Italy Before Rome

THE NEW CRITERION, October 2023

Italy before Rome

On Greek colonies, Etruscan tombs & Italian origins.

The landing began eighty years ago at one minute past midnight. Loudspeakers on the American troopships approaching the coast of Italy gave the signal. In the first moments of September 9, 1943—an earlier D-Day of the Second World War, this one of Operation Avalanche—soldiers climbed over the gunwales and down the nets into their landing crafts. Their destination was the fortified beach at Paestum, a town in Campania along the sandy coast twenty-five miles south of Salerno.

Italy had surrendered to the Allies just a day before, but Nazi forces were dug in. The amphibious assault around the ankle of Italy was meant to free the boot of what was now German-occupied territory. Paestum was to serve as one of the beachheads for the American and British campaign north and west up the peninsula while isolating German troops to the south. By enabling the eventual capture of Naples and then Rome and beyond, the landing was another step in the liberation of Italy and the slow march on Germany; Operation Overlord and the Allied landing at Normandy were still nine months off.

At H-Hour—three-thirty in the morning—the landing crafts, or those that were able to find their way in the night, came together three miles out to sea. They then made their final approach towards the dark beach.

“Come on in and give up!” a German voice blared from loudspeakers on shore. “We have you covered.”

To achieve the element of surprise, the American generals had decided not to bomb the Tyrrhenian coastline leading up to the landing. A British diversionary assault then tried to draw German forces out of the area. The deceptions proved counterproductive. The waters were mined. The Paestum beach was defended with gun emplacements and wire. Eight divisions from the German Tenth Army, under the command of Heinrich von Vietinghoff, were stationed to counter the American assault. Against artillery, aerial, sniper, and machine gunfire, and a counterattack from the Sixteenth Panzer Division that nearly pushed them back into the sea, American forces stormed the beaches and fought to reach assembly points inland.

Photograph: Photographer unknown, National Archives, Washington D.C. 

As supplies and personnel began moving in from the beachheads, a Negro unit from Headquarters Company, 480th Port Battalion, established a temporary office in the ruins of a Greek temple just off the beach. These U.S. signal-corps soldiers unloaded their portable equipment and began their relay work among the ruins of what we now call the Temple of Hera II. They sat on wooden crates and rested their helmets and canteens atop their fold-out desks and typewriter boxes.

On September 22, an army photographer came upon their bivouac and recorded their field office. “A company of men has set up its office between the columns (Doric) of an ancient Greek temple of Neptune, built about 700 B.C.,” reads the caption on photograph 111-SC-181588, now in the National Archives. As the signal officers worked in a line at their makeshift desks on the temple platform, the scene of ancient and modern, of new arrivals communing with settled stones, became one of the more iconic photographs of the Second World War. Here were segregated American soldiers fighting the German Wehr-macht from a Greek temple on Italian soil. The uncanny confluence served as a reminder that the Apennine Peninsula has long been contested by waves of warring nations. There was even an Italy before Rome.

Twenty-five hundred years before, in this low tidal area near the mouth of the Sele River, ancient Greek mariners had created their own Italian beachhead at the same spot. They called their outpost Poseidonia, after the ocean god Poseidon. They carved out streets and houses and built a row of temples out of the local iron-rich stone, which, unlike their native Greek marble, turned red in the salt air.

Human settlement here dates back to the Stone Age. The nearby rivers, fed by steep mountains to the east, produce a fertile floodplain. The Greek colony was founded in the mid-seventh century B.C., one in that constellation of Hellenic settlements the Romans later called Magna Graecia. But this was still some fifty years before the village of Rome—then just a small settlement clinging to a handful of rises above the Tiber River—has drained the land for its Forum between the Capitoline and Palatine Hills.

At the time, the Etruscans, competitors and occasional overlords of the Latin tribes, were gaining power in the area. This Greek outpost, like the American beachhead, was intended to forestall enemy expansion and protect friendly settlements to the south. Over the next few hundred years after its founding, the town fell to the Italic Lucanians, then returned to the Greeks, then the Lucanians again. In 273 B.C. Poseidonia finally succumbed to the expanding dominion of Rome. The Romans renamed it Paestum. They built their forum, replacing the Greek agora or marketplace at the center of town, and laid down their Roman roads around the Greek constructions.

The Great Temple at Paestum, 1897. Photograph: Photographer unknown, New York Public Library.

