Curtains for Lincoln Center

THE NEW CRITERION, May 2024

Curtains for Lincoln Center

On the falsification of Lincoln Center’s history.

During the high dudgeon of the Black Lives Matter movement, New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts joined the chorus of handwringers with a particular twist. “In our 60+ year history, we have not done nearly enough. It is part of our job now to help change the status quo,” read the center’s “Message on Our Commitment to Change.” Lincoln Center’s multiple concert venues may have been shuttered by the pandemic. Its institutional constituents, which include the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and the New York City Ballet, were facing the prospect of millions of dollars in losses. Yet as its first priority, the center determined to dedicate itself to

Telling the story of Lincoln Center from our beginning, in its truth. The displacement of Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families that took place prior to the construction of our campus is abhorrent. We may never know its full impact on those dispossessed of the land on which Lincoln Center sits. But only by acknowledging this history can we begin to confront the racism from which our institution has benefited.

With the blood-and-soil essentialism of today’s identity politics, the commitment to “confront[ing] the racism from which our institution has benefited” and “telling the story of Lincoln Center from our beginning, in its truth” fell in line with the new progressive rhetoric of land acknowledgments, colonialist dispossession, and supposedly unearthed legacies of systemic oppression. The diagnosis also presented an opportunity for Lincoln Center’s younger leadership, remote-working members of a new generation of the managerial class, to treat their organization’s “abhorrent” injustices against “Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families” with their own patent mixture of tinctures, elixirs, and balms. How much of this “truth” is in fact true was beside the point. By design, their cure would be worse than the disease.

For the racial pathologists, in the case of Lincoln Center this sickness was malignant, metastasizing, and neglected for far too long: the center’s four-block complex owed its existence not just to Peter Minuit’s alleged swindling of Mannahatta for sixty guilders back in 1626, but also to the supposed destruction of a vibrant black community known as San Juan Hill some three centuries on. This culturally vital neighborhood of residences, businesses, and theaters, where Thelonious Monk lived and James P. Johnson developed the Charleston, was targeted in the 1950s by no less than Robert Moses for one of his largest projects of urban renewal. Such “slum clearance,” scattering seven thousand families and eight hundred businesses, paved over those “Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families,” as the leadership of Lincoln Center now represents its origin story, with white travertine and white culture.

Coming clean with these supposed injustices, Lincoln Center focused its post-pandemic programming not on Mozart or Stravinsky as it once might have done, but on turning its land acknowledgment into a multistage extravaganza. In 2022, commissioned by Lincoln Center in collaboration with the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Public Art Fund, the organization plastered a 68-by-150-foot mural called San Juan Heal at the corner of Broadway and Sixty-fifth Street across the northern façade of David Geffen Hall—formerly known as Avery Fisher Hall and, originally, Philharmonic Hall. Here the artist Nina Chanel Abney mixed symbols referencing ragtime and jazz alongside such phrases as “homage,” “honor,” and “urban renewal?”

Nina Chanel Abney, San Juan Heal, 2022, Latex ink & vinyl mounted on glass, David Geffen Hall, New York.

Geffen Hall’s inaugural opening night with its resident orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, then featured a new “immersive multimedia work” called San Juan Hill: A New York Story. Created by Etienne Charles, this piece brought together, according to its billing, “music, visuals, and original first-person accounts of the history of the San Juan Hill neighborhood and the indigenous and immigrant communities that populated the land in and around where Lincoln Center resides.”

To make the story more explicit, Lincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic arranged for a graffiti crew known as the ex vandals to paint a mural for the center’s Amsterdam Avenue façade. Conceived by a musician and tagger known as “Wicked Gary” Fritz, the work presented the black historical figures of San Juan Hill on the left, a depiction of the modern Lincoln Center plaza on the right, and a wrecking ball crashing through the middle. “This was a thriving Black community that they took out to bring in Lincoln Center,” Fritz explained to Ebony magazine at the unveiling.

