A Beautiful Way to Go

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Keith Muchowski | Leave a comment

Four years ago, just prior to getting married, I moved from an apartment I had lived in for twelve years to another about five blocks away. Overall, the move wasn’t much: same grocery store, post office, dry cleaner, etc, etc. The big change (other than the marriage) was that I was no longer so close to Prospect Park. An extra twenty minutes each way may not seem like much, but it adds an almost-prohibitive amount of time to a potential weekend walk or evening stroll after work. Brooklyn’s Prospect Park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux and, though not as well-maintained, is very much the equal of their earlier Central Park. (Central Park is better maintained because the rich folks who live along its perimeter give piles of private money for its maintenance.) For me it was a big loss, though one that came with an equally big win: I am now just five minutes away from the gates of Green-Wood Cemetery. Green-Wood is one of the original garden cemeteries and is currently celebrating its 175th anniversary. To mark the occasion the Museum of the City of New York is hosting an exhibit titled A Beautiful Way to Go: New York’s Green-Wood Cemetery. It opened yesterday and runs through October 13.

Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery

Garden cemeteries, sometimes called rural cemeteries, were a phenomenon of the nineteenth century, when American and European societies were industrializing rapidly and green space was becoming scarcer and scarcer for city dwellers. It may surprise you to know that in the late nineteenth century Green-Wood was the most-visited place in New York State after Niagara Falls. Graveyards are for the dead, final resting places for those who came before us and have now passed on; cemeteries are for the living, places to commune with nature and the past. One hundred and seventy-five years later Green-Wood is still serving this function. No matter how many times I have been there–and it is in the hundreds by now–I always see something new on each visit. It is not hard to do, whether it’s reading the many freshly-planted headstones of the 4,000 Civil War soldiers buried there, poking my head into the bars of a mausoleum to peek at the Tiffany windows, or seeing the sun hitting a familiar vista at a different angle during the change of seasons. I am looking forward to catching this show in the coming weeks, and will have more to say about it here on the blog after I do.

Sunday morning coffee

Posted on May 12, 2013 by Keith Muchowski

The Scottish – American Soldiers Monument, Edinburgh

An interesting vignette came to my in-box yesterday about the George E. Bissell statue of Lincoln that stands in Edinburgh’s Old Calton Cemetery. Bissell’s name does not carry the same weight as Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Daniel Chester French, or Paul Manship, which is unfortunate because the sculptor was very much their equal. Bissell created one of my favorite statues in all of New York City, the monument to Chester Arthur that stands in Madison Square Park. Bissell’s Arthur stands adjacent to the more lauded Saint-Gaudens’s tribute to Admiral Farragut. Sadly, both are off the tourist path and stand equally unnoticed by New Yorkers themselves as they go about their daily routines.

Bissell’s Lincoln was dedicated in 1893 and was the first of many Lincolns erected outside of the United States during the era. As you can see, it fits neatly into the “Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves” motif described by Kirk Savage in his book of the same title. We have our own such statue, for Henry Ward Beecher, here in downtown Brooklyn. Bissell’s Lincoln is more than a tribute to the Great Emancipator, however; it was also built to pay honor to the Scots who fought for the Union. If you look closely, you will notice that it stands next to the tomb of philosopher David Hume, which could not have been coincidental. We are clearly meant to associate the two men and to think of them as equals. In the tradition of the time turnout was significant for the dedication, so much so that tickets were required despite the blustery conditions. It is lost on us today how seriously people of the period took these kinds of things. Bissell’s Lincoln is a good reminder, too, that the world was paying attention to the events in the United States during our Civil War.

(image/Ad Meskens)

Easter morning coffee

Posted on March 31, 2013 by Keith Muchowski

Happy Easter. I am sitting in the living room with my coffee and Kind of Blue is on the turntable. The windows open to the early spring warmth.

