Getting Inside Old New York: Tom Sachs at the Armory and Mark Dion at the Explorers Club

There are two exhibitions running in the city right now--just three blocks from each other--that are not only worthwhile to visit for their own charms, but because they give access to some fabulous old New York spaces.

At the Park Avenue Armory (formerly the Seventh Regiment Armory) through June 17 is Tom Sachs Space Program: Mars, an exploration--in replica, miniature, film, and performance art--of every step of a mission to Mars. The bulk of the show is in the armory's drill hall, but some of the smaller exhibits are in the former Veterans Room and Library, which were decorated by Louis Comfort Tiffany's Associated Artists. These are the most complete Tiffany interiors in situ and definitely should be seen by anyone interested in Gilded Age interior design. As we write in Inside the Apple:

The materials in the rooms are an eclectic assortment, from aluminum foil in the coffered ceiling to recycled wallpaper rollers reused as column capitals. A gorgeous Tiffany fireplace with turquoise tiles stands against one wall of the Veterans Room and the walls are capped by an elaborate frieze depicting twenty great battles from the dawn of history to the modern era.

(Be forewarned, these rooms are poorly lit but still worthy of exploration.)

Also on view at the armory is Thomas Nast's Departure of the Seventh Regiment to War (reproduced above), which hangs in the hallway just to the left of the entrance (near the Veterans Rooms). No matter what your opinion of Nast, this is a great painting.

At the nearby Explorers Club on East 70th Street, Mark Dion's Phantoms of the Clark Expedition (on until August 3) takes a look at the ephemera associated with Sterling Clark's 1908-09 scientific expedition to map China's northern provinces. The exhibition features (in the artist's words) "not only what Clark and his team took from China but also what they brought to the site of inquiry. Thus, the equipment and provisions to undertake such a complex tour are given a new importance that emphasizes the labor of the journey rather than the particular scientific results." Dion and his team have created papier-mache versions of everything from the expedition's campfire to the cages used to haul chickens--there's even a replica of Clark's hat. The show is set up in the Explorers Club's Trophy Room on the fifth floor, a space originally designed to be an art gallery.

The club is housed in a mansion built by Stephen Clark--Sterling's brother--thus forging a connection between the building and the exhibition. It is a great opportunity to get a peek into this space that is normally off limits to non-members.

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Read more about the Park Avenue Armory in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

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Captain Kidd

On this date--May 23, 1701--Captain William Kidd was hanged for murder and piracy at the so-called "Execution Dock" in London. Though born in Scotland and hanged in England, Kidd is most associated with New York City, where he lived at the peak of his career.

Today, historians disagree as to the extent of Kidd's outright piracy. Most often, he sailed a privateer with a letter of marque, with the explicit permission to attack enemy ships. A prosperous member of New York's mercantile class, Kidd was friendly with a succession of New York's colonial governors, including Benjamin Fletcher. Under Fletcher, "piracy was a leading economic development tool in the city’s competition with the ports of Boston and Philadelphia."

In 1691, Kidd married Sarah Bradley Cox Oort, an wealthy widow, and they lived on Pearl Street. (Sarah's story is a tangled one for another time; Kidd was her third husband, and they applied for a marriage license only two days after her second husband, John Oort died. Did Kidd have something to do with that?)

Kidd was an active contributor a few years later to the building of the first Trinity Church, Wall Street, lending block and tackle for the hauling of stone and contributing money in pew rent. Kidd never sat in a pew, however; he left New York in 1696 before the church was finished, and was arrested in 1699, having never returned to the city.

One of Kidd's greatest prizes, the Quedagh Merchant, was found a few years ago in shallow waters off the Dominican Republic. Kidd had seized the French East India Company vessel on the grounds that it was a French ship and therefore an enemy of the British. That it was actually an Armenian vessel captained by an Englishman didn't seem to matter. The capture of the vessel branded Kidd a pirate and in a vain attempt to clear his name, Kidd ditched the boat in Caribbean and headed back to New York. He ended up in Boston, was arrested, and sent to England where he was convicted and hanged.