A year later, Lincoln Center launched an online “hub” on its institutional website, called “Legacies of San Juan Hill” and dedicated to “interrogating our role in this history.” Here we can read of the “old, long disgraced story, the one in which benevolent city fathers swept in to rescue the city from slums and blight.” San Juan Hill “may have been run down, a source of hardship and deprivation, but the cure was worse than the curse,” continues one article. “Clearance and rebuilding scattered neighbors, broke apart fragile social networks, uprooted working class communities, destroyed jobs, targeted people of color for removal, and deepened racial segregation.”

Lincoln Center’s latter-day struggle sessions have played into a new media environment in which race-based narratives are an editorial imperative. “Before Lincoln Center, San Juan Hill Was a Vibrant Black Community,” went one headline in The New York Times. “A vibrant neighborhood known as San Juan Hill, which was home to many low-income Black and Latino residents, was razed to make way for the center’s construction,” went another article. Whatever the historical reality or the artistic merits of the San Juan Hill initiative, Lincoln Center banked its post-pandemic recovery on a narrative of its own abhorrence, developing programming and even a new campus plan around its “original sin” of race-based displacement. The one problem with such self-abnegation is that Lincoln Center’s historical record turns out to be far less loathsome than what its leadership represented, and even exculpatory of the crimes to which they now confess.

When Black Lives Matter becomes a marketing strategy, facts offer little impediment to “truth.” In the case of Lincoln Center, this new battle of San Juan Hill has ultimately been a story of conflation, exaggeration, and wishful thinking. The history of Lincoln Center and the neighborhood that came before it both deserve genuine appreciation, observed beyond the hothouse of race-based managerialism.

There indeed was a time when San Juan Hill—an area roughly defined as Manhattan’s far West Sixties, backed up against the New York Central Railroad’s sprawling Sixtieth Street Yard along the Hudson River—was a nexus of black New York. The bohemian energy that enlivened this neighborhood’s small theaters and nightclubs also attracted artists to the Lincoln Arcade, a loft building and theater at Sixty-Fifth Street and Broadway where the Juilliard School now stands. Robert Henri, Milton Avery, Stuart Davis, and Marcel Duchamp all passed through its studios. For nine months in 1908–09, the playwright Eugene O’Neill even lived there in George Bellows’s basement studio, basing his 1914 play Butter and Bread on the experience. To its credit, articles on Lincoln Center’s “Legacies of San Juan Hill” web hub explore this history in greater detail.

An image from San Juan Hill prior to Lincoln Center’s development. Photo: Lincoln Square Slum Clearance Plan, 1956.

But the cultural height of San Juan Hill came and went soon after the turn of the century. Manhattan’s own Great Migration saw black New Yorkers moving north from Greenwich Village through this West Side neighborhood on the way to Harlem. The “old law” tenements that filled out San Juan Hill’s narrow lots were made illegal after the city’s new code provisions of 1901 mandated greater setbacks for air and light—one explanation for why many black New Yorkers chose to move out of these overcrowded blocks. The advent of single-room-occupancy residences (after city housing law changed in 1939 to allow sros) and the conversion of several tenements into illegal business spaces further diminished the neighborhood’s housing stock. Garages, repair shops, gas stations, and utilities were intermixed into these blocks as extensions of the automobile row that still runs along Eleventh Avenue. Finally, centered among Irish, Italian, Polish, and other ethnic enclaves, the neighborhood became besieged with gang violence. The nickname of San Juan Hill, applied to an area that was officially known as Lincoln Square and Columbus Hill, may have been a reference to the black veterans who settled there after the Spanish–American War. Just as likely, the name came out of the ethnic warfare that famously inspired the musical West Side Story (which was filmed at the northern end of San Juan Hill just before demolition).

