Masterpiece: An Iconic Beacon Shines Anew

An Iconic Beacon Shines Anew

A newly finished restoration of the Empire State Building gives us the chance to again appreciate the structure’s glittering brilliance

The Empire State Building is an expression of Jazz Age exuberance so familiar we can easily miss it. Be sure to look at it now, though, because the building has never appeared brighter. A bottom-to-top restoration, 15 years in the making, has just wrapped up at the circular observation level on the 102nd floor and returned the building to its original wonder.

And what a wonder it is. An encrustation of obsolete radio equipment and dunnage has been removed from around its spire, or “mooring mast,” and relocated to the single top antenna spike. The sky-high work has revealed the full glistening form of this faceted glass lantern and its four aluminum wings. Cleaned, sealed and repainted, the building now never stops shining, again able to reflect sunlight by day just as it glows from inner illumination by night.

The final, astonishing masterpiece of the Roaring ’20s, the Empire State Building opened in the Depression-plagued 1930s as “the eighth wonder of the world.” Its appeal has always seemed historic, not just of one particular age but one for the ages. Ninety years ago, returning to New York for the first time since the Crash, F. Scott Fitzgerald observed this “last and most magnificent of towers” as rising “from the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx.” From the moment it was first sketched out to its completion just 18 months later, on up to the travails of the present day, Empire State has been there to elevate us out of our street-level depressions.

The term “mooring mast” should suggest the particular magic of Empire State’s design. When a former General Motors executive named John J. Raskob wanted to construct a singular office building at 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, he looked to the architect William Lamb to design a tower that would rise with unprecedented speed from this central plot of Manhattan Island. Lamb edited his tower back to the essentials of machine-made form. The design cut every corner but the ones that mattered. An army of actual skywalkers would slot in 600 million pounds of prefabricated steel, limestone, and chrome-nickel panels. Light, strength and lift were everything as the enterprise aimed to become the tallest building in the world.

The office-level floors of Empire State wear these considerations right on their face. The building’s smooth skin has little want of setbacks or shadows. Its minimal articulations balance height and mass in classical proportions with only the most distilled Art Deco details. What matters are the window lines of glistening metal all connecting, all pointing up.

But the tower as originally conceived was only part of what we see today. Lamb’s initial design ended with a flat roof at the 86th-floor observation deck. That was just a few feet taller than the spire of the Chrysler Building completed half a mile away. So Raskob thought his building could use a hat. Al Smith, the former governor of New York and effervescent president of the enterprise, suggested they make it a mooring mast for dirigibles. With a new observation floor right at the top of the mast, the late addition raised the building by an additional 200 feet to its final 1,250-foot designation, securely making it the tallest building in the world, a title it held for 40 years.

The mooring mast “was a proposal akin to a fantasy of Jules Verne, ” writes John Tauranac in his definitive 1995 history of Empire State, since the idea of an airship tying up a mile above Fifth Avenue and safely handling passengers was impractical at best.

No matter. Smith announced he was “building with an eye to the future.” Shreve, Lamb and Harmon set about designing the mast and strengthening the building’s entire steel structure to withstand the forces of its future use for aviation.

What resulted was the iconic form we see today. Empire State comes together not as a streamlined sculpture like the Chrysler Building or a cathedral of commerce like the Woolworth Building but as a monumental set of working parts. Like that wonder of the ancient world, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, Empire State rises as a plinth to support a beacon for all to see. Its 2.8 million square feet of office space continues to attract a range of tenants. Nineteen radio stations and five television stations now broadcast from the antenna spike that was first added in the 1950s. Across the city grid and far beyond, the building remains a light in the clouds and an anchor in the sky.

Just the other day I felt compelled to take a ride to the top. On the way up, a full new floor of exhibits beautifully honors the legacy of the building’s construction and culture. Walking into the open air of the 86th-floor observation deck, the city seems to breathe together. Up in the rarefied aerie of the 102nd floor observatory, new floor-to-ceiling windows reveal the panorama of the possibilities below.

