The Nashville Symphony recently built an entirely new concert hall named the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. While we decry ‘centers’—what’s wrong with a ‘hall’?—the name does hold some significance for us, because Schermerhorn is, of course, an old New York name. The Schermerhorns were one of the first families of New York and there are numerous places and things named after them throughout the city and state. This concert hall bears the name in honor of Kenneth Schermerhorn, born in the traditional Schermerhorn stomping ground of Schenectady, New York, and conductor of the Nashville Symphony from 1983 until his death in 2005. He had also previously conducted (during his military service in Germany) the symphony orchestra of the U.S. Seventhy Army and later the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, as well as serving as music director to the Hong Kong Symphony Orchestra and the American Ballet Theatre.

The new concert hall is built in an admirably traditional style, though if you look closely enough here and there you can see the craftsmanship still wasn’t quite up to snuff. Still, a step in the right direction, needless to say, and we decided to show you some photos for your general edification.
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TO THE OLD Whitney Museum down on 8th Street, now home to the New York Studio School, which held a panel discussion to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the New Criterion. An interesting chat between Hilton Kramer, who left the New York Times to found the magazine in 1982, Karen Wilkin, one of our regular art critics, and James Panero, managing editor and art critic, all moderated by Michael J. Lewis of Williams College. The panel discussion covered myriad subjects related to art, from art criticism to the impossibility of an avant-garde in today’s culture of anything-goes to whether the New Criterion‘s ‘view’ of art can be considered part of any particular school of thought. Hilton had some particularly choice moments.

The building is a particularly nebulous one with many strange nooks and crannies, which can perhaps be explained by the fact that it is actually four townhouses gradually combined over a period of time. The Whitney Museum of American Art, of course, was founded in the 1930s by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and was housed in these merged townhouses until moving to the specially-designed home at Madison and 75th in 1966 — widely agreed to be the ugliest building on the entire Upper East Side.

Among the nooks and crannies previously mentioned, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s former studio in the old mews building provided an excellent location for the dinner held afterwards, to which the participants, organizers, and a number of hangers-on (including yours truly) were invited. I sat between Gabbe, the New Criterion‘s former Editorial Assistant now working for the Studio School, and Joseph, an art student from outside Canterbury in Kent whose grandmother and grandfather both taught at the Studio School. Joseph and I discussed the beauty of the Somerset countryside, and I confessed I’d buy a cottage and move there in a second were it possible. The inimitable David Yezzi sat across the table and guided much of the conversation on our leg of the three tables, which had been arranged in a U-formation. A little later, I chatted with the artist seated to Gabbe’s left, who had been born in Latvia, with childhood spent in Baghdad, Italy, and England, before settling down in New York at the age of seven. We discussed the glories of Eastern Europe and the linguistic intricacies thereof. During dessert, however, I got on to architecture with the amiable Michael J. Lewis. I sung the praises of Audubon Terrace, one of my favorite spaces in all New York, which he (a Philadelphian) had only stumbled upon for the first time a month ago, and also of the nearby sculpted tomb of Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, the greatest of all American architects.

Time waits for no man, however, and I managed to catch a late train back home from Grand Central. Alighting at Bronxville, I walked through the misty streets where the spherical streetlamps cast an eerie glow against the limestone façades of the shops. Home before midnight, and time for rest. Tommorrow, aside from being the feast of Saint Andrew, is Stefan Beck’s last day at the New Criterion. Needless to say, commemorative festivities are in order, and an alcoholic concoction known as ‘batch’ is to be brewed. It will not, I imagine, be for the faint of heart.

Elsewhere, the Austrian navy is no more.

