New York City preserves itself.

The NYC Landmarks Law turns 50 this week. And this is the story of just one building it saved.

John Jacob Astor III and his wife Charlotte founded The New York City Cancer Hospital in 1884 in a fortress of a building at Central Park West and 106th Street, largely in response to former President Ulysses S. Grant's inoperable throat cancer. It is important to remember how much the entire nation loved Grant for his efforts to bring the North and South together again.

Cancer was thought of as a dirty disease, a disease of bad hygiene and poverty. It ruined people's lives with humiliation, let alone the deadly consequences. Grant's illness brought national attention to cancer.

This building's sumptuous design owed as much to the French gothic as it did to turn of the century advances in hospital care: round rooms to provide cleanliness and ample head space between beds and massive central ventilation shafts to clear the air of germs.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's daughter Rose practiced nursing here.

Because cancer continued to be so deadly, however, the hospital was stigmatized by New Yorkers and even nicknamed The Bastille. It deteriorated from lack of funds. In 1955, it closed its doors as a hospital and moved its services across town to become the new Memorial Sloane-Kettering hospital for Cancer Research.

It suffered a few poor incarnations, abandoned at certain times, jerry-rigged as a nursing home at others, and falling apart as NYC did in the 70s. But fortunately, it was granted landmark status in 1976.

Many developers tried to use the building, but most certainly it would have been torn down if not for this protection. Finally in 2000, it was purchased and developed into condominiums.

After a massive restoration and repurposing which included adding a residential tower behind the original building, today the round rooms are exquisite apartments fetching upwards of seven million dollars a pop.

I'll never get near one of those apartments, but thanks to this law, I get to pass this building several times a week, and I always point out its captured glory to captive and captivated visitors.

A reflection on September 10th.

After a night of nightclubbing in Lower Manhattan, in love with the city and the quiet it can surprisingly produce at 4AM, unexpected and dense like a blanket that fell from your mother's arms, I stumbled upon this view. It was the early 1990s and I was unstoppable. But these towers stopped me dead in my tracks with a mighty awe, these quiet mountains of glass and steel standing guard over the end of the island and my false sense of impenetrability. As will do the moon, sometimes things just look enormous in the night sky. And that night, these buildings looked bigger than my imagination. I felt so safe in their presence in a dark city that was in those days still a bit dodgy and dangerous.

Nobody ever much liked Towers One and Two of the original World Trade Center. The most that many could say of them was that they looked like the boxes the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings arrived in. But that is unfair. They were a benign presence of simple elegance and they defined our skyline for thirty-three years. Tomorrow, I'll remember the people. But thirteen years ago today was the last day of these buildings. And while I'm rather a cheerleader for the new World Trade Center in a much larger field of critics, today, I'll miss this view, the view of my youth, and miss these mountains that took me by surprise one night as we yielded to the unbearable morning, the twins who made me realize my place in the world, tiny and vulnerable, important, sure, but cut down to right size.

My Willa.

Willa Cather was born in Virginia but spent her formative years on the plains of Nebraska where the drama of the landscape and the pragmatism of prairie life mingled in her mind. She set out to become a physician, an unusual pursuit for a young woman at the turn of the last century, but her gifts as a writer were obvious at a young age and she switched her major to English at the University of Nebraska. After moving back east, she wrote for journals, newspapers, and magazines for ten years in Pittsburgh, PA, home to my favorite female authors, before moving and settling for the rest of her life in NYC, in Greenwich Village at the age of thirty-three. Here she wrote her masterpieces, Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction, much of it on Bank Street where you can still see her home. Her work is full of wistful romanticism flavored with an unusual economy, the hallmarks of her life in Nebraska, and while she produced quite a bit of verse, it is the free-form flowing prose-poetry I highlight here, a bit of wonder from My Antonia.

The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers...I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

Hughes and Poem.

Born in Joplin, Mississippi, you cannot talk of Harlem without talking of Langston Hughes. The Harlem Renaissance was nearly his invention, he certainly was its greatest voice, and he sought to give African- and Caribbean-Americans a similar voice, one without self-hatred, fear, or shame. He wrote columns, novels, and plays, but I love him for his poems, many short, some epic, all empowering. He inspired his contemporaries like Thurgood Marshall, Zora Neale Thurston, and Aaron Douglas and many foreign authors including black writers in French-speaking Africa. He discovered Alice Walker. Published often in The Crisis, the official literary magazine of the NAACP, he is most known for The Negro Speaks of Rivers, The Weary Blues, Let America be America Again, and Harlem, What Happens to a Dream Deferred? But it is the short poem below that took the wind out of my sails one day and I've never been quite the same since. It says nearly nothing, but because it is so specific, a moment we've all experienced--a poem about not having the words to write a poem--that it says everything to me, the bravery of a heart that puts a friendship in a box on a shelf because the silence is far more powerful than the poem. That is a courageous writer. And every time I encounter this piece, part of me cracks with a perfect sadness.

