The wonder is that there is any beauty left at all. The century’s assault has been relentless. Every year, another fragment of grace or style or craft is obliterated from New York, to be replaced by the brutally functional or the commercially coarse. Vandalism is general. I don’t mean only those morons with spray cans, whose brainless signatures now mar even the loveliest old carved stone. There are corporate vandals, too, political vandals, and vandals equipped with elaborate aesthetic theories. They never rest, and when they strike, their energy is ferocious.
And yet, beauty persists — scattered across the city, the beauty of nature, and of things made by men and women. There is beauty above as people hurry through the city streets. It nestles behind the fortress walls of banal structures, and sometimes stands unrevealed before our eyes. In recent years, the Landmarks Preservation Commission, the Municipal Art Society, and other groups have done splendid work preserving what remains of the past, but much is already lost, and everywhere there are valuable and beautiful creations under threat. Still, there are places whose value need not be ratified by a committee; they are hidden islands of the marvelous, capable of evoking emotional, even mysterious, responses.
I don’t know the name of the sculptor whose flowers, cupids, and ornamental letters adorn the façade of the Stuyvesant Polyclinic, on Second Avenue between St. Marks Place and 9th Street, but I love his excess, the showering extravagance of his talent. The man who wrought the iron steps and balconies of the townhouse at 328 East 18th Street is unknown to me, but although he did his job in 1852, his work is here today to pleasure the eye. The Montauk Club, in Brooklyn, has always been part of my life; as a child, I’d gaze up at the frieze of Indians around the top of the building and invent tales to go with those faces and figures; today, I marvel at the audacity of the men who made the building, shamelessly lifting the basic design from a Venetian palace and then localizing it with a narrative of the first Americans.
All such places have a personal meaning. Why do the sprawling Victorian houses in Clinton Hill seem so melancholy now? Powerful men once lived in this Brooklyn neighborhood, in the area around Pratt Institute, raising huge families far from the congestion of Manhattan; in summer now I expect to see Mark Twain emerge onto a porch in a white suit to hector the millionaires who are his hosts, or I envision Jack Johnson walking defiantly on these streets with his white wife. The Billopp House, on Staten Island, can summon a more remote era; built in 1680 by the British military man who won Staten Island from New Jersey in a boat race, this austere and serene building stands at one end of Hylan Boulevard like a reproof. In front of such a house, or on Grace Court, in Brooklyn, or along some of the elegant streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant, there comes the urge to be still.
Stillness, in fact, is probably the only condition that will allow the city’s beauty to reveal itself. You can’t experience it from the window of a careening taxi, or rushing from subway to office. Time must be taken, imagination engaged. I’m convinced that one of this city’s greatest architects was a Brooklynite named Ernest Flagg, who died in 1947 at age 90. He designed the old Mills hotel, on Bleecker Street (the Village Gate is on the ground floor), St. Luke’s Hospital, and the Flagg Court housing complex, in Bay Ridge. He had a long, productive career, living in a house of his own design at 109 East 40th Street and on an estate on Staten Island.
Today, he is almost completely forgotten — except for two masterpieces. One is the “little” Singer building, at 561 Broadway, near Prince Street, complete with wrought-iron railings, its façade sheathed in orange and blue terra-cotta. The other is the Scribner bookstore, at 597 Fifth Avenue. His greatest masterpiece, however, is gone. This was the Singer tower, at 149 Broadway, a Beaux-Arts extravaganza full of decoration and briefly the tallest building in the world when it went up in 1908. I used to visit there when I worked downtown at the old New York Post; the building was a romantic affront to all the reigning dogmas of the Bauhaus. I loved it. Then it fell into the hands of United States Steel and was, of course, demolished.
And yet the eclectic, imperialist confidence of that old building made it part of New York in a way that many newer buildings will never be. Sometimes I go downtown to look at the “little” Singer building (now the Paul Building), which is a more handsome example of Flagg’s work than the tower, and I wonder what New York would be like today if his vision (and those of his contemporaries) had prevailed, instead of the bullying blankness of the International Style. Certainly this would be a more visually interesting city. Flagg’s buildings have detail, ornament, proportion, and, most important, surprise. The eye can move from floor to roof of the Singer/Paul building and be at once assured by the proportions and surprised by the decoration. Are Flagg’s buildings functional? I don’t really know; I’ve never worked in one of them. But if the function of a bookstore is to sell books, then the Scribner shop is certainly functional; I can never enter that store without buying a book.
