New York City Major Points of Interest

NEW YORK AQUARIUM

New York Aquarium is set in the marine atmosphere of Battery Park. Housed in a circular three-story building, a converted fort, in the northwest section of the park, it is second in size among the world's forty or more great public aquaria, but first in variety and number of specimens.

In the thirty-six years ending December, 1938, more than seventy-six million visitors passed under the two gilded figures of sea horses carved above the main doorway. The average attendance is about seven thousand a day. On certain days, however, when the fleet has been anchored in the harbor, sailors on shore leave have brought the daily attendance to more than fifty thousand.

According to a recent census the exhibition comprises some 8,877 fishes, 872 invertebrates, 198 reptiles, 65 amphibians, and 12 birds. The stock, subject to frequent change and replacement, is housed in 7 large floor pools, 88 large glass-fronted wall tanks, 83 small tanks, and 29 large reserve tanks containing specimens not on exhibition.

A casual inspection of the aquarium building is sufficient to recognize its original military character and its resemblance to Castle Williams on Governors Island to the south of Battery Park. Built by the Federal Government about 1807, it was known at first as the West Battery and stood on the Capske, a cluster of rocks a short distance from the shore line of that time. It was renamed Castle Clinton after the War of 1812. When it became evident that its worth as a harbor fort was dubious, it was ceded to the city of New York. As Castle Garden it was the scene of notable public and social events. Lafayette was welcomed here in 1824, Louis Kossuth in 1851, and Edward VII then Prince of Wales in 1860. Here Professor Morse demonstrated the telegraph in 1835, and in 1850, under the sponsorship of P. T. Barnum, Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale," made her American debut. An undistinguished bust to the right of the entrance commemorates her success.

In 1855 Castle Garden became the country's chief immigrant station. Here raw Irish were recruited to fill the ranks of Meagher's brigade during the Civil War, and here landed the Italians who swarmed into Mulberry Bend and the Jews who supplied labor power for the garment and cigar lofts of the East Side. From 1855 to 1890, 7,690,606 aliens entered the United States through the Castle Garden station. In the latter year an investigation under Governor Cleveland resulted in the transfer of immigrant reception and care to a commissioner at Ellis Island, and Castle Garden was closed, to be opened six years later as the Aquarium of the City of New York.

In 1902, the operation of the aquarium was assigned to the New York Zoological Society, with the city supplying the funds. Although plans for remodeling were drawn that same year by the famous firm of architects, McKim, Mead, and White, the changes recommended were not made until the 1920's.

The original eight-foot-thick walls, massive bolt-studded doors, and gun embrasures of Castle Clinton remain. The chief change in the exterior has been the addition of a white square-fronted administration and laboratory annex, with an ornamented main entrance, which forms the east facade. The interior of the building has been converted into a gay and pleasant exhibition hall. The rotunda, aisle, and two-level ring of tanks, which follow the old circular walls, unite to form an interesting play of spaces and shapes. Even the radiators have been used decoratively as bases for the columns. The walls are decorated with Charlotte Anne Case's bright ma rine murals.

For thirty-five years Dr. Charles Haskins Townsend served as director of the aquarium. He was succeeded upon his retirement in November, 1937, by Charles M. Breder, Jr., an ichthyologist of note who had served for fourteen years as assistant director and aquarist. Breder introduced important improvements in the complex system of water circulation, aeration, and temperature maintenance necessary to the well-being of the aquarium's ten thousand-odd specimens. Behind the tanks a system of catwalks enables attendants to patrol the building, unseen by the visitor. Three circulatory systems carry 300,000 gallons daily of pure sea water, harbor water, or New York City water to the creatures, according to their various needs. Certain rare tropical varieties are brought to the aquarium in their native water, which is carefully guarded, filtered, and maintained at the temperature to which the fish are accustomed. Temperatures range from 40 F. to 90 F., the brook trout taking the coldest and the lungfish the warmest.

School children, inquiring laymen, and amateur and professional scientists come in throngs to see varieties of fish ranging from the common fresh-water specimens to strange deep-sea monsters, from delicate minnows to frighteningly ugly 3OO-pound groupers. The electric eels, which generate enough current to light a bulb above the tank, are first in popular acclaim ; runners-up are the lacy Siamese fighting fish, hideous green and spotted morays, and grotesque toadfish. In the large pools on the ground floor graceful California sea lions bark and disport themselves before a gallery of enthusiasts. Here also are the enormous sea turtles, penguins from South Africa, seals, turtles, alligators, and crabs. In the many smaller tanks around the balcony perpetual submarine ballets are staged by minute and delicately colored tropical fishes silvery moonfish, blue or green parrot fish, fringe-tailed goldfish, and angel and butterfly fish.

The aquarium operates a fish hatchery that produces millions of tiny food and game fishes, which are deposited in the various waters of the State to grow and breed. Research is carried on in the laboratory and the thousand-volume library. The aquarium is the first stop of visiting ichthyologists from such distant points as London, Paris, and Goteborg, the marine institute at Tel Aviv, and the Australian Museum at Sydney. Director Breder is always on the alert for an advantageous swap, trading, for example, a batch of common horseshoe crabs for some exotic specimens.

The aquarium operates on an annual budget of about eighty-seven thousand dollars, with approximately sixty-seven thousand dollars provided by the city of New York and the balance by the New York Zoological Soriety. After the salaries of a staff of thirty-eight, and maintenance, heating, and repairing costs have been deducted, there is nothing left for the purchase of new specimens. The only funds available for this purpose come from the sale of booklets, post cards, and souvenirs something less than two thousand dollars a year. Wireless operators on ocean freighters obligingly carry to far-off corners of the world castoff clothes, whisky, and other goods given them by the aquarium, and barter them for rare fish to add to the aquarium's collection.

Trinity Church

Broadway and Wall St.

The good Queen Anne, in 1705, gave to the young parish of Trinity Church a grant of land to be used "for the benefit of said Church and other pious uses." The yearly rent stipulated was thirty pounds, "a reasonable request." The farm lay west of Broadway, extending from Fulton to Christopher Street.

Thus Trinity, the first Protestant Episcopal church established in New York, came into ownership of a good section of lower Manhattan and, as a consequence, became possibly the world's wealthiest parish of that denomination.

Compared to the great cathedrals subsequently erected in New York, there is little about the century-old structure, fronting on Broadway and facing into Wall Street, that in any way suggests this great wealth. Yet, for its day it was completed in 1846 the church, designed by Richard Upjohn, one of the famous architects of the period and sponsor of the Gothic Revival mode, doubtless was considered duly impressive. The church is constructed of dark brownstone in a free rendering of perpendicular English Gothic. Although only 79 feet wide and 166 feet long, the build ing is so beautifully proportioned that it holds the attention, even in its present setting, enclosed as it is by high office buildings that would dwarf any less inspired structure. Graceful porches project beyond its side en trances. The main entrance, at the foot of Wall Street, is in the base of the rectangular tower fronting the nave. The tower is surmounted by an octagonal spire with a cross at the top. For years, the spire, attaining a height of 280 feet above the steps, served as a landmark. Both the tower and the spire are of brownstone ashlar, and are exceptionally fine in workmanship. The first "Ring of Bells," a gift from London, was received in 1797, and is the oldest in the city. Others were added and today the chimes of Trinity include ten bells. They were originally intended to be swung, but the difficulty of obtaining competent ringers, and the fact that the public preferred tunes to changes, resulted in their being made stationary. The clappers are connected to a ringing case in the room below the belfry.

Three pairs of bronze doors, at the base of the tower, to the east, north, and south, designed by Richard M. Hunt, the architect, are the gift of William Waldorf Astor as a memorial to his father, the second John Jacob Astor. They are designed with bas-relief decorations in the manner of Ghiberti's doors for the Baptistery in Florence. The main entrance panels were executed in bas-relief by Karl Bitter, and represent symbolic scenes from the Bible, as do the north doors, the work of J. Massey Rhind.

The panels in the south door, designed by G. M. Niehaus, depict Dr. Henry Barclay, second rector of the church, preaching to the Indians in 1739, the consecration of Trinity Church in 1846, and George Washington in St. Paul's Chapel following his inauguration in 1789.

Double rows of carved columns support the groined nave vaulting. Seven white marble panels above the high altar depict scenes from the life of Christ, particularly associated with the Last Supper. The reredos of Caen stone, perpendicular Gothic in style, is divided by buttress forms into three bays, in which are figures of the Twelve Apostles. The stone floor, walls, pillars, pews, and even the glass of the windows almost com pletely filling both walls, are, uniformly, of an even and mellow tone of soft yellow-brown. They have the worn, but unsoiled tint of a well-kept ancient vellum manuscript. In striking contrast to this color scheme, yet not garish, is the brilliant stained-glass window (above and behind the reredos) of burning blue and ruby. Blending harmoniously with these two effects is the warm ivory of the marble in the altar.

All Saint's Chapel, at the west end of the north aisle, is a fine example of the English Gothic style that flourished during the latter half of the fourteenth century. It was designed by Thomas Nash, who also designed the baptistery (near the northeast corner of the chancel). In the latter is a fourteenth-century altarpiece.

The parish came into existence during the reign of King William III, when on May 6, 1697, the charter was signed by Governor Fletcher. Episcopalians in the colony, however, had been holding religious services since the English acquisition of New Amsterdam in 1664, worshiping in a chapel of the fort that stood near the Battery.

The first church, opened in 1698, was destroyed in the fire of 1776. It lay in ruins until 1787, when the church was reconstructed. More than a half century later it was replaced.

From the beginning Trinity numbered among its parishioners the city's most distinguished personages, some of whose descendants still worship there. Many of those early parishioners lie buried in the churchyard which surrounds the building on the north, west, and south sides. Carved in the weathered slabs are inscriptions naming such honored dead as Alexander Hamilton, Robert Fulton, Captain James ("Don't Give Up The Ship") Laurence, Albert Gallatin, William Bradford, founder of the city's first newspaper, the Gazette, and earliest champion of the freedom of the press, and John Watts. The Martyr's Monument, a tall memorial to American patriots who died while imprisoned by the British in New York, stands near the Broadway-Thames Street corner.

Near the iron railing along Broadway on a sunken granite stone is carved the name, Charlotte Temple. Charlotte, said to have been the granddaughter of the Earl of Derby, eloped with an English officer, who brought her to America and abandoned her after the birth of her child. A popular novelist of the day (1790), Sarah Haswell Rowsan, used her story in Charlotte Temple, one of the most widely read novels in the English language.

At noon the cemetery is a retreat for workers from the office buildings of the financial district. During their lunch hour, they sun themselves on the benches along the paths, or on the steps and railings of the porticos.

Trinity is the parent of seven subsidiary chapels: these are not small annexes of the mother church, but rather they include some of the largest and most beautiful church structures in New York. One is old St. Paul's Chapel (see page 98), north of Trinity on Broadway; and another, the one most recently built, is the Chapel of the Intercession, in Trinity Cemetery.

The controlling corporation still owns about one-fifth of the original grant, estimated to be worth about ten million dollars. The remainder was given to church and educational institutions. The acquisition of these vast holdings has furnished a classic example, for reformists and economists, of the social evil of land speculation. As recently as 1938, in the Federal Theater production, ft . . . one third of a nation . . .," a play dealing with housing conditions, the church's history was recalled, from the granting of land to the young parish in 1705 to the municipal investigation of 1894. In the latter year it was revealed that tenement property acquired by the church corporation at the expiration of long term leases comprised a portion of the city's worst slums. The church has since divested itself of its tenement holdings.

BROOKLYN BRIDGE

Brooklyn Bridge, soaring over the East River, is the subject of more paintings, etchings, photographs, writings, and conversations than any other suspension bridge in the world. Uniting the maze of the nineteenthcentury brick and frame residences, factories, and warehouses of the Brooklyn shore and the modern skyscraper district of lower Manhattan, the majestic highway has supplied an extravagant theme to romantic and symbolic fancies. Native artists, including the noted water-colorist John Marin and the abstractionist Joseph Stella, have played many variations upon its graceful catenaries, suspenders, and granite towers; while the poet Hart Crane conceived it in his The Bridge as the dynamic emblem of America's westward march.