I was having a brief back-and-forth online the other day with someone about Grant’s Tomb. Specifically, we were talking about how far the monument had fallen during New York City’s lost years in the 1970s and 1980s. This excellent piece in yesterday’s Wall Street by Dennis Montagna of the Park Service about the Grant Memorial on the grounds of the national capitol got me thinking even harder about various Grant statues and monuments I have seen over the years. Built from roughly 1885-1922, the monuments initially reflected the nation’s sentiments for the man many put in the same class with Washington and Lincoln. After the horrors of the First World War the Grant the Butcher meme took hold and his standing went down precipitously in the coming decades. To visit Grant Cottage in Upstate New York one must enter the grounds of a medium security prison. People walk past the beautiful Grant statue in Brooklyn, across the street from what was the Union Cub, everyday without think twice about it. When I visited two years ago a woman who worked in the adjacent building said they always wondered who it was, which struck me as odd because his name in on the pedestal. Oh well.

In a sense these things are inevitable. It is not even just Grant. I have seen beautiful statues of Lincoln in places like Newark and Jersey City that are visited by no one except the homeless who now inhabit those areas. Time moves on. Demographics change. Once thriving industrial areas that could afford a statue in, say, 1913 have better thing to worry about a hundred years later. The recent immigrants of Flatbush–and it is the immigrants who have revitalized Brooklyn in the past 25-30 years–are concerned with educating there kids and moving on to bigger and better things, not the particulars of the old statuary in their neighborhood.

The major ones deserve are our attention, though. Great things have been done to revitalize the vicinity around Grant’s Tomb in Upper Manhattan. Hopefully, strides will be taken with the Grant Memorial on the capitol grounds. It would be great if they got rid of the ugly reflecting pool for starters. The Grant bicentennial (1822-2022) is just nine short years away.

(image/Ad Meskens)

Quote of the day

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Keith Muchowski

In the evenings when Washington was quiet, I would often go to the Lincoln Memorial and talk to Mr. Lincoln. In those days you could drive right up and park at the foot of the steps of the memorial . . . I loved that majestic seated figure surrounded by his eloquent words. I found him to be a wonderful listener.

–Cynthia Helms, An Intriguing Life: A Memoir of War, Washington, and Marriage to an American Spymaster

Presidents Day weekend

Posted on February 16, 2013 by Keith Muchowski

I am on the Boltbus to DC. We just crossed under the Hudson into New Jersey.

I was having a conversation with someone the other day in which we were talking about the things that are uniquely of the 21st century. Hard as it is to believe, but we are now more than a full decade into the new millennium. The people of the 20th century saw the introduction of radio, television, and the personal computer. But what is new and unique so far to the 21st century? A few things we came up with were the eReader, the iPad and other tablet devices, and for those who live in the Northeast Corridor, the Boltbus. It has become such a part of the fabric of life in this region. I firmly believe that some filmmaker a half century from now will create a nostalgic scene in which two young lovers, circa 2010, head off for a weekend alone in the big city by taking this cheap and thoroughly enjoyable mass transit. Don’t laugh. Woody Allen did something similar in his depictions of, say, the Automat in Radio Days.

This weekend I am hoping to see the Civil War exhibit at the Library of Congress. Also on the list is the Civil War and American Art show at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum. This will actually be at the Met later this year, but there is going to be so much to it that I want to see it more than once; viewing art can be exhausting and emotionally draining. Speaking of the Met, this is a Holiday Monday coming up. Winter is a great time to visit, especially with the Matisse show set to run for one more month.

I have blogged about the Met’s New American Wing before. Here is a short video that PBS Channel Thirteen released this week about the works of Augustus Saint-Gaudens at the Metropolitan Museum. It is really something to live in New York and walk past these sculptures every day when going about your business. Yesterday morning I paused briefly in front of Saint-Gaudens’s statue of General Sherman while I was on my way to the dentist. No matter how long I live here, I will aways be a tourist. I love the still photograph in the video of what I assume was the dedication ceremony. It is lost on us today that people turned out by the thousands, even hundreds of thousands, for such occasions. Pretty wild.

