Tonight’s concert will feature some Victoria, some Elgar, some Guerrero, and more, but most appealing to me is the Christus vincit by James MacMillan — Scotland’s greatest living composer. If you share my tastes, you avoid music by any composer who hasn’t been dead at least half a century, but MacMillan is good enough to be elevated to the realms of the honorary deceased. He’s also commented on this blog in the past!

In August, I enjoyed a lazy, espresso-fuelled afternoon in this place with Herr Doktor Zmirak and D. Riccardo.

On Sunday 21 August 2011, the Church of St Agnes on 43rd Street in Manhattan was host to a group of Catholic ambassadors to the United Nations for the regular 11:00 Extraordinary Form Mass, offered by Fr. Richard Trezza OFM. (Fr. Cid, a recently ordained Franciscan priest was also in choro). The group included representatives from Grenada, Haiti, the Philippines, Korea, the United Kingdom, and the Empire of Japan.

The informal gathering, formed just this year, is open to Catholic Permanent Representatives and Deputy Permanent Representatives — the first- and second-highest ranking diplomats at national missions to the U.N. — and has heard Mass at a number of different parishes around Manhattan.

“PRACTICALLY PERFECT in every way” was how the nanny Mary Poppins described herself in the Disney film, but fashion designer Ralph Lauren has given birth to an architectural grande dame on the Upper East Side that might justifiably make a similar claim. In this age of fashionable-today-dated-tomorrow starchitecture, the Bronx native has swum against the current and delivered for the people of New York a most welcome piece of architecture with his new store on the corner of Madison Avenue and 72nd Street.

Those familiar with the neighbourhood might be a bit confused: doesn’t Ralph Lauren already have a beautiful French chateau on that street corner? Worry not, the old Rhinelander mansion has not been demolished. Rather, its interior was recently given a ‘masculine makeover’ so shoppers can peruse and purchase any of Ralph Lauren’s men’s lines there.

Across the street, meanwhile, with his new women’s store, Ralph Lauren has reinvigorated Manhattan’s faded glory with a new injection of Parisian splendour. The unremarkable “taxpayer” two-storey on the site was razed and a completely new four-storey structure has risen in its place. Two smaller wings flank the middle, which is recessed above the ground floor’s triumvirate of skilfully curved arches. The two central storeys above are topped by a more reserved attic, with the facade clad in American-sourced limestone throughout.

Often when clients are desirous or willing to choose a traditional design, they skimp on the actual materials and building costs resulting in a building that looks cheap and fake. Such results are then used by the hypermodernists as a stick with which to beat the traditionalists, citing poor execution as evidence of the inappropriateness of traditional style to contemporary architecture.

Here, however, the patron has clearly backed up his daring choice of style with the resources to see it done properly. The execution and detailing superbly match the quality of the design, and upon his visit to the building Mayor Bloomberg asserted “We can no longer say, ‘They don’t build them like this anymore’.”

James Gardner, formerly the architectural critic for the defunct New York Sun, agreed with the mayor, writing that the new Ralph Lauren building is “something mightily substantial, as sturdy in its forms and structure as the Metropolitan Museum, the New York Public Library or City Hall”.

It is a canny and scrupulous re-enactment of the sort of Beaux Arts buildings of the turn of the last century, which themselves were imitations of the French high-classicism of such 17th-century architects as Le Vau and J.H. Mansart. And that architecture was itself, of course, a reinterpretation of ancient Greek and Roman models.

The irreplaceable Christopher Gray, meanwhile, describes the structure as “suave, exhilarating interpretation of a small 18th-century Paris palace”. Mr Gray relates further:

Such archaeological accuracy is rarely seen in New York architecture, and is often regarded with suspicion, viewed as silly or even subversive.

Indeed, when it was under review at the Landmarks Preservation Commission, neither the Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts nor the Historic Districts Council supported the application, considering the building imitative. That reflects the longtime preservation ideal that any new building should represent “our time,” usually by being modernist in style.