During more than half a century of continuous use, the bridge has retained its place as the most picturesque of the sixty-one spans that bind Greater New York into a world metropolis. It was designed in 1867 by John A. Roebling, who had built the bridge at Niagara Falls and the more remarkable one over the Ohio River at Cincinnati. While engaged in drawing the plans for Brooklyn Bridge, Roebling sustained an injury which resulted in his death from tetanus a year before construction began.

His son, Washington A. Roebling, became construction engineer, but he too was injured. From a window of a Brooklyn Heights residence he supervised the construction of the bridge, watching its progress through a telescope.

The bridge was opened to traffic on May 24, 1883, pedestrians being charged a toll of one cent. Six days later a tragedy occurred on the crowded walk. A woman fell down the wooden steps at the Manhattan approach to the promenade, and her screams resulted in a panic in which twelve persons lost their lives and scores were injured.

Unlike the steel towers of the East River bridges that followed, the buttressed towers of this bridge, rising 272 feet above mean high water, are constructed entirely of granite. Expressing the increasing load, they become thicker as they extend downward; and the segmental arches that tie the piers together are buttressed against lateral thrust. The whole design is a superbly clear statement of the contrast between the ponderous compression in the towers and the tight-strung tension of the steel members.

The roadway platform, eighty-six feet in width, is hung on two-inch diameter steel suspenders strung, from two pairs of cables the catenaries sixteen inches in diameter. Each cable is composed of 5,296 galvanized steel wires. (The total length of wire used is 14,357 miles, a distance more than half the circumference of the earth. ) Each is capable of sustaining a live load of 12,000 tons, or a total live load equal to 48,000 tons, the weight of the structural steel in the Empire State Building.

The bridge has an over-all length of 6,0 1 6 feet, and the center of the i, 595. 5-foot channel span is 133 feet above the river at mean high water.

Until the Williamsburg Bridge was completed in 1903, with an over-all length of 7,308 feet, Brooklyn Bridge was the world's longest suspension span.

Among the ingenious methods introduced by the younger Roebling in the construction of the bridge methods which have since exerted considerable influence on engineering technic were the pulley-and-reel system for spinning the cables of the catenaries, the use of semi-flexible saddles as cable rests to provide for expansion and contraction owing to temperature changes, the employment of chains of eyebars in the anchorages and wire wrapping as protective covering for the finished cables, and the cross-lacing of suspenders with stay cables that act as bracers.

The center promenade, a board footwalk twelve feet above the floor of the bridge, is flanked on each side by elevated tracks and one-way, doublelane driveways, which accommodate both trolley and vehicular traffic. The Manhattan approach to the footwalk slopes upward from the damp, gloomy Park Row floor of the BMT terminal opposite City Hall Park. In this dark and rather vague spread, where the streetcar lines crossing the bridge curve into their terminals, are news venders, frankfurter stands, and iron gates, usually closed, leading to the elevated lines overhead. This almost subterranean atmosphere is also characteristic of the Brooklyn approach, which is graded to the Sands Street level of the sprawling BMT terminal structure.

In the Manhattan abutment are wine vaults, suggestive of Roman catacombs. Built in 1876, seven years before the bridge was opened, they were used until recently by a New York department store as a storage place for European liquors. The cellars, entered from 209 William Street, were sealed during Prohibition.

The bridge quickly became popular as a Sunday promenade. Here strolled women in Sunday ruffles, hourglass stays, bustles fringed with everything but bells, and shoes laced up to the kneecap ; gentlemen trussed in broadcloth to the Adam's apple, inquisition collars to the ears, and trousers to the toes. Foot traffic gradually waned, however, with the installation of surface cars on the bridge and with the building of the larger Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Queensboro bridges. The elevated line began operating over the bridge in September, 1883, the surface cars in 1898. The present workday traffic averages about twenty- six thousand vehicles.

The bridge affords a magnificent view of the East River, the harbor, and downtown Manhattan the buildings of the financial district changing their hues during the different hours of the day. Down below, seen from the Manhattan grade, lies the darkness of the old city markets and gloomy warehouses to the south; and on the north, slums, elevated lines, and crooked streets, where one notices horse-drawn vehicles and an old mission with JESUS SAVES painted on the walls in large white blocklettering. Knickerbocker Village, a housing development (see page 115), is set among these slums spreading north from the foot of the bridge.

The apocrypha of Steve Brodie belong among the bridge's more distinctive legends. There are men living who claim they saw Brodie's leap from the bridge in July, 1886, the rescue skiff tossing on the East River, the hero-worshipers who cheered as he climbed to the dock; on the other hand, mention of his name causes many old-time barkeepers to put their tongues in their cheeks. In any event, Brodie has entered the American idiom: to "pull" or "do a Brodie" has come to serve as a synonym for taking a high dive, whether on the stock market, in a love affair, or in the prize ring.

The promenade still draws its visitors, lyrical, noisy, or inarticulate. In the famous "view" of the bay and sky line, tourists encounter the original of a long-familiar picture post-card panorama; while the high arched towers and vast curving cables of the bridge itself are rediscovered daily by amateur camera artists. On summer days old ladies, invalids, Sunday morning strollers, unemployed men, and wandering boys and girls absorb here the indolence of space, sun, and water. Employees of downtown office buildings seek at the bridge during lunch time and after work a session with the outer world. At twilight, the conventional beauty of the setting attains such intensity that even the wisecracks of up-to-date lovers are sublimated. And in the wastes of night, so passionate is the contrast between the deserted and melancholy bridge entrances and the moonlit altitude of the passage itself, that the solitary pedestrian feels himself drawn into association with all the extravagances of the poets.

BELLEVUE HOSPITAL

One of the twenty-six municipal institutions under the supervision of the Department of Hospitals, Bellevue is the oldest general hospital on the North American continent. Probably no other hospital in the world admits so many patients and treats such a diversity of ailments. Contagious cases, however, are transferred to the near-by Willard Parker Hospital. The number of cases for 1938 totaled more than the population of San Francisco: 65,352 admissions and births, 634,242 outpatient visits, and 28,253 ambulance calls.

A city complete in itself, Bellevue covers approximately twelve square city blocks. Its twenty-five buildings contain 102 wards and cost more than twenty-three million dollars. The massive eight-story Psychiatric Hospital at the northwest corner, of clean red brick trimmed with natural gray stone, exemplifies the hospital's program of modernization. A new Administration Building with three chapels is under construction (1939).

Bellevue serves a heavily populated area of the East Side between East Houston and Forty-second Streets, east of Sixth Avenue. Hospitalization, medical care, and clinical treatment are provided without cost to anyone who is unable to pay for them, investigation as to ability to pay being made after, and not before, admission is granted and treatment begun. Bellevue is a free, not a charity, hospital, and according to a city law, it must accept any applicant who resides in its district and requires medical treatment.

The ambulance service operates on a twenty-four-hour basis, and an ambulance and doctor can be dispatched within thirty seconds after a call for aid has been received. Bellevue' s morgue, the official mortuary for New York County, is in the Pathological Building on Twenty-ninth Street. The same building also houses the Medical Examiner's office, where New York's official autopsies are performed, and the headquarters of the Mortuary Division of the city Department of Hospitals. About twenty thousand bodies pass each year through Bellevue's morgue, eighty-five hundred of which are never claimed. All unclaimed bodies are photographed, described, and a docket entered for them at the Police Department's Bureau of Missing Persons. After reposing for two weeks or more in refrigerated vaults of the morgue, some of the cadavers are given to private embalming schools whose students practice in a room adjoining the vaults, and a cer tain number are allotted to medical schools for dissection. The remainder, about 170 a week, are placed in plain, wooden coffins and carried on a barge, up the East River to Potter's Field on Hart's Island (see page 551).

In the new Psychiatric Hospital, the alcoholics, the sexually unbalanced, the hysterical, and the alleged insane are under care. The Psychiatric Division of Bellevue has become a laboratory for the medical and social-service professions in the United States. The "disturbed," or violent, wards utilize none of the old-fashioned, inhumane methods that some hospitals still employ for pacifying psychotics. Though overcrowding detracts from the desired effect, the new building, with its pleasant murals, minimizes the sense of confinement. The Psychiatric Hospital, originally planned to care for 630 patients, was pathetically overcrowded only six months after it was opened in 1936.

The medical departments of three outstanding universities are affiliated with Bellevue: Columbia, Cornell, and New York. A fourth group of doctors and internes not connected with these particular schools is included in an open division. Bellevue's 550 staff doctors, 200 internes, and 400 clinic physicians are, for the most part, either faculty members of these schools or regular hospital employees who are selected by the schools. New York Training School for Nursing, established in 1873 by Bellevue, was the first of its kind in the United States. Its standards have since served as a norm for other schools. The hospital also maintains the Mills Training School for Male Nurses.

Bellevue's list of contributions to medicine is a long and notable one. Its ambulance service, inaugurated on a horse-and-buggy basis in 1869, was the first in the world. Doctors Valentine Mott, James R. Wood, William H. Van Buren and F. H. Hamilton brought the hospital fame through their medical and surgical discoveries. At Bellevue, Dr. Herman Biggs founded the first bacteriological laboratory in the United States, Dr. Lewis A. Sayre pioneered in orthopedics, and Dr. William H. Welch established America's first pathological laboratory. Noted graduates include Dr. William S. Halstead, who first used cocaine as an anesthetic; Dr. Frank Harley, inventor of the electrical surgical saw ; Dr. William H. Gorgas and Dr. Jesse W. Lazear who, with Dr. Walter Reed and others, discovered how yellow fever was transmitted, and eradicated the disease from Cuba and Panama.

Bellevue's history goes back to British New York in 1736, when the city corporation ordered the construction of a "Publick Workhouse and House of Correction" on the site of the present City Hall Park. Infirmary activities were confined to a single room with six beds. To accommodate ever increasing numbers of the needy, new buildings were erected, until by 1811 the hospital section of the workhouse had become its largest department. When further expansion became imperative, Belle Vue Farm, the present site of the hospital, was purchased (1816), and the new group of buildings became known as Bellevue Establishment. Constant increase in population and resultant clinical demands on the hospital during the nineteenth century necessitated frequent additions to and renovations of the plant. Modern Bellevue began in 1908, when it became a part of the "Bellevue and Allied Hospitals." In 1929 the Department of Hospitals of the City of New York was created, with Bellevue as one of its units.

Under the spur of PWA and WPA grants, added to city appropriations, the old Bellevue, with its maze of mid-Victorian buildings of ominous gray, has given place to the group of eight-story structures of brick and stone with granite foundations. The firm of McKim, Mead, and White designed these new buildings with the exception of the Psychiatric Hospital; the architects of the latter were C. B. Meyers and Thompson, Holmes, and Converse. In February, 1938, the C & D Building was opened as a model unit for the treatment of pulmonary diseases. When the new Administration Building is erected, it will complete the group of seven great units making up the new Bellevue.

Architecturally, there is a deliberate suppression, on the exterior, of the functional differences between the various elements and parts of the buildings. The interiors, in contrast, are designed as frank expressions of their uses and of the materials employed, with reliance for effect placed upon tasteful proportioning and choice of color. The walls of the buildings have been decorated with the murals executed under the auspices of the WPA Federal Art Project.

Bellevue, like all large municipal hospitals, is still to some extent the object of fear and rumor, for in handling vast numbers of humanity's underprivileged it naturally has a high death rate. Almost vanished, however, are such once popular superstitions among the poor as that of the "Black Bottle," used to do away with troublesome patients. In the past, charges of unsanitary conditions, a depleted commissary, political graft, and inadequate care by nurses and orderlies had considerable basis in fact. Scandalous conditions at the hospital lack of supplies and often food, vicious surroundings, and untrained female prisoners acting as nurses contributed to a frightful mortality during the cholera plague of 1832, when more than thirty-five hundred New Yorkers died of the disease and a very few who entered Bellevue recovered. Again, the Civil War all but demoralized the work of the hospital. The school for nurses was established after an investigation by public-spirited women disclosed that the nurses "were nearly without exception to the last degree incompetent. ..."

