The English baroque architecture of New York

The Critic magazine, U.K., September-October 2022

Studio: The English baroque architecture of New York

Climbing around, looking up, and zooming in: the delights of Beaux-Arts architecture in New York

Just as Augustus found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble, New York’s robber barons found a city of brownstones and left it a city gilded in gold. From 1870 to 1930, between the end of the Civil War and the start of the Great Depression, this Gilded Age defined the city in ways that continue to enrich its existence today. Amidst the forest of cookie-cutter high rises that now slice through the city skyline, it can be easy to miss the great Beaux-Arts architecture that resulted from these earlier aspirations. Still, most New Yorkers live for what remains of this age of exuberance, especially compared to the International Style of the last 70 years that has brutally tried to supplant it.

The lavish 412-page book with around 300 new colour photographs in large format folio

New York would be little more than another faceless glass-and-steel city were it not for its Gilded Age buildings and institutions —from the main branch of the New York Public Library and Grand Central Terminal to the many forgotten remnants we delight in rediscovering and now fight to preserve. An American Renaissance: Beaux-Arts Architecture in New York City, written by Phillip James Dodd with photography by Jonathan Wallen, is a gilded embrace of this legacy. Produced by Images Publishing, the lavish 412-page publication with some 300 new colour photographs in large format folio takes us up close and personal with 20 of the finest examples of Beaux-Arts architecture, arranged chronologically, that continue to enliven the city today.

1 – Gould Memorial Library with its rotunda

The book reminds me of my own memorable moments of urban discovery, such as stepping up into the golden rotunda of the Gould Memorial Library [1] (Stanford White, 1899-1901) and walking in the falling snow around the mausoleums of Woodlawn Cemetery (built between 1884 and 1920). I will never forget that feeling of standing inside the small laureled chamber of the Soldiers & Sailors Monument (Charles and Arthur Stoughton, 1902) or looking up for the first time at the celestial vault of Grand Central (designed by Reed & Stem with Warren & Wetmore, 1913) after it was cleaned of decades of cigarette smoke in the 1990s. Or how about settling into a book in the main reading room of the Public Library [2] (Carrère & Hastings, 1911) or having a drink in what was originally the Samuel Tilden House (remodelled by Calvert Vaux in 1884)?

This book collects all of these Gilded Age impressions and suggests we have much more to see. Who knew about the polychromed classicism of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank (George B. Post, 1875) or the Byzantine splendour of the Cunard Building (Benjamin Wistar Morris, 1921)? Climbing around, looking up, and zooming in, Dodd and Wallen have done the job of revealing these delights, ones that might be new to those who live across the pond or even right next door.

2 -New York Public Library’s Astor Hall

Despite living just down the block from the General Grant National Museum [3] (John H. Duncan, 1897), I am ashamed to say I have never set foot inside the building, based on the mausoleum at Halicarnassus, that illustrates the book’s cover. That means I have yet to answer, with absolute certainty, Groucho Marx’s famous question from the 1950s quiz show You Bet Your Life, “Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?”

Julian Fellowes supplies a foreword for the book. It is clear that Gilded Age architecture has recently been on his mind. Rather than a mere costume drama, The Gilded Age, his new television series, is more like an architectural drama, as architecture and architects are the scene stealers of the show. “In the space of 70 years the city’s population exploded from 123,000 in 1820 to over two million in 1890,” he writes in the book. Reflecting the city’s burgeoning wealth and aspiration, “the Beaux-Arts style came to the United States, and in particular to New York, at precisely the right moment”.

The General Grant National Memorial, based on the mausoleum at Halicarnassus

The architecture was lavish and drew freely from eclectic sources, from Imperial Rome and the Italian Renaissance to the French baroque and farther afield.

“Stanford White based his design for the rooftop at Madison Square Garden II on the Giralda in Seville;” Fellowes writes, “his rotunda at Gould Memorial Library emulated the Reading Room at the British Museum in London; and the façade of the Metropolitan Club was heavily influenced by the Reform Club on London’s Pall Mall.”

Fellowes’s television series reminds us how the city’s great social tension was not so much between upstairs and downstairs as between old money and new—the old downtown Knickerbockers versus the new uptown Industrialists building palaces gilded with the riches (and even the walls) of Europe. To the old guard of Livingstons and Astors, the new regime of Huntingtons and Rockefellers were parvenus building their gaudy McMansions along Fifth Avenue—or make that MacMansions, as in the case of Andrew Carnegie, the son of a poor Scottish weaver who became the richest industrialist in America.