Poem.

I loved my friend.

He went away from me.

There's nothing more to say.

The poem ends,

Soft as it began--

I loved my friend.

The Seeger River, turn turn turn.

Many people ask me who was responsible for turning NYC around after its plunge into bankruptcy and despair, neglect and unfettered crime, a brokenness that seemed unfixable in the 1970s. There are several answers. Mayor David Dinkins took on crime like no one had before. Michael Bennett and Marvin Hamlisch wrote A CHORUS LINE and Broadway became relevant again, a must-see destination. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani implemented the Broken Window Theory and residents took pride in their own neighborhoods. And of course, as I'm always ranting, the artists invaded the neglected corners of the city and infected them with enthusiasm and joy.

This is an incomplete picture.

No one, no person, no group, no theory, no police force was more responsible for the resurrection of NYC than the man we lost today. Many years ago, Pete Seeger built a sailboat and sailed it up the river that was brown. He'd stop on shorelines and give concerts and instruct the audience that the river was our blood and we must clean it or we would not survive. So we did. And the Hudson River became clean. And the fish returned. And the city reflects the green and blue waters that now surround it. So important was this man to NYC that I propose we rename the Hudson River the Seeger River. And I propose we sing his songs today, at least once a day, forever, because no sweeter soul ever walked our streets and no kinder man ever sung about social injustice and no better man ever made our city great.

Old NYPD HQ, for you.

Sometimes weeks go by when I don't see this perfect gem of a building at the crossroads of no less than four different neighborhoods: SoHo, Chinatown, Little Italy and TriBeCa.

The Old Police Headquarters is a masterpiece of the drama of the Baroque and the stateliness of the Edwardian. It takes up an entire block and one must seek out a view, often hidden by surrounding subsequent buildings, of the treasure at the top: A copper-clad dome of such exquisiteness it reminds one of St. Paul's Cathedral in London or Castle Howard in Yorkshire.

The five-story limestone edifice is a feast of cornices, columns, balustrades, clock faces, finials, pillasters, but designed by the firm of Hoppin and Koen with such Palladian proportion that none of it seems overdone or out of place.

When it opened in 1909, it was meant to impress both policeman and prisoner with the majesty of the law. The basement included a pistol range. But in 1973, the NYPD moved out of the building leaving its fate in the balance. Fortunately, the Landmarks Preservation Society saved the building which was converted into 55 luxury apartments in 1987.

The last listing I saw for apartments:


2-bedroom apartment  for rent at $7,000 - $11,500 per month
2-bedrooms for sale at $1,050,000 to $1,500,000

You pay for luxury, even on the corner of four neighborhoods.

Lenny. And weep.

One of the reasons I love living in New York City is because Leonard Bernstein lived right up the block. And right up the block they filmed the location shots for his masterpiece, WEST SIDE STORY. When WEST SIDE STORY opened, most people complained as they left the theatre that none of the songs were "hummable."  What a window into how far ahead of his time the Maestro was, as it is now one of the most recognizable scores in the world.

Listen to his "Tonight":

What might have easily been a pedestrian, conventional love ballad, he underscores with breathless syncopation and our hearts flutter along as these two infatuated youngsters fall in love on a fire escape. The key shifts wildly, keeping us off balance, and each verse ends in an ominous minor key foreshadowing the star-crossed nature of a fleeting romance. It is the musical equivalent of pure joy, with the haunting notion ever present that all of this might not last or end well. Pay special attention to the young Sondheim's lyrics here. They are pitch-perfect for this song, the youth, the vigor, and the sweet, almost inarticulate ways a drop-out gang member and an immigrant dress-maker might describe their indescribable feelings. "With suns and moons all over the place." "Today, the world was just an address, a place for me to live in, no better than all right. But here you are, and what was just a world is a star."

While Bernstein was writing this score, he was simultaneously writing his opera TROUBLE IN TAHITI, a sad story loosely based on the demise of his parents' marriage. 