The pesthouse and prison atmosphere of Bellevue's past has been obliterated. Through the years the hospital has steadily improved, and today it ranks as one of the best medical centers in the world. To the average New Yorker, Bellevue Hospital is a reassuring symbol of man's humanity to man. To the poor of the East Side, admission to the hospital often represents a dividing line between illness and good health, life and death. Overcrowding and understanding continue to be the chief difficulties. The new buildings have done much to remedy crowding, but it remains a vital problem to the hospital, which must receive all comers even though it is forced to put up cots in the corridors. Understating has been mitigated by substantial additions to the staff in 1938, bringing the total to 3,200 employees nurses, orderlies, attendants, and others; at the same time, the old twelve-hour shift was cut to eight. Some six hundred WPA workers are assisting in the children's, clerical, and other departments.

ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S CHURCH AND GENERAL ELECTRIC BUILDING

ST. PATRICK S CATHEDRAL

HOTEL SAVOY-PLAZA

DEAD END NEAR SUTTON PLACE

PARK AVENUE AND THE WALDORF-ASTORIA TOWERS

RCA BUILDING, Rockefeller Center

NEW YORK HOSPITAL CORNELL UNIVERSITY MEDICAL COLLEGE

EMPIRE STATE BUILDING

The Empire State Building, 1,250 feet high, is the tallest structure in the world. Seen from a distance it emerges above New York like a great inland lighthouse. The Chrysler Building, second in height, measures 1,046 feet to the tip of the lance; the Woolworth Building, for many years the tallest tower of Manhattan, is only 792 feet. The Eiffel Tower in Paris is 1,0241/2 feet to the top of the flagpole.

The great limestone and steel structure has been called a monument to an epoch the boom years from 1924 to 1929. The building became, as those who envisioned it promised, an internationally known address.

The superb main shaft of the Empire State rises in an almost unbroken line out of the broad five-story base that covers approximately two acres adjoining Fifth Avenue. Atop the shaft, at the eighty-sixth floor level, is the 2oo-foot observation tower a sixteen-story glass and metal extension shaped like an inverted test tube buttressed by great flaring corner piers. Though the design of the tower is pleasing in itself, it has been widely criticized for a lack of unity in its relation to the shaft.

Its architectural importance far transcends the matter of height alone. The design, for which Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon won the gold medal of the Architectural League in 1931, is essentially modern. The great tower walls are composed almost entirely of standardized machine-made parts. Not only the windows but the cast aluminum panels or "spandrels" under them, even the stone column facings and the steel strips that enclose them, are standardized units. The pattern window, spandrel, window, spandrel is repeated without a break for 725 feet. Such a wall treatment is the direct opposite in conception of such early skyscraper buildings as the Flatiron, where each story is adorned with a minor horizontal terra-cotta cornice.

A peculiarity of the Empire State Building is that the windows, instead of being set back into the wall, appear to be flush so that the effect is one of a continuous wall. By this expedient the architects not only avoided gouging the wall into something resembling an immense waffle iron, they also eliminated the need to trim the stone around the openings, thus saving much time and money in construction.

The color scheme of the building, though losing its remarkable first "blond" tone through weathering, is spectacular in early and late sunlight.

The aluminum spandrels and the soft-textured limestone are tinged with gray and lavender, and the silvery sheen of metal on the walls creates an effect of airy lightness.

On Fifth Avenue a monumental but somewhat dull entrance, flanked by heavy stone pylons the full height of the five-story base, opens into a long hall, three stories high and lined with Rellante and Rose Famosa marbles. The high silver-leaf ceiling is painted in metallic colors with geometric patterns suggesting stars, sunbursts, and snowflakes. On the wall opposite the Fifth Avenue entrance is a great brass and aluminum plaque depicting the Empire State under a blazing sun. Subsidiary entrances give access to the building from both Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth Streets.

The entire building is planned around a central core roughly pyramidshaped, containing the utilities and the sixty-seven elevators. Though run at a lesser speed, the self- leveling elevators can rise 1,200 feet a minute. Because of its height, nearly one-third of the whole must be devoted to elevators and utilities. In rentable floor space, the Empire State, with 2,158,000 square feet, ranks among the three largest office buildings in the United States, the others being the Merchandise Mart in Chicago and the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center.

The speed with which the Empire State was built set a new mark in construction efficiency. On October i, 1929, the first truck rolled into the former Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to begin demolition; May i, 1931, the completed Empire State Building was formally opened by Alfred E. Smith, its president. When construction (by Starrett Brothers anfl Eken) was in full swing, an average of four and a half stories were erected every week, and at top speed, fourteen and a half stories in ten working days. Because of lack of sidewalk storage space, the supplying of building materials had to be synchronized exactly with construction speed. The land cost sixteen million dollars, the purchase including the magnificent old Waldorf, which had occupied the site some thirty-five years and had itself cost thirteen million dollars.

In the first five years of its existence, more than four million visited the building's observatories on the 86th and 1O2nd floors, whence, on clear days, a fifty-mile panorama is visible. The city, with its waterways and suburbs, spreads like a relief map a quarter of a mile below; and directions for identifying the various points are marked on the observation terrace. To the south, near the tip of Manhattan, is the Wall Street district. To the southeast lies Brooklyn, and crossing the East River are the Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Brooklyn bridges, from north to south. In the southwest, the Statue of Liberty is outlined, and beyond it lies Staten Island.

To the west are the docks of the Hudson (North) River where ocean liners are berthed ; on the other side of the water is the ridge of the Palisades; and beyond, the flatlands of New Jersey. In the northwest the Orange Mountains dim the horizon far beyond the Palisades ; in the immediate foreground is Broadway, cutting diagonally through the Garment Center and Times Square, and then swerving west and continuing north to Yonkers. The sheer white wall of the RCA Building of Rockefeller Center dominates the foreground directly north ; beyond it lies rectangular Central Park. In the vague distance across the snake-like Harlem River, extends the Bronx.

To the northeast, Fifth Avenue cuts straight through the vista that comprises the skyscrapers of the mid-town section: the view moves clockwise from the hotels of Central Park South and the Plaza to the twin towers of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, then to the gold-leafed tower of the New York Central Building. The Chanin, Chrysler, Daily News buildings and the mass of Tudor City mark the Forty-second Street line to the East River. Welfare Island, with its hospitals, lies under Queensboro Bridge to the northeast, and past the river stretches the borough of Queens, the World's Fair Grounds lying near the north shore. Directly east, the most conspicuous landmark is Bellevue Hospital on the west bank of the river. Initiates visit the tower in the late afternoon, dine in the cafe on the eighty-sixth floor, and stay until the lights of the city come on.

METROPOLITAN OPERA HOUSE

Efforts to provide a new building for the Metropolitan Opera House are made perennially indeed, Rockefeller Center is a by-product of this move ment. Yet, the warehouse-like yellow-brick structure that occupies an entire block on the edge of the garment district, remains the home of the world's foremost opera company: and within its original domicile the opera continues to expand its activities and enlarge its functions.

The opening of the Metropolitan Opera House in 1883 was part of the great wave of artistic endeavor which arose in America in post-Civil War days. The new moneyed aristocracy, assuming in the last decades of the nineteenth century the role of art patron, depended for its aesthetic tutelage on the taste of contemporary European capitals. Immense numbers of paintings, sculptures, and architectural models, both good and bad, were imported. New museums appeared in American cities, and great private collections were initiated.

With all this grandiose expansion of artistic enterprise, there were, however, certain misgivings when the ambitious plans for opera in America were announced. The New York Times wrote that the auditorium envisioned for the presentation of Italian opera was "on a scale of possibly too great magnitude." Its interior would "dazzle the eyes" of an assemblage accustomed to "the primitive surroundings" of the old Academy of Music, its predecessor on Fourteenth Street.

The opera house was designed by J. C. Cady, a prominent architect of the day. That Mr. Cady was without experience in theater construction seemed to matter little ; audiences ever since have paid for his mistakes, as but half the stage can be seen from the side seats of the balcony and fam ily circle. What did matter at the time, especially to the press and to readers of its society columns, was that the opera house had a "Golden Horseshoe" two tiers of boxes and a row of baignoires occupied by the seventy original stockholders, among them the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, and the Goulds.

Henry E. Abbey directed the opera during the first season. At the opening performance Vianesi conducted and Christine Nilsson sang the role of Marguerite in Faust. The Horseshoe was crowded with patrons whose total wealth was estimated at more than five hundred million dollars. Socially the first season was successful, but financially it showed an estimated loss of six hundred thousand dollars, a deficit underwritten by patrons who thus established a precedent.

The following year Dr. Leopold Damrosch, German- American musician (1832-85), became the director. He suggested the introduction of the music of Wagner, then hardly known in New York and considered extremely radical. Wagner's works filled the house with delighted audiences, and incidentally reduced the deficit.

Fire gutted the supposedly fireproof structure in August, 1892. It was quickly rebuilt, and reopened in November, 1893. Ten years later, it was redesigned by Carrere and Hastings, who eliminated the baignoires of the Golden Horseshoe and retained the two tiers of boxes which came to be known as the Diamond Horseshoe. Because of limited funds, the architects chose to treat the entrances and corridors simply and to splurge in the auditorium itself, which was fashioned into a magnificent, spacious hall. The tiers sweep around in great horizontal arcs from the proscenium. Vigorous carved decorations impart a sense of richness to the generous and handsome proportions of the auditorium.

Opera continued to appeal to a large number of opera goers as a spectacle rather than as music. Audiences demanded familiar works Atda, II Trovatore, Faust and, because this exotic business was associated with foreigners in the popular mind, native singers often masqueraded under alien names. (Precedent for this custom was set the first season, when Al wina Valleria [Schoening] sang the role of Leonora in // Trovatore.) Meanwhile the star system, abandoned to some extent through the Wagnerian period, was resumed in 1898 under the directorship of Maurice Grau. During the "golden age of song," names, world-famous then, and still well-remembered, headed the bills: the De Reszkes, Nordica, Scotti, Sembrich, Lehmann, Eames, Calve, Schumann-Heink. Caruso, under the directorship of Heinrich Conried, made a nervous debut in Rigoletto, November 23, 1903. The next year he opened the season in Atda, the first of sixteen consecutive "Caruso opening nights." His last appearance was in Elisir d'Amore; although he suffered from a hemorrhage he insisted on singing and was able to finish an entire act. He died in 1921.

Arturo Toscanini during his tenure as conductor, from 1908 until 1915, established the highest musical standards the Metropolitan has known, and his departure, after disagreements with the management, was a severe loss to American opera. But the man who probably influenced the Metropolitan more than any other was Gatti-Casazza, who became director in 1908 and remained in charge until 1935. He widened the Opera's repertory to include new and varied works: Pelleas et Melisande by Debussy; Boris Godounoff by Moussorgsky (the title role played by Chaliapin) ; the neglected classics of Gluck and Mozart; and recent compositions, including Walter Damrosch's Cyrano de Bergerac, and Deems Taylor's Peter Ibbetson and The King's Henchman for which Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote the libretto. He introduced to Metropolitan audiences such singers as Gio vanni Martinelli, Amelia Galli-Curci, and Kirsten Flagstad. Salome was first produced by the Metropolitan, January 22, 1907, with Olive Fremstad in the leading role, but the Dance of the Seven Veils aroused protest, and the management did not offer the opera again until January 13, 1934. Two outstanding events of the Gatti-Casazza tenure were the world premieres of Puccini's Girl of 'the Golden West and Humperdinck's Goose Girl.

From 1910 to 1929, the management not only succeeded in operating the Metropolitan on a sound financial basis but also accumulated a surplus.

With the depression, however, the contributions of stockholders fell off, and although crowds might stand in line for seats in the family circle or for standing room, the balconies might be packed by the time the late arrivals reached their places in box and orchestra, bravos might thunder from under the roof, there was always a deficit at the end of the season. The Metropolitan faced ruin.

Then, in 1935, a reorganization was effected. The Metropolitan Opera Association was formed, with a management committee that included John Erskine as chairman, Lucrezia Bori, Cornelius Bliss, and Allen Wardwell. Public contributions were solicited, and a subsidy was obtained from the Juilliard Musical Foundation. The association sold radio rights for Satur day matinee broadcasts, receiving as much as ninety thousand dollars a season. Edward Johnson, for many years a Metropolitan tenor, was made director. Thus the Metropolitan was saved, and as a result of the radio broadcasts it had achieved a great popular audience. Appreciative letters were received from farmers, filling-station attendants, cowpunchers. The institution had definitely altered its relation to society.

THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

In other directions as well, it was on its way toward becoming a national institution. American ballets were presented during three successive seasons (1935-8). To encourage American singers several hundred young voices from all parts of the Nation are heard each season by a committee of musicians ; the best are given an opportunity to sing on radio programs, and some are selected for the spring opera season. Those who distinguish themselves participate in the regular winter performances. Together with regular broadcasts of the best symphony music, the free concerts given in museums and other public buildings, and the Federal music theaters, the Metropolitan Opera of today is a significant part of a tendency toward the broad dissemination of musical culture.

THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY: THE CENTRAL BUILDING

Eleven thousand readers and visitors, on an average day, enter the Fifth Avenue building of the New York Public Library. Here is the center of a library system which, exclusive of separate systems in Brooklyn and Queens, is second in size in America only to the Library of Congress. In the reference department, which occupies the greater part of this building, eighty miles of shelves are crowded with more than two and one-half million books. Approximately a million and one-half books more are available through the Circulation Department, which comprises fifty-one branches and eleven subbranches in Manhattan, Richmond, and the Bronx. The library's collections are strong in history and biography, especially in relation to America; supplementing tens of thousands of books in the Americana collections are thousands of prints and etchings, and scores of valuable documents and maps dealing with the nation's history.

The building, which occupies the site of the old Croton Reservoir, was designed by the firm of Carrere and Hastings, architects, and completed in 1911. It cost $9,000,000. Architecturally, it is an outstanding example of the eclectic neoclassic style that was popular following the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893. The building has been much criticized for lack of functional expression, overabundant detail, and the sacrifice of utilitarian values for the sake of appearance. Nonetheless, it fully justifies the pride of its generation, for it was and still is a magnificent civic monument. Its huge substantial bulk of white Vermont marble, ornately decorated, darkened by the weathering of time and thereby made to seem more massive, commands attention even on Fifth Avenue, bordered as it now is with new, spectacular architecture.

Thomas Hastings, of the firm of Carrere and Hastings, was never completely satisfied with the Fifth Avenue front, and made numerous studies for its alteration. His widow provided in her will a sum of money which might be applied to the cost of alterations. The west, or rear, elevation is artistically beyond criticism even from the functionalist standpoint; tall narrow windows, lighting the seven floors of stacks within, extend all the way to the large windows of the reading rooms in the. attic story, forming a facade that is truthfully and skillfully handled.

A long forecourt, extending the full length of the Fifth Avenue side, has become familiar throughout the nation as a meeting place for all classes. A few broad steps flanked by E. C. Potter's famous couchant lions lead to a raised, pigeon-inhabited walk, separated from the street by a stone parapet. For more than a generation this place has attracted tourists, eccentrics, lovers, visiting celebrities, and itinerant intellectuals from the farthest corners of the country.

The facade is dominated by a central pavilion with a triple-arched deepset portico and coupled Corinthian columns. Surmounting the colonnade is an attic parapet embellished with six vigorously modeled figures, by Paul W. Bartlett, representing History, Drama, Poetry, Religion, Romance, and Philosophy. The fountain figures in wall niches on either side of the portico, by Frederick MacMonnies, represent Truth and Beauty. The grotesque sculptural groups in the pedimented end pavilions, by George Gray Barnard, represent History and Art.

The entrance from Fifth Avenue leads into a two-story vestibule with a vaulted ceiling of veined white Vermont marble and wide stairways on opposite sides of the hall. The effect is impressive and cold, but the scene is humanized by the busy information desk facing the entrance, and by the activities of those who use the hall (with its four marble benches) as a meeting place.

The immense size of the entrance hall, the elaborate series of stairways, the wide corridors, the vistas of columns and vaulting, may seem improvident in view of a relative shortage of actual library space. But the library is more than a place for the study of books ; in effect it is a center of the city's intellectual life, and the monumental character of its design is, therefore, appropriate.

An elaborate classification and shelving system, by which any book in the Forty-second Street collection can be brought to the delivery desk in six and one-half minutes, is entirely modern in character. Delivery centers about Room 315, which houses three units: the Public Catalogue Room and the adjoining North and South Main Reading Rooms. The reading rooms constitute, in effect, a single hall of vast scale with an elaborately decorated ceiling. Every item of the immense reference collection is indexed and cross-indexed in the catalogue six million entries in all.

In the American History Room (300) are books from the libraries of George Bancroft, James Lenox, Gordon Lester Ford, Thomas Addis Emmet, and Theodore Bailey Myers; and dictionaries and grammars of the Indian languages. The Economics Division (Room 228) possesses the Dugdale Collection of books on pauperism and criminology, the Henry George Collection on single tax, and a comprehensive collection of midnineteenth-century works on socialism. More than 3,000 languages and dialects are represented in the library's collection. Of these, more than 50,000 volumes, some of them purchased with the Jacob H. Schiff Fund, are to be found in the Jewish Division (Room 216). Mr. Schiff also gave the library 317 water-color paintings, by James Tissot, illustrating the Old Testament. Other separate language collections are the Slavonic, in Room 216, and the Oriental, in Room 219. In the Music Room (324) are more than 75,000 catalogued items: books, pamphlets, orchestra scores, sheet music, and phonograph recordings.

The Rare Book Room (303), entered only by special permission, contains 50,000 treasures, including the Lenox copy of the Gutenberg Bible, in two volumes ; the only known existing copy of the original folio edition in Spanish (printed in Barcelona in April, 1493) of Christopher Columbus' letter concerning his discoveries in America; the full first folio edition of Shakespeare (1623) ; and the Bay Psalm Book, printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1640, the first English book published in America. The final draft of Washington's "Farewell Address," in his own handwriting, and other American and British documents of historical importance are in the Manuscript Room (319). Here, and in the Spencer Collection (Room 322), are more than 100 illuminated manuscripts produced in Europe from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries. In the Spencer Room rare illuminated manuscripts from the Spencer Collection and superbly illustrated and finely bound books are displayed. Among the noteworthy items is the early fourteenth-century Tickhill Psalter.

The Newspaper Room, near the Forty-second Street entrance, attracts a cosmopolitan group of readers. It has current newspapers from all parts of the world, and files of New York City newspapers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some papers are now available on rolls of motion-picture film, a single one reproducing, by means of microphotography, an entire month's output of a metropolitan daily.

Special art or bibliographic exhibitions are generally on view in Rooms 112, 113, 316, 321, and 322. Along the walls of the third-floor corridors are old Dutch, English, French, and Italian maps of the New World, as well as early American prints of both documentary and artistic value.

These are part of the Phelps Stokes Collection of American Historical Prints, presented to the library in 1930. Among them is Paul Revere's engraving of the British landing in Boston in 1768.

In the Lenox Gallery (Room 318) are three portraits of Washington: two by Gilbert Stuart, and a copy by Rembrandt Peale of Stuart's first portrait. Munkacsy's Blind Milton Dictating to His Daughters typifies the narrative painting popular in the last century. There are portraits by Gains borough and Reynolds, landscapes by Landseer and Morland, and Copley's distinguished Lady Frances Wentworth.

The Stuart Gallery, opposite the Main Catalogue Room, contains additional examples of the anecdotal painting of the middle-nineteenth century, when works entitled Hope and Faith and Pilgrims Going to Church were admired. It has some fine examples of the Hudson River school. Sunday visitors will find this collection closed, as its donor, Mrs. Robert L. Stuart, stipulated.

The Print Room (308) contains more than 100,000 items, including full sets of Whistler and Haden, an excellent selection of English engravings and Japanese prints, and innumerable American historical prints. Diirer is well represented, and there are 800 prints by Daumier, including the only etching he ever made, 900 lithographs by Joseph Pennell, and a complete set of Mielatz's views of New York City. Another group comprises eighty engravings of Turner's work, etched by the painter himself. The library possesses one of the best contemporary collections in the city, purchased with moneys from the Samuel P. A very Fund.

Operating expenses of the central building are paid from the interest of the nearly $44,000,000 principal fund of the library. The branches and the Circulation Department are maintained through municipal appropriations. The library is administered by the staff officers and a board of trustees, including the mayor, the comptroller, and the president of the City Council as ex-ofncio members.

The library developed from the consolidation of the Astor and Lenox li braries and the Tilden Trust, effected in 1895. This great institution was built as much by the devotion of the people who fought for free libraries in the face of general indifference as by generous gifts. James Green Cogswell, a teacher, persuaded the first John Jacob Astor that a "fitting testimonial to his adopted country by its richest citizen" should be a library. (A huge monument to Washington had been favored for a time.) In 1848 the schoolmaster who "had stayed at the old gentleman's elbow to push him on" had his reward. Astor, in his will, gave $400,000 and a plot of land to the city for a library, and accordingly a reference library was opened in 1854 on Lafayette Place. Together with books and bequests by members of the Astor family, it represents a total of $1,000,000. The Lenox Library, opened in 1875, was founded by James Lenox, book lover and scholar; at the time of consolidation, it contained 85,000 volumes and had an endowment fund of $505,000. Samuel J. Tilden, governor of New York in 1874 and Democratic candidate for President in 1876, died in 1886 and left his money for a free library and reading room. The Tildren Trust brought an endowment of $2,000,000, after the original bequest of about $4,000,000 had been reduced by a successful contesting of the Tilden will.

The Lenox Library had been intended for scholars rather than for popular use. In the i88o's the experience of the Astor and Lenox libraries made it seem foolhardy to expect that public libraries would be supported, and with the establishment of the Tilden Fund a consolidation with the Astor and Lenox libraries was sought. Meanwhile, women of the Grace Episcopal Church, adopting a different approach, had collected 500 books and obtained a room on Thirteenth Street for a popular library. Readers, no longer overawed by the magnificence of the earlier institutions the Astor Library, for instance, had liveried doormen came in such numbers that the sidewalks were blocked during the two hours once a week when the library was open. Such libraries soon were established in other neighborhoods, and in 1887 they were united as the New York Free Circulating Library, and financial help was given by the city. In order to benefit from a $5,200,000 gift made by Andrew Carnegie to the city for library buildings, the New York Free Circulating Library with eleven branches joined the Astor-Lenox-Tilden consolidation in 1900, and still later, nine other independent libraries were united with it. Thus began the New York Public Library's Circulation Department.

Today, the offices of the Circulation Department, the Department's Union Catalogue, the Picture Collection, Central Children's Room, and the Central Circulation Branch are in the Central Building.

Notable among the branches are the Music Library, 121 East Fifty-eighth Street, the Municipal Reference Library, Municipal Building, and the Library for the Blind, 137 West Twenty-fifth Street. More than 10,000,000 books are lent to readers annually by the Circulation Department, and the Picture Collection, with a classified stock of more than 800,000, makes nearly 900,000 loans a year.

MADISON SQUARE GARDEN

New Yorkers think only of what happens inside of Madison Square Garden. The rare individual who wanders down Forty-ninth or Fiftieth Street for a view of the building itself sees nothing but blank brick walls and fire escapes. The main entrance opens on Eighth Avenue through an arcade, but the Garden proper is concealed behind a smaller structure and runs back toward Ninth Avenue.

This plain building is, however, already famous as America's chief indoor arena. Charity benefits, national political conventions, championship prize fights, cowboy rodeos all draw throngs to Madison Square Garden. The composition of the crowd on one night contrasts sharply with that of another. From the vantage of a $315 box, the aristocracy, in evening attire, politely applauds the horse show. Twenty-five cents is the price of admission to a Communist rally at which 20,000 people rock the Garden with cheers. Politicians, sportsmen, and socially prominent personalities occupy $16.50 ringside seats to watch a pair of heavyweights in action for an hour or less, while hoi polloi sit in cheap seats under the roof. On a good night patrons eat 12,000 hot dogs, washed down with 1,000 gallons of beer and soda pop, while sixty private policemen, unarmed, are stationed there to prevent disorder.

From the top balcony at the Ninth Avenue end, an Olympic ski jumper darts down a slide, hangs momentarily in the air, lands on a snow mound, and stops near the Eighth Avenue end of the arena. Children crowd under the big top for circus matinees. For seventy-five cents a sleepless night is spent at the six-day bicycle races. Three thousand carefully reared and pedigreed pets compete in a dog show. The President makes a speech at a political meeting. A world champion figure skater dances the tango under a spotlight. A professional hockey game is halted by a brawl while fans add to the racket with cowbells and jeers. Tennis matches, basketball games, track meets, and trade exhibitions are among the events staged regularly in the arena. A $34,000 mineral- wool ceiling was especially provided to improve the acoustics when Paderewski played for charity.