The town lasted another thousand years, well into the Christian era, before malarial swamps finally reclaimed it. From the middle ages until the nineteenth century, when the Sele River was re-channeled and the area re-drained, the abandoned settlement remained overgrown, even dangerous to visit. The site was only excavated starting in 1907, a process that is still ongoing. Paestum’s long-abandoned state means that its two monumental temples dating from the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., at first thought to honor Poseidon/Neptune but now believed to be dedicated to the goddess Hera/Juno, are some of the best preserved ancient Greek structures in the world. A smaller third temple, dedicated to Athena and dating from the same era, also stands today.

Acentury ago, in the late 1920s, D. H. Lawrence toured his own pre-Roman sites with his American friend Earl Brewster, a painter and a scholar of Buddhism. Lawrence then wrote a paean to the pre-Roman people in “Etruscan Places,” an essay first published along with his other Italian travel writing in 1932, two years after his death.

The fate of Rome’s closest neighbors—who were among its earliest conquests—has long intrigued artists and perplexed historians. Michelangelo sketched the Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia. Piranesi composed an etching based on the Etruscan ruins at Chiusi. Robert Adam decorated the state dressing room of West London’s Osterley Park estate in Etruscan-style fresco. Johann Joachim Winckelmann made a study of Etruscan civilization along with the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. Meanwhile the Society of the Dilettanti in London discussed the Etruscans’ lack of facial hair as compared to the Greeks—a habit of grooming, they surmised, that the Etruscans must have passed down to the Latins.

D.H. Lawrence beneath an olive tree at Villa Mirenda, San Polo Mosciano, ca. 1926–27. Manuscripts and Special Collections, The University of Nottingham. Photograph: Photographer unknown.

Veii, a southern town of Etruria just ten miles north of Rome, supposedly fell to the Roman Republic in 396 B.C. after a ten-year siege. Despite their proximity to Rome, the Etruscans spoke a language that was non-Indo-European, like Hungarian or Basque, and which today remains largely elusive. Their origins have been debated since ancient times; the eyewitness records of Rome’s own early interactions with Etruria’s hilltop settlements may have been destroyed in Brennus’s Gallic sack of Rome in 387 B.C. We do not know for certain how Etruria came to mix with its Latin neighbors to the south. Before the establishment of the Roman Republic in 509 B.C., three of Rome’s seven ancient kings—Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius, and Lucius Tarquinius Superbus—were supposedly Etruscan. The rape of Lucretia by Sextus Tarquinius, the Tarquin prince, precipitated the Roman overthrow of the Etruscan monarchy. As told by Livy and recounted by Ovid, the legend of Lucretia’s rape and suicide was used in ancient times to justify the Etruscans’ demise and has been widely depicted in Western art since the Renaissance, taken up by Shakespeare, Titian, and Benjamin Britten, among many others.

What mainly remains of Etruria itself are its tombs, which are open to exploration today much as D. H. Lawrence found them in the 1920s (I first visited the sites some thirty years ago as an undergraduate). These necropoli are indeed “cities of the dead.” The Etruscans carved, built, and painted their tumuli as second homes, hillside condominiums for the afterlife. To complicate the historical record, some of their decorations were Greek-inspired if not Greek-made—a reflection of Near Eastern influences under Etruria’s “orientalizing” period, which reached a high point in the seventh century B.C. While it was long thought that these tombs depicting the characters of Greek myth revealed the Greek ancestry of the Etruscans, archaeological consensus now links the Etruscans to Italy’s Iron Age Villanovans. Here are central Italy’s aborigines—ab origine, Latin for “from the beginning.”

In “Etruscan Places,” Lawrence took up the history of these ancient people in part to slight their Roman successors—and, by extension, the Italian fascists drawing their authority at the time from classical antiquity, following Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922.

Lawrence was not the only writer of his time to use Etruria’s ancient backdrops for modern commentary. In “Roman Fever,” her sensational short story first published in Liberty magazine in 1934, Edith Wharton alludes to Italian aviators flying two American daughters from Rome to Tarquinia for a fraught moonlit tour of the site. What distinguishes Lawrence’s writing is his first-person account of the Etruscan tombs of Cerveteri, Tarquinia, Vulci, and Volterra, intermixed with grand pronouncements and often absurd speculation. As Lawrence began:

The Etruscans, as everyone knows, were the people who occupied the middle of Italy in early Roman days, and whom the Romans, in their usual neighborly fashion, wiped out entirely in order to make room for Rome with a very big R. They couldn’t have wiped them all out, there were too many of them. But they did wipe out the Etruscan existence as a nation and a people. However, this seems to be the inevitable result of expansion with a big E, which is the sole raison d’être of people like the Romans.

