[log in to unmask] writes:
> This must be the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. No kidding, this was
> the *original* Hall of Fame from which all other Halls of Fame are mere
> knockoffs, and yes, it's in the Bronx. It went through some bad times
> when NYU abandoned the campus, but it's starting to be appreciated again.
No, it's not the Hall of Fame, it's the Library behind the Hall of Fame. The
Hall of Fame, a half-circle outdoor colonnade has bronze busts of famous
Americans. The Gould Library (which is the subject of the application I
originally cited) is the adjacent dome-topped structure (sort of like Low
Library at Columbia, but 3x as elegant) which has a series of 3/4size plaster
statues ringing the top walkway of the rotunda, 80 feet up. The (plaster)
statues are of the usual famous dead white whales (Shaman, ONEcat, Twybil,
Mary Julep, etc.) and are a leettle beet shaky on their pedestals. With the
number of neighborhood kids who find their way up their, it's surprising that
they haven't taken swan dives.
Two Nobel-quality articles on the two buildings follow this commercial
message (hey, polygon, note telephone number at end of second story).
Sign me, Brought To You By Our Sponsor
September 27, 1992, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
HEADLINE: Streetscapes: The Busts in the Hall of Fame;
Crusty Green Yields To a Uniform Brown
BYLINE: By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
HOW do you like your heros, fossilized or face to face? That could fairly
sum
up the issue drawn by the work going on at the Hall of Fame for Great
Americans,
a long neo-Classical walkway of bronze busts.
The hall is on New York University's old uptown campus at 181st Street and
Sedgwick Avenue, now Bronx Community College. Almost all of its 98 busts have
been stripped of their crusty, irregular green finish and given new, uniform
brown patinas to make them both recognizable and accessible.
One problem: As works of art, they have been severely damaged.
The hall was conceived in the 1890's by N.Y.U.'s chancellor, Henry
McCracken,
who moved the college from the Washington Square campus to a new one in the
Bronx. The 500-foot-long limestone colonade, designed by Stanford White, was
opened in 1901 at the western edge of the campus overlooking the Harlem River
and Manhattan.
Spaces between the square piers were reserved for inscribed tablets and
busts
of famous native-born Americans who have been dead at least 10 years. A
committee of judges made the selections, confirmed by the N.Y.U. Senate. In
the
first of many periodic elections, Washington came in first with 97 votes,
followed by 28 men like Eli Whitney, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert E. Lee.
Busts have been added intermittently and many are by America's most
prominent
sculptors -- Daniel Chester French, Evelyn Longman, A. Stirling Calder and
others. The last elections were held in 1976 and the Hall of Fame has always
struggled to find interested groups to contribute the sculpture itself.
Franklin
D. Roosevelt was elected in 1973 but his bust was installed only this July at
a
cost of $10,000.
N.Y.U. ultimately abandoned its Bronx campus and the Bronx Community
College
took over both the buildings and the operation of the Hall of Fame.
It sounds corny and boring, but a trip down the long walk can be inspiring
in
a grand way. The plaques are filled with old-fashioned words like honor, duty,
purity, glory, liberty and reason. If you are beyond being thrilled by the
words
of, say, the Declaration of Independence, you will probably find the
inscriptions silly.
Ralph Rourke, the part-time director, is equally inspiring. He talks of how
Dr. William Gorgas's attack on yellow fever relates to the current AIDS
epidemic, of how Alexander Graham Bell's invention opened thousands of jobs
for
women or of how Eli Whitney's cotton gin inadvertently gave the faltering
institution of slavery a boost.
It is not just dead white males -- Susan B. Anthony, George Washington
Carver
and others are included -- but in a television age, Mr. Rourke's efforts to
revitalize the Hall of Fame are really heroic.
Now the William A. Hall Partnership is planning to restore the Guastavino
tile ceiling, but the most obvious work has been undertaken since this spring
by
the Cavalier Renaissance Foundry of Bridgeport.
ALL but seven busts have been pried off their bases and blasted with walnut
shells or treated with acid to remove the black staining and green patina
common
to weathered outdoor bronze. They have been repatinated and sealed to a
uniform
coppery brown. Mr. Rourke notes that with the new, uniform patina the busts
are
recognizable as human beings, as indeed they are (Mark Twain, one of the seven
unrestored busts, looks like he was born without eyes).
Mr. Rourke says that children, especially, can see the human being depicted
in the brown, even finish. The work on the 90 busts cost about $40,000. But
these are works not only of historic, but also of artistic significance. Three
independent conservators approached by the writer, Douglas Kwart, John Scott
and
Steven Tatti, expressed concern about the process.
Mr. Kwart, an object conservator in Yonkers, says the original patinas
certainly varied widely, depending on composition, foundry and artist, from
black to brown to gold and even green. He adds that many sculptors consider
the
green patina part of the work of art. Mr. Scott, director of the New York
Conservation Center, says the green patina is not a cause of deterioration and
can be preserved without harm to the object. Mr. Tatti, a sculpture
conservator
who worked on the Statue of Liberty, says less aggressive methods would have
left the green in place, removed harmful deposits and restored the busts to
perfectly recognizable appearance.
Two of the three agree that the current project has removed any evidence of
the original artists' patina. "With minimum intervention, you would at least
preserve the physical evidence for future study," says Mr. Tatti. "Now, you're
out of options; you're left with a 1992 finish."
GRAPHIC: Photo: Part of the Hall of Fame of Great Americans at New York
University's old uptown campus in 1961. (New York University)
Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
March 24, 1996, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
HEADLINE: Streetscapes/Gould Memorial Library;
A Spectacular Interior Designed by Stanford White
BYLINE: By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
FEW people know one of New York's most spectacular interiors, just as
sumptuous as the New York Public Library and just as dazzling as the Chrysler
Building. It's the 1899 Gould Memorial Library, at New York University's old
uptown campus, on 180th Street between Sedgwick and University Avenues -- now
Bronx Community College. The grand, domed reading room, designed by Stanford
White, has long been idle, but now Bronx Community College is making progress
in
returning it to use.
Henry MacCracken, who became Chancellor of N.Y.U. in 1891, was convinced
that the private college on Washington Square needed a campus far north of its
crowded Greenwich Village site. With White, a partner in the architectural
firm
of McKim, Mead & White, he developed a plan for a site on a high ridge of
Bronx
land overlooking the Harlem River, with dramatic, distant views to the
Palisades.
The White/MacCracken plan ringed a large plateau with a sports field,
dormitories and, on the western edge, academic buildings flanking a central
structure for university administrators, an auditorium and a library.
The donor of the new central building was Helen Miller Gould, who had
graduated from N.Y.U. Law School in April 1895 in a class of 48 women in a law
program separate from that for male students. Her father, Jay Gould, was a
ruthless railroad speculator who had amassed millions.
Anyone who knows Charles McKim's contemporary Low Library at Columbia will
be astonished at the comparison with the Gould Memorial Library, designed by
McKim's partner. Although both are domed structures of very similar purpose,
McKim's limestone Low Library is passive, reserved, distant.
By comparison, White's library is full of brilliant flashes of excitement,
like lightning bolts in a grand thunderstorm. On the outside, of straw-colored
brick and limestone, White played with a complex series of forms that bob and
weave around the dome, itself emphasized by a high drum. A rich copper
cornice,
like deeply worked Art Nouveau silver, follows the roofline around the
building.
Behind, the sweeping colonnade of the Hall of Fame and its busts of famous
Americans -- another Helen Gould benefaction -- centers this temple of
learning
and frames the crest of the Palisades, to the west.
Inside, a narrow, Renaissance-style flight of stairs under a high barrel
vault rises until you spill into the huge, round reading room, with a domed
ceiling perhaps 80 feet high. This room is a symphony of mosaics, green Irish
marble, Tiffany glass, statuary and gilt decoration.
The surrounding ring of book stacks is emblazoned with the names of the
most
important creators of our written knowledge. A hundred or more of those names
stare back at you: Cervantes, Confucius, Faraday, Mohamed, Isaiah, on and on.
The ceiling is a mesmerizing swirl of interlocking coffers, leading to what
once
was a central circle of stained glass. In the center of the room, a glass
block
floor originally let light down into the auditorium below, a striking but less
ambitious room.
IN 1969 an arsonist burned out the auditorium, and the fire and smoke broke
through the glass floor and rushed up through the reading room, destroying the
stained glass in the dome by a chimney effect. The next year New York
University
rebuilt the auditorium in a striking but brutal modern style, perhaps designed
by the campus architect of the time, Marcel Breuer.
New York University left its uptown campus in 1973, and for years the Gould
Library has lain largely fallow at what is now Bronx Community College.
Although
the auditorium is used for assemblies, the reading room has been opened only
for
special occasions. For a recent lunch it was filled with metal folding
chairs,
food carts and movable aluminum coat racks.
The surrounding stacks are empty of books, littered with dust and debris,
and
the giant marble columns are stained from water damage. The room has the
tragic
beauty of a great encyclopedia in gilt Morocco leather bindings just tossed
in a
corner. The college has not abused it, but it cries out for real use.
Now the college, part of the City University of New York, has hired the
William A. Hall Partnership to design a roof renovation, and has chosen Platt
Byard Dovell to design a restoration of the basement auditorium -- in part to
recapture the larger seating of the original design.
"The credit is all to Fernando Ferrer," the Bronx Borough President, says
the
architect Paul Byard. The office of Mr. Ferrer, a former landmarks
commissioner
who attended the N.Y.U. uptown campus, is providing about one-third of the
$1.4
million budget. The rest is coming from the City Council.
That will leave the reading room. The four-level warren of stacks that
surrounds the room is so inefficient in modern terms that the building will
never be used as a real library again. But according to the college's dean of
administration, Donald Cancierre, Bronx Community College does have a draft
master plan to build a new library behind the old one, and restore the reading
room as a central introductory area. That plan, though, is years away.
In the meantime this haunting but inspiring space is open on an informal
basis to the public. Information is available through the Hall of Fame office
--
(718) 289-5161.
GRAPHIC: Photos: Parts of the Gould Memorial Library will be restored. But
restoration of the domed reading room as part of a new library is still years
away. (Photographs by George Gutierrez for The New York Times)
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