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For more about New York in the English Colonial era read

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News PAPER Spires at the Skyscraper Museum

At the end of the nineteenth century, when newspapers were at their peak, there were 43 daily papers in New York City. Most were published from "Newspaper Row"--the blocks of Park Row near City Hall--from grand skyscrapers that were among some of the first truly notable high-rise buildings in the city.

While most of these newspapers are gone and their headquarters have been torn down, the Skyscraper Museum has brought them back to life in their new exhibition "News PAPER Spires," running through July 15th. The small exhibition makes good use of archival drawings, blueprints, photographs, and newspapers themselves to tell the story of some of the city's most famous skyscrapers, including the World, Tribune, and Times buildings. (Of those three, only the Times building still stands--it's the building from which the ball drops on New Year's Eve.)

Of particular interest in Joseph Pulitzer's World tower, which was the first skyscraper to proclaim itself the tallest in the world. Designed by George B. Post (who also built the New York Stock Exchange and City College), the building reached to 309 feet to the top of the dome. It was a "giant among giants" to use the paper's PR terminology, and soon the Times and Tribune were racing to expand their buildings as they increased their circulation. Alas, the World tower came down when the approach ramps to the Brooklyn Bridge were expanded.

The show also focuses on the improvements in technology--from the use of rag paper to the invention of the linotype machine--that kept millions of papers circulating every day.

The Skyscraper Museum is located at 39 Battery Place (next to the Ritz Carlton) and is open Wednesday-Sunday, 12-6pm. If you can't make it in person, there's a virtual exhibition on the museum's website.

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To read more about the race to build skyscrapers in New York

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Will the World Trade Center be America's Tallest?

As you may have read, there is controversy brewing as to whether the new World Trade Center building (formerly known as the Freedom Tower), will be America's tallest building upon its completion.

At issue is the building's spire, which was designed to reach a final height of 1,776 feet, thus marking the year of the Declaration of Independence. This piece of symbolism has stayed with the building from Daniel Liebskind's original master plan through architect David Childs's architectural redrafts. However, back in January, the Durst Organization (co-developers of the building) made the decision to strip the spire of its $20 million cladding, leaving it a bare--and functional--antenna. And there's the rub: according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, decorative spires count in a building's final height; solely functional antennae do not.

This controversy between functional vs. decorative height can be traced back to the construction of the Chrysler Building, 40 Wall Street, and Empire State Building in the late 1920s.

As we write in Inside the Apple, the contest between 40 Wall and the Chrysler Building to be the world's tallest building was stiff:

In March 1929, the announced height of the Chrysler Building was 809 feet, to be topped with a dome. The Manhattan Company [aka 40 Wall Street] rejoined by announcing it was to be 840 feet. By October, Chrysler’s estimated final height had risen to 905 feet and—after a few last-minute drafting sessions by Severance and partner Yasuo Matsui—the Manhattan Company was revised upward to 925 feet. 

But no one knew of the “vertex,” a secret spire that Van Allen’s crew had been assembling inside the steel dome since September. On October 23, 1929, it was set in place. No newspapers carried the story the next day; no newsreel cameras were on hand to record the momentous occasion. Chrysler and Van Allen were happy to keep their secret—if you can call a 185-foot spire crowning a 1,046-foot building a secret—until the time was right. 

As Van Allen succinctly put it: “We’ll lift the thing up and we won’t tell ‘em anything about it. And when it’s up we’ll just be higher, that’s all.”

This stunt caused many to cry foul--could the Chrysler Building really be the world's tallest with the simple addition of a decorative spire? The Empire State Building wasn't going to wait to find out.