SAN FERNANDO CATHEDRAL in San Antonio, Texas, named after the holy King Ferdinand III of Castile, is one of the oldest cathedrals in the United States. Indeed, there is considerably debate as to precisely which church is the oldest cathedral in the United States. The Baltimore Basilica, recently restored, was the first cathedral to be located in the political entity known as the United States. The Cathedral Basilica of Saint Augustine in the Floridian city of that name was founded in 1594 (making it the oldest parish in the U.S.) but the current structure was not built until 1793, and the church did not become a cathedral until 1870. The core of San Fernando was built from 1738 to 1750, but the nave was replaced in 1868 with one of a neo-Gothic design. It became a cathedral when the See of San Antonio was erected in 1874. So the Baltimore Basilica (or the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, to give it its full name) was certainly the first cathedral in the United States, though not the oldest church serving as a cathedral. To add to the fray, the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace claims that it is the oldest continuously operating cathedral in the United States, since the Baltimore Basilica is no longer the cathedral of Baltimore, but rather merely co-cathedral to the bizarre art-deco-gothic Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in that city. It’s all quite mad really. Suffice to say, San Fernando is old and it is a cathedral; it’s an old cathedral. (more…)

THE BRIDGE AND TUNNEL CLUB site often features photographs of myriad places, scenes, and things all around New York and beyond. Recently, the Bridge-and-Tunneller made a sojourn to various sites up the Hudson, and thankfully decided to share his photos. We bring you a selection of them, which you can find in their original form on the B&TC website. (more…)

The 22-yard-tall Peace Arch stands between the city of Blaine in Washington state, and the city of Surrey in the province of British Columbia, demarcating the boundary between the United States of America and the Dominion of Canada. The monument, built in 1921, commemorates the 1814 Treaty of Ghent re-establishing peace between the United States and the British Empire.

Or, What £40,000 Gets You in Today’s World

A

MONG THE MANY changes which the Rt. Hon. David Cameron MP has wrought in his ten months as leader of the Conservatives one of the most public is the change of the party’s emblem. The flaming torch is out and the solid oak is in, at a cost of £40,000 to Conservative Central Office (according to the Times). There are three slightly different designs of the tree for the UK-wide, Scottish, and Welsh parties. Previously, the national party used the ‘flaming torch of liberty’ logo while the Scottish party used a blue lion rampant and Wales had its rather comely red-white-and-blue dragon with fire pouring forth from its mouth. The former logo was the ‘flaming torch of liberty’, which only entered into usage in the 1980’s under Mrs. Thatcher. In its place, we find instead an oak tree with healthy greenery on its limbs and a trunk made out in the traditional Tory blue. (more…)

An old Dutch gable complete with old Dutch vrouw gazing miserably from the window. Albany County, New York, 1930’s.

The form of brick course on the gable is known as ‘mouse-tooth’ and is found primarily in Holland, East Anglia, and the Hudson Valley of New York, though also here and there in the American South.

AND SO, THE ONWARD march of progress continues. Yale University’s old Adee Boathouse on New Haven harbor is to face the wrecking ball to make way for traffic improvements to the Pearl Harbor Memorial Bridge which carries Interstate 95 across the Quinnipiac River. Despite some quite extraordinary plans to physically cut the building from the shore and float it across to the opposite side of the river, it now appears that the boathouse is to be demolished. (more…)

ONE THING WE greatly enjoyed about the Scotsman in its pre-tabloid days was that they often deemed St Andrews social events worthy of coverage in their august pages. It was a source of pride to see ‘the national newspaper’, a respectable broadsheet, covering events at the oldest university in the land (which we are proud to call our own). Naturally, once the conversion to tabloid size was complete, we were rarely heard of again, which was a little saddening. The Scotsman is not what it used to be —a beautiful, well-designed, informative respectable newspaper— but it still manages to print some thoroughly worthwhile articles which is more than can be said of any other Scottish daily. (One need only point out two articles by Prof. Haldane, c.f. here and here, recently posted on this site).

“…when the diehards decided to totter the one and a half miles back to toon on foot.” Sounds familiar.

Admittedly, most of the events covered were organised by the Kate Kennedy Club, which seems to take pride in the sheer vulgarity and tastelessness with which they advertise many of their events. (This is only slightly mitigated by their superb running of the annual Kate Kennedy Procession). Still, we enjoyed the Scotsman‘s coverage and wish it had continued. I only bought the Scotsman on occasion after the switch, but often gave the Common Room’s copy a browse when I lived in St. Salvator’s. (Its Sunday edition, Scotland on Sunday is worth buying for Gerald Warner alone).

Here are a few bits and pieces clipped from the Scotsman for your perusal:

‘Undampened spirits take the party indoors‘ / Lumsden Club garden party moved indoors on account of the rain. (I didn’t go).

‘High jinks and low cuts at Kate Kennedy’s‘ / This covered the Kate Kennedy Procession dinner which takes place at the Old Course Hotel on the evening following the procession. This particular year I was in attendance myself and recall commiserating with Michelle Romero, that charming daughter of Venezuela, about the troubled state of her native land. I was their with our favorite Dane, Sofie von Hauch, and my flatmate, a member of the KK who wishes to remain unnamed on this site. Will Lyons couldn’t make the dinner himself, so he sent ‘K‘ up instead, accompanied by ‘society photographer Z‘ whom I ran into while we were on our way out.

‘Maltesers set ball rolling for charity‘ / The 2004 Knights of Malta Ball, not covered by this website because it did not exist at the time. It was a good time, especially so because I had three friends over from the States. Yalie Adam Brenner was doing his semester abroad at St Andrews at the time, and fellow Old Thorntonian Clara de Soto popped over from Boston College for the weekend with her good friend Katie Cordtz of Atlanta. The four of us together with Michelle Romero and the aforementioned unnamed flatmate of mine piled into a cab and made the hour’s journey to Edinburgh for the soirée. Poor Adam, though. Towards the latter part of the evening Archie Crichton-Stuart, an exceptionally amusing Edinburgh student, and his friend Ramsay forced Adam to consume the significant remnants of a bottle of house red. It all went down swimmingly, but came back up on the cab ride back to Fife. Freddy McNair, who was recently nearly killed by an incompetent gurkha on a training ground, sat at the table next to ours, I recall. (Also, in the lower right-hand corner of the clipping you can spy the face of our good friend Ricky Demarco peering out from an unrelated article).

Previously: Another Broadsheet Bites the Dust

Chumley’s Launch Party for ‘Forgotten New York’ Book

AS I GROW more and more cantankerous, my tolerance for evening trips down to Mannahatta declines, but on occasion there’s an event which would be a crime to miss. Last Thursday, Dawn Eden and I popped down to Chumley’s, the old speakeasy on Bedford Street in the West Village, for the shindig launching Kevin Walsh’s brilliant book, Forgotten New York: Views of a Lost Metropolis. (Kevin reports on the party here). I’ve been following Kevin’s Forgotten New York website for years now, and it has earned an unquestionable rank as one of my favorite sites ever (though, shamefully, I’ve never been on one of his legendary ‘Forgottentours’). The author himself was on hand, naturally, and I also enjoyed meeting a number of very kind people who are as fond of Forgotten New York as I am.

The Man of the Hour himself: Kevin Walsh (in glasses).

While Dawn and Kevin are familiar friends (she even gets a mention in the book’s acknowledgements), I had never before had the privilege of meeting this great chronicler of quinqueboronian miscellany. He is very much like his website: simple and brilliant. Happily, I got my complementary copy of the book personally inscribed, though I quite presumptuously upbraided him for only mentioning Audubon Terrace in passing (c.f. FNY: ‘I Can’t Drive 155’) while I believe it is worth a Forgotten page of its own. (Naturally, I have a post slowly developing on Audubon Terrace, which I believe is one of the most beautiful public spaces in all New York, as well as one of the most underappreciated).

No, the camera isn’t smudged; an angelic haze follows Dawn wherever she goes.