In a certain way, Lawrence’s literary achievement was his ability to write, even in his twilight years, like a petulant adolescent. His analysis may be overblown. He also committed the sin of reading contemporary politics into historical events. His rhetorical deployment of the “Etruscans” could be just as facile as Il Duce’s “Romans.” At the same time, what makes his Italian travel writing compelling is the often inadvertent humor of this celebrity-radical raiding tombs among the poor paesani. “Impossible to leave an unlocked small hold-all at the station,” he bemoans at one point, when the local station attendant at Palo refuses to hold on to his luggage for him. “B. and I are two very quiet-mannered harmless men,” he elsewhere laments, when a fourteen-year-old child declines to take these two strangers to the tombs at Cerveteri: “But that first boy could not have borne to go alone with us. Not alone!” “The Etruscans had a passion for music, and an inner carelessness the modern Italians have lost,” he gathers upon seeing the painted tombs of Tarquinia. “It is different now. The drab peasants, muffled in ugly clothing, straggle in across the waste bit of space, and trail home, songless and meaningless.”

Writing an appreciation of the book for The Washington Post two years ago, Walter Nicklin maintained that Lawrence “seamlessly mixes closely observed, naturalistic details with the kind of inward reflections found in essays and memoirs. Adding spice to the mix, he never feared to offend with his sharp historical analysis sprinkled with cultural and social criticisms.”

At Cerveteri, for example, with its cylindrical mausolea carved out of the bedrock, Lawrence wrote of “the natural beauty of proportion of the phallic consciousness, contrasted with the more studied or ecstatic proportion of the mental and spiritual Consciousness we are accustomed to.” The Romans, meanwhile, “hated the phallus and the ark [womb], because they wanted empire and dominion and, above all, riches: social gain. You cannot dance gaily to the double flute and at the same time conquer nations or rake in large sums of money.”

Achilles ambushing Troilus (on horseback) Etruscan fresco, Tomb of the Bulls, Tarquinia. Photograph: Mary Harrsch.

Encountering the tomb figures of Tarquinia, Lawence likened the “sun painted” Etruscans to “Red Indians” and remarked on the visceral effect of vermillion among animistic people: “They know the gods in their very finger-tips.” It was Greek skepticism and Greek rationalism, Lawrence deduced, that “more or less took the place of the old Etruscan symbolic thought.” Finally, under Roman rule, the “Etruscan princes became fat and inert. . . . The Etruscan people became expressionless and meaningless.” He concluded: “For all of the Italian people that ever lived, the Etruscans were surely the least Roman. Just as, of all the people that ever rose up in Italy, the Romans of ancient Rome were surely the most un-Italian, judging from the natives of to-day.”

What is perhaps most telling about Etruscan tombs is how varied they could be from town to town, something Lawrence rightly noted. Some were carved into the hillside. Others were constructed in mushroom-shaped mounds. Inhumation was practiced in one place while cremation was common in another. Lawrence observed how

the Etruscans carried out perfectly what seems to be the Italian instinct: to have single, independent cities, with a certain surrounding territory, each district speaking its own dialect and feeling at home in its own little capital, yet the whole confederacy of city-states loosely linked together by a common religion and a more-or-less common interest.

To follow on Lawrence’s point, it was this regional variation that ran counter to the Roman mindset, which went on to express its astonishing power by laying down the same roads and aqueducts and temples from Africa to Judea to Britain to the Caspian Sea. Latin legend has long held that the Romans emerged from something beyond the native Italic. This was the story most famously expressed in the twelve books of Virgil’s Aeneid, connecting Aeneas’s escape from the destruction of Troy to the founding of Rome and even to the ancestry of the Caesars.

As it happens, clay figurines depicting the story of Aeneas carrying his father Anchises on his back out of Troy have been discovered in Veii. Whether these figures date from before or after Rome’s conquest of the town in 396 B.C. remains an open question. It could be that the Aeneas myth reached Rome through Etruria, or that both the Latins and the Etruscans received it from Greek sources, or that the story in fact reveals some ancestral Hellenic connection between one group or another. It could also be that the origin myth of the Latins was just that, a myth, and that the Latin stock was just as proto-Villanovan as that of the Etruscans.