By the time New York turned its attention to redeveloping this section of the West Side, Robert Moses was not the only one who saw its deteriorating conditions and future potential. A decade before Lincoln Center ever took shape, the historical black center of San Juan Hill was leveled under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to build Amsterdam Houses, an integrated housing project to the west of what is now Lincoln Center that opened in 1947, originally for veterans of the Second World War.

Proposed location of the Lincoln Square Project. Photo: Lincoln Square Slum Clearance Plan, 1956.

By the 1950s, thanks to the Federal Housing Act of 1949, cities across the country were using and often abusing eminent domain to tap into federal funds for slum clearance. The Lincoln Square Renewal Project of 1955 is remarkable not for what it cleared—seventeen decrepit blocks between Sixtieth and Seventieth Streets—but for what was created in its place: not another urban highway as was cut through many other municipalities, but rather a Manhattan campus for Fordham University, a new headquarters for the American Red Cross, four thousand units of middle-income housing, and a campus for multiple performing arts organizations of world renown.

For an evenhanded account of its creation and endurance, Beacon to the World: A History of Lincoln Center, by Joseph W. Polisi, the former longtime president of the Juilliard School, ably updates Edgar B. Young’s Lincoln Center: The Building of an Institution of 1980.1

A preliminary design for the opera house at Lincoln Center, by Wallace K. Harrison, 1955. Photo courtesy of Columbia University.

“A persistent problem with the Center’s legacy is manifested in the ‘original sin’ it committed in the 1950s of displacing thousands of families living in the Lincoln Square neighborhood,” Polisi begins. “As with most retrospective historical scenarios, evaluating through a revisionist lens the decisions made at the birth of the Center may be a pointless exercise.”

At the time of demolition, the New York City Planning Commission determined that the neighborhood of Lincoln Square had become “clearly substandard and unsanitary . . . a blighting and depressing influence on surrounding sections contributing to gradual deterioration of the Upper West Side.” “Maintenance of buildings was neglected, building code violations were numerous, and fire hazards were great,” notes Young. “By 1955, the entire area was in an advanced state of decay” and “one of the city’s worst slums.”

Substandard living conditions identified by the slum clearance committee. Photo: Lincoln Square Slum Clearance Plan, 1956.

New York City had identified the neighborhood of San Juan Hill for demolition and redevelopment long before the concept for a performing-arts center took hold. The idea for Lincoln Center only emerged after several of the city’s performing arts institutions found themselves in need of updated venues at the same time. The Metropolitan Opera had long ago outgrown its original home at Thirty-ninth Street and Broadway, an opulent Gilded Age venue but one with a limited back of house. Rockefeller Center and Columbus Circle were both considered as sites for relocation before Robert Moses approached the opera for his renewed Lincoln Square.

At the same time, the private owners of Carnegie Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Society, at Fifty-Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, had plans to tear down their storied venue and replace it with a high-rise office tower. The Philharmonic was sent scrambling after the landlords informed the orchestra its lease would not be renewed after its expiration in 1959. Finally, the New York City Ballet, part of City Center along with New York City Opera on West Fifty-fifth Street, was on the lookout for larger venues in order to stage George Balanchine’s ambitious ensemble works.

Proposed boundary map of the Lincoln Center Project. Photo: Lincoln Square Slum Clearance Plan, 1956.

As representatives for what would become Lincoln Center’s first three constituent organizations came together under the leadership of John D. Rockefeller III, the concept of a major new performing-arts center took shape and grew. The Juilliard School, then at West 122nd Street, and the special music collection of the New York Public Library, then located in the library’s main branch, were soon brought in as essential components for music education and research. Constituents for theater, film, chamber music, bel canto opera, jazz, and dance education eventually coalesced into the nearly dozen organizations that make up today’s Lincoln Center campus.

Under the Federal Housing Act of 1949, cities could draw on federal funds to purchase deteriorating neighborhoods through eminent domain and then sell the land for redevelopment at a discount. The difference between the purchase price and the sale price was known as the “land write-down,” for which the federal government financed two-thirds of the difference and, in the case of New York, the city and state split the remaining costs.