“As I stood there ’twixt earth and sky,” Helen Keller wrote of her own visit in 1932, “I saw a romantic structure wrought by human brains and hands that is to the burning eye of the sun a rival luminary.” Nine decades on, the Empire State Building still lights the imagination as it calls us to safe harbor.

Porgy and Best

SPECTATOR USA, November 2020

Porgy and best

How the porgy became my preferred piscine

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed his esteem for a lifetime. There are few miracles greater than what rod and reel will conjure from the deep. So it has been for me as I cast away my cares in this uncertain year.

In early spring, I delighted for the first time in the freshwater lake fish of New England. In the cooler months, bluegill, pumpkinseed, yellow perch and largemouth bass all swim close to the Connecticut lakeshore. Fishing from the shore in one such lake in Litchfield County, I found that a simple spinning jig or, better yet, a nightcrawler on a hook and bobber are all that is necessary for a strike. These frisky creatures can be as colorful as their names.

The largemouth bass, the leaping gamefish that gives title to a chain of eponymous ‘pro shops’, is best returned to the waters to leap again. The others are excellent panfish — plentiful and delicious. To make the most of them, I scale and gut the fish dockside and fry them whole, minus the head and gills, breaded and seasoned however I fancy.

Fishing is the great social leveler. The sport-fisher hauling in some bluewater beast is no greater than the dock-fisher or ice-fisher. Or so I like to believe. I take a special pride in my humble rod and tackle, perhaps 20 to 30 dollars all said and done. What wonders they still deliver. Abbondanza!, I say at ‘fish on’, as the lazy line goes tight, playing out the drag.

In late spring and through the summer months I moved from freshwater to salt. I would take the fishing grounds of Atlantic New England over just about any other. Fluke and black sea bass populate the seafloor. The meaty, muscled stripers that feed off the rips of Montauk, New York and Block Island, Rhode Island are ample evidence of divine creation. When the fish are running, and the tides are just right, sea creatures of all stripes, from sharks to blues, will just about leap onto your boat. I last fished off Montauk with the artist Joe Zucker, trawling with umbrella lures from his boat, The Rodfather. I named my prized catch of the day ‘Mahmoud A. Bass’.

I grew up surfcasting off Block Island. In the late afternoons, my father, grandfather and uncles would drive giant rods with equally giant spoons and poppers out to Sandy Point, past the then-derelict North Lighthouse, on the northern tip of the Island. As the sun set over the western shoreline of Block Island Sound, with a beach fire of driftwood crack- ling in the background, they would cast and reel into the breakers with tremendous speed. We grandchildren meanwhile feasted on fire-roasted hamburgers and hot dogs, and our grandmother’s picnic of beans and slaw, all spread across the tailgate of their tan Chevy Suburban, which we called ‘The Gentle Giant’.

Sometimes the men came back empty-handed. Other times the stripers ran up the shoreline in packed races. In one picture, my six-foot-tall grandfather holds two of his catches stretching from beltline to floor. Then the stocks went down, the levels of PCBs and other chemicals in the fish went up, the state limits went sky high and there were very few gamefish left to catch in these shoreline waters.

Fortunately, stripers are not the only fish in the sea for surfcasting. My first casts in life were for fluke, otherwise known as summer flounder. Today these cockeyed bottom feeders can still be found around the sloping channel sands of Block Island’s Coast Guard Beach, at the cut to New Harbor. Rarely do they now reach the minimum 19 inches for keepers. It has been several summers since I brought one home to fillet and fry.

Yet with the same simple spinning rod and a weighted rig baited with cut strips of frozen squid, another fish now makes its appearance. It is the abundant porgy. The reason for its abundance is its disdain among sport anglers. This is not a gamefish. At just a foot or so in length, it produces no meaty fillets. I was brought up to believe its bony flesh was inedible. And yet, done right, as I learned this summer, porgies can make for a delicious family meal, grilled every day of the week.

The New England porgy is otherwise known as the scup. It cuts a jaunty, almost tropical profile. Pound for pound, it can also put up a fight with the best of them. Chefs have started to discover its merits and have added porgy to their locally sourced menus. You might now see it called Montauk Seabream or some similar iteration. To me it remains porgy, happily pulled in by my entire family. Not everything went remote last summer. Along the harbor coves inside Block Island’s New Harbor channel cut, away from the surfcasting multitudes, we found a school of these fish regularly in session.