After William Van Allen revealed the Chrysler Building’s vertex, it became imperative to make the Empire State Building taller without adding a “useless” spire. To that end, Smith announced in December 1929 that the top of the Empire State would house a mooring mast, 1,300 feet from the ground, for transatlantic dirigibles. 

This was utter folly. Not only does a dirigible need to be anchored by both the nose and the tail (which is why they landed at air fields in New Jersey in the first place), the updrafts in Midtown were so strong that a zeppelin the length of two city blocks would have whipped around in the wind like a child’s toy. More to the point, a dirigible’s gondola was in the ship’s center; people would never have been able to (as pictured here in an early publicity drawing) exit from the helium-filled balloon straight into the 102nd-story waiting room.

In late September 1931, the New York Evening Journal completed the only successful dirigible mooring. At great danger to life and limb, it delivered a package of newspapers from the Financial District to the Empire State Building’s roof. It looked great on the newsreel cameras, but would be the closest the mooring mast ever saw to real use.

It's ironic that the Empire State Building worked to make its spire functional (even if it never would be), when today having a solely functional spire doesn't count toward a building's final height. Of course, to many people the most important measurable statistic is highest occupied floor, which will continue to be held by the Willis Tower in Chicago, whether or not the Council on Tall Buildings decides to count the World Trade Center's spire or not.

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Read more about the race to the be world's tallest building in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

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Wall Street, 1820, at the Duncan Phyfe Show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

We're a little late to the game on this post -- in fact, you only have one more day to see the Duncan Phyfe exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show closes May 6, 2012 (i.e., tomorrow), but if you are looking for something to do tomorrow, it is well worth a visit. Not only does it showcase the work of a great New York cabinetmaker, it is also your opportunity to examine a little-seen painting of the city, Wall Street 1820 by Johann Heinrich Jenny.

The painting (on loan to the museum from a private collection) is an amazing view of the city nearly 200 years ago. The above black-and-white reproduction does no justice at all to the vibrant colors of the original, which looks like it could have been painted yesterday.

Views of Wall Street were common in the nineteenth century, as it was not just the financial center of the city, but--prior to the move by the wealthy to Greenwich Village and Brooklyn Heights--its residential heart as well.

(The second view, below, shows the street in 1847, as more and more Greek Revivial banks came to dominate the area.)

If you do go see the show, there's a gallery talk at 10:00AM on May 6.

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For more about New York in 1820s, pick up a copy of
Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City,available from the Metropolitan Museum's gift shop, and fine booksellers everywhere.

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Hart Crane (1899-1932)

We were touring through Greenwich Village, showcasing places of literary significance, when we remembered that today marks the 80th anniversary of the death of poet Hart Crane.

Best known for his long-form poem The Bridge--a celebration of America using as its central symbol the Brooklyn Bridge--Crane was one of the greatest modernist poets of his generation.  Plagued by alcohol problems and the perils of being a gay man in a closeted society, Crane cut short his own life on April 27, 1932, when he jumped from a steamship in the Gulf of Mexico.

Crane lived a number of places in New York, including 45 Grove Street, 54 West 10th Street, and 79 Charles Street in the Village, and 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn Heights, where he wrote the bulk of The Bridge. Only later did he discover that the bridge's co-designer and chief engineer, Washington Roebling, had once lived in the same apartment building overlooking the East River.

James Franco's film, The Broken Tower, which is a biography of Crane, opened in limited release today.

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Interested in a literary walk of Greenwich Village? We lead private tours for groups large and small; contact us at walknyc@gmail.com or events@insidetheapple.net for more information.

Reminder: "The House of Mirth" at Metropolitan Playhouse on Sunday at 3pm

We hope everyone has a great weekend, and we just wanted to remind you that tickets are still available for Sunday's 3pm performance of The House of Mirth at the Metropolitan Playhouse. After the show, we'll be talking about Edith Wharton's New York and how the mores and customs of the times are reflected in the play and her other writings. It should be a lot of fun and we hope to see you there!