Madison Square Garden is a successor to two earlier Gardens that were actually on Madison Square, at Madison Avenue and East Twenty-sixth Street. The first of these occupied the abandoned New York and Harlem (Railroad) Union Depot that had housed Barnum's Hippodrome and then Gilmore's Garden before acquiring the name Madison Square Garden in 1879. It was replaced in 1890 by the building later known as the "old Garden." P. T. Barnum, J. P. Morgan, and Darius Mills were among its directors. Stanford White designed the structure one of the most impressive of its day. Its beautiful tower, copied from the Giralda in Seville, was surmounted by Augustus Saint-Gaudens' statue of Diana. In the roof garden White was killed in 1906 by Harry K. Thaw, and the murder developed into one of the outstanding scandals of the era.

Saint-Gaudens had clothed Diana in a drapery but this was soon torn away by the winds. The graceful figure was a welcome and familiar sight for many years. It was only when the building was demolished that those who concerned themselves with the fate of the lovely lady discovered that she was put together with rivets as large as those in a battleship. SaintGaudens' Diana is today a New York legend. The Pennsylvania Museum of Art owns her in what might be called the flesh. A working model stands in a niche in the Museum of the City of New York.

The old Garden became a national show place, scene of a bewildering variety of events. There William Jennings Bryan accepted the Democratic nomination for President, Adelina Patti sang, and Jack Dempsey knocked out Bill Brennan in defense of the heavyweight title. Six-day go-as-youplease (walk, run, or crawl) races, the Wild West Show, aquatic exhibitions in the mammoth pool, the first American automobile shows, and mass meetings of the Christian Endeavor Society drew large audiences.

Two master showmen Tex Rickard, gambler, promoter, and cattleman, and John Ringling, circus magnate were responsible for the success of the old Garden. Rickard's first local enterprise, the Willard-Moran fight, grossed $250,000. His spectacular methods were so effective that, when the Garden was razed to make room for the New York Life Insurance Company Building, he was able to interest a group of financiers in the construction of a new and greater Garden, a project he directed until his death in 1929.

The present Garden was designed by Thomas W. Lamb, theater architect, and constructed in 1925. It has a seating capacity of 18,903 for boxing bouts, 15,500 for hockey games, and 14,500 for bicycle races. The building can be emptied of a capacity crowd in five minutes. The roof of the structure is carried by steel trusses that make columns largely unnecessary, thus permitting a clear view of the arena from almost any seat. The main seating section, comprising whorls of seats on an incline, rims the elliptical arena floor. Two balconies, similar to the main section, are cantilevered from the walls. When only part of the arena floor is used for staging events, the remainder is filled with rows of seats. The land and building cost $5,600,000.

The different uses to which the arena is put requires flexibility in its plant operation and extraordinary efficiency on the part of the Garden staff.

Within three or four hours after a hockey game, for instance, two tractors clear the rink of ice and a gang of thirty men cleans house and prepares the arena with a ring and 4,200 additional seats for a championship boxing bout the next evening. Brine flowing through thirteen miles of pipe under the concrete floor freezes the rink for hockey again in eight hours. In six or seven hours two pulverizers driven by internal combustion motors change 500 tons of ice into snow for the annual Winter Sports Show. Since no satisfactory sectional track has as yet been designed, 300 men build a new track for each six-day bicycle race, completing it in eight hours at a cost of about five thousand dollars. During the horse show, the circus, and the rodeo, the animals are quartered in the basement: a contractor, on such occasions, "rents" 690 tons of earth to the Garden for $2,500.

The Garden is operated by the Madison Square Garden Corporation, of which Colonel John Reed Kilpatrick is president. Its income is derived from the promotion of sports events and from rentals. Among the annual spectacles are the Six-Day Bicycle Race, the Winter Sports Show, the Skating Carnival, and the New York Police and Firemen's Shows. The arena has been rented to the Ringling Brothers-Barnum and Bailey Circus for twenty-seven days each spring at the flat rate of $100,000; the price for most public meetings is $3,500 a night on weekdays and $5,000 a night on Saturdays and Sundays. Professional hockey, which the Garden controls in New York, is perhaps the most consistently profitable venture, with the gate running well over $700,000 a year. The Garden owns the New York Rangers, and receives 40 per cent of the receipts from the games of the New York Americans. The amateur Rovers, who play Sunday afternoons, provide a "farm" for the Rangers.

With the economic depression and the passing of the million-dollar gate,the Garden's income dwindled. But in 1932, despite the adverse business situation, the Garden spent $160,000 to build the Madison Square Garden Bowl, seating 80,000 people, in Long Island City. Though the Bowl proved of little or no profit (having been used only for an occasional prize fight and in 1936 for midget auto racing on a specially constructed asphalt track), the Garden has recovered from the lean days of the early 1930's.

The Garden is still said to be "the largest and most prosperous sports organization in the world." From early October until late May the arena is rarely empty. But when the thirty-six circus elephants lumber from the building, signaling the close of the season, the Garden goes dark. Then, for four months, New York is quieter and less colorful.

Rockefeller Center

The twelve buildings of Rockefeller Center constitute not only a vast skyscraper group but an organized city. The group, said to be the largest ever undertaken by private enterprise, represents the belated culmination of the boom of the 1920's.

Covering twelve land acres in the fashionable mid-town shopping district, the project includes a vast skyscraper office center, a shopping center, an exhibition center, and a radio and amusement center. The western front, along Sixth Avenue, is made up of buildings devoted primarily to entertainment: the RKO Building and the adjoining Radio City Music Hall, the National Broadcasting Company's extension of the seventy-story RCA Building, and the Center Theater. The name "Radio City," which is often incorrectly applied to all of Rockefeller Center, properly designates only this western portion.

Sharing the eastern exposure, four lesser buildings serve as Fifth Avenue showcases for foreign nations: the British Empire Building, La Maison Francaise, the Palazzo d' Italia, and the International Building East. Slightly behind the latter two rises the forty-one-story International Building. The Time and Life Building, the Associated Press Building, and 30 Rockefeller Plaza (RCA Building) tower about the plaza, as will Holland House, one of the two new buildings still to be constructed (1939).

In its architecture Rockefeller Center stands as distinctively for New York as the Louvre stands for Paris. Composed of the essential elements of New York skyscrapers steel framing and curtain walls, encasing elevators and offices the group relies for exterior decoration almost exclusively on the pattern of its windows, piers, spandrels, and wall surfaces. Its beauty derives from a significant play of forms, and light and shadow.

Its character abrupt, stark, jagged, and powerful arises fundamentally from the spacing of the buildings, from their direct functionalism, their mass, their silhouette, and their grayish-tan color; not (as in the case of the buildings surrounding the nearby Grand Army Plaza) from ornamental roofs, reminiscent styles, or elaborate setbacks. The color tone of the Center is given by the warm tan limestone walls, the slate-gray cast aluminum spandrels under the windows, and especially by the light-blue window shades inside ; the gray of the whole, blending into the surrounding atmosphere, adds to the apparent height of the group.

Noteworthy is the integration of architecture with such "allied arts" as mural painting, sculpture, metal work, mosaic, wood veneering, and the like. Where individual skyscrapers in the past have boasted of employing a single painter and sculptor in addition to the architect to direct the work, Rockefeller Center gave employment to painters, sculptors, and decorators by whole groups and schools. The three architectural firms sharing equally the credit are Reinhard and Hofmeister ; Corbett, Harrison, and MacMurray ; and Hood and Fouilhoux.

In terms of site planning, Rockefeller Center represents a complete departure from similar developments in New York and other large cities. It is the first group of tall buildings that does not simply face on the existing streets. Instead, the three blocks were freshly considered as a unit. The RCA Building, as the tallest, was placed close to the center of the plot. To reach it, a new private street, "Rockefeller Plaza," was established, running north and south between Forty-eight and Fifty-first Streets, and a pedestrian walk was cut through to Fifth Avenue. All the other chief buildings are staggered both as to height and location, in order to shade one another as little as possible and to build an interesting composition of forms. Two of the twelve acres of the Center's site are open areas. The tower-like shapes of such structures as the Empire State Building result from the application of setback regulations to buildings on relatively small plots; the large scope of the site planning of the Center, on the other hand, made possible the characteristically slab-like main buildings with long, narrow, and efficient floor areas, easily penetrated by sunlight and fresh air.

The most impressive entrance to the Center is from Fifth Avenue through the Channel, a pedestrian passage 60 feet wide and 200 feet long that separates the British Empire Building from La Maison Franchise. Six shallow pools bordered with yew hedges, in the center of this esplanade, are fed by bronze fountainheads designed by Rene P. Chambellan to represent rollicking tritons and nereids. The Channel slopes from Fifth Avenue down to a flight of stone steps that lead to the lower plaza, eighteen feet below street level. The plaza, 125 feet long and 95 feet wide, may be flooded for winter ice skating, or embellished with hedges and flower beds for summer use as an outdoor cafe. Against its west wall, Paul Manship's huge bronze figure of Prometheus rises above spouting streams of water. Prometheus has been the target of caustic criticism; his detractors have nicknamed him "Leaping Looie." From the top of the stairway, walks diverge, following the rim of the lower plaza past a series of fountains set in greenery to Rockefeller Plaza. Across this street is the entrance to the RCA Building.

Several doorways leading from the lower plaza to an underground concourse hint at Rockefeller Center's subterranean activity. A great underground shipping center and three-quarters of a mile of passages are entered through a 4OO-foot truck ramp just east of the Music Hall. A branch ramp turns off to a shipping room beneath the International Building, then enters the main truck area at a point directly beneath the lower plaza. This system handles all freight deliveries except those to the theaters and the RKO Building.

The 850-foot RCA (Radio Corporation of America) Building, the central member of the group, is one of New York's tallest structures and, in gross area, the largest office building in the world (1939). Its huge, broad, flat north and south facades, its almost unbroken mass, and its thinness are the features that impelled observers to nickname it the "Slab." The entrance is presided over by a rather astonishing bearded giant floating over a compass, in token of "the genius which interprets the laws and cycles of the cosmic forces of the universe to mankind." The side panels represent two of the "cosmic forces": Light and Sound. The whole was sculptured by Lee Lawrie. The screen below, with the appearance of crumpled cellophane, is made of square blocks of pyrex glass.

The walls of the elevator banks in the middle of the two-story lobby are covered by large murals. Those on the south wall are by Jose Maria Sert and represent "man's intellectual mastery of the material universe" ; they deal with the evolution of machinery, the eradication of disease, the abolition of slavery, and the suppression of war. Those on the north, by Frank Brangwyn, depict "man's conquest of the physical world," portraying respectively the cultivation of the soil, the development of machinery, and the hope of mankind's salvation the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount. A mural, painted by Diego Rivera and originally in this lobby, caused an international controversy when the management first screened it and finally destroyed it, contending that the artist had departed from the approved preliminary sketch. Others held that the mural was destroyed because it included a likeness of Lenin. The case became a classic conflict between the artistic rights of a creator and the property rights of a purchaser. The space is now occupied by a Sert mural depicting the triumph of man's accomplishments through the union of physical and mental labor. The Museum of Science and Industry (see page 342) is entered from the lobby.

The Sixth Avenue entrance to the RCA Building is surmounted by a glass mosaic by Barry Faulkner. Industriously assembled of about a million pieces of glass in 250 shades of color, it represents "thought enlightening the world." About thirty feet above the mosaic, in the spaces between windows, are four sculptured panels by Gaston Lachaise, American sculptor of the modern school. They are titled Genius Receiving the Light of the Sun, Conquest of Space, Gifts of Earth to Mankind, and Spirit of Progress.

The most widely known tenants of the RCA Building are the National Broadcasting Company and its parent, the Radio Corporation of America. NBC's twenty-seven broadcasting studios, offices and other facilities occupy about four hundred thousand square feet of space on ten floors. These quarters, air-conditioned, sound-proofed, and equipped for television, are the home of WEAF and WJZ, the key stations of NBC's Red and Blue networks, respectively, and form the largest broadcasting establishment in the world.