Reel good: James and Lily, 10

It helps that this same cove supplied our summer share of clams and crabs, along with a marine biologist’s haul of aquarium-worthy specimens. There was always something fresh to prepare for supper, from chowders to linguine vongole to crab fritters.

For us the porgy always ended up grilled whole. That’s the secret, to prepare it much the same way as the lake panfish. We catch a handful. Then back home I scale and gut and clip the fins on my deck, hosing off the guts into a bucket as the kids get lessons in piscan anatomy. I hear a grill basket helps prevent sticking and keeps the flesh together, although I have yet to get one. No matter: once removed from heat, this flaky fish looks divine any which way when dressed in a topping of summer vegetables and fruits stewed in vinegar.

You can also prepare your porgy escovitch-style with onions and peppers pickled in malt vinegar, or seasoned with Magic Blackened Redfish Seasoning; just always do them whole. Once done, pull the spine up and out, and the meat falls off the bone. Nothing remains but a head attached to a cartoon-like skeleton. How I count my blessings bringing this fish to table. Like the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the porgy is small but feeds multitudes.

Grilled Porgy

1. Catch your porgy or some similar abundant panfish. Scale it, gut it, clip the fins and wash out the cavity. Leave the head on, remove the gills

2. Score the skin and stuff the bodies with lemon wedges, then salt and slather with olive oil. As an option, season additionally with hot powder, or prepare a topping of grilled fruits or vinegar-soaked vegetables

3. Grill on high, 5-6 minutes a side for the larger ones. Baste with more lemony oil or your preferred sauce or seasoning, with the grill lid open to dissipate the flames

4. Serve fish whole for full effect. Separate the meat for any fishbone-fearing guests

Escape Vehicle

SPECTATOR USA, November 2020

Escape Vehicle

The automobile’s artifice is its art, but it is still an art of artifice: A review of “Detroit Style: Car Design in the Motor City, 1950-2020” at the Detroit Institute of Arts from November 15, 2020 through June 27, 2021.

One of the more unusual works in the family art collection is a concept drawing of an automobile from 1937. The car, identified by the angular writing on its nose, is the LaSalle.

To call this a drawing of just a car does a disservice to the concept behind it. With its shimmering grilles and Futurist forms, the vehicle might as well be an open-cockpit fighter plane about to strafe a runway. Automobile enthusiasts, as I recently learned, consider the drawing to present one of the first known examples of a ‘ripple-disk single-bar flipper hubcap’. Clearly, here is a machine meant to do more than just deliver you from point A to point B. It is a vehicle for transporting desire, for mowing down all obstacles in your path, for getting you wherever you want to go with whatever means it takes.

My grandfather, James Ross Shipley, created this concept drawing when he was a young art-school graduate working in Harley Earl’s Art and Color Section at General Motors. The fanciful sketch reveals much about the creative origins of car design. The man behind it — behind the way we even think about ‘the car’ — was Earl, my grandfather’s boss and the industrial designer who made Detroit.

The bones of the automobile have changed little in over a century. Even the electric-car revolution, so far, has not altered the basic construction of an engine on a frame with four wheels. And before Earl, a car was little more than just that. You bought your vehicle unfinished and sent it to a coachbuilder for body fabrication. Earl began his career customizing the early cars of Hollywood in this way, but he also gave them something more than just a hood, a trunk, a windshield and some seats. When he arrived in Detroit, his genius was to turn the car body into an object of love, to convey more than mere conveyance, to make it all something on an industrial scale that we would want to acquire, occupy and control. He also expected us to trade it in when the new ‘model year’ came out — built-in obsolescence being another one of his great innovations.

Detroit Style: Car Design in the Motor City, 1950-2020, a new exhibition organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts, reveals the driving influence of American car design over the post-war period. As a constellation of car companies consolidated into the Big Three — GM, Ford and Chrysler — their design teams competed to capture the evolving American spirit in mobile form.

