Because it was eclipsed by baseball, an infinitely more indigenous pastime, people often forget that cricket was quite a widespread and popular sport in the United States. It wasn’t until the Civil War that baseball really took over, aided by its shorter play time and the wider national mood. (Doubtless someone has, or will, write a scholarly article on this.)

It survived a few generations more as something of an elite sport, more strongly in Philadelphia and its environs, as well as in colleges and universities. The interwar period pretty much killed it off, only to be revived in interest amongst Americans by seeing it played by urban immigrant communities from the West Indies and the Subcontinent. The last time I checked there was even a cricket oval being laid out on the banks of the Mohawk river, across from the farm Jan Pieterse Mabee purchased from Daniel Janse Van Antwerpen in 1705.

This charming rustic scene shows children playing cricket on the grounds of St John’s College, Fordham, with a priest speaking to a gentleman out on a constitutional with his son. As the college advertised itself in an early prospectus:

This institution, incorporated with the privileges of a university by an act of the Legislature, is situated near the village of Fordham, in a most picturesque and healthy part of the county of Westchester, at a distance of about eleven miles from the city of New York and three from Harlem. It is of easy access at any season of the year, by private conveyance or by the railroad, which passes immediately along the borders of the beautiful lawn in front of the college. The buildings are large, elegant and commodious; the grounds extensive and tastefully laid out.

This part of the Bronx remained within Westchester until 1874, when the parts west of the Bronx River were added to New York County. The remainder of the Bronx was ceded in 1895 and was created a borough of the consolidated City of New York in 1898, though only erected as its own county in 1914 (minus Marble Hill, which is another story entirely).

The engraving was drawn by William Rodrigue, a Philadelphia architect who later became associated with New York’s James Renwick, the designer of Grace Church and St Patrick’s Cathedral. Rodrigue auspiciously married the sister of one Fr John Hughes, who became Bishop of New York in 1842 — and the first Archbishop when the see was raised to metropolitan status in 1850.

St John’s College, now Fordham University, was one of Hughes’ pet projects, and perhaps unsurprisingly Rodrigue was chosen to design many of the earliest college buildings on the former Rose Hill estate, in addition to teaching mathematics, geometry, and drawing. He lived with his family in an outbuilding on the estate that now houses a coffee shop named “Rod’s” in his honour and his sons were among the earliest students of St John’s.

The first buildings Rodrigue completed were the chapel and the residence, the latter of which is still known as St John’s and forms one of the three sides of Queen’s Court, now a residential college within the university. The chapel benefited from stained-glass windows donated by the King of France for the (currently flourishing) old St Patrick’s Cathedral but which were found to be the wrong size and so incorporated into what is now the University Church.

The building in the right background of the view was the main house of the Rose Hill estate purchased by Bishop Hughes. For a long time it was known as the Administration Building or the Manor House, though as it dates from the 1830s it has no direct connection to the Manor of Fordham granted to Jan Arcer by Governor Lovelace in 1671 (other than sitting on the land of it). More recently it was renamed Cunniffe House thanks to the generosity of Maurice J. “Mo” Cunniffe, Fordham Class of 1954. The wings have been much altered but the central block of the house remains largely intact.

In 2019, the university’s emeritus professor of history, Dr Roger Wines, discovered the earliest known image of the institution while sifting through periodicals at the Philadelphia archdiocese’s research centre.

“It is located in a beautiful situation remote enough from the city to make it in the country,” the accompanying text in The Truth Teller, an early Catholic newspaper of New York, explained, “enjoying all the advantages, and yet so near the city as to afford it all the conveniences attainable in town.”

“The circumjacent country is extremely beautiful,” it continues. “The river Bronx meanders not far from the college, amongst undulating fields, and magnificent forests. […] We have every reason to congratulate ourselves on the selection of so fine and desirable a spot for the education of youth.”

The writer assures the college “will stand a perennial monument of zeal and success to the admiring eye of posterity”.

Assiduous readers may recall my posting about the Palacio Barolo, the mad Buenos Aires skyscraper that was conceived as a monument to the genius of Dante.

In a recent entry of Kit Wilson’s excellent Eclectic Letters, novelist (and recent ‘Foidcast’ guest) Thomas Peermohamed Lambert recalls this eccentric edifice:

Palacio Barolo is not my favourite building aesthetically — depending on my mood, that accolade might go to one of Le Corbusier’s Assembly building Chandigarh, or Westminster Cathedral, or the Duomo di Monreale, or the Nakagin Capsule tower — but no other building has lodged itself quite so firmly in my soul. I first visited it in 2018, while I was living in Buenos Aires. Someone mentioned to me that a few blocks from the drab neoclassical Congressional Palace resided the former tallest building in South America, designed by a mad Italian architect to accord with the cosmology of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I had to go.

Palacio Barolo is wonderful enough from the outside: it has a mad, Art Nouveau energy that reminds me, bizarrely, of Brussels. But its interior is even better. Its lobby is lit by orange-glowing pits that are meant to look like Hell’s lowest circles; there are statues of monsters, gargoyles, and pretty much every doorway has some kind of masonic symbol on it. Because labour is cheap in Buenos Aires, the place is also massively and confusingly over-staffed: there are uniformed people buzzing around you, ushering you into clanking iron lifts and up astonishingly decorated staircases whether you ask them to or not. At the top of the building is a completely pointless lighthouse beacon, included for the sole purpose of seeming divine and celestial, and one of the best views of Buenos Aires you’ll ever see.

Maxfield Parrish was the king of middlebrow. More of an illustrator rather than a practitioner of high art, he was at least a painter through and through. Norman Rockwell — widely rated as more important — referred to him as his ‘idol’. His 1900s visions of blousy clouds and flowing garments are significant for the time but perhaps best forgotten. By 1931 he had pronounced to the press that he was ‘done with girls on rocks’.

As he gained in years, Parrish moved more towards the observed, inhabited landscapes of his adopted New England. He set up his studio in Plainfield, New Hampshire, where he painted Village Street, Winter.

A leaf-barren tree stands dark against the winter dusklight, partly obscuring the village church. Ground-floor windows of wood clapboard houses emit a warm glow — suppertime isn’t long away now.

No idyll lasts forever: this scene was painted in 1941, the last winter of New England’s peace before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor thrust the United States into the great conflagration. Many sons of the Granite State must have thought of still scenes like this as they fixed bayonets in Europe and the Pacific.

Parrish painted the picture for his own pleasure, but such an artist with such a long commercial career was not unwise to the potentials of profit: even painters must eat. The reproduction rights to the image were licensed to Brown & Bigelow to feature in calendars, prints, and other materials which made Parrish a pretty penny. He was the Jack Vettriano of his day.

Brown & Bigeloow renamed it ‘At Close of Day’, and the back of the original painting shows a fascinating array of names for the work, including ‘Plainfield Church’, ‘Plainfield New Hampshire Church at Dusk’, and ‘Plainfield New Hampshire Village Church at Dusk’.

The most mentions, however, go to the name the artist himself gave it: ‘Village Street, Winter’.

Instagram: @andcusack

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