In the eastern end of the sixty-fifth floor is the Rainbow Room, a night club, where a color organ throws shifting patterns on a reflecting dome and a crystal chandelier over a revolving dance floor. The Rainbow Grill, at the western end of the same floor, is less formal in decoration and atmosphere.

The seventieth-floor observatory promenade, 200 feet long and 20 feet wide, affords one of the finest views of New York. At the eleventh-floor level, directly over the NBC studios, is the largest of the seven roof gardens in the development. Visitors enter directly upon the International Rock Garden, where specimens from all over the world are arranged along a stream that cascades, winds, and twists for a distance of 1 2 5 feet along the terrace. There are a native American garden, with its old rail fence and shaded pool; typical Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, and aquatic gardens; and, perhaps the most successful of all, an English garden with a sundial from Donnington Castle and fine examples of yew planting.

Offices of many motion-picture producers and distributors are in the thirty-one story RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) Building which faces Sixth Avenue above Fiftieth Street. Three large panels, carved by Robert Garrison, extend across the Sixth Avenue facade; their subject is "Radio Spreading the Inspiration of the Past and Present." A mural by Boardman Robinson hangs in the lobby. Its subject matter is concerned with the spiritual challenge of modern civilization.

Immediately adjoining the RKO Building is the largest indoor theater in the world, Radio City Music Hall. The Music Hall was opened in December, 1932, as a variety house under the direction of Samuel L. ("Roxy") Rothafel. It proved to be an unprofitable white elephant. Soon after, Roxy's mammoth variety shows were abandoned and the present type of show motion picture and variety was instituted under the management of Rockefeller Center, Inc.

The majestic foyer, fifty feet high, sweeps to a grand stairway leading to three mezzanines. Brocatelle wall covering repeats the rich henna of Ezra Winter's large mural above the stairway. Gold wall mirrors extend from the floor to the gold-leaf ceiling.

The spectacular modern auditorium contracts in a series of narrowing arches to the proscenium. Lights, hidden in the telescoped joints of these arches, can suffuse the great curved interior with glowing colors. The unusual excellence of the planning affords a pleasing and efficient arrangement of the seats.

The smoking- and powder-rooms are decorated with the work of Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Henry Billings, Stuart Davis, Witold Gordon, Buk Ulreich, and other artists. In the main lounge is William Zorach's sculptured Dancing Figure and the black walls carry vignettes by Louis Bouche. Robert Laurent's Goose Girl is placed on the first mezzanine. Gwen Lux's sculpture, Eve, stands in the main foyer.

Three circular metal and enamel plaques, representing the Theater, Dance, and Song, designed by Hildreth Meiere and executed by Oscar Bach, are the only decorations on the long Fiftieth Street exterior wall of the Music Hall.

Nearly everything about the Music Hall is tremendous. It seats 6,200 patrons, the staff of 600 employees is paid some $35,000 weekly. The 300ton steel truss that supports the immense golden proscenium arch, sixty feet high, is the heaviest yet used in theater construction. The orchestra is the world's largest theater orchestra, and the screen, seventy by forty feet, is the world's largest. The stage, which cost more than $400,000 to build, has three seventy- foot sections that can be raised forty feet from the subbasement to a position fourteen feet above normal stage level. Another Music Hall superlative concerns the troupe of "Rockettes," whose claim to the title of "world's finest precision dancers" has never been challenged.

The Center Theater, also facing Sixth Avenue, is smaller than the Music Hall and is very different in decor. Its foyer, lighted by five large windows, etched in relief, has Bubinga mahogany walls whose soft tones are accented by vermilion doors leading to the auditorium. The auditorium, seating 3,700 people, has walls of mahogany, and from its decorative ceiling hangs a six- ton chandelier, twenty-five feet in diameter, that is reputed to be the largest in the world. A special ventilating system carries off the heat produced by the four hundred bulbs in the chandelier.

Arthur Crisp, Maurice Heaton, and Edward Steichen were among the artists who decorated the mezzanines and lounges. The Forty-ninth Street exterior wall bears another metal plaque, said to be the largest ever made. Designed by Hildreth Meiere and executed by Oscar Bach, it represents the transmission of electric energy by radio and television.

The Center Theater has been used for motion pictures, for musical spectacles and for popular-priced opera, but it has never established itself as a profitable enterprise. Reduction of its seating capacity has been proposed as a remedy.

The entire western facade of Rockefeller Center could not be seen properly as long as it was partly hidden by the disfiguring Sixth Avenue elevated. Such optimistic expedients as brightening the el structure with aluminum paint were of little help. Now the el is gone.

The Time and Life Building and the Center Theater were the only buildings completed by 1938 in the block between Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth Streets. The former opens on Rockefeller Plaza from the east and is named for the two Luce publications having offices there. It was the temporary home of the Museum of Modern Art (see page 347) in 1938, while a new museum building was being erected. Holland House, a new sixteenstory structure in this block, west of Rockefeller Plaza, was under construction early in 1939.

Because Rockefeller Center, Inc., does not control the Fifth Avenue end of the Forty-eighth to Forty- ninth Street block, the Center presents only a two-block frontage on the east which consists of La Maison Franchise and the British Empire Building, between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth Streets, and the twin six-story extensions of the International Building, called Palazzo d' Italia and International Building East, between Fiftieth and Fifty-first Streets. Architecturally, these four buildings are restrained in design and very similar, even in their formal roof gardens.

The main entrance of the seven-story structure named La Maison Francaise carries a sculptured panel designed by Alfred Janniot in gold-leafed bronze. It greatly flatters its host city by representing Paris and New York joining hands over the figures of Poetry, Beauty, and Elegance. Three sculptured panels by Carl Paul Jennewein decorate the Fifth Avenue entrance of the virtually identical British Empire Building across the promenade, while above them is the British coat-of-arms. In the panels nine figures in gold leaf represent the major industries of the Empire. The north and south entrances bear panels designed by Lee Lawrie. The fagades of both La Maison Franchise and the British Empire Building are topped by carved limestone insets by Rene P. Chambellan. Those on the former building symbolize four epochal" events in French history the sword, the rise of Charlemagne's Empire; the clustered spears, the united effort of new France; the shield, the absolute monarchy under Louis XIV; the fasces, Phrygian cap and laurel, the birth of the Republic. Similarly, those on the British Empire Building are of historical significance, their motifs being the crests of the kingdoms: Wales, England, Scotland, and Ireland.

These two structures are "dedicated to the commerce, industry and art" of their respective nations. Similarly, the Palazzo d'ltalia is dedicated to Italy. The treatment of its facade includes a panel in cast glass by Attilio Piccirilli. The motto "Arte E Lavoro . . . Lavoro E Arte" means "Art is Labor; Labor is Art." The other motto "Sempre Avanti Eterna Giovinezza" means, "Advance Forever, Eternal Youth." Piccirilli designed a similar panel for the International Building East. Between these two northern structures a court, forty-five feet deep, leads to four huge stone piers that connect the two low buildings and form the entrance to the splendid Great Hall of the forty-one-story International Building proper. For decoration, a clever use is made of the reflection, in the plate glass of the lobby, of St. Patrick's Cathedral (located across the street). From the three-sided court, Lee Lawrie's forty-five-foot bronze figure of Atlas beetles down on Fifth Avenue.

The general proportions and treatment of the International Building are like those of the RCA Building. The spaciousness of the lobby, four stories high, sixty feet wide and eighty feet long, is remarkable in a purely commercial building. The design is considered by many to be the best in the Center. The effect of restrained modernism is heightened by the brilliant choice of contrasting materials and the imaginative use of four wide escalators in place of monumental stairways. It houses a United States passport office and many travel agencies, and is particularly well equipped for exhibitions and large displays. The corridors leading from the lobby are notable for the way lighting has been used as decoration.

In 1929 the Rockefeller Center site, most of which was owned by Columbia University, was covered by two-hundred-odd buildings, many of them housing speakeasies. The leases to the land were about to expire and the tract was proposed as a suitable setting for a magnificent new opera house. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was approached as the most likely backer; when his support was assured the Metropolitan Square Corporation was formed and a lease was negotiated at ten times the sum the university had been deriving from the property. The agreement ceded tenancy to the corporation for twenty-four years, with three renewal options extending to the year 2015, at an annual rental beginning at $3,000,000 and gradually increasing to $3,600,000 by 1952.

The opera house project was abandoned after the Wall Street crash of 1929. Rockefeller was left holding three blocks of non-paying property and staggering rent and tax bills. It was then that the plan was conceived of using the land for a co-ordinated building group as "an example of urban planning for the future."

Under Rockefeller Center, Inc., successor to the Metropolitan Square Corporation, the engineering firms of Todd, Robertson, and Todd, and Todd and Brown commenced work in 1930. One and a quarter million tons of debris were hauled away in wreckage of the old buildings and excavation for the new. Between 1932 and 1938, 88,000 tons of Portland cement and 39,000,000 bricks were joined to structural steel to complete eleven buildings. With the completion of the Associated Press Building in 1938 only two buildings remained to be constructed. Holland House was to go up behind the Center Theater at once, and an office structure is planned for the southwest corner of the project.

Long before a shovelful of dirt was turned, Rockefeller Center was severely criticized. The project was called "wasteful and useless," "undistinguished," and "inartistic" as the first buildings rose. Disagreements with artists added to the confusion. Yet, out of the clamor of disparaging voices, the development grew: Rockefeller Center's position among the city's institutions is now secure. Reproach has given way to respect. New York began to be proud of these strong new towers. Approximately 80,000 visitors appear every day as well as 20,000 permanent tenants. The NBC studios alone draw about 700,000 sightseers annually, while about 900,000 people attend broadcasts.

Not the least of the many Rockefeller Center features that merit the title, "world's largest" is the mortgage, which is held by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. It amounts to $44,300,000.

NEW YORK MUSEUM OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY

RCA Building, Rockefeller Center, 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

Housed appropriately in a setting typical of twentieth-century ingenuity and accomplishment, the museum is a focal point of interest for scientifically curious adults and a wonderland for children. It is known also as the Hall of Motion because its thousands of models, replicas, dioramas, working demonstrations, and visitor-operated machines dramatize the scientific achievements and industrial developments of the machine age ; motion pictures, lectures, and conducted tours supplement these graphic illustrations of simple and complex mechanisms of the past and the present. The museum is visited annually by half a million people.

Approximately twenty-five hundred permanent displays and a constantly changing series of exhibitions lent by notable research laboratories, government agencies, and industrial organizations inform the visitor of the latest inventions, discoveries, and scientific developments. Included in the series of temporary exhibits have been zoning models and unified city planning designs of the New York City Housing Authority, graphic surveys of the work of the Rural Electrification Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority, a collection of X-ray plates and photographs indicating the progressive steps in a brain operation, "Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry," "Modern Plastics," "Steels of Today and Tomorrow," and "The Story of Man."

Permanent exhibits are grouped under the general classifications of textiles, shelter, food industries, power, aviation, communication, machine tools, highway, railroad and marine transportation, and electro-technology. Several hundred machines both in model form and actual size are either in continuous operation or may be put in motion at will ; the visitor may op.erate an electric generator, a telautograph, a model locomotive, a power plant, an ocean depth finder, or a radio direction finder. Especially attractive is the experience of handling the controls of an actual airplane.

The 112 examples of sectional machine parts, mounted on the semicircular wall of the main rotunda, are popular features of the museum, for they afford thrilling discovery of machine operations usually hidden from view. Put in operation by means of push buttons, the gears, pulleys, levers, cogs, shafts, pinions, and other parts, brightly colored in red, blue, or green, spin, mesh, revolve, bend, or twist. In a rear section on the same floor, models of an ancient windmill, steam and hydroelectric plants and turbines, and a generating station illustrate the modes of power production. One model reproduces a cross section of the plant of the Brooklyn Edison Company.

Operating demonstrations of epoch-making inventions and discoveries in the story of electrical science are on exhibit in the division devoted to electro-technology ; other demonstrations make clear the fundamental principles involved. Here also are modern business-office machines, such as the punching, sorting, and tabulating devices, that "think like a man."

A collection of ship models arranged in historical sequence begins with an Egyptian boat of 3500 B.C. and features famous ships of different periods, including the liner Normandie. Near by a group of marine engines illustrates the various types that have been developed through the years. The push of a button operates a large model of a floating dock with a ship.