The second hint was a proposal two years ago to replace a forgettable 1966 facade at 12 East 72nd, which itself replaced the little 1890 Gothic-tinged castle. The new No. 12 was to match the limestone row houses from 14 to 20. There the Historic Districts Council said that it would be “false history,” since the original No. 12 looked nothing like the proposal.

The architect and critic Steven W. Semes has dared to challenge this notion, particularly with his 2009 book The Future of the Past: A Conservation Ethic for Architecture, Urbanism and Historic Preservation. He maintains that there is no reason to lock historic styles in the closet, that they are just as contemporary as anything else, just as the classical style was used in the Renaissance without a second thought. As far as Mr. Semes is concerned, there is nothing false about the new Ralph Lauren store — it is not a matter of making something stand out, but of making it fit in.

The building’s interiors were handled by the firm Wendle Gillmore, and have echoes of the partnership’s previous work for Ralph Lauren on the Avenue Montaigne in Paris.

My above claim that the building is “practically perfect in every way” is a bit of appropriate hyperbole. While the overall project is deserving of immense praise, I must offer just some sparse criticism.

The balustrades, for example, have rather overdosed on balusters: there are far too many of them. Removing a third of them and spacing them further apart would be a welcome and easy improvement.

Furthermore, the attic seems a rather dull, flat end to a promising start. Some sort of sculptural adornment or varying of the strict horizontal would be a welcome addition to the building’s Madison Avenue facade.

These small criticisms aside, it’s difficult to restrain oneself from giving this building full marks all around. Would that we had more architectural patrons like Ralph Lauren – whether commercial or private – to demand traditional architecture and ensure it is realised properly.

Dennis Clinton Graham Heiner was born in New York in 1927 to Robert Graham Heiner and Frances Eliot Cassidy, friends and fellow-travellers of Margaret Sanger, the notorious racial eugenicist & founder of Planned Parenthood. Dempsey’s parents enrolled him at St. Bernard’s, where he was in the same year as George Plimpton, the founder of the Paris Review and twentieth-century embodiment of the gilded amateur. Plimpton (who died in 2003) described Dempsey as “the brightest boy in the class, a genius” and remarked that since leaving school he remained something of an enigma.

Dempsey stretched the veracity of the truth regarding his date of birth in order to join the U.S. Navy and catch the tail end of the Second World War. With the return of peace, it was Harvard for undergrad, and then a law degree from Yale Law School (though he never practised law), followed by study at the University of Paris from which he received a medical degree (though he never practised medicine either). Dempsey’s typically cryptic response to an alumni questionnaire from St. Bernard’s stated that he had been “studying languages” for forty years.

Assuming that Dempsey had retired from some field or profession, a close friend of mine once asked of Dempsey’s sister, “What did Dempsey do?” “Dempsey didn’t,” was the simple response. The answer is telling yet inaccurate. In fact, Dempsey did. In the 1950s, Dempsey did convert to Catholicism, as Father Rutler put it, “in contradiction of everything his parents understood to be rightly ordered”. Dempsey did frequently pray the Rosary, silently and solemnly, outside one of Manhattan’s busiest abortion clinics. Dempsey did marry Helena Reina, a Cuban psychiatrist who fled the ravages of Castro’s revolution. Father Rutler again:

They were married for more than fifty years, and all the while I knew them he was her nurse, for she had become blind and nearly comatose. Even toward her end, whenever I brought her the Blessed Sacrament, he sat her under an oil portrait of herself in youth. Not once did I ever hear him speak of her as anything but a blessing, or of her infirmity as anything but a benison, and he seemed never so joyful as when he tried to make her drink through a straw.

But the most famous thing that Dempsey “did” happened on December 16, 1999. The Brooklyn Museum put on an exhibition entitled “Sensation” that included, among other failed attempts at art, a revolting portrayal of the Blessed Virgin surrounded by images of female reproductive organs cut out of pornographic magazines. The painting was an affront to the good people of the Five Boroughs who hail Mary as their mother, but the popular outrage only increased the smug feelings of superiority amongst the puerile cultural elite of the city.

And so Dempsey did. The 72-year-old visited the exhibition, stepped over the barrier in front of the offensive misrepresentation of his beloved Mother, opened a tube of white paint and smeared it all over the work. He was quickly apprehended by Brooklyn Museum security guards, who phoned the authorities, but once the arresting police officers were out of sight of the museum officials, each one shook Dempsey’s hand with pride, and patted him on the back for a job well done.

The trial provided a somewhat surreal moment as Dempsey, testifying in his own defense, listed the numerous places throughout the world where the Blessed Virgin is reputed to have appeared. The court stenographer asked for the proceedings to halt temporarily so she could take down the spellings of such exotic locales as Częstochowa.

Dempsey’s filial devotion for Mother Mary shone forth to such an extent that even the judge, a Jew, was convinced. Judge Thomas Farber admitted that before the proceedings began he had expected to hear nothing but hate from Mr. Heiner but that instead he heard only love. He rejected the prosecutor’s request for probation, community service, and an order barring Dempsey from the Brooklyn Museum. Instead, he encouraged Dempsey to visit any museum he liked “but without a tube of paint”, and sentenced him to one day of sensitivity training. “I am sure that no amount of sensitivity training,” the Judge avowed, “will lessen the defendant’s love for the Virgin Mary.” Truer words were never spoken.

The last time I saw him alive was a Monday morning in 2008, as I was ensconced in Bloom’s Deli on 39th and Lexington, enjoying a hearty breakfast at a table beside the window. I looked up from the morning paper out towards the street below and there he was, Dempsey Heiner, sailing slowly down the sidewalk with a steady but ponderous gait, immaculately dressed in jacket and tie. I immediately dropped the paper to knock on the window and wave hello, but relented at the last minute and decided to let him go his way in peace, sure I’d see him another day.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord,
and let perpetual light shine upon him.
May he rest in peace. Amen.

Some consider winter the time of death and desolation but I disagree. Winter for me is the incubation, the child in the womb, the seed beneath the soil waiting for the moment to sprout. Autumn, rather, is the time of melancholy and retrospection. Most of the trees here in New York are now bare, but before the leaves fell our friend the Brooklyn-based graphic & web designer Emily E. Owen (website here) caught these photographs of New York in the brilliant crepuscular light. The views are from Fort Tryon Park at the very top of the isle of Manhattan.

THE CHURCH OF Saint Thomas on the corner of Fifty-third Street and Fifth Avenue in New York is one of the artistic gems of the city: both as an architectural marvel designed by Ralph Adams Cram & Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue and as a musical paradise with its renowned choir of men & boys formerly under the tutelage of Gerre Hancock. (It’s foolish for anyone in the city during Advent to miss the Service of Lessons & Carols). The parish of the Episcopal Diocese of New York was established in 1834, and its first building was erected in the Gothic style on the corner of Broadway and Houston.

In 1870, after that neck of the woods became less fashionable, the congregation moved to its current location at 53rd & Fifth, to a new Gothic edifice by Richard Upjohn. That church hosted the marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt to the 9th Duke of Marlborough. When it burned down in 1905, a competition was held to select the design of the new Church of St. Thomas, then perhaps at the peak of its high social status among Manhattan’s Protestant congregations.

Among the entries submitted was this design by the firm of Lord and Hewlett, who were responsible for a wide variety of structures from the Brooklyn Masonic Temple to a number of buildings at Smith College in Massachusetts. Lord and Hewlett’s entry veered towards the Perpendicular in its Gothic, a thoroughly English style appropriate to the origins of the parish’s denomination.

The interior, much more so than the exterior, was obviously inspired by King’s College Chapel at Cambridge, arguably the finest example of English Perpendicular Gothic ever built. Unlike at King’s, Lord and Hewlett’s design has a chancel slightly narrower in width, and the lack of the college chapel’s heavy rood screen allows a greater focus on the high altar, accentuated by a carved stone reredos and flanked by wooden stalls.

The interior is superb but the outside form of the competition entry leaves much to be desired. The design lacks a spire, which is an acceptable loss because the entire massing of the church emphasizes verticality. However their decoration scheme for the exterior is more Continental than English and doesn’t work well with the form. If you’re going to go Perpendicular, go all the way and don’t make any excuses.