The groundbreaking ceremony for Lincoln Center Plaza, 1959. Photo: LIFE Photo Collection.

It is true that controversy surrounded the Lincoln Square Renewal Project at the time of demolition, but not for the creation of Lincoln Center. Instead, preservationists feared the loss of the Philharmonic would expedite the destruction of Carnegie Hall. Only at the last moment, even as its resident orchestra moved out, was the venue remarkably saved as a world-class home for visiting artists thanks to the violinist Isaac Stern, who convinced the city to purchase it. Legal challenges to the Lincoln Square plan primarily focused on the separation of church and state as it applied to the proposed campus of Fordham University, a Jesuit school, slated for the parcel to the south of Lincoln Center. The Supreme Court eventually dismissed this challenge to eminent domain in 1958.

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts came together to function as the umbrella organization for its constituents as well as their benevolent landlord. The new nonprofit also became responsible for the demolition and redevelopment of its then-three-and-a-half-block campus. As the center took ownership of 188 existing buildings with 1,647 occupied units and 383 commercial tenants, it aided in the relocation of its residents and businesses. Many of those moved out of their office spaces were not dispossessed family-run operations but rather federal agencies housed in one of Lincoln Square’s modern buildings, at 70 Columbus Avenue, roughly on the site of what became the New York State Theater, now known as the David H. Koch Theater. Built as the twelve-story headquarters for the Uppercu Cadillac Corporation in 1927, by the 1950s this loft building was owned by Joseph P. Kennedy, who rented its floors to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Atomic Energy Commission. Given this family connection, it should come as little surprise that the city paid a premium for its appraisal and demolition.

Census on minority populations conducted New York Slum Clearance Committee. Photo: Preliminary Report on the Lincoln Square Project, 1956.

While the city lavished funds on the Kennedy clan, Lincoln Center kept close tabs on the residents it helped relocate through the redevelopment plan. Most of them remained in Manhattan, with nine hundred families staying on the Upper West Side. A study of the first 742 relocated revealed that they moved into larger quarters, all with up-to-date sanitary conditions. Most notably, for all of the “abhorrent” claims of the “displacement of Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families,” the census conducted by the Slum Clearance Committee of those relocated to create Lincoln Center revealed a population that was, in fact, overwhelmingly white: 75 percent of those displaced were white, 24.5 percent were Puerto Rican, and just 0.5 percent black. As it turns out, Lincoln Center’s latest racialized tort has been nothing more than a false confession.

Regardless of its ethnic breakdown, the redevelopment of a decrepit San Juan Hill into Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts indeed proved to be the “unparalleled cultural opportunity” that the New York City Planning Commission first envisioned, one that illustrates the bold, high-minded actions of the post-war city at its best. The site’s master plan, under the architect Wallace K. Harrison, took inspiration from Michelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio on the Capitoline Hill in Rome.

It is true that, in the extensive use of travertine marble, which is porous and absorbs water, Lincoln Center’s stone facings have fared far worse under New York’s freeze–thaw cycles than they would under the Italian sun. The center’s International Style architecture—designed by Harrison (the Metropolitan Opera House), Philip Johnson (the New York State Theater), Max Abramovitz (Philharmonic Hall), Eero Saarinen (the Vivian Beaumont Theater), Gordon Bunshaft (the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts), and Pietro Belluschi (the Juilliard School and Alice Tully Hall)—has also aged poorly, set off from the city streets in an austere, windswept design.

Lincoln Center Plaza under construction, 1964. Photo: Bob Serating Photo © Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

“Lincoln Center is a triumph of city planning,” wrote Myron Magnet in the Fall 2000 issue of City Journal, dedicated to reimagining the arts campus. “But as architecture, oh dear. The Center was deplorable, as critics recognized from the start.” A campus refresh by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, completed in 2010, did much to lighten the imposing complex along Sixty-fifth Street and extend Alice Tully Hall up to the angled street line of Broadway, but the bandshell at Damrosch Park, on the southwest corner of the campus, has never succeeded, just as the sides of Johnson’s State Theater remain an unarticulated travertine mass.

