Park Avenue, by James Trager
Brookhiser, Richard
o ne hundred and fifty years ago, trains running south to New York along the path of what would become Park Avenue frequently killed wandering cows. One hundred years ago, the nascent street had a...
...Since the homeless, and the countermeasures that have been necessary to discourage them, have made Grand Central Terminal all but useless as a place where a ticket-holder can wait at ease for a train, their inclusion in this book is altogether appropriate...
...the New Republic saw it as a fruit of "the mass production of millionaires...
...The Harold I. Pratt House, at 68th Street, built for the youngest son of a kerosene magnate, became the headquarters of the Council on Foreign Relations: the curve of a class, from acquisitiveness, to responsibility, to impotence, in one address...
...One emanated from Bauhaus...
...Those who live by government favors, die by the favors given to competitors...
...William Henry Vanderbilt, his son, when asked if he wasn't running a particular train for the benefit of the public, replied famously, "The public be damned...
...Park Avenue is a monument first of all to mind, only second to money—however many puny-minded legatees inhabit it...
...But then I don't have to do the food shopping...
...We meet names Fitzgerald would have hesitated to invite to Jay Gatsby's: Alfred Coster Schermerhorn, Tibor de Nagy, Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel...
...I am working for my stockholders...
...Paul Wallahora, a doorman at 90th Street, had been working there, as of last year, since 1928 (talk about feudalism...
...Van Derbilt bought city councilmen and state legislators like so many potatoes, in order to obtain land and rights of way, thus proving that sweetheart deals are not new to city politics...
...But what buildings, what tenants...
...7. She went to court to keep her number, and lost, though the Social Register never used the hated innovation, giving her address as "northeast corner of Park Avenue and 34th Street...
...The gross bulk of the Pan Am Building was reared over the shed area north of the terminal...
...Let 'em plunk, a libertarian would say...
...When railroads Richanl Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a columnist for the New York Observer...
...Five years later, Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building became the next notable structure in the new style...
...Harold, who codified the rules of contract bridge and defended the America's Cup three times...
...We meet Martha Bacon, who lived at No...
...He cut the time of a trip from New York to Chicago in half, and left a fortune as large as the cash on hand of the federal government...
...After that, the blood ran thin, but Vanderbilts still pop up in Trager's tale: William K., Jr., who collected marine specimens in the Galapagos...
...The star map on the concourse ceiling depicts 2,500 stars...
...24.95 Richard Brookhiser THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 45...
...Albert Kobler, an Austrian immigrant who edited William Randolph Hearst's American Weekly, built himself a little apartment building at 75th Street...
...The Canadian distiller who owned Sea-gram's gave the job of designing the building to Mies at the insistence of his daughter, who had studied architecture at Vassar...
...T he bigger blow was the collapse of 1 the railroad business...
...We can barely live with the masterpieces of the International Style...
...You might think this austere strength, this ugly beauty, is terribly severe," she said...
...Think of that the next time you're snarled there in rush hour...
...PARK AVENUE: STREET OF DREAMS James Trager/Atheneum/294 pp...
...One hundred years ago, the nascent street had a brewery, a piano factory, and tenements full of Irish immigrants...
...They do reflect the bluntness of money and power, and while people seem to be tiring of the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building, the Pool Room still thrills me...
...It glossily sheds human comment...
...Penn Station was never as natural and simple a thing as Grand Central...
...The first thing to say about the new architectural mode," wrote John Updike, when he was doing "Talk of the Town," "is that it leaves one with little to say...
...Trager correctly identifies the villains: the New York Thruway, and the St...
...That's why I'm a conservative...
...It is user-friendly to boot...
...There will always be ugly buildings...
...And yet the progeny of these structures is monstrous...
...At times, his book reads like a list of buildings and tenants...
...Mercury, Hercules, and Minerva float in Indiana limestone over the main facade: "a monument," in the words of Whitney Warren, the architect, "to the glory of commerce . . . supported by moral and mental energy...
...Astor's ballroom...
...FT he Vanderbilts and the railroad 1 empire they built, the New York Central, owned much of the real estate in the heart of the avenue, and their decision, pressed on them by the city, to sink and electrify their tracks allowed the avenue to develop...
...New York has other streets as renowned —Broadway, Wall Street—but they are renowned for activities: entertainment, money making...
...Cornelius van Derbilt (that was the way he spelled it for most of his life) was born on Staten Island and made his first fortune in ferries...
...Lawrence Seaway...
...We meet Andrew Haswell Green, goo-goo reformer and trustee of this and that, who was shot dead, at the age of 83, on the stoop of his house by a jealous gunslinger who mistook him for the wrong octogenarian...
...One has someone to do such things...
...came in, he shifted his field of operation...
...James Trager strives to pack all its history and its resonance between two covers...
...1 Park until the city decided to extend the area designated by the avenue two blocks south, thus boosting her residence to No...
...But another resident found that "when the chips were down and she had to have brandied apricots at 11:30 p.m., `by golly, Mr...
...I am of two minds about these buildings...
...his unit had an onyx and gold bath, a tapestry of Cardinal Woolsey's, and a dining room ceiling copied from the Uffizi...
...Grand Central survived, but suffered indignities...
...Park Avenue became famous as the embodiment of a state of being: being rich...
...The New York Central merged with the Pennsylvania Railroad, only to go bankrupt...
...Fifty years ago, Fortune called it "a spine of metropolitanism...
...Trager includes a chapter on "the other Park Avenue"—Spanish Harlem, and the homeless...
...We meet Ward McAllister, who was in the Clarendon Hotel on Park Avenue South, then Fourth Avenue, when he said there were only 400 people in New York society (the number that could fit into Mrs...
...But their greatest contribution to its opulence was Grand Central Terminal, which manages simultaneously to be as big as a steel mill-33.7 miles of underground track, forty-eight platforms—and imposing as a palace...
...In search of still more cash, the railroad proposed to plunk another tower over the terminal itself...
...But the most important people we meet, as far as the avenue's development is concerned, are Vanderbilts...
...It is, and yet all the more beauty in it...
...You get off a train," wrote the architecture critic Paul Goldberger, "and all you do is walk...
...Robert J. Cuddihy, who launched the Literary Digest, financed a building at 89th Street, because other co-ops wouldn't let in Catholics...
...Along the way, Penn Station was demolished...
...But he simply turned around and bankrupted them first...
...In 1952, Lever House introduced glass to Park Avenue...
...The pompous sculptures gesturing over 42nd Street, he said, "attest that this great enterprise has grown and exists not merely from the wealth expended, nor by the revenue derived, but by the brain and brawn concentrated upon its development...
...But every building, it seems, yields a paper in sociology...
...What we need are ugly buildings we can live with...
...Neither is treachery: twice rivals bribed the poll to revoke their favors, so that van Derbilt would go bankrupt...
...the sixty largest shine with the correct celestial magnitude...
...And human contact...
...In 1984, Kyu-Sung Choi, an ambitious Korean, opened a deli across the street from Kobler's old digs, and Trager wisely turns the story over to William Geist, who covered it for the New York Times...
...Choi had them.' " This altar to the worship of industry and its rewards, this hymn to the heroism of getting and spending, felt two shocks in the postwar world...
...I don't like it being here," one old, minked lady told Geist...
...But I would give the last word to Whitney Warren...
Vol. 23 • July 1990 • No. 7