What matters is that the descendants of one of these Latin settlements managed to dominate the others, and in short order the rest of the Western world. Here is a story so extraordinary that it might as well have started with the twins Romulus and Remus suckling a she-wolf in a cave after they were cast out of the town of Alba Longa. For all of the interest in Italy before Rome, Rome’s remaking of Italy remains the defining story of the peninsula. The Etruscans and Greeks and everyone else serve as supporting characters to this main event. The Etruscans may have been “dancing in their colored wraps with massive yet exuberant naked limbs,” as Lawrence enthused, “ruddy from the air and the sea-light, dancing and fluting along through the little olive trees, out in the fresh day.” Meanwhile, the Romans just down the block were out to make history.

Spanish Lessons

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2023

Spanish lessons

On “1923–2023 Sorolla / Soto Centennials” & “Jewels in a Gem: Luz Camino at the Hispanic Society Museum” at the Hispanic Museum & Library.

The Hispanic Society of America was founded over a century ago to reflect a gilded vision of Spain and the Iberian peoples. Since 1904, this institution on Broadway and 155th Street has faced much harsher realities. The small independent entity—one of scholarly and artistic significance—has struggled so far removed from the limelight of New York’s Museum Mile. To this day the Hispanic Society remains the greatest New York collection few have ever heard of. Now, after a six-year closure to address its aging infrastructure, the museum and library have partially reopened with a renewed vision for the future. Just how much this vision aligns with the foresight of its remarkable founder, Archer Milton Huntington, is a picture still coming into view.

Archer Huntington was the stepson, and most likely illegitimate offspring, of Collis Huntington, one of the Big Four founders of the western railroad. Even more remarkable was his mother, Arabella, a significant collector of European art and a social outcast whose marriage to Huntington scandalized New York society. Arabella’s sense of independence encouraged her only child in his intense cultural pursuits. In 1882, while embarking on a Grand Tour at age twelve, Archer purchased a copy of The Zincali, George Borrow’s 1841 “Account of the Gypsies of Spain,” in a Liverpool bookshop. The book was one of several famous stories that informed the century’s Romantic affinities for primitive Spain—joining Victor Hugo’s Hernani of 1830, Théophile Gautier’s Voyage en Espagne and Richard Ford’s Handbook for Travellers in Spain, both of 1845, and Georges Bizet’s Carmen of 1875.

View of the entrance to the Hispanic Society Museum & Library. Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

As Huntington continued on to London and Paris, he was already envisioning an art collection along the lines of Sir Richard Wallace’s, paired with a library akin to the National Gallery’s, dedicated to the cultures of Spain and the Spanish diaspora. In 1891, to understand better the history of Al-Andalus, he even hired a tutor to teach him Arabic, at a time when no American institution offered classes in the language. On tours through Spain in 1892, 1896, and 1898, he purchased trunks of Spanish photographs while studying the country’s art and culture (the society now has 175,000 such images). In 1902 he acquired the bibliographic collection of Manuel Pérez de Guzmán y Boza, Marqués de Jerez de los Caballeros, who was his mentor. Soon Huntington had the most important collection of Spanish books and manuscripts outside of Spain, a collection growing to two hundred thousand manuscripts and more than three hundred thousand printed books, including over fifteen thousand volumes from before 1700. He paired this collection with paintings by Spanish masters—Velázquez, Goya, Zurbarán, El Greco—which he was determined to purchase only from the international market, so as not to deplete the country’s own cultural patrimony.

Installation view of “Jewels in a Gem: Luz Camino and Jewelry” with Sorolla’s Visions of Spain (1913–19) above. Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

In 1908 Huntington opened his collection to the public in a Beaux-Arts building on Audubon Terrace, so named for being at one time part of John James Audubon’s estate. The building was nearly contemporaneous with Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Venetian vision in Boston’s Back Bay and equally novel, though less flamboyant. As the capstone to the collection, in 1911 Huntington commissioned Joaquín Sorolla to paint a mural of multiple “panneaux” of various Spanish regions, which he installed in its own purpose-built octagon-shaped wing. This impressionistic cyclorama of traditional Spanish culture was called, appropriately, Vision of Spain (1913–19), reflecting Huntington’s own dreamy vision for his new institution.

After Huntington’s death in 1955, there were times when it seemed the lid to his jewel box was bolted shut. When it wasn’t being shouted down as “racista”—as happened to one of its directors in the 1990s while he was chased across Audubon Terrace—the Hispanic Society put little of its energies into its own forward-facing persona. Part of this was an extension of Huntington’s own self-effacing style. “To place one’s name on a donation be it a building or subscription is an artificial and flimsy door to fame,” he once said. “The human race is full of creators, but it is their acts . . . which are interesting.”