The center’s performance venues have faced their own challenges. The Metropolitan Opera House has too many seats but too little lobby space. The New York State Theater, renovated and renamed the David H. Koch Theater, may be well turned out for ballet but remains flat-footed for singers or orchestra, in part accounting for the fall of New York City Opera, which shared the space with City Ballet. Finally, Philharmonic Hall has been such an acoustical failure that it has been redone (and renamed) multiple times. Its latest iteration, as David Geffen Hall, solved many of the sonic challenges but destroyed the elegance of its public spaces, sourcing garish upholstery more in line with a bus terminal and slathering its surfaces with theatrical lighting, all in the name of presenting a more “inclusive” atmosphere.

Philharmonic Hall, 1963. Photo: Lincoln Center for Performing Art.

The synergies that might have been expected from the close contact of many arts organizations have also, just as often, led to internecine conflict. The profligate Metropolitan Opera helped bully City Opera out of existence and has long set itself apart from its neighbors while antagonizing its own audience with aggressive contemporary stagings. Before this latest renovation, the New York Philharmonic even explored a return to Carnegie Hall and the abandonment of Lincoln Center entirely. Most significantly, the umbrella organization of Lincoln Center has more than once been at cross-purposes with its constituents, promoting its own messaging and programs that can be in competition with the presenting organizations.

In their storied histories, the center’s famous constituents have nevertheless sustained and championed the performing arts while also truly revitalizing their surrounding community, including what remained of San Juan Hill. It is noteworthy that the childhood home of Thelonious Monk, in the Phipps Houses on West Sixty-third Street, was spared by the development of both Amsterdam Houses and Lincoln Center and survives to this day. The famous jazz pianist performed numerous times at Lincoln Center, beginning just a year after it opened, recording a live album at Philharmonic Hall in 1963. Late in life, Monk moved into an apartment in Lincoln Towers, in one of the high-rises built as part of the redevelopment plan. Due to these affinities, Monk liked to call his neighborhood not San Juan Hill or Lincoln Square or even the Upper West Side but simply “Lincoln Center.” Similarly, after Nina Simone started performing regularly at Lincoln Center in the late 1960s, she moved into another of the new apartment towers, in the same building as the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton—and also where I grew up. Finally, Jazz at Lincoln Center, a constituent organization founded in part by Wynton Marsalis in 1987 and located in the Time Warner Center since 2004, has done more to sustain the musical culture of San Juan Hill than any facile “commitment to change.”

Lincoln Center Plaza, 1965. Photo: Suzanna Faulkner Stevens.

Under the leadership of Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s young British-born president and chief executive from 2019 until this year, Lincoln Center has merely updated its antagonism toward its constituents for the woke age. In 2021 Timms brought on Shanta Thake, a concert programmer from the Public Theater downtown, as the center’s chief artistic officer. Thake, whose full name is Shannon Shanta Thake-Kriegsman, may be of Indian-German descent, but she plays the race card as her ace in the hole. As their first order of business, Timms and Thake canceled “Mostly Mozart,” the center’s long-running summer festival. Thake pledged to “really confront our past head-on as we move into the future” by “opening this up and really saying that this is music that belongs to everyone”—implying, of course, that Mozart does not belong to everyone.

In the place of Mozart, the new administrators installed a ten-foot-wide disco ball above the plaza fountain and two hundred flamingo lawn ornaments. They also hired rappers, pop groups, and an LGBTQ mariachi band for their new summer performance series. “I’m more in the world of the downtown aesthetic of edgy, in your face, heavily transgressive stuff that comes from an emotional place,” Thake explained of her taste to The New York Times. “I’ve seen people dressed as chickens, covered in baby oil, dancing to the latest pop song.”

