A very happy and blessed St. Nicholas Day to you all. St Nicholas is, as you all know, the patron saint of New York owing to our Netherlandish forefathers. Above you can see Lumen Martin Winter’s mural of St. Nicholas leading Peter Stuyvesant’s legion on their way to attack and take the Swedish fort of Christiania in New Sweden. The account of the battle by Washington Irving is hilarious and counts among my favorite selections of comic writing.

If you’d like to learn more about St. Nicholas, the St. Nicholas Center is a good place to start, as well as the holy bishop’s entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia.

It’s also Sofie von Hauch’s birthday. Tillykke med Fødselsdagen!

Previously: The Feast of St Nicholas

Windy Hollow, Millbrook, Rombout, Smithtown — doubtless these words mean nothing to many but to the huntsmen (and -women) of New York they are immediately recognised as the names of some of the Empire State’s hunts.

These four hunts are just some of the survivors but there were once many more packs of hounds across the state. Long Island before the second war was excellent hunt country but thanks to rapid suburbanisation and cultural changes only the Smithtown Hunt survives there.

Still, hunting loomed large enough in the imagination that it featured on the front cover of The New Yorker with some regularity.

Indeed the very week of the Kennedy assassination, houses up and down Manhattan and the whole East Coast would have had their copy of the magazine with a hunting scene front and centre. (President Kennedy did ride, but of the two of them it was the First Lady who was keener on the hunt.)

Here are just a few of the covers I’ve found.

Roll over the covers for the date of the issue to appear.

BERTRAM GROSVENOR Goodhue considered the Church of the Intercession at 155th Street and Broadway in New York his masterpiece. Being one of the greatest American architects ever, Goodhue knew what he was talking about, and the Church is undoubtedly one of his best. He was one of the last great American creators, a modern architect working within the great tradition. (Art deco, the style in which Goodhue’s award-winning Nebraska state capitol was built, was perhaps the last style within the tradition until a few post-modernists took their stab at reconnecting with the past). (more…)

The above photograph shows a 1963 service in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York. Closest to the sanctuary are four members of the Veteran Corps of Artillery, State of New York, but behind them can be scene a member of the Old Guard of the City of New York. The VCA, of which my Uncle Matt (a frequent commenter upon this site) is a member, is older, being founded in 1790. The Old Guard dates from 1826, and Uncle Matt’s father (my grandpa) was Commadant of that august group. There’s a great photo of my father as a small child gazing up at his father in Old Guard uniform including the tall bearskin busby. Perhaps Pop will scan it sometime, else I will get around to it when I’m back in the States.

With all its traditional pomp and circumstance, the Old Guard of the City of New York turned out to observe the one hundred and fifth anniversary of its organization. There was the usual parade with major generals, colonels, majors, and captains marching as privates under the banners of this battalion and proud of their place in its rank and file. After the parade church services were held in the old chapel on Governors Island.
(A bad copy from The Sun, Fort Covington, NY, 1931)

This photo shows the interior of the Dominican Church of St. Vincent Ferrer, designed by Goodhue, before it was fully completed. The stained glass has yet to be installed, and the same goes for the giant reredos which now graces the altar. A more current view is below.

During the past fortnight, I have been learning to row on the lagoon in Pelham Bay Park, a body of water with which I had no previous aquaintance. “Learning to row?” you ask. “But weren’t you in the University of St Andrews Boat Club during your bejant year?” Yes, dear reader, I was a full paid-up member of said body, but I was too busy avoiding lectures, failing courses, and other such frivolities of one’s first year at university to actually row, and only went to circuit training when Ezra Pierce irritated me enough that I felt obliged to give in and head on over. Nonetheless, at the suggestion of a good friend I decided to enroll in this program and have not regretted it at all. Rowing, in short, is addictive, and it is a grand shame that I shall have to wait until at least September in Scotland to get back on the water. (Above, the Travers Island clubhouse of the A.C. can be seen from the far end of the lagoon). (more…)

I’ve always somewhat admired Santiago Calatrava’s plan for the completion of the (Episcopalian) Cathedral of St. John the Divine here in New York. It was commissioned in the 1980’s by the über-dodgy Rev. James Parks Morton, dean of the Cathedral at the time. Morton was responsible for turning “St. John the Unfinished” into the hippie-trippy-ecumenical-syncretist-pagan-temple-cum-performing-arts-center it is known as today, and came up with this scheme to try to bring the cathedral to completion. (The plan has since been abandoned and all construction ceased a decade ago; scaffolding remains because the cost of removing it was judged to be too high).

The plan involved a ‘biosphere’ garden being planted atop the nave in the giant greenhouse formed by Calatrava’s lithely arches. Though I much prefer the crossing tower in the design by Ralph Adams Cram, I still think that Calatrava’s plan is rather exciting. It only succeeds, however, because Cram and (Heins & Lafarge before him) laid an ample beautiful foundation (well, obviously quite much more than that) for Calatrava to complete. The cathedrals which Signor Calatrava has designed completely himself have been completey devoid of aesthetic appeal, as well as conceived outside of the millenia-long tradition of church architecture.

The (Catholic) Diocese of Oakland commissioned Calatrava to design their new ‘Cathedral of Christ the Light’ after the old seat was greatly damaged in an earthquake. Despite the vacuousness of the design (model below), Signor Calatrava proved to be outside the Diocese’s budget, and his second-rate design was shelved and replaced with a third-rate design of a vaguely similar ilk. The third-rate design is the one which will be built, though a first-rate proposal in the vernacular style natural to California has been drawn up by Mr. Domiane Forte. Methinks Signor Calatrava should stick to his catchy bridges.

Plans are afoot for the construction of a New Globe Theatre in the middle of Castle Williams on Governors Island in New York Harbor. The theatre would be of the same concept as Shakespeare’s old Globe, now reconstructed close to the original site in Southwark, London. (more…)

I received such complaints regarding my opinion of the University Club that I offer up these images as a peace offering. Above, an elevation of the 54th St façade.

A view from Fifth Avenue.

The oft-praised library.

The NYPL digital gallery has provided me with yet another photo to add to my Dewey Arch collection.

One bit of would-be classical New York I can’t seem to find much information on is the 1904 plan by Thomas J. George for a beaux-arts civic center to be built upon what we now call Roosevelt Island (previous Bramwell’s then Welfare Island), an image of which you can see below. I inquired with the Roosevelt Island Historical Society, and all they could really tell me was the date, designer, and that it merits a mention in the book ‘Skyscraper Rivals’. I’m rather fond of it. Certainly better than what they’ve got on Roosevelt Island now.

The Classical Values blog had a post back in October ’03 entitled A Classical Arch in New York, which makes mention of the triumphal arch built to comemmorate Admiral Dewey’s victory over the Spanish in the eponymous war between our two nations round the turn of the century.

The Dewey Arch was only a temporary structure built of a plaster-like material, and thus did not survive. A previous temporary wood-and-plaster triumphal arch was built to commemorate General Washington in Washington Square, and proved so popular that it was decided to replace it with a permanent stone version. Unfortunately, the more attractive beaux-arts Dewey Arch, which also featured a colonnade, was not made permanent as its location in Madison Square would have obstructed the flow of vehicles and required a rethinking of the traffic flow.

The only existing reminder of the Arch near the site is a bar and restaurant called Dewey’s Flatiron.

Nonetheless, here are a few photos of the lost arch.

A view of the Dewey Arch, colonnade, and Madison Square, with Stanford White’s towered Madison Square Garden in the background. Broadway and its trolley line cross the colonnade’s axis. (more…)

A comment of Mr. Hiss on Fr. Sibley’s blog mentioned the Church of St. Jean Baptiste on the Upper East Side. There are few churches in New York, let alone all America, which are as beautiful as St. Jean Baptiste (or “St. JB’s” as people ridiculously call it). A restoration only a few years ago brought the church back to its full splendour.

It used to be the national parish of the French Canadians in New York, hence the French name, and is now home to the National Shrine of St. Anne, formerly further downtown in what became St. Anne’s Armenian Catholic Cathedral (one of a few beautiful and very active church buildings being pawned off by the wretched bureaucrats who run the Archdiocese of New York).

The church is open most of the day and definitely worth stepping into even if you only have a few minutes. Their parish website (link above) has a somewhat detailed history of the parish and the architecture of the church.

The parish and girls’ high school are now staffed by priests of the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament as well as sisters from the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, and the Body of Christ is adored all day long except during Mass.

The Dutch Reformed Church in Kingston, New York.

The Maine Monument has always been one of my favourite monuments in New York. It’s dedicated to the dead of the U.S.S. Maine incident and the Spanish-American War. The Monument is beautiful, not only due to its intriguing massing and beautiful sculpted work, but also because its placement in relation to Columbus Circle. It moves upward, encompassed in the lush greenery of Central Park behind it, and the bottom half projects itself forward into the Circle and creates a pleasing visual arrangement.

Above, as seen through the window of the Allen Room of the new Frederick P. Rose Hall at the AOL Time Warner Center. According to the review of opening night in the Sun, the Allen Room’s acoustics are amazing, and it looks as if Rose Hall will be an important addition to the cultural world of the City. (Note to Lucas and Adam: pencil this into your schedules).

Above the Maine Monument is pictured with the base of the Columbus column in the middle of Columbus Circle. The Circle is currently undergoing a massive refurbishment to try to make it more accesible and parklike rather than just a glorified traffic circle.

Top photo by Corin Anderson

This photo of Albany, the capital of New York, from the 1950s shows a city that, if it weren’t for the straight streets, almost feels like a poverty-stricken Eastern European capital.

Unfortunately, it became even more like a poverty-stricken Eastern European capital when Big Brother decided to get rid of it all and replace it with a giant, heartless, government plaza.

I wonder if Governor Rockefeller visited Brasilia and thought “Gee, I ought to get me one of them!” Empire State Plaza (or Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza as it is now officially known) involved the displacement of thousands of poor people, hundreds of small businesses, bad architecture, and the humongous cost – partly owing to the omnipresent use of marble instead of more economic stones.

The result was the destruction of a large community built on a human scale in favor of an expensive, espansive, inhospitable Communist dreamland on the Hudson. A crime.

TODAY I WAS wondering how many daily newspapers there actually are in New York. I thought I knew all the English ones, the Spanish ones, and that there were a few Chinese ones as well. So my vague idea was somewhere around seven or eight.

After turning to the Encyclopedia of New York and the internet, by my count there are thirty-five dailies in New York, printed in nine different languages!

Eighteen English, five Chinese, three Korean, three Spanish, two Greek, one Italian, one Polish, one Russian, and one Ukrainian. That’s a very large number of newspapers for one city to sustain, though it ought to be remembered many of the language papers are purchased widely in other areas. Still, I wonder if Tokyo, Mexico, Seoul, Sao Paolo, Mumbai, and the other megacities out there have as many daily newspapers.

The eighteen English dailies by founding date are: (more…)

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