The Alexander Hamilton US Custom House

Such rags-to-riches stories were the norm in this Gilded Age. With an essay by Richard Guy Wilson and informative descriptions by Dodd, the book is full of gilded images and observations. Born in rural Pennsylvania, Henry Clay Frick learned to mine coal, and turn it into coke. He helped found U.S. Steel, and built an art-filled mansion on Fifth Avenue (now The Frick Collection; Thomas Hastings, 1914).

Frank W. Woolworth arrived from rural New York and got the idea of his “five-and-dime” variety store while working as a stock boy, and erected the tallest building in the world on lower Broadway (The Woolworth Building; Cass Gilbert, 1913). Americans “are instinctively in sympathy with the Renaissance,” observed Bernard Berenson, as New Yorkers in particular saw the flowering of classical civilisation in their own lush ascendancy. As Otto Kahn famously told the architect of his own Fifth Avenue Mansion (J. Armstrong Stenhouse with C.P.H Gilbert, 1918): “It’s a sin to keep money idle.”

Just as the old guard resented such exuberance, a corporate chastity took hold of the city following the Great Depression and belted it in steel cages. As new money became old, aging industries gave way to the abstractions of high finance and the poker face of a new ahistorical style. The Gilded Age has always had its enemies. “The golden gleam of the gilded surface hides the cheapness of the metal underneath,” Mark Twain lamented way back in the 1870s. It might have been superficial, but still it proved to be New York’s Golden Age, as these twenty glistening survivors attest.

Zabar's is still thriving

THE SPECTATOR WORLD EDITION, June 2022

Zabar’s is still thriving

on “Broadway’s longest running show”

You might expect Zabar’s, the world-famous “appetizing” store on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, to have become a shadow of its former self. This seems to be the case for most of New York’s other independent specialty shops. Fairway, Balducci’s, H&H Bagels, Dean & Deluca: the food purveyors of my youth have gone kaput. They were bought, leveraged, expanded, overextended and oversold. They expired past their sell-by dates.

But somehow Zabar’s survived. For the Upper West Sider, Zabar’s is our Yale College and our Harvard. Like many I make my way down to 80th Street and Broadway most weekends for continuing education. I head to the appetizing counter and take a number. This is the heart of the operation, where it began in 1934 and where things still move at a historical pace. As I wait my turn, I collect my pickled herring and whitefish salad from a nearby refrigerator. Maybe I dart over to the cheese counter for Oma, d’Affinois, and gorgonzola. If I employ some Zabar’s calculus I could even take a number at the delicatessen counter for meats and prepared foods, such as the creamed spinach and truffled mortadella. Each counter comes with its own seasoned attendant, who collects my order in a waxed bag. They might even give me a sample.

My turn comes up at appetizing, the counter that sells the salted and smoked fish. There was a time in Jewish gastronomy when appetizing stores and delicatessens operated separately, because Kosher customers cannot purchase meat and dairy from the same purveyor. Zabar’s has only ever been “Kosher-style,” but the separation remains in house. My order is a quarter-pound “novie” (Nova Scotia-style smoked salmon, a less salty variant of lox), a quarter-pound sable (a tender whitefish that melts in your mouth), maybe a quarter-pound sturgeon (the king of the sea, flaky and pure), and just maybe a jar of the sturgeon’s jewel-like eggs. Behind the counter they are pros. If I am lucky, my namesake James will be the one to do the slicing. Once you see how thinly these Zabar’s guys hand-slice a fish, you cannot go appetizing anywhere else. When I was growing up, my Italian father placed a similar order most Sundays.

Zabar’s is chaotic by design. Food is everywhere, people are everywhere, announcements are frequent. “The lady who was looking for half a pound of chicken liver please come to the front,” I hear over the loudspeaker. While some items are self-service, many are not. You must line up just right. The aisles can barely fit your own small cart, which is a problem as shoppers press in from all sides. “You are out of Seder plate kits?” “Are we out of Seder plate kits?” “I ordered mine days ago.” “They are sold out of brisket!” From a service door, out comes Saul Zabar himself, the patriarch in his white smock pushing a cart. When his father Louis died in 1950, Saul took over Zabar’s at the age of twenty-one and has worked for the family store ever since, partnering with his younger brother Stanley and their relative Murray Klein. Over the years Saul expanded Zabar’s into the best of everything, including introducing New Yorkers to gourmet coffee. At ninety-three years old, he is still the one to wake me up with his “Zabar’s Blend” each morning. The man deserves a monument.