In 2023, it was announced that Louis Langrée, the summer festival’s director for twenty-one years, would be replaced by the thirty-year-old conductor Jonathon Heyward. “The next chapter for the orchestra doubles down on these successes and aims to further Shanta Thake’s broader artistic vision in service to all of New York City,” read the press announcement, “continuing to break down traditional artistic silos.” Plans for the coming summer include a “symphony of choice” concert, with audience members “curating” the program by popular vote, and an exhibition about depression tied to the mental health of Robert Schumann.

The Oasis Dance Floor, 2023. Photo: Lincoln Center for Performing Arts.

Lincoln Center now finds itself at a moment when the Metropolitan Opera, which under Peter Gelb has pushed progressive programming, continues to withdraw emergency funds from its endowment to cover sagging ticket sales and exorbitant operating losses—$40 million this year, $30 million last year. At the same time, Timms has pledged to open up the Lincoln Center campus architecturally to the tenants of Amsterdam Houses, to the west across Amsterdam Avenue, as a top priority. Just how much these residents will help fill out the opera’s dismal numbers remains to be seen, but it is noteworthy that the center’s existing staircase to Damrosch Park, from Amsterdam Avenue and Sixty-third Street, has remained locked through his tenure.

At the groundbreaking for Lincoln Center on May 14, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower took a shovel to the campus’s future plaza and praised the center’s “stimulating approach to one of the nation’s pressing problems: urban blight.”

Here will occur a true interchange of the fruits of national cultures. From this will develop a growth that will spread to the corners of the earth, bringing with it the kind of human message that only individuals—not governments—can transmit. Here will develop a mighty influence for peace and understanding throughout the world.

The triumph of Lincoln Center has been to champion the best of our cultural patrimony. Over half a century, the project has fulfilled its promise by bringing the highest standards of classical music, ballet, opera, theater, film, and jazz to four city blocks in order to promote a “true interchange of the fruits of national cultures.” This has been the full legacy of San Juan Hill, now topped by an astonishingly ambitious and farsighted cultural achievement.

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.

The Way of the Masks

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2022

The way of the masks

On the newly redone Northwest Coast Hall at the American Museum of Natural History.

The museum of today dislikes the museum of yesterday. That’s clear enough as the buildings, the collections, and the curators of the past are branded suspect and even denounced by the leadership of the present. Nowhere has this been more evident than at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. For years the institution has been on an apology tour for America and its relationship to nature and history, all the while turning the museum into a vitrine of virtue-signaling politics. Artifacts from its Hall of South American Peoples, such as the shrunken heads of the Shuar Indians of Ecuador, have been effaced from view. A diorama of “Old New York” depicting trade between the Dutch settlers and Lenape tribesmen has been graffitied over with content warnings. (“The scene offers only stereotypical representations and ignores how complex and violent colonization was for Native people.”) At the same time the museum has shown increasing contempt for its visitors, who must now queue outside for an hour or longer just to pass through a phalanx of security- and covid-theater.

Early this year this progressive onslaught reached a fever pitch as the institution jackhammered up the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt from the museum’s memorial rotunda that bears his name. This work by James Earle Fraser, based on Verrocchio’s grand equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni, had been an integral part of John Russell Pope’s original 1928 museum design (see “A classical illness” in The New Criterion of September 2020). I am still astonished the museum went through with this act of vandalism, which was an affront to the city, not to mention an insult to our twenty-sixth president. The museum has now deprived future generations of its own history as embodied in its art and architecture. It has also shown itself to be at the beck and call of the woke mob, when even those artifacts bolted to the pavement are no longer safe from erasure. As Ellen Futter, the museum’s director of the past three decades, has just announced her retirement, one can only hope that the censorious managerial class she represents will go the way of the dinosaurs.

