The Legends Of Cooper Union
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.
“New York Divided,” the exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, makes clear that New Yorkers did not care for Abraham Lincoln any more than they care for George W. Bush. Yet New York was central to Lincoln’s career, as Harold Holzer demonstrated in his book “Lincoln at Cooper Union” (2004). On February 27, 1860, Lincoln appeared at Cooper Union as part of a series of speeches by presidential hopefuls — among whom Lincoln was not a front-runner — from the young Republican Party.
Lincoln delivered a knockout speech that, because he gave it in the nation’s press capital, catapulted him to serious contention for the nomination. (On the same visit to New York, Lincoln had his photograph taken for a campaign portrait by Mathew Brady. The image eloquently conveyed Lincoln’s common origins, thoughtfulness, and kindness.)
The building where Lincoln gave his speech is still very much with us. Indeed, it is one of the most visible buildings in the city. Cooper Union is a large brownstone building, in Italianate style, between 7th and 8th streets where the Bowery and Third Avenue converge, creating one of those isolated triangles such as we find up and down Broadway.
The building rose in 1853-9, with the top two stories added in the 1880s. The original architect, Frederick Petersen, appealed to New York’s and Brooklyn’s philanthropic reformers. Not only did he design this building for the redoubtable Peter Cooper, but Petersen’s best known works after Cooper Union are the brownstone mansions he designed for the beneficent White and Low families on Pierrepont Place in Brooklyn Heights.
Cooper Union is today most famous as an architecture school on the “cutting edge” of design — Daniel Libeskind is but one famous alumnus. Once upon a time, it was where many of the city’s “working stiff” architects went — the designers of speculative apartment buildings and such. These were the architects, including Catholics and Jews, who lacked the pedigree for the exalted commissions, and lacked the funds necessary to attend the École des Beaux-Arts. Tuition at Cooper Union was free and even today it is priced significantly lower than other schools of its caliber.
This was the dream of Peter Cooper (1791-1883), self-made inventor, industrialist, and philanthropist who dedicated himself to improving the lives of the working classes in New York.
Cooper Union was run for many years by Cooper’s son-in-law, Mayor Abram Hewitt, who in 1897 helped found the Museum for the Arts of Decoration, which became part of the Smithsonian Institution in 1969. The museum was housed at Cooper Union until 1976, when it moved to the former Andrew Carnegie mansion at Fifth Avenue and 91st Street, where it is known as the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.
Cooper Union isn’t an architectural masterpiece — a grander building should occupy such a visible location. But it has a somber majesty that puts one in mind of Peter Cooper — and of Abraham Lincoln.