Think of "Tonight" and all of its breathless promise, now listen to TROUBLE IN TAHITI; Scene 4 (from 0:00 to 2:40):

Achingly beautiful, about an aching subject: A duet sung apart, a couple utterly lost to themselves and to each other. Alone, together. It is a duet of regret, of pointless lies, and running through all of it is an unlikely strain of hope. I think that is what I most admire about Bernstein, that he tenders hope among the hopeless, that he tempers ecstasy with restraint if not sadness. The sweep of this score is monumental, funereal, a requiem of the highest calibre. It is almost inconceivable that Bernstein was capable of such emotional breadth during the same period in his life.

Bernstein was a deeply spiritual man, and drew from his Jewish background and his profound curiosity in Christianity to give us both the CHICHESTER PSALMS and, under commission by Jacqueline Kennedy to open the theatre in her husband's name, his MASS.

Listen to his "Adonai-ro-i:"

Bernstein's gift for melody is all over this piece. Like any good artist, especially any good artist of the late 20th Century, he understood that less is more. This is a simple melodic line rendered lush by the harmonics, and surprising by the occasional flight into the atonal. The harsh staccato section is battled into submission, bathed and washed and cleansed by the return of his stunning and now fully realized melodic line at the end.

And, out of all the transcendent music in MASS, I choose the finale for you:

It is a synthesis of all the themes he has introduced earlier in the score. It builds from the simple song we heard earlier, now sung by a boy, and builds into a canon of glory, of praise, of celebration. Allow yourself to be swept up in Bernstein's gradual rise, let your emotion soar with this score the way it inevitably will if you simply let it wash over you. And feel the enormous peace, perhaps, certainly the peace I feel every time I allow myself the privilege of listening to this.

I've written and often that Leonard Bernstein will be revered by future generations in the way we revere say, Brahms and Mahler and Stravinsky. We don't quite yet. Because he is still mortal to many of us the lucky who lived while he did. But as he passes further into the past, he will pass deeper into our collective psyches. And his music will move us in deeper ways, this man, this genius, who could score the feelings in our hearts, the specific pains and joys, the ordinary and extraordinary, and make us feel things we didn't even know we were capable of feeling. 

I live down the block from where he wrote this music. And sometimes, I have to pinch myself.

A salute.

You, who dominated the skyline of the world for forty-three years, you, who are often called the most recognizable building on Earth, you, who took a punch from a plane in 1945, you, you are my champion.

I think of you gracefully tossing your crown downtown as the first World Trade Center went up forty-four years ago. You had worn it well for decades. And it was your time to sit in the shade of another building or two while still holding onto our hearts like a beloved elder-statesman.

When we watched in horror as The Twin Towers came down, perhaps our only consolation was that you, dear friend, were still safely standing up on 34th Street, and ready to bear the weight of our grief and affection, your head lit up proudly and nightly in the festive colors of the seasons, as we crowned you once again with a smaller coronet, no longer King of the World, but King of NYC most certainly, our Kong, and there you stood guarding us like a kind father while we collected our shattered selves and found the courage to reach for the sky once more.

Then yesterday, you did the extraordinary. You tossed your crown back downtown again. Who does that? Who has the humility and wisdom and graciousness to sit back in the shade twice in their lifetime? You do, my hero.

Yesterday, One World Trade Center became the tallest building in NYC, on its way up to becoming the tallest building in the United States of America. It will have its day and many more in the sun. But this week, I think of you, my forever friend, the building that tells me I'm home as it is always you, the first friend I look for whenever I return.

Thank you for carrying us through the darkness with dignity. You are our older King, but beyond that, you are our Emperor. You are the Empire State Building. And no one will ever take that from you.

In honor of the ship that never came.

Pier 54 in its heyday, with the RMS Lusitania in port.

All that remains of Pier 54, the iron arch, where New Yorkers once waited to greet the RMS Titanic.

There have been a number of days of great sadness for the people of New York City. But giving a tour yesterday on the 100th Anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic moved me in unexpected ways.

Standing in front of the White Star Offices with my new friends from Washington and California and Kentucky, I could almost taste the desperation of the families storming the building as word trickled in and painfully slowly of those we lost that terrifying night, in the cold, off an iceberg miles from the coast of Newfoundland.

Isidor Strauss, the owner of Macy's Department Store, was found floating lifeless in the frigid waters. His wife, Ida, who had made it on to a lifeboat only to get back on the Titanic when she saw they weren't allowing her husband to go with her, was never seen again. John Jacob Astor IV, the wealthiest man on board, the scion of the oldest monied family in NYC, was also found dead in the water, his face blackened by the coal of one of the famous funnels that had snapped from its tethers and crashed onto those desperately trying to stay afloat. But the great majority of the victims were those third class passengers, the immigrants like our own ancestors, whose hearts were filled with hope of life in a new land where hard work might one day pay off, where their children might one day own a home and have an education. Simple dreams, dashed at sea.