Enjoy the video and your weekend.

The Eisenhower Memorial saga continues

Posted on February 14, 2013 by Keith Muchowski

I hope the powers-that-be eventually reach the conclusion that the current proposal for the Eisenhower Memorial on the National Mall is the wrong one, historically, aesthetically, and even technically. It is difficult to imagine the Gehry design withstanding decades of humid District of Columbia summers and windy, cold winters. There have been structural problems with other Gehry projects. On Tuesday the National Capital Planning Commission issued its newest technical report for the proposed monument. Time will tell.

The Eisenhower Memorial, to be continued in 2013

Posted on November 23, 2012 by Keith Muchowski

The demands of work prevented me from commenting the week before last that the National Capital Planning Commission has decided to table any decision on the Eisenhower Memorial until sometime in 2013. I am taking that as a hopeful sign that the powers-that-be will reconsider (i.e. rescind) the plans of starchitect Frank Gehry for his monument to the general and president. In mid-November John S.D. Eisenhower, the 90 year old son of the 34th president and former general and ambassador in his own right, wrote a letter to Senator Daniel Inouye, vice chair of the memorial commission. Media outlets tended to publish only excerpts, His daughter Susan has just published the entire piece. It is worth checking out.

Remembrance Day

Posted on November 11, 2012 by Keith Muchowski

Today is Veterans Day. A few months back I posted the piece below about a potential WW1 memorial on the National Mall. I will still believe it when I see it, but various powers that be are still trying to make it a reality. This weekend William N. Brown, president of the Association of the Oldest Inhabitants of the District of Columbia, wrote this piece in the Washington Post offering some possibilities. If nothing else, it gives me a chance to mention the Association of the Oldest Inhabitants of the District of Columbia. Whatever happens on the Mall, I hope he remember the Great War in a meaningful way.

Happy Veterans Day.

In the area where my brother lives in France Great War monuments are as ubiquitous as Civil War monuments are here in the United States. Every town square has its bronze doughboy representing the young men from that locale who mort pour la France. World War One monuments are less common here in America but one does see them on a fairly regular basis. We have been spending so much time on the Civil War sesquicentennial that the upcoming 100th anniversary of the First World War has been pushed to the back burner. Ready or not it is coming in just two short years. It will be an opportunity to challenge many of the assumptions we have about that conflict, just as the CW 150th has done for the War of the Rebellion. If you ever have a chance I strongly recommend a visit to the National World War One Museum in Kansas City; if you really have a chance take in the Historial de La Grande Guerre in Perrone. Both will change your perspective of this pivotal event in 20th century history.

I don’t know if the National Mall needs another monument but earlier this week Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) proposed the construction of a national World War One memorial to be built in Constitution Gardens near the Reflecting Pool. The proposal has a long road before reaching fruition because of a 2003 law prohibiting new construction on the Mall. Any exemption would mean setting a precedent. Washington already has a WW1 memorial, located in Pershing Park, but it is a local memorial dedicated to the soldiers from the District who fought in the conflict. It will be interesting to see if this proposal goes anywhere. Monuments take time, sometimes decades, to go from drawing board to ribbon cutting. I doubt this would take that long if it indeed comes to pass. 2014 is probably too soon. Perhaps five years, in time for the 100th anniversary of American involvement in April 2017, is more realistic. It will be interesting to see if this goes anywhere.

(image/Thomas R Machnitzki)

A museum Monday

Posted on October 8, 2012 by Keith Muchowski

Young Husband: First Marketing, Lilly Martin Spencer (1854)

I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art today for Holiday Monday. I had the museum almost entirely to myself, in part I suspect because many folks worked today and those who didn’t were outdoors enjoying the cool weather. The Holiday Mondays on which the Met tends to get the most traffic are Martin Luther King Jr and Presidents Days, when more people are off and everyone is trying to find something to do indoors because it is so cold out. