Because these posts might interest a wider audience (our children?) I submit
them to this distinguished forum:

    Original mail from Mark Rabinowitz:

Christopher,
I met with someone recently who lives at this 1960's era building.  It
reminded me that the carriage drive (taxi turnaround) in the front is
decorated with 2 copper lamps which are exact matched for lamps mounted on
either side of the Hans Christian Andersen statue in Central Park at the
model boat basin.  Those are listed in Parks files as being original 19th
century street lamps from Copenhagen donated by the Danish Government at the
time of statue installation. The owners wondered why these lamps, so out of
character for the building, would have been re-installed there.  The
lampposts are not the same as those in Central Park but the lanterns are
exact matches.  Any thoughts?

Mark

    Reply:

No thoughts, except that, to paraphrase Art Linkletter, "modernists do the
craziest things".  Taking some "ye olde" item and sticking it down on a
windblown plaza is actually a fairly common 1960's practice - at 1050 Fifth
(1959, nec 86th & Fifth) Bernard Spitzer salvaged some of the marble and
ironwork from the old Morton Plant house on the site (1922, designed by Guy
Lowell) and plunked it down in his lobby, quite visible from the street.  Tom
Mellins has observed that modernists actually liked decoration, they just
liked to concentrate it all in one glob on an otherwise blank facade - like
the Wheeler Williams sculpture on the front of the old Parke-Bernet building
(across from the Carlyle Hotel on 76th and Madison) and the Paul Manship
plaques on the Coliseum at Columbus Circle.

Seen any anchors in NYC lobbies?

Sign me,  Owen Jones