One of the wiser aspects of the proposal, though, was placing the bulk of the church directly parallel to the street with a parish house, small in comparison to the church itself, to the north. One of the problems of Cram’s design — the one chosen by the vestry and built by the parish — is that the northern set of windows is now overshadowed by tall skyscrapers preventing a proper amount of sunlight from shining in. It is regrettable that New York’s planning laws have not been amended to prevent such infelicities.

“I have a general disgust for Catholic architecture since the 1950s,” says Brother Gary Cregan, the Franciscan friar who is principal of St. Anthony’s High School in South Huntington. The friar was quoted by the once-great New York Times in a 2008 article on the new chapel built by the Catholic school on Long Island, recently featured on the NLM blog. The Franciscans, according to the Times, “believe that the new chapel, with its soaring 30-foot ceilings, will teach teenagers that they are ‘worshiping God, not each other.’” Many of the chapel’s furnishings were bargain finds on eBay including the confessionals, the pews, a 110-year-old stained-glass window, and a century-old statue of St. Anthony. A new bell for the chapel’s tower would’ve cost $20,000, but Brother Gary (or “Mr. Cregan” as the newspaper referred to him) found an old one for $4,000.

Our carbuncle alarm, which went haywire over the Brooklyn Museum’s offensive new entrance, has alerted us to a new monstrosity nearing completion in the adjacent borough.

The former Queens Borough Public Library is being turned into Moda, ‘the most modern, fashionable place to live in the heart of vibrant Jamaica, Queens’. The building first went up in 1930 as the main building of the Queens Borough Public Library, a handsome structure in a classical style which was renovated and added on to in the 1960s to become the Queens County Family Court. (Queens Borough and Queens County are contiguous).

In addition to the small branch library and commercial retail space in the building, Moda will offer the residents of its mixed-income apartments a concierge service, a rooftop deck, fitness center, 24-hour indoor parking, “charming” parquet floors, and hopefully an unabated sense of shame for having ruined a perfectly decent building.

I’ve seen worse additions (like the Royal Ontario Museum), but it still is pretty awful. Curbed describes it as ‘a glassy flesh-eating bacteria swallowing an old building whole’.

No. 54, East Sixty-fourth Street

“FOR 17 YEARS,” writes Peter W. Kaplan, “since The New York Observer entered city life in 1987, it has existed within a red brick and white-marble-stepped townhouse on East 64th Street.” Designed by Ernest Flagg and Walter B. Chambers during their brief partnership, No. 54 East Sixty-fourth Street (between Park & Madison) was built in 1907 as a private residence for Robert I. Jenks. The AIA guide accurately describes it as “four stories of delicate but unconvincing neo-Federal detail… a minor Flagg.” In 1947, the townhouse was converted into offices for the Near East Foundation, which was founded in 1915 to provide relief for Armenian refugees from the Ottoman Empire and later took on greater responsibilities in North Africa and the Levant. It was then bought by Arthur L. Carter, the founder and publisher of the New York Observer for use as the salmon-tinted newspaper’s headquarters.

In 2004, the Observer moved down to Broadway, two blocks south of the Flatiron Building (and just a few blocks up from The New Criterion whose founder, Hilton Kramer, was for nearly two decades the art critic for the Observer). The townhouse was sold by Carter to the Russian-born Janna Bullock, real estate developer & sometime Guggenheim foundation board member for $9.5 million in the year the newspaper moved out. In 2005, Bullock renovated the building and had it used at the Kips Bay Decorator Show House for the year before selling it on to the Irish investor Derek Quinlan for $18.74 million. Quinlan put it on the market for $36 million but last year the asking price was chopped to $27 million.

Twenty-five feet wide, five stories, and with over 10,000 square feet, No. 54 was probably the only newspaper headquarters to feature nine working fireplaces, rosewood panelling, and oak wainscoting. But the best feature, by a mile, is the splendid iron-railed staircase, which looks like it was lifted straight from Paris. Elegant and graceful, a rare century-old survival in Manhattan.