The great triumph of the International Style gave us an architecture of planes, textures, proportions, devoid of ornament. Form must follow function, we were told, over and over and over again. Conveniently, this message coincided with the desire of real-estate men to get maximum bang for the buck. Ornament, stonework, detail cost money; get rid of them, create an aesthetic that makes such cost cutting appear to be a form of modernism, and the result could be an instant fortune. In schools of art and architecture after World War II, an entire generation was instructed to bow before the creations of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. Today, I’m convinced that the entire movement was a gigantic mistake. No wonder that the graffiti artist gazes at the dull, blank, almost totalitarian surfaces of the International Style and begins to decorate. His decorations may be ugly, acts of vandalism, but the urge to impose a human presence can be understood.
I realize that I’m speaking here for unfashionable values. Yes, I can look at the Seagram Building and realize what Mies was driving at. On rainy days, I can enjoy the atrium of the Ford Foundation, and I’ve even spent some pleasant hours among the lavish Vegas-isms of the Trump Tower. But nobody can tell me that the latest version of Madison Square Garden is an improvement on the old Penn Station any more than I can be convinced that the mucky color and primitive draftsmanship of Willem de Kooning are an improvement over, say, John Singer Sargent. The new is different, but it isn’t better; to say it is, given the evidence, is preposterous. Less is rarely more. Less is more often merely less.
Forgive the arrogance, but I believe that most New Yorkers share those sentiments. One reason we live here, instead of Los Angeles or Phoenix or Houston, is that the past is intricately involved in our lives. Like some residents of New Orleans or San Francisco, among American cities, we feel personally damaged when a hunk of the past is removed. We don’t like change. We want the places we loved when we were growing up to be there for our children. Yes, everything changes; this is one reason nostalgia corrodes so many New Yorkers and always has. The anonymous author of the 1866 guide to New York called New York as It Is begins his book with these words:
“The denizens of New York are such utilitarians that they have sacrificed to the shrine of Mammon almost every relic of the olden time. The feeling of veneration for the past, so characteristic of the cities of the Old World, is lamentably deficient among the people of the New.”
The condition and the protest remain essentially the same. But it is no accident that so many of the unseen beauties of New York are survivors from the past. Most New Yorkers have their own private places. Those places most often evoke the past. For example, I sometimes enjoy visiting the traffic island in Grand Army Plaza, in Brooklyn, with its dumb modern monument to John F. Kennedy and its wonderful Bailey Fountain (all Neptunes and Tritons and memories of the Piazza Navona). I walk around the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch, with its evocations of the Etoile, in Paris, and look at the fine bas-relief of Lincoln by Thomas Eakins, and then stare up at the rest. I know that the heroic statuary at the top of this and similar monuments is essentially rhetoric; it propagates patriotic myths; it glorifies values I don’t share. And yet, I prefer looking at it to gazing at Calder or Donald Judd. I not only think about the formal values of the work, the craft, the belief in the well-made thing, but also imagine the artist’s studio, his rough hands, his friends dropping in to chat, the delivery of the great piece to its present site. I wonder who was president at the time, and what the newspapers said, and what happened to the models.
Those are, of course, impure reactions. But in some peculiar way the work that provokes them is doing what great art does: It invokes a sense of continuity with the past, joining us to the generations that came before ours, forcing an obligation to the generations that will follow. When I show my daughters Nathan Silver’s Lost New York, or the “then” and “now” photographs in various books from Dover Publications, they are angry that they’ll never have the chance to see any of those vanished places. And I’m angry because in nearly every case the building that replaced the old was inferior in style, craft, and even function to the thing removed.
If there is a lesson in those pictures of the hidden beauty of New York, it may be this: Leave things alone. Give up the idea of constant renewal, that variation on the dream of perpetual youth. Seek what is truly valuable. Embrace it. Protect it. Love it.