The Inside-Out Diorama

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2023

The inside-out diorama

On the new Richard Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History.

Anyone who has walked through the American Museum of Natural History might have sensed something was wrong. Just go through its Hall of Gems and Minerals, or its Hall of South American Peoples, or its Hall of Pacific Peoples. At the end of each of these long rooms, which were only reached through other long rooms, you found nothing less than a dead end. In a way, the reason was by design: the master plan of this museum, founded in 1869 and first envisioned by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould in 1872, has never been fully realized. Much like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and other grand nineteenth-century American edifices, New York’s natural-history museum was laid out on a massive cross-in-square plan, which has only been partially built out over time.

Beyond merely the dead ends, what this means is that, over a century and a half after its founding, the street-facing façades and infill architecture of this museum have been created in a progression of styles that have reflected, for better and worse, the ideals of their times. The museum began on the southern side of its four-block quadrangle bordering Central Park, carved out of the street grid of the then-undeveloped Upper West Side. From 1874 to 1877, Vaux and Mould extended their pastoral vision from Central Park to break ground on the museum’s first wing in the Gothic Revival style; from then until now, this building, which was soon surrounded by future construction, has housed the museum’s Northwest Coast Hall.

An aerial view of the American Museum of Natural History’s campus. Photo: Iwan Baan.

The plan to extend this Gothic language across the four seven-hundred-and-forty-foot sides of the envisioned museum was quickly eclipsed by changing architectural taste. In 1897, a new plan emerged to complete the museum in a Romanesque Revival style. The Seventy-seventh Street façade, designed by Cady, Berg & See and constructed between 1890 and 1900, and the southwest wing, designed by Charles Volz and built between 1906 and 1908, gave the museum its fanciful red turrets and first distinctive appearance.

The need for natural light and air at one time called for four internal open courtyards located within the circulating wings, all radiating out from a domed central tower. In the twentieth century, with advances in artificial light and ventilation, these open spaces began to be modified and built in. Rather than a dome, the central building became the museum’s lecture hall, designed by Cady, Berg & See in 1900. Wings for ocean life and education filled in the southwest and southeast courtyards in 1924 and 1928. A power and service building of 1930–35 infilled the northwest courtyard. Meanwhile the art-deco Hayden Planetarium, designed by Trowbridge & Livingston, was constructed in the northeast courtyard in 1934–35. At the same time, between 1931 and 1936, the museum’s eastern façade fronting Central Park West received John Russell Pope’s Roman Revival grand vision for the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Rotunda, complete with a triumphal arch, coffered vaulted interiors, and an equestrian statue of our twenty-sixth president mounted at the center of a monumental entry plaza. Then, over half a century later, a year-2000 addition by Polshek Partnership, which replaced the Hayden with the Rose Center for Earth & Space, stayed within this original master plan while again departing in style, this time resulting in a celestial sphere (housing the new planetarium theater) suspended in an illuminated glass cube.

Despite over a century and a half, and the construction of some twenty-five buildings, the museum has still only filled out about two-thirds of its original master-plan footprint. This incompleteness has been most felt on its western side facing Columbus Avenue, where existing wings have ended abruptly, resulting in many of those back-tracking dead ends. A central building that connects these wings, on all four of the museum’s floors, has long been overdue.

The Columbus Avenue entrance to the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation. Photo: Alvaro Keding / © AMNH.

The Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, over a decade in the making and opened to the public on May 4, set out to do just that. (For more, see “Old museums, new tricks” in The New Criterion of February 2017.) Filling in a void along the museum’s western edge, the 230,000-square-foot wing creates some thirty new access points to the museum’s twenty-building complex. It also generally continues the massing of the original master plan while extending the museum’s central axis west from the Roosevelt Rotunda, resulting in a new façade that now lines up with Seventy-ninth Street.

Funded by one of New York’s great latter-day philanthropists, the Gilder Center is named for the late Republican financier who once teamed up with none other than George Soros to found the Central Park Conservancy. Among the other New York–based beneficiaries of Richard Gilder’s largesse before his death in 2020 were the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and the magazine you are now reading.