Instead, the society continued to focus on scholarship and filling out its permanent collection of books, art, artifacts, and sculpture, in particular from the Spanish New World and Spain’s onetime Pacific colonies. Today the collection has grown to include four-thousand-year-old ceramics from the Bell Beaker culture of the Tagus river estuary, Roman statuary from Seville, Islamic pottery and Alhambra silk, Hebrew manuscripts, a map by Giovanni Vespucci, and Renaissance and Baroque ironwork on up through the Symbolist paintings of Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa. Last year, as its main building remained shuttered, two temporary exhibitions revealed the great depth of this collection: “Gilded Figures: Wood and Clay Made Flesh,” an exhibition curated by Patrick Lenaghan with his Hispanic Society colleague Hélène Fontoira Marzin, on the history of Spanish polychrome sculpture; and a display at the Grolier Club of highlights from the society’s library, organized by the society’s former director Mitchell A. Codding and the curator John O’Neill. (See “Visions of Spain” in The New Criterion of January 2022.)

Joaquin Sorolla, Detail from Visions of Spain, 1913–19, Oil on canvas, Hispanic Society Museum, New York. Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

By some stroke of historical luck, the venerable but heavy hinges of the Hispanic Society were never forced open against the will of its founder. One could easily imagine the society’s takeover by a larger institution, the breaking of its indenture of trust along the lines of the Barnes Foundation, or, at the very least, a relocation downtown. Many such options were considered at various times in its existence, which in part may account for the deferred maintenance on its Audubon Terrace infrastructure.

Under the leadership of Philippe de Montebello, who was elected chairman of the society’s board in 2015, the institution has instead decided to double down on its Audubon campus. This has first meant upgrading the building’s aging envelope, designed by Charles Pratt Huntington, and bringing its systems, in particular its climate control, up to modern standards. The museum has also developed a strategic plan with Selldorf Architects to renovate the campus with the executive architects Beyer Blinder Belle and the landscape architects Reed Hilderbrand. An adjoining building to the east, originally the headquarters of the Museum of the American Indian, is being incorporated into the Hispanic Society campus, allowing for ada access to the Main Court galleries while introducing a new conservation studio, a wheelchair entrance, and spaces for special exhibitions and education. This longer phase of the project is still tens of millions of dollars and several years away.

View from Audubon Terrace. Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

Fortunately, even with the introduction of a new entrance in the east building, the society says the door of the Main Court will remain unlocked. Since the society is, and has always been, a free institution, Audubon Terrace is well suited to be an open campus with outdoor seating and concessions—and access to its other remaining cultural institution, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, just up the courtyard. “If you are a regular, and you have a ten-minute lunch break,” says Guillaume Kientz, the society’s new director, “and you want to see the Duchess of Alba, you can do that.” The terrace’s program of Spanish-themed statuary—depictions of Don Quixote and El Cid created by Huntington’s remarkable wife, Anna Hyatt Huntington—is also an integral part of the society’s cultural program and best observed from the Main Court landing.

This past summer, the Hispanic Society reopened its Main Court after its six-year restoration, the first phase of the renovation project. While the treasures of its collection are still on tour through the summer, the museum dedicated its main gallery to the centennials of two artists: Sorolla (1863–1923) and the Venezuelan sculptor Jesús Rafael Soto (1923–2005), born in the year of Sorolla’s death.1 Through the fall, visitors to the terrace will continue to encounter Soto’s Penetrable (1990), a large cube of steel, aluminum, and plastic hoses on long-term loan from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros—a work that trades Soto’s usual optical delicacy for crowd-pleasing interactivity. While Sorolla’s portraits of Spanish life and the genre scenes of his Vision of Spain have little to do with Soto’s kinetic abstractions, the assembly spoke to the breadth of the society’s mandate while also allowing us to open the lid, after a painfully long wait, of the institution.

Jesús Rafael Soto, Penetrable, 1990, Steel, aluminum & plastic hoses, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. Photo: Courtesy of the Hispanic Society Museum.

Yet those of us expecting a full return to form will have to sit tight. What are described as essential repairs to the roof have now covered over the skylights in the Main Court and Sorolla galleries. The darkened result, interspersed with retina-burning spotlights, is heartbreaking for those of us who recall these formerly dreamy spaces. This is especially true when trying to appreciate the Main Court’s intricate terracotta walls and its imagined sense of a sunlit medieval cloister. While the society maintains that plans are in place to install artificial laylight behind the skylight glass, the remediation could not come soon enough. A public-spirited philanthropist could do worse than to underwrite the improvement of gallery lighting. As the Old Masters were almost all painted under natural light, their happy viewing calls out for equivalent illumination.

