Greece and Rome in Gotham
A New Volume Takes Stock of Classical New York
Matthew McGowan and Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis (eds.). Classical New York: Discovering Greece and Rome in Gotham. New York: Fordham University Press, Empire State Editions, 2018. Hardcover, 304 pages, $35. [link to purchase book here]
In Mediterranean cities, Americans enthused by Classical antiquity frequently learn to recognize the layers of history and reuse of Classical forms, from the often intentionally bare antiquity of archaeological sites, to the unique texture of those later buildings incorporating pieces of ancient ones, to the learned use of elements in a Classical style in others. We learn the history of the place, the whos and whys of its construction, and meditate on what the Classical style of building meant both to original builders and contemporaries and to subsequent inhabitants across time. What a contrast these deeply lived-in cities seem to offer to our own, which seem so young in comparison and reflect a culture focused on innovation. We tend to take Classical elements in American cities for granted. Of course the Philadelphia Museum of Art looks like a Classical temple; how else would it look? Of course my bank has columns and Corinthian capitals; lots of banks do. Of course the Washington Monument is an obelisk.
Yet clearly there are stories here, too, layers and engagements with the Classical past, ones worth understanding both to enrich our experience of familiar places and to better appreciate our ongoing conversation with Classical antiquity. The recently published Classical New York: Discovering Greece and Rome in Gotham, consisting of nine essays on that city’s use of Classical form, is a template for such engagement. The volume originates in a 2015 conference held at New York University, sponsored by the New York Classical Club. As is fitting for a volume of essays from many authors, editors Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis and Matthew McGowan emphasize the variety of voices and approaches found therein. Still, the majority of papers gravitate towards a central focus: the employment of architectural form and ornament drawn intentionally from a Classicizing style in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While there are discussions of buildings outside of that era and of other social practices, such as bathing, parades, entertainment, and acquisitioning for museums, certain architectural topics recur again and again, such as the eclectic Neo-Classicism of the American Renaissance, the City Beautiful Movement of the Progressive Era, and the architecture firm of McKim, Mead, and White. Nearly all of this was new to me: I am not a New Yorker, have only visited a handful of times (and never for sight-seeing), and have no special background in American architecture and city planning. If I am not the likeliest of readers of this book, there is still much in it to hold my interest and inspire.
Despite the editors’ depiction of the collection as a fragmented conversation, there is an artful ordering of the chapters. I note a certain pairing. The first two chapters provide arguments for the motivations behind the Greek Revival on the one hand (by Francis Morrone), and the Roman-oriented American Renaissance on the other (by Margaret Malamud). These act as introduction and scene setting, giving broader context for widespread interest in the Classical in New York. Morrone discusses the earliest building treated in the volume, the Customs House of 1833–42 (popularly known as Federal Hall), and Malamud argues that New Yorkers turned to the Roman Empire to articulate their perception of the city as the metropolis of a new American Empire. The following two chapters treat buildings and activities meant to teach and cultivate intellectual and aesthetic pursuits. Elizabeth Bartman traces the shifting priorities of scientific archaeology and aesthetic quality in the acquisition practices of the Classical collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which reflected competing visions of what should be presented to the public in the museum. Macaulay-Lewis introduces the Gould Memorial Library and Hall of Fame at the New York University’s Bronx campus (now the Bronx Community College) and considers its role in inspiring achievement.
The next two chapters turn to large, multi-building centers: the New York Civic Center at Foley Square (by Jon Ritter) and Rockefeller Center (by Jared Simard). Their designers used the Classical to convey divergent messages to the public concerning societal values (more on which below). There follow two chapters on baths. The first looks in detail at the old Pennsylvania Station’s recreation of the Baths of Caracalla (by Maryl Gensheimer), the second surveys New York’s bath houses and bathing culture over a century (Allyson McDavid). Against the ordering of the book, I would read the second first, since McDavid shows how and why the form of the Roman Imperial bath was for the most part rejected for actual public baths, but employed in a variety of other buildings, including the old Pennsylvania Station. The split of form and function resulted in part from Progressive Era reformers’ anxiety over the sensual pleasure associated with the Roman bath. Hygiene was to be promoted, but license and immorality not given free rein, and so public baths tended towards forms that reflected utilitarian efficiency. The form of the Roman Imperial bath was nevertheless admired for its beauty and management of the flow of large numbers of people, and so used in a variety of public spaces. Gensheimer’s detailed discussion of that phenomenon at the old Pennsylvania Station seems to flow from there, and I immediately wanted to read her essay again after finishing McDavid’s. Still her essay also links well with Simard’s preceding essay on the Rockefeller Center, since both concern projects funded by private enterprise and reflective of its aspirations. Suffice it to say that outside of the pairing of chapters I detect, the volume is rich in many such connections across chapters.