I thought of the people that lined the Hudson River up to the White Star Pier at 14th Street, only to see the SS Carpathia arrive with the small fraction of survivors and a larger hold filled with bodies that did not survive, to be laid out on the floor of the ballroom of the Jane Street Hotel for identification. I thought of the days and weeks of confusion as misinformation gave many false hope, that perhaps the Titanic survived and was being towed to Virginia, a story that gained much traction in the minds of those family members who would do anything to keep their hope afloat.

I thought of the sad fact that there are no more survivors of that terrible, terrifying night alive anymore, those people who lived out their lives with the knowledge that they were somehow lucky beyond lucky, that fate had passed over them for the time being, that their stories would be mangled by newspaper men and The White Star Lines' official version of the events, tainted by a company hoping to avoid prosecution. But this was the end of the fabled White Star story. And the stories of the victims would eventually be heard.

It was also the end of a world as we knew it. The inequities of the class system that caused the disproportionate death of the poor that night would not go unnoticed. It was, perhaps, not a coincidence that this event led to the downfall of the greatest dynasties Europe had ever known, and that we would soon plunge headlong into a War of the World. Systems broke down everywhere, and in many cases, for the better. Most certainly not always, but often. The sinking of the Titanic heralded in a Century of Death and rivers of blood would spill in the hopes of creating a fairer world. Much of that carnage was by design. But it all began with a rather coincidental run-in with a piece of ice that had broken off an ice field eighty miles away on a crystal clear night at the height of man's sense of invulnerability.

We are vulnerable now. We always have been. But it took this titanic event to remind us. And remind us again 100 years later.

Rat Rock!

Looming over the kid-tastic Hecksher Playground at the southern end of Central Park is a rat-tacular hunk of Manhattan schist, a huge hunk of schist in fact, called Rat Rock. Kids enjoying the playground climb its heights and marvel at the mica shining in the sunlight in between slides and swings and seesaws and the very famous and fierce kick ball games for which the playground is best known. Hecksher Playground is the oldest (1927) and largest (three acres) playground in Central Park and just underwent a multi-million dollar renovation to make the fun even funner and the safety even safer. But if you want to put safety on a shelf for a moment, put on a good pair of sneakers and sneak up the side of the schist and you'll see the gouges of a glacier that scraped gravel along the granite during the last Ice Age, ice that once was a mile thick on top of your sunny head.

Does it look like a large rat to you?

Subway connections.

Sometimes, when you take the subway, in the middle of a mass of humanity, you can oddly feel a little lonely, particularly on a day when you've dropped off fifty new friends at the airport and they are no longer following behind you except in the pretty pictures in your mind's eye and the lovely song you can still hear in your mind's ear.

Most people on the NYC subway have found a way to disconnect form the throng, to look inward and take a little break from visual and aural invasion of the madding crowd. The good people at Apple have brought us the iSubway, where everyone is connected to their favorite music or tricky games or, if you're above ground in Queens, your gossip-y friend. But I dispensed with all of that and my crossword puzzles last year to look people in the eyes.

To connect.

And it works! Look across the aisle and smile and more often than not, someone will smile back. It is amazing to be reminded that we are human and people respond in kind. Toddlers are the best. Every one in the world is a potential new best friend to them, and although the consistency of the universe is a little beyond their comprehension and you will disappear from their memories the moment they leave the train, they will make any number of faces at you as long as you make faces back.

We should never forget our toddler heart.

One day, on the A train, a group of very rowdy youths got on board at 14th Street. They were pushing one another, their soft drinks flying, laughing and loud. Very, very loud. Then one of them, unusually tall and thin, touched the overhead bar, rose up en pointe, and effortlessly raised his other leg into an arabesque. The poetry of his movement, this moment, moved me to my core. A random act of artistry, and I was so happy to live in New York, on a subway, like today, where beauty can break out like springtime.

Splendor in the grass.

Out of a Tim Burton film, the parabola of a lawn on the Lincoln Center campus is getting ready for another season of thousands of visitors who will climb its curvy verdant sweep to escape the city by one story and take in the sunshine surrounded by the Travertine of Tuscany. Designed by Elizabeth Diller, of the architecture firm, Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the lawn is part of a series of largely subtle changes, pleasing updates, all-around user-friendliness to what had sometimes been described as a bleak, stark urban project. Lincoln Center has a little more life now, a lot more light, and the craziest patch of green that catches your eye and lures you up into its lush life to frolic on a mat of nature in the air. See you up there!