Installation view of “1923–2023 Sorolla / Soto Centennials.” Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

The inclusion of modern and contemporary work also suggests something of a change in the priorities of the institution. While it is true that Huntington for a time embraced the contemporary Spanish art of his day—collecting Sorolla, Ramon Casas, Joaquin Mir Trinxet, Santiago Rusiñol, and Ignacio Zuloaga—he came to distance his Hispanic Society from the art of his own time. “Modern art is not our intention to show in exhibitions,” he declared. “That is a dealer’s affair and not, in my opinion, one for museums.”

Starting September 15, the treasures of the society’s collection are finally returning to its walls, but the installation will no longer be a fixed display of highlights as we experienced in the past. Certainly, with a collection of three-quarters of a million objects, there is a lot to show here. Some shuffling around would be welcome and refreshing. Yet as with most every other museum—including the venerable Frick Collection—today there seems to be an urge to put historic collections in “dialogue” with contemporary art. These interventions are often forced and merely there to serve some political or commercial end—a “dealer’s affair,” in Huntington’s choice words.

Installation view of “Jewels in a Gem: Luz Camino and Jewelry.” Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

The society’s summer display of contemporary jewelry by Luz Camino was one such letdown.2 Filled with loans from a Who’s Who of rich collectors, the exhibition was no doubt designed to stimulate the philanthropic glands of the society’s major donors. Even worse, the exhibition’s gaudy displays were all positioned directly in front of the panels of Sorolla’s Vision of Spain. The cases obscured their view and fully blocked their labels. Despite its wide embrace of Spain and Spanish culture, the Hispanic Society shouldn’t need to include Las Vegas in its purview.

Acentury ago, Archer Huntington set out not to record the Spanish world of the present but to preserve a vision of its past, one that was already fast disappearing. His interest may have been based on a Romantic fiction, but there was a time when we could embrace the power of fiction to triumph over everyday fact. “We can only be grateful to the boy who discovered Spain in a Liverpool bookshop,” says the Hispanic Society curator Patrick Lenaghan, “and, thus inspired, created this extraordinary museum and library.” Even today, we should be able to dream the impossible dream that is the Hispanic Society of America.

1.   “1923–2023 Sorolla / Soto Centennials” was on view at the Hispanic Society of America, New York, from May 25 through July 15, 2023.

2.   “Jewels in a Gem: Luz Camino at the Hispanic Society Museum” opened at the Hispanic Society of America, New York, on May 25 and remains on view through September 3, 2023.

Up the Riverside

THE NEW CRITERION, March 2023

Up the riverside

On New York’s Riverside Drive & Park.

Walking up New York’s Riverside Drive can be like visiting a lost civilization, like seeing the streets of Ostia Antica or Old Jerusalem. The curve of the drive, a departure from the street grid on the far west side of Manhattan, traces the landscape as it follows the bluffs overlooking the Hudson River. A procession of some two dozen monuments lines the road, memorializing the figures of history in a classical vocabulary. Apartment dwellings of nine to twelve stories in brick, terra-cotta, and stone recall the French, Dutch, and English Renaissance, with punctuations of the Gothic and the Châteauesque. Meanwhile a 370-acre park between the drive and the river offers several miles of recreation and waterfront trails while also accommodating a subterranean railroad and a vehicular parkway.

Riverside is the result of sixty years of urban development that ended abruptly less than a century ago. Yet it now seems as foreign to us as the product of another civilization. Its architectural language has since been largely abandoned. Its legacy of craftsmanship—its terra-cotta moldings and stone carvings and copper cornices—has mostly been lost. Thousands of residents still call it home and live among its relics—I count myself among them—but Riverside Drive could never be recreated today.

Despite its reputation as a “modern” skyscraper city, there are of course many old streets in New York, as well as other historic residential districts. Something of the innocent age of Henry James and Edith Wharton can be found in the townhouses of Greenwich Village. On the Upper East Side, Fifth Avenue and then Park Avenue led the parade of the city’s aristocracy uptown, while Central Park West faced them with some of the finest pre-war “hotel apartment” towers in the city.

The Schwab mansion and its surroundings on Riverside Drive, 1906–45. Photo: Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library. 

