugly mall."


Let me add here, it replaces this,

which is about as exciting as a shoebox. They've never been able to get this building quite right, have they?

New York City gone wrong.

This building is quite simply awful. It would be laughed out of Las Vegas where the bar for architecture is, if not low, rather flexible. It's polytetrahedral base is utterly confusing, it's mis-matched asymmetrical tower is faced with a mile of glass in ugly glazes, and the whole thing is bisected by an arc of light that reminds me of a fuse, as if this mess were about to blow itself up out of embarrassment. Out of all the stunning architecture in NYC, THIS behemoth to bad taste is the view from my apartment. Ugh.

Liberty enlightens me again.

My first visit to the Statue of Liberty in 2012 today, the four hundred and thirty-fourth in my life, and I looked up at her, somewhere close to her south-west corner, and the sweep of her arm down to the curve of her dragging leg, the movement of her gown, her copper a striking sea foam green against a particularly azure sky, and I felt as if I were seeing it all for the very first time. It is a wondrous thing.

Jeff's Met Picks: Renoir

Madame Georges Charpentier (née Marguérite-Louise Lemonnier, 1848–1904) and Her Children, Georgette-Berthe (1872–1945) and Paul-Émile-Charles (1875–1895)

Auguste Renoir  (French, Limoges 1841–1919 Cagnes-sur-Mer)

I ALWAYS visit Madame Charpentier. The wife of a wealthy publisher, Renoir knew her husband who asked him to paint this seating. With it's vivid colors, it's forced perspective, the shifting gazes of the porcelain-complected subjects, and the formidable figure of Mme. Charpentier herself dominating the group in black, one's eyes are hurled around this painting in a frenzy of activity and motion, belying the quiet household setting, a loving one, as evidenced by the dog, "Fido" if you will, or the well-known symbol for fidelity in a marriage.

I have Renoir on my mind today. I must confess to having had grown less fond of him, him and his pretty paintings. They were commercially successful with their idealized subjects and doe-eyed models in a time when his contemporaries were struggling to eat. They lack the early signs of abstract expressionism of Cezanne, the primitive force of Gaughin, the ugliness of life in the rising bourgeoisie of Degas, the madness of van Gogh, and eventually, the brutal deconstructionism of Picasso. But he was an utter original, Renoir was. Copied poorly and ad nauseum for a century, I must remind myself that he was the first to apply color as boldly as he did, and, along with Monet, to start to dispense with the realism of his predecessors

Jeff's Met Picks: Brancusi

Bird in Space

Constantin Brancusi  (French (born Romania), Hobita 1876–1957 Paris)

February 19th is Brancusi's birthday. Don't know why I always remember that. His departure from his earlier mentor, Auguste Rodin and Rodin's very classical approach to sculpture, could not be more pronounced than in this sleek, soaring, expressionistic vision of a bird in flight. It is less the bird in flight than it is the very essence of flight itself. Surprisingly simple, it is I think, a masterpiece of both proportion and allegory, sensual and solid, and utterly modern in every good sense of the word. Happy Birthday, Constantin!

Jeff's Met Picks: da Vinci

The Head of the Virgin in Three-Quarter View Facing Right

Leonardo da Vinci  (Italian, Vinci 1452–1519 Clos-Lucé)

The Met's Collection is arguably the most eclectic in the world. Although Italy and France are home to his most famous works, da Vinci is well represented here in a number of studies and drawings like this one in charcoal. That he could achieve such a painterly quality, such realism, evoke such ethereal maternal affection with a piece of chalk is astounding. My favorite left-hander in history, he was equally adept with his right hand, endlessly curious, an inventor of ideas that would eventually dominate our lives 600 years later, an acutely accurate anatomist, a passionate liver of life, he was the very model of what we now call "The Renaissance Man."

Jeff's Met Picks: David

Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794) and His Wife (Marie-Anne-Pierrette Paulze, 1758–1836), 1788

Jacques-Louis David (French, 1748–1825)

Oil on canvas

I see this massive painting every time I go to The Met. It hangs at the crossroads of some of my favorite collections. Painted by David, most famous for his "Death of Marat,"

that hangs in Belgium and is often referred to the painting that started the French Revolution, this painting of his is a masterpiece of portraiture, trompe l'oeil, and neoclassicism. M. Lavoisier, a genius in chemistry (he discovered the chemical composition of water!), went on to lose his head in the Reign of Terror, so it is particularly poignant to see him and his wife, who took all his notes in the workplace, in this moment of quiet, marital equality and happiness.

Jeff's Met Picks: Winogrand

El Morocco, 1955

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928–1984)

Gelatin silver print

I grew up seeing this image everywhere. Then, to see it hanging at the Met, I understood why. The composition is as perfect as any High Renaissance painting. We do not see him. We see her reaction. And it is feral, urban, specific to the Cafe Society of the NYC Supper Clubs of the 40s and 50s, and universal in its emotional life. It is one of the images that took the camera on its very long journey from novelty to its rightful destination as an instrument of serious art.

Jeff's Met Picks: Cristofori's piano et forte

Grand Piano, 1720

Made by Bartolomeo Cristofori (Italian, 1655–1731)

Florence, Italy

Various materials

One of four extant pianos in the world created by the very inventor of the piano (or pianoforte as it was known), Bartolomeo Cristofori. Without this, we would not have has Bach or Mozart or Beethoven or Liszt, or Rachmaninoff or Debussey or ...

Come see NYC with me.

Hi!

My name is Jeff Plunkett. I want to show you NYC through this blog, with pictures, with words, in hopes you'll come tour New York City with me, and keep in touch with me afterwards with comments about your experiences here. These pages will be a tool for us to connect.

I've been giving tours of NYC for fourteen years now. I've met many of you already. But I hope these blog posts will make it clear that every visit to NYC will be different, as every encounter in this city of eight million is ripe with possibility. And in a city that never sleeps, the evolution of the cityscape, its sites, attractions, and treasures, is fast and furious and fun.

Please follow me here. I'd love your suggestions. I'd be happy to make my own should you be planning a visit.

To read the rest of the blog, just click on the "NYC with Jeff" heading.

Best!
Jeff