This version of the novel was written by Wharton herself and is seldom revived, so if you are a Wharton fan you won't want to pass up this opportunity. The play opens tonight and runs through May 20.

Tickets are available at http://metropolitanplayhouse.org/houseofmirth.

Regards,
Michelle & James Nevius

www.insidetheapple.net

Titanic at 100: Myth and Memory

There's been much fanfare in commemoration of the sinking of RMS Titanic on April 15, 1912, en route to New York on its maiden voyage--a new miniseries, the re-release of James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic in 3D, and a host of articles, documentaries, and museum exhibitions.

We recommend the exhibition at the South Street Seaport Museum entitled Titanic at 100: Myth and Memory, which is running through May 16. The exhibition features a host of Titanic ephemera, from the china commissioned for the ship (the examples on view were extras not taken on that first voyage) to advertisements in New York for the April 20 return voyage to Europe that never happened. The most fascinating part of show is its centerpiece--the dispatches sent and received from the Titanic, Olympic, Carpathia, and other ships by marconi wireless operators that document the sinking in real-time.

Just outside the gallery is one of New York's permanent Titanic memorials, the old lighthouse that once stood atop the Seaman's Church Institute at Coenties Slip. When that building was demolished in the late 1960s, the lighthouse was moved to South Street Seaport. (You can see advertisements for the public subscription for the memorial--launched just after the sinking in 1912--in the exhibition.)

If you want to make a self-guided tour of Titanic sites in the city, the New York Daily News published this handy map a couple of weeks ago as part of their coverage of the disaster. (Full disclosure: we helped.)

More information about New York at the end of the Gilded Age can be found in our book, Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City, available from Amazon.com and fine booksellers everywhere.

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"House of Mirth" and Edith Wharton's New York

We saw a preview performance last night of Edith Wharton's adaptation of her best-selling novel House of Mirth at the Metropolitan Playhouse and we urge you to go. Wharton was the most adept chronicler of New York's social set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and she and playwright Clyde Fitch did a masterful job of taking the varied settings and situations of the novel and figuring out how to make them work on stage. As always, the cast and direction at the Metropolitan Playhouse are top notch, especially Amanda Jones as Lily Bart.

Of course, we'd love it if the performance you came to see is this Sunday, April 29, at 3:00pm. Following that matinee, we'll be joining director Alex Roe for a talk back with the audience where we'll be discussing the world of the play and the New York in which Edith Wharton lived and worked.

You can buy tickets for that performance at this link:  http://metropolitanplayhouse.org/HOM8. The show officially opens on Friday and runs through May 20.

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You can also read more about Edith Wharton's New York in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

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Theater Talk Back: "House of Mirth" at the Metropolitan Playhouse on Sunday, April 29, at 3:00pm

Photo by Jacob J. Goldberg

On Sunday, April 29, we will be appearing at the Metropolitan Playhouse in the East Village to do a post-show talk-back following the 3:00pm performance of Edith Wharton's House of Mirth. 

Wharton published the novel The House of Mirth in 1905 to great acclaim and it launched her into the top ranks of American writers, selling 140,000 copies in just three months. It tells the story of Lily Bart, a socially conscious young woman looking for love in Gilded Age New York. In 1906, Wharton joined with prolific playwright Clive Fitch to create a stage adaptation of the work, which premiered at the Knickerbocker Theatre in October of that year. (The Knickerbocker is long gone, but it was the first Broadway house to have an illuminated, rotating electric sign.)

After the Metropolitan's performance, we will be talking about Edith Wharton's New York and the role it played in shaping her writing; her New York works include classics such as House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, as well as lesser-known titles such as The Custom of the Country and Old New York.

We'll being copies of our own book, Inside the Apple, for sale and signing.

To purchase tickets to House of Mirth, please go to the Metropolitan Playhouse's website at http://metropolitanplayhouse.org/houseofmirth