A few years ago, I found myself at dinner sitting next to an unassuming woman named Lori Zabar. Was she related to the famous store? Indeed she was — Stanley’s oldest daughter. How is Zabar’s still thriving? Because the family never sold out and four generations now work for the business. Please make sure that continues, I begged.

It turned out that Lori, who died in February at age sixty-seven, was well positioned to make the case. The family historian, she cooked up a reserved and at times harrowing new book on her name and the store that bears it. Zabar’s: A Family Story, with Recipes ($28, Shocken) conveys the importance of what her family created.

Drawing on her grandfather’s own testimony taken at the time of his displacement in the early days of the Soviet Union, the beginning was anything but appetizing. In 1920 Cossacks allied with the Red Army were terrorizing the Jewish enclave of Ostropolia, now Ostropol in present-day Ukraine. During the pogrom, a husband tried to defend his wife. The Cossacks stabbed him to death. They shot his wife in the face. They murdered his daughter in front of him in his home. Their surviving son, Mordko Leib Zabarka, then chased the soldiers off with a gun and went into hiding. Two years later, the young man arrived in New York as Louis Zabar.

Louis worked in New York food retail from the bottom up. He married another Ostropolitan exile, Leika Teitelbaum, who became Lilly Zabar. In the Zabar’s origin story, Louis began in fruit and veg but developed an allergic rash to the skins. “As he toiled,” writes Lori, “he noticed that only one thing helped: when he put his hands in a barrel of pickled herring, the brine soothed his rash.”

So Louis became an “appetizing man” and rented a small retail space on Broadway. From this Capitoline Hill between 80th and 81st Street, a food empire was born. At first Louis set out to build a chain of everyday markets. When he died at age forty-nine, it was the vision of the next generation of Zabar partners — Saul, Stanley, and Murray Klein — to consolidate the business and turn it into the gourmet flagship of today. As they watched the gastronomic tide of home cooking rise in the second half of the twentieth century, they floated to the top with the finest fish, the freshest bread and the smoothest coffee.

Lori Zabar serves us a concise history of Jewish food retail. She explains the difference among pickled and matjes and schmaltz herring. She tells of Uncle Eli’s defection to retail on the Upper East Side, where he developed his own appetizing restaurant called E.A.T. and a bakery called Eli’s Bread. She also recalls seeing a carp and a herring swimming in her grandmother Lilly’s Upper West Side bathtub. “They were destined for her delicious Shabbat gefilte fish.”

The joys of watching the “longest running show on Broadway,” as Lori calls her family store, contrast with the sorrows its creators once faced. The Cossacks were but a prelude to the Nazi invasion of Ukraine and the extermination of 1.6 million Jews there in 1941. The terrors of Ostropolia a century ago now seem all too familiar in Ukraine today. In this light Zabar’s becomes a new Garden of Eden. Here on a corner of the Upper West Side, she writes, her family celebrated “personal exodus from religious persecution in the Old World to America — their promised land of freedom and dignity.”

The obtuse bard

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2022

The obtuse bard

On “Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Winslow Homer (1836–1910) was an artist of few words and much action. His paintings and watercolors depict moments of contemplation often surrounded by turmoil. Man against man, man against nature, and nature against innocence are recurring themes. The beloved Yankee chronicler of the second half of the nineteenth century, largely self-taught, captured the fading light of agrarian New England to elevate his genre scenes into portraits of profound expression. He started as an artist of the Civil War. His first assignments were battlefield dispatches for Harper’s Monthly. Over his prodigious career he edited down his observations into fraught, ambiguous narratives. With daring passages of abstraction, his late seascapes, of waves crashing against rocks around his home in Prouts Neck, Maine, prefigured the twentieth century’s modern turn while remaining true to his regional vision.

Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream, 1899, Oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

You can see these achievements in “Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents,” the survey now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.1 Here are many of Homer’s greatest paintings in one place. Beyond over a dozen major works from the Met’s own collection, the exhibition includes such iconic pictures as Crossing the Pasture (1871–72, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth), Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) (1873–76, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), The Life Line (1884, Philadelphia Museum of Art), and Fox Hunt (1893, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia).

While containing passages of the specific, the paintings rise above the regional and anecdotal to speak to the broader themes of childhood exploration, interpersonal relations, and natural wonder. Mystery and peril vie against ingenuity and observation. From the stoic industry of The Veteran in a New Field (1865, Metropolitan Museum of Art), to the playful game of Snap the Whip (1872, Metropolitan Museum of Art), to the heroic salvation of Undertow (1886, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts), we can see the preciousness of life and reminders of our own mortality.

And yet, this major exhibition leaves the artist foundering. Political baggage has been piled high. Much like The Gulf Stream (1899, reworked by 1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art), the masterpiece at the center of the show, the tiller has broken, the mast has snapped, and the cargo will not make it to shore. Contemporary hurricanes have come to churn the waters. Homer has been blown to sea. The unfortunate artist is adrift.

The conceit of “Crosscurrents” is that The Gulf Stream, a highlight of the Metropolitan’s American collection, is singularly central to the artist’s body of work. The powerful painting drew on watercolor studies Homer made over some twenty years during his winter vacations in the Bahamas, Cuba, Florida, and Bermuda. Homer sketched frequently as he escaped the Maine cold. Yet The Gulf Stream as composed back home was an outlier, his only Caribbean seascape in oil and his only one depicting a black sailor. An investigation into the development of this image might make for an interesting focused exhibit. But this is not the case: the lending and collecting powers of the Met and the National Gallery, London, where this exhibition will next be seen, are brought to bear on a full-throated revisionist survey based on a far-fetched academic thesis.

With eighty-eight oils and watercolors, this show is the largest gathering of Homer’s work since Washington’s National Gallery retrospective in 1995. It is also something of a sneering response to that prior exhibition, one that championed Homer as “America’s greatest and most national painter.” Privileging a “traditional modernist trajectory of masculine genius, innovation, and originality,” reads the present exhibition catalogue, the National Gallery show of 1995 blindly “glossed over issues of gender, race, and class in Homer’s life and art.”

Winslow Homer, Breezing Up (A Fair Wind), 1873–76, Oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

The centrality of The Gulf Stream to “Crosscurrents” is built right into the exhibition design. Openings have been cut into the gallery walls so that the painting, situated midstream, can be seen from the introductory hall and other waypoints along the route. Arranged thematically, the survey then swirls like a gyre around this one myopic focus of the show. The point of it all is to dislocate Homer from his rooting as a Yankee artist into something of a diasporic critic of American imperialism, capitalism, racism, and environmental degradation. In this way, the exhibition’s “sociopolitical framework centered on race, politics, and environmentalism aligns with the Museum’s educational mission to share truthful and complex narratives of the past,” writes Max Hollein, the Met’s director, “advancing institutional commitments to racial reckoning and social justice.” It also helps to sell the show as a transatlantic co-production with London’s National Gallery—or, as one catalogue writer puts it, a deracinated reflection on Homer’s “North Atlantic boreal region.” As the exhibition charts a passage into contemporary waters, the heavy-handed helming capsizes the operation more than once.

A charitable understanding of what follows is that the curators of “Crosscurrents,” Stephanie L. Herdrich and Sylvia Yount, both of the Met’s American Wing, must now conform all collection highlights and exhibition programming to the strictures of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Only by “reconsidering Homer’s dramatic pictures” can we appreciate the artist’s “ability to distill challenging issues for diverse audiences, then and now,” reads the introductory wall text. The show promises that a “close study of his art” will reveal Homer’s “persistent concerns with race and the environment.” It also claims that The Gulf Stream “addresses the racial politics of the time and the imperialist ambitions of the United States.”