Still, for its harmony of landscape, function, and design, Riverside is a special achievement. “Heaven on the Hudson” is what the author Stephanie Azzarone calls the neighborhood in her new book on the “Mansions, Monuments, and Marvels of Riverside Park.”1 I would not disagree. “In this part of the city,” she begins,

there is so much that has always been the same and little that is new or modern. On the façades of buildings large and small, intricately carved details above doors and windows speak to character formed a century or more ago.

A full tour of Riverside would begin, as Azzarone’s does, at West Seventy-second Street, its southern border, and head north. At one time the drive extended from here all the way to Dyckman Street in Inwood, at the northernmost tip of Manhattan. Though a northbound section of the Henry Hudson Parkway now interrupts it, today you could still walk the drive some six miles to about 180th Street, to the ramps of the George Washington Bridge. Alternatively you can follow the park’s riverfront esplanade to the “Little Red Lighthouse,” the one confronted with the arrival of the “Great Gray Bridge” in Hildegarde Swift’s famous 1942 children’s book. Azzarone’s tour, complete with photography by Robert F. Rodriguez, ends at the start of the first Riverside Drive extension at West 129th Street, where the topography drops into Manhattan Valley and F. Stuart Williamson’s elegant elevated viaduct of 1898 connects the drive to the heights of 135th Street.

But first, take a detour south from Seventy-second Street to the new construction on Riverside Boulevard, a recent extension of the drive, and consider what we tend to build today. A row of postmodern high-rises leads to a cluster of glass-shard skyscrapers. These final fishbowl condominiums offer the latest in high-gloss finishes and amenities. Their modernist forms are impressive from afar and imperious up close. But of course they would not be built this way if they did not appeal to today’s apartment dwellers. Fully exposed to an elevated highway in front of them, their designs also reveal the two great shortcomings of contemporary development: the open floor-plan and the glass curtain-wall. Both tend to be coveted by the high-end condo buyer. It also happens that these features greatly reduce building costs, as fewer materials and on-site expertise are required to erect prefabricated glass components. As a developer once explained to me, their widespread appeal is the great lie of his trade.

North of Seventy-second Street it’s a different story. Rather than anticipate a future wiped clean of antique residue, Riverside Drive looked to the past to reflect the weight of history in the monumentality of its designs. Bookended by the 1902 Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument at Eighty-ninth Street and the General Grant National Memorial of 1897 at 122nd Street (see my “Monumental madness” in The New Criterion of April 2020), there are memorials dedicated to firemen, to women’s health, to Joan of Arc, and to a range of others that all add their own gravitas to the park and drive (see “Gallery chronicle,” January 2016). All are products of the “City Beautiful” movement of the turn of the last century. Stop by Warren & Wetmore’s Robert Ray Hamilton Fountain of 1906 at Seventy-sixth Street, designed for the watering of horses. Or walk to the John Merven Carrère Memorial of 1919 at Ninety-ninth Street, a small terrace dedicated to the architect of the main branch of the New York Public Library—Carrère died in an automobile accident just months before the library’s opening—designed by his partner Thomas Hastings.

The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, ca. 1910.

Along the way, look up to the blue glazed terra-cotta window treatments of the Peter Stuyvesant Apartments of 1919 at Ninety-eighth Street, a building developed by James T. Lee, the grandfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Consider the curving façades of the Colosseum and the Paterno, apartment buildings by the architectural firm of Schwartz & Gross, both completed in 1910, at a bend in the drive at 116th Street. Then look back to 103rd Street to the stepped finial—at one time a glistening copper-clad stupa—of the Master Apartments, originally built for the followers of the guru artist Nicholas Roerich (see “Gallery chronicle,” November 2013). This art-deco tower, one of the last constructed during the drive’s building boom, circumvented the city’s height and fire regulations by foregoing individual apartment kitchens and calling itself a hotel.

In the years after the Civil War, history weighed heavily as New York took on new responsibilities as a global capital. For a century prior, scattered farmhouses, villages, and “country seats” for downtown residents had gone up near the heights above the river. The early landowning families here, the De Lanceys, Apthorps, and Livingstons, still lend their names to modern Manhattan. Edgar Allan Poe wrote “The Raven” while renting the second floor of the Brennan Farmhouse next to what is now West Eighty-fourth Street in 1844. Yet even as the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 laid down the Manhattan street grid, development was slow on the Upper West Side, where the rocky terrain was difficult to clear. This was especially true between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues, where the steep and irregular drop from the heights to the river made conforming to the new grid especially challenging for residential development.