Early on the Gilder Center was designated to expand the museum’s educational mission, with additional classroom space as well as room to display more of the museum’s permanent collection of objects and scientific specimens, of which only 2–3 percent might ever be on view at any given time. Rising over three stories, these new displays, called the Louis V. Gerstner Jr. Collections Core and the Macaulay Family Foundation Collections Gallery, are among the Gilder Center’s most beneficial new additions. Behind the vitrines we can see the new rolling-stack storage shelves where some 12 percent of the museum’s collection, or four million specimens, has been, or is being, relocated. These displays, by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, reveal the breadth and depth of the museum’s holdings while also, for the first time, giving us a window onto its activities as a working scientific institution.

The development of open storage has been an undersung initiative of recent museum practice, one that in fact revives the object-based focus of the Renaissance Wunderkammer, the precursor of our nineteenth-century museums. At the Gilder Center, touch screens and detailed labels tell us much about these slices of the museum’s varied collection. In one area are displays of antique lantern slides, eastern box turtles, giant extinct mammals, wasp nests and galls, cleared and stained fish, New York rocks, Gaia astronomical data, Korean pottery, Maasai beadwork, and even a selection of Vladimir Nabokov’s butterflies. Another floor contains handmade African toys, bats, insects and spiders, parrots, astronomical instruments, amphibians, field documentation, a hadrosaur footprint, crinoid fossils, and the bones of a giant grouper. Still another houses Pueblo pottery, Maya bricks, Camarasaurus vertebrae, animal horns, drill core samples, trilobite fossils, sea-snail shells, megalodon teeth, ammonite fossils, and a captivating display of corals and echinoderms. Nearby, yet another new storage room and study center, visible through a window, now contains a sizeable percentage of the museum’s 3.1 million specimens of moths and butterflies. The one discordant note in all this is “Housewares of the Mao Era,” a display of Communist agitprop that describes the Cultural Revolution as merely a “sweeping campaign to reshape and reeducate Chinese society.” By sweeping away the death of some thirty million Chinese, the museum might satisfy ccp censors, but the appalling omission should not escape our notice.

The David S. and Ruth L. Gottesman Research Library and Learning Center at the Richard Gilder Center. Photo: Alvaro Keding / © AMNH.

A new library and reading room on the top floor, called the David S. and Ruth L. Gottesman Research Library and Learning Center, continues the spirit of open storage with walls of books and artifacts. The library is another achievement of the Gilder wing, bringing the museum’s extensive bibliographic collection out from a hidden location off of the dinosaur hall into wider and more welcoming public view. A wall of floor-to-ceiling shelves called the “Great Range” contains models of a polar bear from 1912, of a Camarasaurus from circa 1919, and of HMS Beagle from circa 2005. Also here is a crate from the museum’s Congo expedition (ca. 1909–15), a museum flag from its land exhibition of 1941, and a lunar tire prototype from 2011. Nearby, for the first time, the library has an alcove to exhibit a selection of its rare books, objects, and manuscripts, such as a 1705 edition of Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium.

One of the wing’s new permanent exhibits is the five-thousand-square-foot Susan and Peter J. Solomon Family Insectarium. The ground-floor display makes the best case for our buggy acquaintances, whether they be vectors for our diseases—by a wide margin, the mosquito has been the most lethal animal to human life—or the essential pollinators of our food supply. Here the focus is an elaborate terrarium of live leaf-cutter ants walking across ropes and bridges with their snipped loads. A floor up, the Davis Family Butterfly Vivarium relocates the museum’s live butterfly room from its digs in the Whitney Memorial Hall, with historical dioramas Pacific bird life that will now hopefully be restored and reopened, to a more permanent home.

Life’s interconnectedness is a recurring theme of the Gilder Center. A twelve-minute immersive video called “Invisible Worlds,” designed by Tamschick Media+Space with Boris Micka Associates, is a remarkable feat of interactive projection. Still, I am not sure how much insight can genuinely be gleaned from its ambient soundtrack and ASMR narration—“humans have created digital networks to extend the reach of our ideas. How many texts have you sent today?” asks a breathy female narrator. More thought-provoking are the touch-screen quizzes in the film’s entry hall, asking whether we are more closely related to mold or moss (the answer is mold, by a difference of some five hundred million years) or sea sponges or starfish (starfish, by two hundred million years).