Winslow Homer, The Veteran in a New Field, 1865, Oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The catalogue makes even more explicit the turbulence the exhibition seeks to stir up and the magical thinking it aims to engender. Yount invokes the show’s “multivalent title” to draw us away from the traditional “emphasis on Homer’s manly individuality,” which “sat comfortably in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century strenuous age of American imperialism.” Instead we are expected to challenge the “popular conception of him as a parochial ‘Yankee’ realist who painted mostly Northeastern subjects.” One way the show does this is by confusing Homer’s formal evolution, rejecting his powerful late seascapes, for example, as his final statements. Such a challenge, Yount continues, “became more urgent after the racial reckoning fueled by the murder of George Floyd and a reinvigoration of the Black Lives Matter social justice movement during the pandemic summer of 2020.” She concludes:

More Homer scholarship needs to critically interrogate how race and class and their structures of power weave throughout his production, grounded in the afterlives of transatlantic slavery, plantation economies, and cultural dispossession, scarred and defined by violence and survivance.

Interrogate? Survivance? An activist idiom inflects much of the language here and distorts the show’s attempt to frame our observations. Any understanding of Homer’s biography or his formal developments must be extracted from these politically charged semantics. For an understanding of Homer’s paint handling, for example, we must turn to “The Various Colors and Types of Negros: Winslow Homer Learns to Paint Race,” the catalogue essay by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw. Here we read that Homer at first indulged the “tropes of Black indolence and grotesque musicality”—for example, in painting the black banjo player of Defiance, Inviting a Shot before Petersburg (1864, Detroit Institute of Arts)—with the same pigments that minstrels used for blackface:

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the hands of White performers working in minstrelsy and those of White painters, like Homer, were often stained with the same substances, as pigments like burnt cork and lampblack were mixed with various types of nut or seed oil for easel painting or cocoa butter for stage makeup. Both . . . [sought] to simulate racial Blackness.

In an art history of identity politics, stained hands must be racist. So is the weather: “The weather is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack,” writes Christina Sharpe, a black studies professor at Canada’s York University, of The Gulf Stream, as quoted in the catalogue of “Crosscurrents.” Peter H. Wood, a professor of history at Duke University, similarly imputed that “at the heart of this storm was black disenfranchisement.”

Through the lens of identity politics, how could The Gulf Stream not be freighted with geo-racial commentary? The painting depicts a black man in extremis in the waters of the Middle Passage. Stalks of sugarcane seem to bind him. He has set off at a moment in history when Cuba has been liberated from Spanish oppression. Sharks encircle him in a way that recalls Slave Ship, Turner’s 1840 interpretation of the massacre of the Zong—a painting that Homer saw and admired. A waterspout and a tall ship, both on the horizon, suggest the possibilities of salvation or ruin.And yet, the painting is a concatenation of the same maritime images and themes that Homer explored his entire career. The framing of the ship and the posture of its passenger most recall Breezing Up. The lay of the sharks repeats images from his tropical watercolors of 1885. As Homer reworked the painting between 1899 and 1906, he also added the name “Anna” to the stern of the small catboat and identified its home port as “Key West.” That the ship does not hail from Havana or Nassau but an American island, in fact, pulls this image away from international commentary into a more domestic setting. It also helps locate this sailor in the Florida Straits—in the Gulf Stream, to be precise, which is all Homer said the painting was ever about if he said anything about it at all.

“Do not smell of this, but stand off!” Homer admonished his dealer. In tiny lettering, he even printed a warning into the left-hand corner of The Gulf Stream, “At 12 feet you can see it.” In other words: If you can read this, you are too close.

Homer was vehemently resistant to over-interpretation. In the 1870s, his friends in the Tile Club labeled him the “Obtuse Bard.” “Don’t let the public poke its nose into my picture,” he said. In 1902, when his dealer at M. Knoedler & Co. asked about the meaning of The Gulf Stream, he replied to the “inquisitive schoolma’ms”:

I have crossed the Gulf Stream ten times & I should know something about it. The boat & sharks are outside matters of very little consequence. They have been blown out to sea by a hurricane. You can tell these ladies that the unfortunate negro who now is so dazed & parboiled, will be rescued & returned to his friends and home, & ever after live happily.

Homer was an avid sportsman, hunter, and fisherman. His work reflected the realities of life lived by the current, the wind, and the tide. His simple reply to those “inquisitive schoolma’ms” looking for more might be the same now as it was then: “I regret very much that I have painted a picture that requires any description.”

1. “Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents” opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on April 11 and remains on view through July 31, 2022. The exhibition will next be seen at The National Gallery, London (September 10, 2022–January 8, 2023).