In 1866 Andrew Haswell Green proposed an act in the state legislature for the development of a park in the drop-off between these two avenues. Fresh from their successes to the east, the Central Park commissioners set about acquiring the land above Seventy-second Street from the heights to the river—or at least up to the riverfront railroad tracks laid down in 1848 to bring freight to downtown Manhattan (a railyard was located just south of Seventy-second).

In 1873 the commissioners wisely turned to Frederick Law Olmsted to design the project. Eleventh eventually became West End Avenue, while the docklands at Twelfth were absorbed into the park’s jurisdiction in 1894. In between, Olmsted used the contours of the heights to determine the sinuous shape of a new drive to bisect the two, carving out plots for development to the east that could overlook a park sloping down towards the river. His design made the most of the heights’ commanding views of the Hudson and the shoreline beyond. In two sections where the drop-off was too steep to connect his drive to the grid’s side streets, Olmsted split off a narrow carriage road, in the process creating extra “island parks.”

Olmsted “considered the existing grades and contours, the existing plantings and views, and designed a winding drive,” writes the Landmarks Preservation Commission. It was all a

seemingly simple, but for its time, remarkable design concept, which combined into a single unified design a picturesque park taking advantage of the natural attributes of a dramatic site and an urban parkway providing a landscaped environment for a residential community.

Starting in 1880, as the drive and park first opened, some twenty detached mansions went up, but this initial boom of the New York “Four Hundred” proved to be a bust. New York’s aristocracy mostly went to the Upper East Side. By 1902 a majority of the lots still remained vacant. Instead, it was the arrival of the Ninth Avenue Elevated and then the irt subway (now the 1, 2, and 3 lines) in 1904 that brought up from the crush of downtown a new business class eager for the drive’s riverside views. Developers were there to appeal to them, first with speculative row houses and, soon thereafter, with a proliferation of large rental apartments in multi-unit dwellings.

Outside of the overcrowded tenement, the apartment or “French flat” was a new concept for the upper-class New Yorker at the turn of the twentieth century. Beaux-Arts design helped to convey their respectability, as ornate lobbies and building attendants could now offer aesthetics and services surpassing those of a detached single-family home, with less expense.

The limestone façade of 190 Riverside Drive, constructed in 1908, at West Ninety-First Street. Photo: James Panero.

Over the following decades the class appeal of Riverside ebbed and flowed. During the Great Depression many spacious apartments were broken up into much smaller tenements, some even to single-room occupancy (SRO) units. It didn’t help that the open railroad tracks at the far edge of the park blocked the waterfront with an odoriferous cargo destined for the city’s meatpacking district.

It might be said that among developers, Robert Moses is now loathed by the Left nearly as much as Donald Trump. Both unabashedly appealed to the upper-middle-class city, and both focused on the future of Riverside. Moses’s great legacy here was to cover the Riverside tracks in a public-works project that cost nearly five times as much as the Hoover Dam. His 1934 West Side Improvement Plan brought in four million cubic yards of landfill and extended the shoreline 250 feet, doubling its size and turning Riverside into a genuine park while adding a new vehicular parkway. (More recently, even after federal funds had been allocated, a similar effort to bury the highway south of Seventy-second Street was blocked by Congressman Gerald Nadler due to his hatred of Trump, who controlled nearby development rights.)

Riverside’s final salvation came in the co-op conversion plans of the 1970s and ’80s. Hamstrung by the city’s market-killing rent regulations, landlords found ways to unburden their indebted structures onto their tenants. The process created thousands of small homeowners newly invested in the future of the neighborhood. As Riverside adopted a conservancy funding model in 1986 along the same lines as Central Park, neighborhood volunteers spread out every weekend to replant and fix up and tend to the dirt hills then covering the park’s grounds. Their efforts are still a defining characteristic of Riverside today.

Over time,” Azzarone concludes,

there have been multiple Riverside Parks. In the nineteenth century, Olmsted’s version was devoted to the pure enjoyment of nature. At the turn of the twentieth century, the City Beautiful’s park focused on monumental aesthetics. In the 1930s, Moses introduced the Riverside Park of recreation.

Any future for Riverside must still look to the past with reverence. Given present circumstances, such an impulse is the one most in need of renewal.

1.   Heaven on the Hudson: Mansions, Monuments, and Marvels of Riverside Park, by Stephanie Azzarone; Empire State Editions, 240 pages, $39.95.