Abroad in New York
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
I have lately been hired to write the text for a book of paintings by Childe Hassam (1859-1935), and so have had the pleasure of poring over Hassam’s paintings, not least his beguiling paintings of Union Square. It was thus with a headful of Hassamiana that I found myself in Union Square at twilight one day recently.
The lowering sky in New York, as dusk veils the city, produces the most beautiful light known to man. It’s made even more beautiful by the shimmering limestone walls of many of our buildings, and by the city lights coming on. For fleeting moments buildings are etched distinctly against the sky, even as the veil of dusk allows electric lights to stand out. It can stop you dead in your tracks.
Winter brings a special frisson as this festival of lights coincides with rush hour. No place these days rushes more than Union Square, the unexpected epicenter of fashionable life in New York. Sometimes I am as caught up in the rush as anyone. But on this day I stood on the sidewalk in front of Whole Foods Market, and let the rushing pedestrians stream around me.
Street vendors from at least four continents hawked their wares along the curbside of the sidewalk, channeling the pedestrian hordes close to the buildings, where they collided on the perpendicular with shoppers alighting from stores. The rush became a slam dance. Normally, this agonizes me: If only people put their cell phones away and stayed to the right, I think, this would rush like a mountain rapids. But this night it didn’t bother me at all; in fact it turned me on, as I gazed northward across the square.
Straight ahead was George Washington, looking gorgeous. To the right, Zeckendorf Towers, which I hate but at this moment seemed absolutely right. Righter still, just north, stood the square’s stateliest building, Henry Bacon’s Union Square Savings Bank. Most right of all was the exuberantly mansarded shaft of the old Guardian Life Building, its outsize rooftop neon sign now proclaiming “W Union Square Hotel.” The odd pinwheel subway kiosks in the square seemed to spin as they sucked in and disgorged as many pedestrians in ten minutes as enter Rochester in a day. To the left and north rose the spindly stalks of the Bank of the Metropolis and the exotic-Moorish Decker Piano Building.
Behind and all around me I could feel an electric current through my body, a current generated by the crowds washing over me as dusk washed over Manhattan, and by the gaudy electric signs of the stores – Whole Foods, Forever 21,Virgin Megastore, Shoemania – that were as stores have ever been in New York, loud and crowded and the heartbeat of the city.
I thought, here are individual elements that I may like or deplore. But all that mattered was: Would Childe Hassam have wanted to paint Union Square in 2006? Yes, he would have. That thought gave me great comfort.