But enough of the fun, how’s the book? Well I love it. It’s emphasis is on breadth rather than depth, since it’d be impossible to reproduce the entire contents of the encyclopedic website in a mid-sized paperback book. I view the book in two regards: first, as a handy basic guide referencing the variety of forgotten, unnoticed, and underappreciated sites around the Five Boroughs; and second, as a good jump-start companion to the more thoroughly informative website.

Take, for example, the Lent Riker Smith House out in Queens. Browsing through the book we see the entry on the ‘Lent Riker Smith Homestead’ which gives us two paragraphs of information. Enough to whet the appitite and plant the seed of intrigue, but when we check out the website’s entry on the house we get much, much more… and in color, to boot. I hope readers not yet familiar with the website will use the book as a springboard, but I also hope that we will be gifted with updated editions of the book in years to come, with added features.

Buy the book. Aficionados of forgotten-ny.com will appreciate a version of the familiar in dead-tree form, while the uninitiated will find it extremely useful as a foundation for appreciating Gotham’s numerous nooks and crannies. Kevin Walsh has done a great service to all those who have a love for the Big Apple.

The Manhattan Muncipal Building (topped by Civic Fame) with the Hall of Records to the left.

ONE OF THE finest buildings in all New York is also one of the least-appreciated and most forgotten. The old Police Headquarters at No. 240 Centre Street was built in 1909 on a triangular lot in what was then solidly Little Italy. Arguably, it is today located in the ever-expanding Chinatown, but real estate brokers usually describe its location non-ethnically as Soho, just on the cusp of the area which is increasingly (and most irritatingly) known as NoLIta, ‘North of Little Italy’.

From the basement shooting range to the rooftop observation deck, the building was designed in the monumental Beaux-Arts style by the firm of Hoppin & Koen, “to impress both the officer and the prisoner with the majesty of the law.” The New York Times wrote that “its grandeur contrasted utterly with the little buildings and crooked streets around it.”

The older old Police Headquarters, where reformer Teddy Roosevelt held court as Police Commissioner, was located nearby on Mulberry Street and when the nerve center of the N.Y.P.D. shifted to Centre St. between Broome and Grand, the gun shops, cop saloons, and police reporters followed suit. One restaurant across the street was simply called ‘Headquarters’. With its oak bar and ceiling of carved wood, the ‘Headquarters’ restaurant became a particular favourite among the higher brass of the N.Y.P.D. According to popular lore, a tunnel was actually constructed connecting the restaurant with the actualy Police HQ, in which a number of the Boys in Blue used to enjoy a drink during the trying days of Prohibition. (more…)

A WEEK AGO AFTER the 11 o’clock Sunday Mass at St. Agnes, Dino Marcantonio, Matt Alderman, and I stood in front of the church and fantasized about how we would fix the old place. Well, perhaps ‘old’ isn’t the right word for the place. While the parish was founded in the 1840’s, the current church building only dates from the late 1990’s, built after the old Victorian edifice was consumed by fire. As for design, its heart is in the right place, but as they say the Devil is in the details. The interior is marred by quite obviously large joints between component parts of arches and cornices and the exterior just looks fake. Is craftsmanship dead? No, but it helps to search it out instead of accepting just any old thing.

At any rate, Matt Alderman has thrown together these esquisses of what his St Agnes would look like, and it’s all rather Austrian. (more…)

OUR GOOD FRIEND Tori Truett sends greetings from Buenos Aires where she is visting relatives and her salutation sparked a number of memories from my all-too-short time down there. One of these memories was being relieved upon by a bird whilst pottering about the market of San Telmo one afternoon (it remains the only time I have suffered the indignity of such an aerial bombardment). The good city, however, has more beautiful buildings than the Big Apple, both in quality and quantity. Their good buildings are better than ours, but then their ugly buildings are even uglier. (As terrible as the Whitney Museum is, I doubt it matches the Biblioteca Nacional for sheer vulgarity). (more…)

Leftist Italian Writer, Atheist, Defender of the West, Sometime New Yorker, Once Made the Ayatollah Laugh

Oriana Fallaci, that indomitable and cantankerous Italian, has finally succumbed to cancer in her native land. When she first learnt of her cancer years ago, she kept smoking and refused to treat it because she had “too much writing to do”. Later, when it became difficult to eat solid foods, she drank champagne instead. Her 1972 interview with Henry Kissinger was described by him as “the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press”.

