Dyin' Before the Good Stuff, Part Three

THE ARCHITECTS

5--Ray Hood did get to see his skyscrapers finished (including the American Radiator Building, the McGraw-Hill Building, and the Daily News Building) but he died before the completion (and before being recognized as the lead planner) of New York's most important business and entertainment complex.  According to Daniel Okrent's history, Great Fortune, Hood's "obituaries made surprisingly little mention of his role in Rockefeller Center, presumably because, at the time, the specific contributions of the various architects were not clear.  Hood never once attempted to claim credit due him for the design triumph that was Rockefeller Center."  

6--A major critic of Hood's (and almost every other architect) was Frank Lloyd Wright who still eulogized Hood respectfully:  "Architecture needs about ten first class funerals of the higher-up more than it needs his."  Unlike Hood whose reputation was quiet, Wright loudly proclaimed his own genius, perhaps rightfully so as he gave us some of the greatest structures in the U.S.  Wright designed few buildings in New York City, but one of his masterpieces and one of his final achievements stands boldly on Upper Fifth Avenue:  the Guggenheim.  Wright died in April, 1959, and his inverted ziggurat opened that October.  (Solomon Guggenheim for that matter also never saw the museum that bears his name, the temple for nonobjective art he dreamt about and financed--he died a decade before it opened.)

Dyin' Before the Good Stuff, Part Two

THE SCULPTORS

3--Karl Bitter, an Austrian who came to America in 1889, quickly became one of the country's preeminent sculptors.  He's the man who gave us the elaborate and intricate bronze doors at Trinity Church as well as one of the city's most popular gathering spaces--the Pulitzer Fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel.  Bitter was not yet finished with that fountain in 1915 when he and his wife attended a performance at the Metropolitan Opera. Trying to cross the street afterwards, Bitter was hit by an automobile and dragged thirty feet in front of a horrified crowd.  He died at the hospital and work on the Pulitzer Fountain fell to his assistant.

4--George Grey Barnard, described as a "titanic genius" and the "American Michelangelo," realized while living in Paris that he could make more money selling medieval sculptures and fragments he picked up from the French countryside than he could by selling his own work.  Accused of "stealing the soul of France" in 1913, Barnard was able to clear French customs with hundreds of items before a new law was passed to stop him.  He displayed much of the work in his studio in Upper Manhattan and in 1926 sold it all to Rockefeller for $600,000.  The acquisition became part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a permanent facility was built to house the medieval collection a few hundred yards from Barnard's studio.  Sadly, Barnard died on April 24th, 1938, 16 days before the Cloisters opened to the public.

Dyin' Before the Good Stuff, Part One

A few years ago, a young Georgian presented a point to ponder when she asked from the back of the bus, "Why do people always gots to be dyin' before the good stuff?"  At first, I had no idea what in the world she was going on about, but then I thought back over some of my commentary.  There is a significant number of New Yorkers who have died before seeing their contributions to the city completed or recognized.  This week we're featuring ten of them, two a day.

THE MONUMENTS

1--The most enduring work by Emma Lazarus, a prolific writer on the subjects of Judaism and America, is a sonnet written to raise funds for the construction of the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty.  (The French sent over the statue without a stand and asked us to take care of that.  The French also like showing up at parties with flowers and forcing the hostess to scrounge around for a vase.)  The New Colossus, concludes with the lines: 

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

By putting these words in Liberty's mouth, Lazarus framed the sculpture as a beacon for immigrants and a symbol of the American promise, associations that were more hers than they were the sculptor's.  Though her poem is now engraved on a plaque located inside the very pedestal she helped to finance, Emma Lazarus never got a chance to see the Statue of Liberty.  Suffering from cancer, perhaps Hodgkin's Disease, Lazarus left for Europe in 1885, a year before the statue was assembled.  When she returned in 1887, she was too sick to come to the deck, and she died on the Upper West Side two months later.

2--Ulysses S. Grant led the Union forces to victory in the Civil War and served two terms as president.  Then the tides turned.  Unable to secure a third nomination, he moved to New York and trusted almost all of his assets to a Barry Madoff type character named Ferdinand Ward who bankrupted his company, ruining the former president as well as other investors recruited by Grant.  Around this time, Grant was diagnosed with throat cancer.  It seemed an ignominious end to a remarkable career, but he was soon approached by none other than Mark Twain who offered to publish his memoirs.  Grant, ill and destitute, set to work and finished his book a few days before his death.

The memoirs would go on to sell 300,000 copies and provide his family with almost half a million dollars.  The success of what many still consider the best presidential memoirs ever written played a part in raising the donations to build Grant's Tomb, the largest mausoleum in North America. 

Little Bytes Recommends: YOU ARE HERE...Now in Paperback

(This was posted last year when the hardcover was originally posted.  Little Bytes still highly recommends!!!)

Sometimes I think that the more I research New York, the harder it gets to give a tour of the city.  How do you cover it all in four days, let alone four hours?  How do you do justice to the history of Madison Square while speeding by it on a bus?

This is one of the reasons why I so admire admire Christopher Potter's first book, You Are Here, wherein he presents the history of the entire universe in only 271 pages. 

Many have raved about Potter's lucid, enjoyable and conversational tone.  I agree with their praise, although by conversational, we're not talking about a chat you have with a stupid person on an airplane.  This is more like the kind of conversation you have at a dinner party where you push your wine glass just out of reach because you realize you're going to need all of your remaining faculties to follow each thread of your neighbor's narrative.

The dinner party analogy isn't too far off.  You Are Here is filled with fun anecdotal trivia (from Dolly Parton's uniqueness in scientific history to a $125 million mistake resulting from a confusion between miles and kilometers) and has the feel of a dinner companion, who has read all of the most recent scientific journals, bringing you up to speed on what's happening in the increasingly removed world of the modern laboratory.

What I love most about the book, however, is that Potter employs an ingenious structure, which leads the reader on a series of well-ordered sightseeing excursions.  He first takes us on an ever expanding tour that begins with the tallest human known to exist (in the 1 meter-10 meter range) and ends 13 billion light-years away.  Later, he takes us on a reverse tour, a tour of diminishment, that starts with the smallest human and ends with quarks and electrons deep inside the atom.

Other chapters are histories of scientific inquiry that resulted in our removal of ourselves from the center of the universe, and explanations of relativity and quantum mechanics.  Then he takes us on a tour of the birth of stars and our galaxies and our planet and moon before giving a time line of life on earth (as bacteria 4 billion years ago) that eventually brings us to our bipedal ancestors in the Pliocene epoch (between 5 and 3 million years ago) and finally to our own Holocene epoch when our ancestors begin to farm for the first time.  He concludes with what we know today about human development and global migration.

And that concludes his tour.  Feel free to visit the gift shop. 

An amazing accomplishment!

See the review of You Are Here in The Guardian.

Read the article about the author and book by Stuart Jeffries.

Hear an interview with the author on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Tourist Gives Westfield a New Name

7:00 am.  Park Central Hotel.

ROBERT:  Okay, I need my group over here.  The group flying out of Newark tomorrow over here.  JFK group over there with Michael.  The Newark group over here.  Good morning, everyone, my name's Robert, and I'll be with you today and tomorrow...

7:15.  Seventh Avenue and Fifty-First.

MADISON FROM OREGON:  Excuse me, how do you pronounce your name?

ROBERT:  Robert.  Very easy.

MADISON FROM OREGON:  I thought your name was New Ark?