“We worked in a home,” continues Kaplan, an old-school newspaperman, the fourth (and longest-serving) editor of the paper:

Four floors, a giant alimentary center-hall staircase, caked moldings, brass chandeliers, glass-fronted oak cupboards, The New York Observer sometimes felt like a Henry James society home or a 70′s swinger pad, with reporters stacked and stuffed in its confines like Hong Kong tailors. Our legal reporter set up his computer in the fourth-floor closet, near the tuxedo that was used by whomever had to go out to a formal evening.

When I walked in, Mr. Charles Bagli and Mr. Terry Golway were stuffed back-to-back in the front living room, reporters were so close that one yammering diva could stop work for the entire room, turning the whole floor into an instant Eugene O’Neill parlor trauma. Later, a strange and occasionally brilliant agglomeration of writers and editors built up; pretty often, some were seduced to go off to slicker, better-paid indenturements. We lived together like vaudevillians at an actors’ boarding house.

Phone books and files were occasionally hurled from the fourth-floor window out onto the 64th Street sidewalk like a faithless lover’s pajamas. … Visitors stopped by. The writer Veronica Geng lived down the street and used to offer advice, bartering it for a day with one editor who drove upstate to empty her country house. Down the block, the great luxury mastodon 32 East 64th, home to Mrs. Kitty Carlisle Hart, whose trim gams took her on their evening constitutional past the office every night; she would nod and ask, ‘How’s the paper?’ Across the street, the vaguely decadent Plaza Athénée, with its leopard-skin benches and $12 martinis.

While up into our building trooped writers: the cheeky, the depressed, the jolly, the mission-driven, the perky. On the first floor, in what had been a grand dining room, the production department: hot waxers reminiscent of-not reminiscent of, identical to!-your high-school paper’s.

One flight up, the mandarin office of the publisher, a huge Oriental frieze staring down at the participants below, black-and-white photographs of Thomas Mann and Einstein smiling down at the whole enterprise. Across the hall, ad salespeople: glamorous, dark and shiny ladies with a sheen, first single, then married, then single, with dangerous ebony hairdos like movie noir heroines.

Cranking up and down, a cage elevator, witness to God knows how many muttered or screaming conversations, creaking up and down among the four floors and the cool basement, where checks were cut that soothed tempers on the other floors.

Highest of all in this crazy little enterprise, the dotty fireworks of the fourth floor, where politics were dissected, plots hatched, sociology sprinkled, coffee guzzled and names thrown around. … Hidden calls from psychiatrists, occasional nervous breakdowns not-so-manqué , pranks of Homeric intricacy, involving a floating cast of characters that appeared to the in-house residents of the house like the offstage stock company in a sitcom during the Seinfeldian 90′s. Story subjects called and screamed; others showed up for some mischief: Bill Murray, Mike Wallace, the occasional Mayor. Norman Mailer, clanking in on a cane to bring draft after draft of his cartoon ‘Puffs’. Bill O’Reilly and Carol Channing were on the phone. Martinis were served in summer, and ‘Sex and the City’ came and went.

There was Leon the office-supplies guy, who gave out pencils one at a time, and Angie the switchboard operator, who shrieked the editors’ names up the stairwell like Stanley Kowalski, and the young intern who everyone was afraid might have explosives strapped under his shirt. But nobody brought out the curious empathy of the building like the librarian who sat in her cubby making small cooing noises like a pigeon and one day just fluttered away without notice, leaving behind the French-fairy-tale possibility that she had been a bird all along.

Much has changed, not only at No. 54 East Sixty-fourth Street, but also at the transplanted Observer. In 2006, a 25-year-old NYU law student named Jared Kushner bought the paper off the founder Arthur L. Carter and has transformed it in the brief time since then. The swanky, old-fashioned broadsheet format was dumped for a tabloid size, the internet presence was boosted (as was coverage of finance and real estate), and old journo Kaplan finally gave up the editorial helm of the Observer last year. But its old headquarters can be yours for a cool $27 million — or perhaps a few less million if you’re inclined to put in an offer.

Listing: Sotheby’s International Realty