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 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.

New York City gone wrong.

Polled in 1987, this building has the distinction of being the structure the majority of New Yorkers wanted demolished in their hometown. It is overbearing, with unpleasing planes and bared concrete, taking the worst pages from the often interesting Bauhaus School of Design and massing them into what was once the largest commercial office building in the world. As such, it blocks THREE NYC jewels: Grand Central Terminal, The Helmsley Building, and the sweeping view of Park Avenue. And I have to walk around the entire thing just to get home sometimes. Ergh!

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: Rembrandt

Self-portrait

Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn)  (Dutch, Leiden 1606–1669 Amsterdam)

The only museum in the world to house more Rembrandt paintings than The Met is the Museum het Rembrandthuis (or "Rembrandt House") in Amsterdam. This man took the medium of oils to new heights, and new depths, if you will, as his masterly application of hundreds of layers of glazes gave his work remarkable and unsurpassed dimension. His lavishly rich golden-toned works seem to radiate light from within. Rembrandt van Rijn painted himself many times over the course of his life. This is one of his last self-portraits and his honest, unforgiving eye portrays himself warts and all. I am always particularly struck by the wisdom emanating from his well-worn face, and a knowing sense of his psychology in an age that predates the formal science of psychology by some 200-plus years.

Jeff's Met Picks: van Gogh

Cypresses

Vincent van Gogh  (Dutch, Zundert 1853–1890 Auvers-sur-Oise)

van Gogh called cypress trees "Nature's perfect architecture." If you walk north through Central Park to The Met, you pass a grove of them on Cypress Hill. It is an especially fun thing to do if you are taking in the number of canvases of cypresses by van Gogh hanging in the museum. van Gogh's paintings are three-dimensional as he slathers on the paint with such abandon, the wide and wild paint strokes have an actual depth. Paintings in relief. The colors range from brilliant to putrid and the painting is at once a peaceful view of hilly countryside and a manic ride through the mind of one of the world's most celebrated artists, the man who sold one work out of his 2,100 in his lifetime, works that now sell regularly for 50 to 100 million dollars.

I wonder that van Gogh wasn't so much troubled as he was lonely. He may have had a social adjustment problem that today we would place on an autism continuum. He suffered from vertigo and inner ear infections, and as such, owns a piece of my heart. He cut off his ear out of pain, not out of love. He's been described as bipolar, epileptic, alcoholic (especially fond of absinthe), porphyric, and schizophrenic. And the end of his life is not often told correctly. A group of local youths in Auvers-sur-Oise taunted van Gogh for weeks, pretending to be his friend. It is very likely they lured him to a garden one day and shot him. He stumbled blocks to his room where he told the manager he had shot himself, despite no gun ever being found. He never told on the boys. He thought they were his friends.

His last words were: The sadness will last forever.

I remember all of that when I see this painting. A man longing for connection, giving life to the inanimate around him. And I do not find the painting sad or the product of a tortured mind. I find it joyful and telling from a man capable of ecstatic highs who paid our price with inconsolable lows.

Jeff's Met Picks: Picasso

The Blind Man's Meal

Pablo Picasso  (Spanish, Malaga 1881–1973 Mougins, France)

There was a recent retrospective of Picasso at The Met and all of his "periods" paintings were grouped together. I recall entering the "Blue Period" Room and likening it to a "cathedral of sadness." This painting is extraordinary on many levels. It shows Picasso's development from representational art to abstract expressionism. Hints of his "cubist" period to come are present in his rendering of the blind man's musculature, his clothing, the objects, but also present is Picasso's expert draftsmanship. He could render a human emotion with a line. The loneliness of this figure, groping for his wine, is heightened by the blue palette Picasso employs. And the honesty of the feeling is authentic. This was a particularly sad time in Picasso's life and, like all great artists, he turns that sadness into beauty.

Jeff's Met Picks: Yves Saint Laurent

Dress

Yves Saint Laurent, Paris  (French, founded 1962)

Artists have conversations with one another, challenging one another, shaping one another, sometimes outright copying one another as in this homage by Yves Saint Laurent to Piet Mondrian, the Dutch painter famous for a series of canvases much like the shift Saint Laurent created: Vertical and horizontal intersecting lines whose resultant blocks are occasionally filled with only the three primary colors. It was post-War 1919 Paris that led Mondrian to this revolutionary form of graphic abstractionism and harmony of pure color. It was the revolutionary 60s counter-culture in fashion that led Saint Laurent to refer to his predecessor in this now classic dress.