A genuine covered wagon, a sleigh of Colonial days, an Egyptian oxcart of a date prior to 200 B.C. and still in a fine state of preservation, and a Model T Ford (presented by the inventor) are favorites among the vehicles in the highway transportation exhibit.

A comprehensive series of model locomotives, most of which may be operated by button, show progress in railroad transportation, from the Salamanca engine of 1812, the De Witt Clinton, and other famous "characters" of early railroading days up to the electric locomotive of the present.

Examples of coupling and air-brake systems, signaling devices, and switch sections illustrate technical developments.

Scale-model dwellings in appropriate historical settings depict the history of housing from the neolithic lake dweller's shelter to the ultramodern residence of structural glass and stainless steel. Plowing implements, a working demonstration of milk pasteurization, gas and electric refrigerators, models of a sugar refinery, and a modern cold storage plant are features of the food industries division.

The story of the textile industry is graphically told by spinning and weaving machines from the Colonial spinning wheel to the modern headstock, and from hand to power loom and in the samples of fabrics produced by the various processes. An exhibit of interest to many visitors displays several types of modern looms suitable for school or home and finished articles from these looms. Another popular exhibit is a demonstration of the manufacture of rayon from wood chips to finished product.

The museum, established in 1927 by a bequest of Henry Robinson Towne, was known originally as the Museum of Peaceful Arts and was housed in the Scientific American Building. Within three years, however, its rapid growth made larger quarters necessary, and in 1930 the museum moved to the Daily News Building. It was installed in its present quarters in Rockefeller Center in 1936.

ST. PATRICK'S CATHEDRAL

St. Patrick's, America's first major cathedral built in the Gothic Revival style, is the seat of the Archdiocese of the Ecclesiastical Province of New York, which includes the dioceses of Brooklyn, Buffalo, Albany, Rochester, Syracuse, and Ogdenburg. Begun in 1858, the nave was opened November 29, 1877, and the cathedral dedicated May 25, 1879. With the exception of the Lady Chapel and two smaller chapels the entire project was designed by James Renwick (1818-1895).

The cathedral with its dependencies occupies an entire block. Although its twin spires are dwarfed by the skyscrapers of Rockefeller Center and other near-by buildings, its granite 'and marble mass is still impressive.

The design is based upon that of the Cathedral of Cologne; the Fifth Avenue facade is composed of a steep central gable flanked by towers and traceried spires. Above the canopied central portal is a rose window, twenty-six feet in diameter. The exterior is constructed of granite. Owing to the nature of this material much of the delicacy and grace characteristic of Gothic architecture is lost in the detail of the tracery, molded profiles, and carved ornament of the exterior. A purist would be disturbed by the lack of flying buttresses where he would expect to find them ; the pinnacles of the missing buttresses are present, however, though their function is a bit puzzling in view of the lack of stone vaulting inside the church.

The plan of the cathedral is cruciform, with nave, transepts, and choir. The interior is reminiscent of Amiens with a forest of magnificent clustered piers of white marble separating the central aisle from the two side aisles. The unusual height of the side aisles suggests St. Ouen at Rouen, while the clustered columns, with their richly ornamented capitals, and the elaborately vaulted ceiling follow such English examples as York, Exeter, and Westminster Abbey. The triforium above the side aisles affords a continuous passage fifty-six feet above the floor, around the interior, broken only by the walls of the transepts. The entire architectural composition is unusually open and delicate, partly due to the slenderness of the nave piers, which are only five feet in diameter above the base. The interior has dignity and spaciousness, combined with religious somberness.

Forty-five of the seventy stained-glass windows are from the studios of Nicholas Lorin at Chartres, and of Henry Ely at Nantes. Rich in tone some dark, some of pastel lightness and combined with elaborate tracery, they glow in the sunshine, but unfortunately, much of the detail in them is too delicate to be legible at a distance. They become simply patterns of red, yellow, green, blue, and purple against the framework of the stone walls which, in the dusky light, takes on a tone of deepest gray.

The nave extends east from the main portal on Fifth Avenue ; at its eastern end is the glimmering High Altar. Shallow aisle chapels, on both sides of the nave, contain altars dedicated to the worship of various saints. Below the first window of the north wall is the baptistery. Its beautiful font, carved of dark wood, rests on a marble base. The adjoining chapel is dedicated to St. Bernard and St. Bridget. Its richly decorated background, a reproduction, in ecru-colored marble, of the doorway of St. Bernard's chapel in Mellefont, Ireland, is flanked by clustered green columns.

The fourteen Stations of the Cross, around the transept walls, were designed by Peter J. H. Cuypers and carved in Holland. On the west side of the south transept is a small window dedicated to St. Patrick, the cartoon for which was drawn by Renwick. In the lower panel the architect is shown discussing the plans of the cathedral with Archbishop Hughes.

The statue of St. Francis, in the north ambulatory, is a reproduction of one by Giovanni Dupre in the Church of St. Francis at Assisi. In the south ambulatory is a Pieta, by William Ordway Partridge. It resembles the famous work of Michelangelo, although differing in composition and pose. The Chapel of the Little Flower, adjoining, contains a statue of St. Theresa by Mario Korbel.

In the choir itself, the High Altar, designed by Renwick, has a reredos adorned with statues of St. Patrick and other saints. Its treatment lacks the imagination of the work of later neo-Gothic architects such as Cram and Goodhue; and the white marble of which it is constructed contrasts too sharply with the mellow texture of the semicircular apse. The Archbishop's throne, on the north side of the choir, is of carved French oak, overhung by a delicate Gothic canopy, supported by columns, and crowned by a richly ornamented octagonal lantern. The white marble pulpit, on the south side, is another work of art from the hand of Renwick ; from a stem of short, clustered columns, it expands cupshape and hexagonal in form, and is overhung by a petal-like canopy of chastely decorated translucent marble.

Behind the apse is the Lady Chapel of white Vermont marble more pleasing than the granite of the cathedral proper and adjoining it are two smaller chapels. These were designed by Charles T. Mathews. The first mass in Lady Chapel was said on Christmas Day, 1906.

The residences of the archbishop and rector are, respectively, at the northwest and southwest corners of Madison Avenue and Fiftieth Street. On the block north of the cathedral, on Madison Avenue, is a building housing Cathedral College, and other Catholic societies. On the northeast corner of Fifty-first Street and Madison Avenue is the chancery, a large stone structure.

The present church is an outgrowth of the first St. Patrick's Cathedral, founded in 1809. Rebuilt after a fire in 1866, the latter still stands at Mott and Prince Streets. Its founder, the Very Reverend Anthony Kohlmann, Vicar General of the New York See, was the head of the New York Literary Institute, a Jesuit establishment on the present site of the cathedral, where later, in 1842, was erected the little Church of St. John the Evangelist. In 1852, however, the trustees of St. Patrick's Cathedral acquired the property; and razing of the smaller building was soon begun to make way for the great edifice.

Once an outpost of the town, St. Patrick's is today in the crowded heart of the city; once a landmark visible for miles, its spires now are surrounded by the loftier towers of secular buildings. Nevertheless, through the years, the cathedral takes on greater significance for the large Catholic population of the metropolis. During the regularly scheduled services, the rich formality of historic Catholic ritual fills the dim spaces with music and intoned prayer, but on such occasions as the celebration of Mass on Christmas Eve and Easter, and the great parade on March 17, in honor of St. Patrick himself, the ceremonial splendor of a pageant is invoked. On other days societies organized under the cathedral's direct supervision Catholic organizations of every sort, many of them groups organized within secular institutions of business and the professions meet in tribute to the patron saint or day especially sacred to them. To grasp the magnitude of the cathedral's influence in the city, it needs only to be realized that the Roman Catholics of the archdiocese number one million.

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

The Museum of Modern Art is New York's permanent meeting place for the contemporary artistic energies of Europe and America. About a mile and a half uptown, the Metropolitan Museum of Art sedately displays its accumulated masterpieces of the past, but here, amid brownstone fronts and small sidewalk trees, the strikingly modern building of the Museum of Modern Art has become a symbol of those technical and imaginative innovations that have transformed the character of art during the past seventy years.

Before the establishment of the museum the more advanced forms of modern art had made their appearance in the famous "Armory Show" of 1913, in Alfred Stieglitz' "291 Fifth Avenue" and in the exhibitions of the Societe Anonyme. These showings, with occasional purchases, infrequent exhibitions, and such private collections as that of John Quinn, had given New Yorkers a hint of the strange aesthetic events taking place here and across the Atlantic.

Today the Museum of Modern Art sponsors the more important forms of aesthetic experiment. As a consequence New York has been treated for the first time in its history to the spectacle of long lines of people waiting on the street for a chance to look at paintings. The great Van Gogh exhibition of 1935 caused New York journalists suddenly to note that art can attract as many people as a prize fight.

Founded in 1929 under the sponsorship of a group of prominent collectors, the museum set out to encourage the study and appreciation of modern art. At that time it still remained to be seen whether there existed enough public interest in the newer art to justify the eventual establishment of a permanent institution of exhibition and education.

To carry out its purpose more effectively, the museum decided at the start to renounce the conventional policy of a single permanent exhibition occasionally increased by acquisitions or loans. Contact with new aesthetic movements could be maintained only if works were kept constantly passing through the museum. Modern art also had to be presented in such a way that its implications and antecedents would be clarified.

The manner in which this program has been accomplished may be illustrated by the retrospective exhibition of abstract and cubist art. Three hundred and eighty-three pieces were assembled from all available sources.

Together with abstract art of the last twenty-five years, examples of primitive sculpture (which served as a source for modernist treatment) as well as such European antecedents as Cezanne, Rousseau, and Seurat were also shown. To complete the setting, the exhibition indicated certain social uses and influences of abstract art by including reproductions of architectural designs, interior decoration, typography, commercial art, films, and other practical applications of the style. Thus, one exhibition became virtually a study course in one of the principal phases of modern art.

In the course of its ten years' history (1939) the museum has shown eighty-five exhibitions in New York to more than one and a half million visitors. Some, such as the exhibition of Cubism and Abstract Art just described, or The American Film 18951937, have been carefully historical; others have presented a particular problem, such as book illustration, mural painting, design for college architecture, or art for subways ; and still others have included large groups of paintings by important masters of the recent past, among them the French painters Cezanne, Corot, and Daumier, and the Americans, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Albert P. Ryder. One-man shows of living artists have included paintings by Henri Matisse, Diego Rivera, Edward Hopper, and John Marin; sculpture by Lachaise, prints by Rouault, architecture by Le Corbusier and Aalto, photographs by Walker Evans. Other exhibitions have emphasized national achievement, for instance, German Painting and Sculpture (1931), Modern English Architecture, Murals by American Painters and Photographers, New Horizons in American Art (the WPA Federal Art Project).

Sources that have stimulated the modern imagination, such as Paleolithic cave paintings, African Negro sculpture, Aztec, Incan, and Mayan art, and even the art of children and the psychopathic have also been placed on view. American folk art, for example, produced between 1750 and 1900 by artists unheralded and unsung in fine art circles, was set before the modern eye because this nai've and serious work bears a stylistic affiliation with certain phases of living contemporary art.

About half the museum's exhibitions have been sent on tour to more than three hundred different institutions. The Van Gogh show for instance was seen not only by 142,000 New Yorkers but also by 800,000 other Americans in museums as far west as San Francisco and as far north as Toronto. It is chiefly because of its circulating exhibitions and its excellent publications that the museum may be considered a national institution.

Many of the museum's exhibitions are fed from the permanent collection as well as by loans from all parts of the world. Because of lack of space prior to the erection of the present building the permanent collection has never been shown in its entirety; the museum, however, plans to exhibit the most important objects in this collection. Its nucleus is the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest of 235 works, together with the gift of 181 items from Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. These are constantly augmented by acquisitions of European and American paintings and sculpture. The collection already possesses excellent examples of work by the best of the moderns and their immediate forerunners. Cezanne, Degas, Gauguin, Redon, Henri Rousseau, Seurat, and Daumier are represented by a rich collection containing several acknowledged masterpieces. More recent painters and sculptors include the Europeans, Picasso, Derain, Matisse, Braque, Modigliani, Segonzac, Maillol, Despiau, Brancusi, Dufy, and Dali, and the Americans, Hopper, Karfiol, Walkowitz, Cropper, Burchfield, Marin, Benton, Epstein, Lachaise, and Calder.

