New-York Historical Society Gets New Face
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.
On April 24, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission approved a proposal by the New-York Historical Society to alter its designated-landmark façades on Central Park West and on West 77th Street. In the grand scheme of things, the alterations, though I may prefer they not be made, will not do sufficient damage for me to get very exercised about them. (I will leave for another time the society’s plan for a modern high-rise to be built atop the Central Park West building.) Still, the proposed changes do tell us a good deal about the fate of one of the city’s most important institutions, and about architectural culture in New York today.
The New-York Historical Society has, under the presidency of Louise Mirrer, reinvigorated itself in ways that only a few years ago one could scarcely have imagined. The two slavery exhibitions, as well as outstanding exhibitions (drawn largely from the society’s remarkably deep collections) of watercolors by John James Audubon and paintings by the artists of the Hudson River School, are exactly what we should expect and get from the society. Right now, exhibitions on Asher Durand and Clara Driscoll both rank as must-sees. That the society has been offering up a steady diet of such riches is one of the happiest things in New York in recent years.
It is all the better for being a long-hoped-for fulfillment of mission for a long-troubled institution. Not long ago, we worried the society might not make it — and there was talk that it should merge its collections with those of the Museum of the City of New York. The latter museum had a recent blockbuster of its own with “Robert Moses and the Modern City,” so maybe this town is big enough after all for two history museums.
The New-York Historical Society dates from 1804, making it New York’s oldest museum. The society’s Central Park West building is in a severe variant of the Beaux-Arts idiom, a kind of flattened-out version of Henri Labrouste’s influential Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris. It’s that severity that came to concern those who run the society.
Edward York and Philip Sawyer, whose firm ranks among the best in American architectural history, designed a very good building that was only partially erected in 1904. The design called for a long, rusticated base, set with severe, but beautifully proportioned, rectangular windows. Above the base rose a stately Ionic colonnade — the Ionic being the typical choice for places of learning. The design was finished off with slightly projecting, distyle end pavilions. Missing in 1904 were the end pavilions, so that the building had an unfortunately truncated appearance.
In 1937, a talented firm, Walker & Gillette, added the pavilions, but in a much starker design than York & Sawyer had called for. Perhaps it was because of the Depression, but these additions on the north and south ends along Central Park West lacked York & Sawyer’s columns, windows, and rich moldings. To the extent the façade has a forbidding or chilly appearance, it’s Walker & Gillette’s doing.
Yet in remedying this chilliness, the society and its architects, Platt Byard Dovell, have not addressed the Walker & Gillette pavilions at all, but rather gone after York & Sawyer’s rusticated base. The windows on either side of the doorway are to be lengthened to full entrances, and glassed in. In addition, two large display panels, set on bases, are to be placed on either side of the (expanded) entrance stairs between each set of unaltered windows. It may not be worth getting exercised about, but the design does considerable damage to the best thing the façade has going for it, which are its good proportions.
I would have loved to see the society hire a classically trained architect who would have recast the façade to something closely approximating York & Sawyer’s original design. It, first of all, would have meant getting rid of those icy pavilions. And the entrance in the original design was more richly embellished, with ornamental ironwork and flanking statuary.
I certainly don’t begrudge the society its desire to create a more welcoming building. I just wonder if it hasn’t missed an opportunity to recover something historic.