The exhibition tells this tale through ten vehicles, displayed along with the story of their designs, side-by-side with concept drawings and related automobile-inspired art. The exhibition begins with GM’s 1951 Le Sabre, a convertible of tapered nose and heavy chrome that resembles a fighter plane. With its wing-like hoodline and jetlike intake and exhaust grilles, the Le Sabre speaks to the power look of Earl’s GM. Glittering ornamentation is built right into its curving forms. Earl wrote in a 1955 brochure that he intended to make ‘these useful things beautiful, not in the sense of applying superficial ornamentation, but in developing a form of beauty exactly suited to the purpose’. ‘People like something new and exciting in an automobile as well as in a Broadway show,’ he added. ‘They like visual entertainment, and that’s what we stylists give them.’

There is power in Le Sabre’s bulging forms and cut lines, but the overall massing is also heavyweight and over-the-top — all muscle, no brains. Compare this to the next model on display: Chrysler’s 300C of 1957. Rather than roaring through the air, here is a car that looks like it could float on water. In the 300C, Chrysler’s design team, led by Virgil Exner, championed a ‘Forward Look’. With reduced chrome and a single grille, the car’s bulk is now ‘concentrated toward the rear, crowned by the upsweep of the tail,’ Exner explained. ‘Big racing boats take the same general form.’ The Chrysler’s tail is not a wing so much as a line of wake. You could imagine this elegant vehicle motoring through the canals of Venice, with headlamps like lashy eyes beckoning you on.

As the jet age became the space age, Earl set his sights higher. For his Firebird III concept car, he wanted ‘what you would expect the astronauts to drive to the launch pad on their way to the moon’. The result was the apotheosis of fin, as much Batmobile as automobile. This Firebird’s abstracted forms continued to influence 1960s car design even after its wings were clipped.

The Sixties proved there was more to car design than flying forms. Some cars took on natural shapes. The 1959 Corvette Stingray Racer, a stunningly attractive concept car from GM’s new head of design Bill Mitchell, conveys the teardrop shape of a sea creature. Meanwhile the 1967 Mustang, Ford’s wildly successful ‘pony car’, references the smoothness of a saddle mounted atop a galloping heart (made all the more apparent in the iconic equine grillework).

Fin de siècle: Dave Cummins’s ‘1960 Chrysler’ design, 1956 (Detroit Institute of Arts/Collection of Brett Snyder)

In the 1970s, Detroit doubled down on power. The 1970 Chrysler Plymouth Barracuda borrowed lessons from such cars as the 1966 GM Oldsmobile Toronado to represent strength in brutalist, hard-edged form. A straight beltline ties the body together from headlight to tail. A flat front end presents a menacing blackened maw with a hood scoop of simian nostrils.

A decade later, after an oil embargo or two, Detroit was ready to repent. With its chastened forms, the 1983 Ford Probe IV puts the car in an exercise leotard. Aerobics and aerodynamics now came to represent Detroit’s supposed new efficiency. Computers and wind tunnels, as much as the clay model, came to define car design. The 1987 Chrysler Portofino, a concept car designed by Sergio Coggiola at his Carrozzeria Coggiola near Turin, also shows the growing influence of European styling over Detroit. Here torsional forms replace lines of lateral speed. In a surprising Futurist move, the doors, hood, and trunk all rotate up to reveal an entirely open cabin.

By the 1990s, Detroit looked to the past as much as the future. Nostalgic designs appealed to the same car buyers who coveted the Detroit designs of decades before. As its name suggests, the 1998 Chrysler Chronos is a time machine back to the 300C and Exner’s Forward Look. In the Ford GT Concept of 2002 and the 2017 Ford GT, the final two cars of the exhibition, the end results are back to the future. The forward styling of the past now informs designs that are still to come.

I never got to ask my grandfather about his car-designing days. As he went on to become a professor of industrial design, all I heard of his time in Earl’s shop was that it was long hours for little pay. ‘Automobiles are hollow, rolling sculpture,’ said Arthur Drexler, MoMA’s curator of architecture, at mid-century. The automobile’s artifice is its art, but it is still an art of artifice — one designed, in the end, merely to sell you a new car.