While an ardent leftist, she was an unrepentant foe of what she saw as the Islamic colonization of Europe. Her diatribes against the Muslim immigrants who habitually pissed on the walls of Florence cathedral earned her the ire of many, and legal proceedings were initiated against her in France. The liberal commentator Christopher Hitchens described her work as “an example of how not to write about Islam”. She began writing her infamous The Rage and the Pride, a book teeming with passion and righteous indignation, on September 11, 2001 at her home in New York.

Fallaci said she felt encouraged when Cardinal Ratzinger, another thinker who warned against Western self-loathing, was elected pope. “I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger,” she wrote. The Telegraph reports that the Holy Father granted her a private audience a number of months ago, on the condition that never disclose its contents.

Oriana Fallaci will be buried tommorrow in the family tomb in the Protestant Cemetery in Florence. There will be no funeral; I hope a priest will say a mass for the repose of her soul.

Daily Telegraph obituary
Times of London obituary
‘La journaliste Oriana Fallaci est morte’, Le Figaro

The New Yorker featured a good profile of Fallaci in its June 6, 2006 issue, ‘The Agitator’ by Margaret Talbot.

THE RECENT PURCHASE for the Neue Galerie of Gustav Klimt’s 1907 ‘Adele Bloch-Bauer I’ (above), alledgedly for a record-breaking price of $135,000,000, gives me the perfect opportunity to write a post on the eponymously recent addition to New York’s coterie of art museums. Since its 2001 opening, the Neue Galerie has resided in the handsome 1914 beaux-arts mansion on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 86th Street, designed by Carrère and Hastings (of New York Public Library fame) for industrialist William Starr Miller and later inhabited by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III. In the time since the construction of No. 1048, the rest of Fifth Avenue has undergone a lamentable transformation from a boulevard of beautiful townhouses and mansions to an avenue predominantly consisting of apartment buildings. While one appreciates the inoffensive design of the pre-war buildings on Fifth, there remain a number of thoroughly opprobrious modern interlopers which offend the graceful avenue. One can’t help but pine for Fifth Avenue before the mansions came down, but we can at least give thanks for holdouts like the Neue Galerie. (more…)

The fair-minded, independent observer would look at the figures above and think to himself “Interesting, the proportion of Asian students is on the rise, while that of White, Black, and Hispanic students is generally in decline”. However the racialists (I will not use the more loaded term of ‘racist’, though the meaning is exactly the same) at the New York Times can only see the Black and Hispanic decline, captioning the chart ‘The share of black and Hispanic students New York City’s three most elite specialized schools has declined’.

And why no chart depicting the racial make-up of the also public selective Hunter College High School? Is it, by some unknown criterion, not in the same league or perhaps the proportion of black and Hispanic students there actually rose? The Times reader is left uninformed as to the greater picture, but suitably inculcated in racialist thinking.

Gothamist’s Jen Chung notes the decline is “in spite of the city’s best efforts to encourage [Black and Hispanic students] to apply and attend” while City Councilman Robert Jackson ponders “”Is it institutional racism or is it something else?”.

Could it perhaps be that the racial makeup of the city’s elite public high schools is subject to (quel horreur!) occasional fluctuations? What is the racial makeup of an elite public high school “supposed” to be? Here’s a concept worth considering: how about giving the students in selective public high schools the best education on offer and admit students based purely on a meritocratic standard which does not descriminate by sex, race, class, or creed? Just a thought.

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