Finally, the last essay (by McGowan) stands apart in its focus on inscriptions, not on architectural form or figural ornament. Its placement at the end of the collection reflects elegantly on the work done by the volume as a whole. McGowan interprets the presence of a Latin inscription on a monument as the potential to initiate in the viewer a renewed engagement with the past and reflection on the activity of using and recognizing Classical form. Mutatis mutandis this engagement and reflection also functions in encounters with the Classical in architectural form and ornament. Moreover, it encapsulates what the authors of this volume have done in their essays: created their own record of engagements with the past activated by their recognition of Classical form. The essay serves as a fitting capstone to the collection. That it is concerned especially with memory and its preservation is equally fitting.
Looking differently, there are two major modes that the essays operate in: one, a focus on a single building or complex, and the other a treatment of a broader trend, range of time, or type of building. Concerning the focus on single buildings, I have never seen any of the places discussed in detail in this book in person (and, of course, never will see the old Pennsylvania Station), but the authors succeed at imparting a sense of their presence and impact on the visitor, such that I have a rich mental image of the places. Each author describes their selection’s form and ornament well, supplemented by photographs and plans. Particularly stunning is the image of the main reading room in the rotunda of the Gould Memorial Library. Would that we all had such a library, and may it see the renovation that Macaulay-Lewis indicates is needed for its survival. Each chapter also interprets each building’s interaction with its Classical models, as well as subsequent examples that are likely to have been known to the designers. At the same time they situate each building’s construction in its contemporary social and historical context, including discussion of the lives of planners, architects, and funders and competing pressures on the construction. The reader is thus encouraged to consider the building as a nexus of a double history. One reaches back to a classical site and places the New York building into a series of interactions with the ancient one, the other illuminates the buildings’ surroundings in the societal context of its day.
I was especially stimulated by the treatments of wider social practices, especially of the complex interaction and selective understandings of the Classical’s relationship to contemporary social needs. Ritter’s chapter, for example, illustrates the competing pressure in city development between the City Beautiful movement favored by civic planners and the laissez-faire approach favored by commercial interests. Champions of the City Beautiful movement wished to see city centers reorganized into highly ordered areas uniting civics and commerce, taking the Roman Forum as a model. Such organized spaces and Classical forms were understood to have a didactic effect on citizens, promoting civilized order and cohesion of the community. Such aspirations, however, were blocked by commercial interests loathe to surrender the prime real estate of the city center for civic purposes. The result, according to Ritter: the various civic centers planned during this era, including New York’s at Foley Square, were forced to marginal locations away from major commercial arteries, their promise unrealized.
Ritter’s account of the City Beautiful movement’s aspirations and compromises may be contrasted with Simard’s interpretation of the sculptures of the Titans Prometheus and Atlas at Rockefeller Center. On the one side, we have Classical form, publicly funded for public use, and intended to promote social cohesion of the immediate community of the residents of the city, yet blocked from full realization by commercial interests. On the other, we have a privately funded complex that drew upon the City Beautiful movement’s ideal of a “city within a city”, but deployed it for private economic interest; we see Classical content in the use of mythology, but deviation from Classical form in the rendering of the statues; finally, Simard interprets Prometheus and Atlas as celebrating the businessman as hero of technological progress and internationalism. Rockefeller Center is the most recent construction (1930s) discussed in the volume, and the editors in their afterword note that such a separation of content and form “signals the decline of the appropriation and redeployment of classical elements on New York’s public monuments and private buildings” (236). Indeed, the volume indirectly reinforces my distinctly jaded opinion that the union of laissez-faire commercial interests, utilitarian efficiency, and technological futurism has a corrosive effect on aesthetic form, social cohesion, and sense of the past. One can only weep upon seeing a photograph of the waiting room of the old Pennsylvania Station (171) at the thought that only 50 years after its construction it would be demolished in favor an office building and sports venue.
The volume as a whole equips one to come to the places under discussion with a deeper and broader sense of their relation to the Classical past and to the historical context in which they were constructed. During my studies in the Mediterranean I have become accustomed to thinking my way through the layers of Athens, Rome, Istanbul, and other cities, and through the dense relationship between past and present so much a part of life in those places. This volume helps bring such an approach home, as it were. It reminds me that my built environment in America, places I have often taken for granted, is just as much informed by negotiation with the past, whether Classical or not, and between competing cultural currents. The sensitivity of thought and sustained research displayed by the authors of the volume encourages us all to approach other places in a similar spirit and with similar effort.
[Copies of the book may be purchased here.]
David Hewett is a graduate student at the University of Virginia, and Outreach Manager for Classical Tours for the Paideia Institute.