The Invisible Worlds Immersive Experience at the Richard Gilder Center. Photo: Iwan Baan.

The Gilder Center has tucked its many exhibits and displays around a five-story entry atrium designed by Jeanne Gang that is presented as the showpiece of the project. On the building’s exterior, blocks of Milford pink granite—the very same stone used on Pope’s Roosevelt Rotunda—have been cut by computer into sedimentary wave-like patterns. On the interior, shotcrete, a spray-on concrete used primarily for tunnel construction, has been slathered and scraped onto rebar molds to form the walls and ceilings. The architect has described the forms of this space as being inspired by slot caverns, riverbank canyons, melting blocks of ice, and prehistoric cave dwellings. Its construction is presented as ecologically sensitive in every conceivable way; talk of climate change is never far from the sales pitch. The result is a cross between Antoni Gaudí and Fred Flintstone. This is not to suggest the forms are not arresting. The atrium leads onto a grand staircase by way of Castle Grayskull. Pseudo land-bridges connect the upper floors. The shotcrete surfaces, left scraped and raw, have the look of tufted wool from afar and the feel of coarse-grit sandpaper up close. The walls can catch the raking sunlight in a satisfying sculptural way. In contrast, any knee or hand that catches its sharp and crumbly surface will feel most unsatisfied. I can only imagine how this rough aggregate will age once the first cup of coffee spills down its side and gum sticks to its surface. I fear starchitects, especially those bearing eco-pablum.

The staircase in the Kenneth C. Griffin Exploration Atrium of the Richard Gilder Center. Photo: Iwan Baan.

For all of its nature-like forms, this shotcrete architecture is also the most artificial aspect of the new facility. The American Museum of Natural History is known for its historical dioramas. One way to see this design is as a diorama turned inside out, one where we are the specimens on view. It is interesting to note that shotcrete was invented by no less than the naturalist Carl Akeley, the pioneer of the museum’s historical dioramas.

But now the diorama frame is gone. So too is all of the historicized architecture, washed away in the same progressive deluge that recently toppled the Roosevelt statue from the museum’s front stairs. What results is a museum wiped down to the bone. Here is a post-apocalyptic vision where we are no longer the civilized masters of the universe but cave dwellers once again. In our self-obsessed age, perhaps it is appropriate finally to be the subject of this museum’s latest and largest diorama. Just what the five-story display says about the future of humanity is a label yet to be written. If I had my way, to borrow a line popularized by William F. Buckley Jr., I might simply suggest, Don’t immanentize the eschaton. The anthropocene will never kill us, but scientism just might.

Higher Authority

THE NEW CRITERION, May 2023

LETTER FROM THE GOLAN

Higher authority

On security in the Golan, Israeli politics & settler culture.

Israel’s judicial woes exploded just as we were approaching Ben Gurion Airport for our flight home. This time, it wasn’t Syria or Lebanon, Iran or Egypt, or any of the other bad actors surrounding us making trouble, but Israel itself. The protesters became more numerous throughout the day as we neared Tel Aviv. Almost all of them were against the judicial reforms promoted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They took to the highway overpasses and often to the highways themselves. They shuttered the national parks and even staged walkouts at many of the country’s McDonald’s—cutting off our visit to the archeological site of Caesarea, and my family’s meal options, before takeoff.

That the general strike then closed down Ben Gurion International for several hours speaks to the long shadow of the country’s short history. As the founding prime minister of the State of Israel, David Ben-Gurion had more pressing concerns in 1948 than load-testing his nascent country’s governmental architecture, and he left it without a proper constitution. The proposed judicial reforms, and the controversy surrounding them, are the consequences of this legislation delayed, legislation denied, now quickly boiling over into an un-constitutional crisis, right as the country is about to celebrate its diamond jubilee.

It was with some irony that we largely avoided the protests during our final days in the country by touring the Golan Heights. To this day this northeast corner of Israel, taken from Syria in the Six-Day War in 1967, remains contested Israeli territory by all but the United States. In March 2019, President Trump affirmed Israel’s claim to the region. The move elicited condemnation from the European members of the U.N. Security Council and much celebration here. In honor of the U.S. announcement, Netanyahu broke ground on a new settlement named Trump Heights (Ramat Trump) east of the Jordan River, on the road to the former Syrian military headquarters, which has become a brutalist ruin now covered in graffiti. A monument to Trump marks the entrance to the settlement with the sculpture of a bald eagle taking flight from a menorah.