Against the backdrop of our own tribal politics, the study of culture, in which the American Museum of Natural History was once an unapologetic leader, can still come as particular relief. Even as it now eats itself, the institution, in its founding mission, was an ark for the world’s traditional cultures at a moment when many of them were under threat or vanishing. At no time was this more evident than under the guidance of the anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942). Over a century ago the museum through his work preserved the customs and artifacts of the tribes of the Pacific Northwest in astonishing ways that continue to enrich us today. This preservation has been especially valuable as those tribes under Canadian jurisdiction faced a government that outlawed their rituals and destroyed their artifacts as a matter of policy for nearly a century. In 1899 Boas’s Northwest Coast Hall opened in the museum’s first wing. Today it remains the oldest exhibit on view, and in its original location. Now after a five-year renovation, the hall has reopened. The results should still remind us of the genius of Northwest Coast culture and the achievements of Boas and his colleagues in preserving it. At the same time the renovation signals troubling new directions for anthropological display.

The old Northwest Coast Hall. Photo courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

The ten nations that make up the Northwest Coast tribes—Tlingit, Haida, Nisga’a, Gitxsan, Tsimshian, Haíltzaqv, Nuxalk, Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-cha-nulth, and Salish—at one time enjoyed an abundance of natural resources that allowed for the development of a richly artistic and performative culture. This abundance was celebrated through the “potlatch,” an elaborate social pageant where rank and status were conferred through the ritual sacrifice of some of these resources. As a field researcher in British Columbia, Boas did not just amass the tribal artifacts of the peoples living there. He also studied their tribal customs, in particular those around the potlatch. Working with George Hunt, an English-Tlingit guide married to a Kwakwaka’wakw native, in 1897 Boas published The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, an extensive monograph that recorded their ceremonies, songs, and language in relation to their artistic materials—in particular the transforming, animistic wooden masks of the Kwakwaka’wakw.

A map of the Northwest Coast tribes. Photo courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

The complexities of these native practices, especially the ritual destruction of resources, were used as justification by the Canadian government for banning the potlatch and subsequently confiscating and destroying their artifacts, through laws that were in effect from 1884 to 1951. While motivated by the “best practices” of the age, which sought to assimilate native populations into Canadian culture, these statutes were an injustice that proved to be catastrophic for native art and custom.

It was the great ingenuity of Boas to work around Canada’s potlatch ban and complete his research. Rather than continue his field research in Canada, he arranged for Hunt and his extended family to live for seven months in 1893 in an ethnographic display as part of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he could study the Kwakwaka’wakw outside of Canadian jurisdiction.

When Boas’s hall opened in 1899, he carried through his deep understanding of Pacific Coast cultures while respecting their tribal specificity. Thanks to his extensive field research, he was able to exhibit their artifacts on their own terms, in separate alcoves dividing the hall that were dedicated to each nation and its social practices.

By today’s standards, Boas’s tenure at the museum was not without fault. A family of Greenland Inuits lived and died in his care at the museum in 1897. After staging a mock funeral for the benefit of the one boy, Minik Wallace, who survived, Boas in fact dissected his father’s body and placed it in the museum’s collection. Wallace dedicated his life to the return of these desecrated remains.

Boas’s approach to tribal research nevertheless revolutionized his field as he went on to found the department of anthropology at Columbia University. Zora Neale Hurston, a disciple of Boas at Barnard, applied his groundbreaking methodology to preserving the folkways of the black South. The structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss likewise credited Boas with inspiring his own methodology in the 1940s, leading to his 1975 book The Way of the Masks.