It has been a policy of the museum not to confine its interest to painting and sculpture but to include in its program almost all the living visual arts. Photography and the theater arts have been presented in large exhibitions and will probably be established as integral divisions of the museum's work. Already there are permanent museum departments devoted to architecture, industrial design, and motion pictures.

The Department of Architecture and Industrial Art was founded in 1932, following the controversial exhibition of modern architecture, which helped to popularize the International Style developed by Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and J. J. P. Oud. The department has also emphasized the pioneer work of the Americans, Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1934 the Machine Art Exhibition inaugurated the department's work in industrial and commercial design, which now includes furniture and utensils, typography and posters. The department works through competitions as well as publications and exhibitions.

The Museum of Modern Art Film Library, founded in 1935 principally with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, comprises a collection of motion picture films marking distinct stages in the development of the cinema. Its scope includes the earliest motion picture, such historic American productions as Griffith's Intolerance and Cruze's Covered Wagon, the Keystone comedies, the early Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin pictures, together with such German experiments as the Last Laugh, the work of the Russians Eisenstein and Pudovkin and of the surrealist jantatshtes. Film programs, to which members of the museum are admitted free of charge, are presented each season and have been distributed to scores of educational institutions throughout the country. The film library maintains active research and information services and presents each year in conjunction with Columbia University a course in the history and technique of the motion picture.

The museum regularly conducts a number of other activities. Modern art committees have been established in thirty cities. Museum publications, issued at reasonable prices, supplement and perpetuate the current exhibitions. A bulletin is issued six times yearly. The museum also houses a fine working library of more than three thousand volumes on modern art, periodicals, and photographs ; and a lending collection of slides, photographs, and half-tone cuts for printing service. Lectures on a variety of subjects are also included in the museum's service.

The museum building, five stories above ground with a theater below, is constructed of reinforced concrete and steel with contrasting surfaces of veined marble, glass brick, blue glazed tile, and plate glass. Its interior affords rich but simple settings for the display of art. The museum is planned as part of a design that includes the Rockefeller Apartments to the north, and Rockefeller Center (see page 333} to the south. Eventually, the southern facade with its strong horizontal lines will terminate a plaza leading from the Center. The rear facade forms one side of a garden court of the apartment house; its setbacks were designed to allow sunlight to enter the garden.

CENTRAL PARK

From the upper floors of an apartment hotel on its southern border Central Park appears as a vast irregular terrain marked by outcropping rock formations, wooded areas, and many bodies of water. Deep green marks it, summer and spring, and fall brings to it a variety of color that changes day by day. The park is enclosed by stone walls, with entrance gates at frequent intervals. It has two longitudinal boulevards, East Drive and West Drive, and four transverses depressed below the park's level East Sixty-fifth to West Sixty-sixth, East Seventy-ninth to West Eighty- first, East Eighty-fifth to West Eighty-sixth, and Ninety-seventh Street east to west. Intersecting roads for motor traffic, thirty-two miles of winding footpaths, and a four-mile bridle path make up an informal pattern. An 84O-acre tract, two and one-half miles long and a half mile wide, Central Park extends from the solid border of hotels and apartment buildings of West Fifty-ninth Street to Harlem at noth.

The park's setting is the result of more than eighty years of planning and effort. The purchase of the land in 1856 was preceded by ten years' agitation by the press and by such public-minded citizens as Washington Irving, George Bancroft, and William Cullen Bryant, who became members of the first Park Board. The section was then on the outskirts of the city, and scrubby trees and outcropping rock formations marked the land which barely afforded pasturage for the gaunt pigs and goats of impoverished squatters. Egbert L. Viele was commissioned to make a topographical survey. His difficulties consisted not only in problems arising from the irregularity of the terrain, but in the opposition of the squatters, who saw in his visit the threat of eviction; it is believed that Viele's first attempt was abruptly terminated when the squatters ejected him bodily.

The park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, and their general plan has since been followed. Construction began as a relief project under the stress of the panic and depression of 1857. Changes and improvement have been made in the design through the years ; yet it may safely be claimed that under Park Commissioner Moses, of the LaGuardia municipal administration, the park achieved the appearance of a place more carefully tended than at any time in its history. Besides widespread renovation there has been an unprecedented development of new facilities, most of this the work of such agencies as the Civil Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration.

There are entrances to the park convenient to subways, to residential neighborhoods, and to the museums that were originally part of the park plan. The Merchant's Gate at Columbus Circle is often used by visitors who wish easy access to the Heckscher playground a venture in which philanthropy and the Works Progress Administration have combined to provide for the recreational needs of children. The playground's facilities include a wading pool and a drinking fountain, with sculpture by F. G. Roth showing "Alice in Wonderland" and the "Duchess." From a hillside just beyond comes the familiar music of the Carousel. A round stone terrace on a hilltop is all that is left of the Kinderberg an arbor where children played before such recreational developments as the Heckscher playground existed.

The Green, also accessible from the Merchant's Gate, holds the Tavernon-the-Green, erected in 1870 to house a flock of Southdown sheep. The building was converted into a restaurant in 1934. A flagstone terrace, dotted in summer with gaily colored umbrellas, looks out upon West Drive.

Since 1903 Augustus Saint-Gaudens' equestrian statue of General William T. Sherman has marked the Plaza entrance (Fifth Avenue and Fiftyninth Street) to Central Park, although horse-drawn hacks and Karl Bitter's Abundance, a nude female figure whose gold leaf has been recently renewed, are also identified with this corner. The surrounding architecture has been photographed so often that few visitors fail to recognize the dignified mansard of the Plaza Hotel and the terraced setbacks of the new apartment hotels, towering above the formal arrangement of the Plaza entrance itself, and reflected in the Pond at the park's southeastern corner.

At the entrance to the first walk is Gustave Blaeser's bust of the scientist, F. H. Alexander von Humboldt. It was unveiled in 1869, the park's second sculpture acquisition, the first having been the bronze Tigress and Cubs which stands near the colored umbrellas of the Zoo cafeteria.

The Plaza entrance, the one most often used, offers a direct course to the Mall, following East Drive, and a visit to the Pond where wild fowl, pelicans, and swans decorate the natural lagoons. A third and popular route is a path, between East Drive and the Fifth Avenue wall, that leads to the Zoo, past the dirt track where children may ride on Shetland ponies. Zoo buildings line the approach to the neat brick structures of the quadrangle designed by Aymar Embury II, architect for the Triborough Bridge and the Henry Hudson Bridge. (Zoo open daily 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; admission free.) Outdoor cages and the sea lion pool occupy the inner court. Zoo buildings surround it on three sides ; the cafeteria and pavilion take up the west side of the court. The new Zoo is in striking contrast to the former grimy buildings, where the iron bars of the cages were so rusted that the keepers carried guns for self protection. The Arsenal, at the Fifth Avenue side of the quadrangle, is an example of Gothic Revival architecture striving with its octagonal turrets for a medieval effect. It was built as a state arsenal in 1848 and has since served as the first home of the American Museum of Natural History, a weather bureau, and a police precinct ; today it is the headquarters for the city Park Department.

An underpass next to the Primates house veers leftward to the Mall. At an intersection close to East Drive is the bronze figure by F. G. Roth of the Alaskan dog, Balto, and a bas-relief of Balto as the lead dog of a team of seven "huskies." The sculpture bears the inscription, "Dedicated to the spirit of the sled dogs that relayed antitoxin over six hundred miles of rough ice, across treacherous waters, through Arctic blizzards, from Nenana to the relief of stricken Nome in the winter of 1925."

The Mall cuts a diagonal line across the park's rectangle, pointing due north across the Lake towards the Belvedere Tower, purposely kept small in order to increase, by forced perspective, the illusion of distance. The Mall was intended by Olmsted and Vaux as a grand promenade. At the entrance to the wide walk lined with trees are bronze sculptures of Columbus, Shakespeare, Robert Burns, and Sir Walter Scott. In the gas-light era this was a playground for children ; for a dime they could ride the length of the Mall in barouches drawn by teams of goats.

At the north end of the Mall is the Concert Ground where popular programs of classical music are given by Edwin Franko Goldman's band and by WPA orchestras. Across the ground from the orchestra shell Henry Baerer's huge bust of Ludwig van Beethoven broods over a female figure, representing the spirit of music, that rises from the foot of the pedestal. On summer evenings dances are held here against the background of lights and electric signs along the park's southern border.

During the day parts of the near-by roadways are roped off for cycling and roller skating, while east from the orchestra shell, on the site of the Casino, whose high prices were something of a scandal a few years back, is the Rumsey playground for children. On the concert ground itself performances of folk dancing and similar exhibitions are held.

The northern end of the Mall terminates in a balustrade. Broad steps lead through an arched underpass down to a brick terrace that extends to the Lake. In the center of the Terrace is Bethesda Fountain, the only piece of statuary arranged for in the original plans. Like the ornamented pilasters and balustrades of the stairways and the arcade, the bronze Bethesda, wings outspread, was executed by Emma Stebbins after the design by architect J. Wrey Mould. Worn stone, gurgling fountain, and the wooded hillside of the Ramble across the Lake succeed more than any other spot in the park in fulfilling the intent of Olmsted to take the city dweller out of his urban surroundings. The sound of oars in their locks, the flapping wings of waterfowl blend with the cries of children across the Lake and the Ramble, the latter deep with autumn, heavy with winter's snow, or yellow-green with another spring.

Left from the terrace a path explores the hilly area of the Ramble through deep gorges and past banks of rhododendrons and azaleas. Another path leads right, to the house, where flatbottom boats are for rent at a moderate fee. Conservatory Pond, a pool of formal design where toy yacht regattas are held, may be reached by an underpass near the boathouse.

Continuing northwestward by the Lake and the Ramble a country sense of direction is of value in a large park with few signs a rocky ledge and a series of stone steps lead to the Belvedere, where a U.S. Government Weather Bureau is maintained. The building resembles a miniature old castle, but its tower contains the modern scientific instruments used in predicting the weather; in winter it extends its field of applied science, flying a banner with a red ball when the ice on New Lake, just to the north, is safe for skating. A bronze tablet to Dr. Daniel W. Draper, who established the first Meteorological Observatory in Central Park in 1868, is fixed to the wall of the tower.

Belvedere Terrace, cut from Vista rock, looks out upon the area between the Belvedere and the Receiving Reservoir. In the immediate foreground is New Lake, and beyond it the oval expanse of the Great Lawn. The pages of Robert Nathan's novel, One More Spring, recall one of the most bitter years of the park's history, when the bowl of the drained reservoir was used as a refuge by victims of the depression. After the hovels had been removed the area was landscaped and the reservoir basin filled in.

To the left is the Shakespeare Garden, with an oak from Stratford on Avon and flowers and small shrubs mentioned in the work of the poet; and, close by, the replica of a nineteenth-century Swedish schoolhouse, brought to the Philadelphia Exposition in 1876. Northwestward also is Summit Rock, crowned by Mrs. Sally Farnum's equestrian statue of Simon Bolivar, Venezuelan liberator. A network of paths on the left leads to these points and to the Lower Reservoir playground, the central Promenade between the Great Lawn and the Receiving Reservoir, and the play area to the right which includes a roller-skating rink.

To the right from the terrace across the green oval of the Lawn are the buildings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (see page 368), and the Obelisk, quarried by Thothmes III in 1600 B.C. and brought to this country in 1880 with much difficulty: unloaded at Staten Island it was towed on pontoons up the Hudson to Ninety-sixth Street and then in a great cradle it was rolled on cannon balls to the "worst place within the city for getting an obelisk to." The path that leads over billowing landscape to the neighborhood of the museum is the best approach to the Obelisk's two hundred tons of granite, whose hieroglyphics tell of Thothmes III, Rameses II, and Osarkon I. In 500 B.C. Cambyses, the Persian, overturned the monument, and in 12 B.C. Romans brought the shaft to Alexandria, and placed it before a temple. Although it is widely known as Cleopatra's Needle, the obelisk has no known historical connection with Cleopatra.

The original wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, red brick and steep ma