A sign in the Golan warning of the presence of land mines. Photo: James Panero. 

The contested status of the Golan has left the region, which in a brief span borders Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, largely unpopulated since the disruptions of 1967. The battle-scarred hills are still littered with Syrian bunkers and unexploded mines, over which there now falls a contingent peace. One morning we took an old Land Rover up from the Hula Valley into the Height’s rutted dirt roads. “Where are we?” I asked our driver, Royi. “You are in the Middle East,” he replied.

Wildflowers now grow around the rusted barbed wire that crisscrosses the hillside and the numerous signs that read “danger mines!” Mustard flowers, poppies, and tall grasses provide abundant food for the mix of bees, cattle, and wild animals that now call these slopes home. Beef from the Golan is free-range, save for the minefields, and results in some of the most flavorful steak you can find—one evening I dined on a local T-bone and Golan wine at a horse ranch just north of ancient Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee.

Once up on the heights’ plateau, we pulled over. We got out of the vehicle, being sure not to wander off the road. Royi brewed a tea of Golan lemongrass on a camp stove he balanced on the hood of his vehicle. He peeled and handed around slices of local orange—the smell of orange blossoms is a particular treat when walking through the groves in the valley. A hoopoe, the national bird of Israel, with its orange crown and a winged jacket of black-and-white feathers, foraged in a bush by the side of the road. In the distance, we spotted a family of boar circling in the shade of a tree. A herd of Nubian ibex, a vulnerable species that has found its own refuge in Israel, ran along the ridgeline.

An Iron Dome launch site in the Golan, with Mount Hermon in the distance. Photo: James Panero. 

As we continued up to the present Syrian border, we passed Israeli bases and active IDF training grounds. “Iron Dome,” Royi pointed to our right. There they were: mobile sand-colored missile launchers just off the side of the road, trained in the direction of Lebanon. “TANK CROSSING” read another sign nearby. It is a warning that I learned needs to be taken at its word. Our guide during our Israeli stay, a spritely Golan homesteader named Lior, lost all of his bees six years ago when an Israeli tank ran over his forty hives during nighttime training maneuvers. He restored a few of the hives and gave us a jar of his personal supply to take home. He would need the rest in this land of milk and honey for his growing family of “only four” children, as he likes to say.

For lunch we stopped at a farm in central Golan at Moshav Kidmat Tzvi, one of those Jewish cooperative communities, founded in 1981, still deemed illegal by what Israel’s antagonists like to call “international law.” Here the owners, Tami and Babi, served a meal of local abundance: platters of fish and pasta, hummus and cheese, and fruits and vegetables, paired with their homegrown olive oil and wine. The building is made entirely of recycled materials. Tami sits down at our table to explain their history as her cat rubs against my leg. The walls are covered with homemade glass and artwork. A tree trunk grows up in the middle of the room and exits to the outdoors through a hole in the ceiling. Babi offers me a brandy distilled from his own apples. From the charoset and maror of the Passover seder plate, food has always held a central place in Jewish symbolism. Now a fresh cornucopia, shared at this Israeli table, replaces the bitter herbs of Egypt with the succulent fruits of aliyah, or “going up,” to Zion.

This frontier attracts settlers with the same pioneer spirit that you might have found in Oklahoma Territory over a century ago. These are times when Israel resembles nothing less than a young and vibrant United States. Today the settlers vary in their politics. Some are old leftists, the secular holdouts of the kibbutzim. Others are religious idealists, fulfilling what they see as their own manifest destiny. What they share is a spirit for Zionism, the civic virtue that has propelled this nation, despite its conflicts and divisions, to astonishing heights in under a century.

Up at the border, the contrast with these achievements can be most striking. Through its industry and energy, against the odds, Israel has shocked the world with its successes. The triumphs have only brought shame to its Arab neighbors, who have mainly shown themselves to be impotent and corrupt. Beyond the demilitarized zone, the abundance of the Golan ends in a sharp line and gives way to the denuded hills of Syria and Lebanon. On the flank of Mount Avital, with the snow-covered peak of Mount Hermon in the distance, I felt a cold wind blowing across the ridgeline. Here in the late afternoon we overlooked Camp Ziouani, the DMZ outpost operated by the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force—the “useless nations,” as Israelis call them. From all around, a chorus of manic laughter emanated out of the grass. “Jackals,” Lior told me. I was unsure if he was referring to the animals or the Hezbollah bases just beyond.

The Israeli border, with Syria in the distance. Photo: James Panero.

For anyone who doubts the strategic necessity of the Golan to Israel, just visit the old Jewish settlements clinging to the hillsides to the west of the Jordan River. Before 1967, the Syrian border ran right in front of them, straight down the middle of the Hula Valley. The line split the region in two and placed Israeli villagers within sniper range of the militarized Syrian positions overshadowing their settlements from the east. As it is, the region can still be besieged by rocket fire from Lebanon and was under heavy bombardment as recently as 2006. At the time, Hezbollah was firebombing Israel with over two hundred rockets a day. Israel’s aerial fire brigade flew out of Mahanayim airfield, just down the hill from our bed-and-breakfast in Rosh Pina.

The charming village of our stay, a stone’s throw from the city of Safed, is something of the Plymouth of Zionism. The village was settled in the 1880s as one of the first Jewish homesteads in what was then the Ottoman Vilayet of Beirut. The name Rosh Pina, meaning “cornerstone,” refers to Psalm 118:22—“The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” It speaks to the foundational aspirations of its pioneers. Baron Edmond de Rothschild underwrote the town’s agricultural development, purchasing land to grow crops, which made it one of the region’s first self-sustaining Jewish communities. The eminent Victorian Laurence Oliphant, who gathered support from Christian Zionists for such settlements, visited soon after in 1886, writing:

These consisted of twenty-three Roumanian and four Russian families, numbering in all one hundred and forty souls. The greater number were hard at work on their potato-patches when I arrived, and I was pleased to find evidences of thrift and industry. A row of sixteen neat little houses had been built, and more were in process or erection. Altogether this is the most hopeful attempt at a colony which I have seen in Palestine.

The future of Israel now seems a world away from these pioneers. The risk today is that many in the younger generation, increasingly wealthy and cosmopolitan and centered around the booming tech corridor of Tel Aviv, are seeking to align themselves with the same liberal international order that has proven to offer false shelter for the Jewish people time and again. When they appeal to “democracy” in protesting Netanyahu’s judicial reforms, for example, what they really oppose is his attempt to rein in an unaccountable judicial elite; part of Netanyahu’s proposed reforms would align their nominating process with something closer to the democratic American system. In opposing the legislation of the Israeli Knesset—put forward by its elected members—Israel’s overreaching judiciary has long weakened the country’s borders and thwarted its efforts at counterterrorism. In 2007, Judge Robert H. Bork even noted that Aharon Barak, the former president of the Supreme Court of Israel, had written “a textbook for judicial activists.”

The Golan plateau. Photo: James Panero.

Beyond such policy disagreements, the mass protests are really an attempt to oppose the Netanyahu government through mob rule by drawing on the progressive shock tactics of Antifa and Black Lives Matter. “Whatever individual protesters may have told themselves, the real purpose of the uprising was not to stop judicial reform. It was to get rid of Netanyahu,” wrote Melanie Phillips in the Jewish News Syndicate. “Protesters absurdly claimed that the reform program—proposed by a democratically elected government—was a ‘coup.’ . . . That is the antithesis of democracy.”

Nation-building is tough business. Israel’s burden has been to build one under a contemporary spotlight while being reprimanded by many of the same world powers whose actions necessitated the creation of the Jewish State in the first place. Here is a country the size of New Jersey that is regularly under attack by one or more of its neighbors. Israel’s unabashed struggle for self-survival has been a defining characteristic of its history and the fire fueling its great successes. As Golda Meir, Israel’s iron-lady prime minister, famously said: “If we have to have a choice between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image.” In the Golan Heights, at least, that spirit lives on.

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.