In some aspects of the new Northwest Coast Hall, the legacy of Boas can still be felt. The tribal alcoves have been roughly retained. The Haida dugout canoe known as the “Great Canoe,” which for decades resided in the museum’s Seventy-seventh Street entrance, has been restored to the center of the hall where it appeared when the room first opened. Extensive labels also now accompany the restored artifacts, with some one thousand objects now on display. In the Kwakwaka’wakw section, for example, these labels describe and explain the fool masks of the red-cedar-bark ceremonies and the transformation masks of the myth of Siwidi, an ancestor taken by a giant octopus to an undersea kingdom who returns transformed as a sequence of sea animals.

The “Great Canoe” in the Northwest Coast Hall. Photo courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

The problem with the new hall, and it is a big one, is in its curatorial voice. Some ten contemporary tribal members are listed here as co- and consulting curators. The results come off as exhibition by committee and anthropology as memoir. The wall labels are almost all presented in the first person. The distinctions between science and myth, subject and object, are nowhere maintained. “The Haíltzaqv people have lived on the central coast of British Columbia in and around Wáglísla (Bella Bella) since time began,” reads one wall text. “The case lighting has been darkened at the request of Tlingit advisors to reflect the cultural sensitivity of these items,” reads another.

The leadership at the museum is now so beholden to contemporary First Nations, or at least makes such a show of being beholden to them, that the presentation drowns out the very objects of history meant for display. “We need to talk about racism!” exclaims one introductory wall label in an extra-large font. “Systemic racism has been present here since first contact with white people and persisted to this current moment and this conversation,” goes the welcome video on repeat loop. On another wall, under the label “Support native art—made by Native artists,” we are given examples of decorated skateboards, sneakers, and basketballs.

For all of the verbiage now packed into this one hall—aimed at best obliquely at the museumgoer new to this cultural content—certain names and stories are notably absent. Gone is the remarkable history surrounding the transportation of that sixty-three-foot Great Canoe, the largest dugout canoe in existence, which until recently was included with its display. Created around 1878 from a single piece of Western red cedar, the canoe was acquired by the museum and moved by steamer to the isthmus of Panama, where it was transported by rail to the Atlantic, then shipped to a Manhattan pier, then moved to the new museum by horse-drawn wagon.

Also absent is the story of Franz Boas himself. You might think that if you are telling a story of the survival of culture, you would include the role of the curator who saved it. It is unfortunate that today’s anthropology museum must scrub itself clean of its own fingerprints to create the illusion of native curatorial control. A display dedicated to the history of the hall would make for a genuinely revelatory introduction.

Instead we now learn almost exclusively of the museum’s historical mistakes. “An anthropologist working for the Museum recorded scant information about this carved house post when it was taken in 1909 from Haida territory in Alaska,” says one label. “Beginning in the latter half of the 1800s, anthropologists and other unsanctioned ‘collectors’ took the belongings and stole the actual bones of our Ancestors,” reads another. The only place Boas now appears, at least that I could find, is in the display of his remarkable 1896 model of the Kwakwaka’wakw village of Xwamdasbe’—“the earliest model of its kind still in existence,” reads the label. The text then proceeds to point out the model’s elisions and inaccuracies.

Today’s Northwest Coast Hall dwells in the present at the expense of the past. Lost finally in this modern-day political potlatch is a spirit of appreciation for the ancestors of anthropology. This is a sin of omission that rests on today’s museum leadership and its misleadingly selective use of native voices, not on these voices themselves.

Five years ago, Garfield George, the head of the Raven Beaver House of Angoon, Tlingit, accompanied at the podium by his young daughter, Violet Murphy-George, gave a dedication at the museum that deserves to be remembered. Since these words appear nowhere in the new hall, I reproduce them here:

In 1882 they set our canoes on fire, set our village on fire. Our food caches. But the canoe prow was taken care of by this great institution. It was one of the only canoes to survive the bombardment and was used to gather food. Gather materials. It was the canoe that saved us. Someone asked me recently if it is hard to see these objects in this museum. The answer is yes, it is, but it survived.

Today’s Northwest Coast Hall is a testament to all of those who worked for this survival—acknowledged and otherwise.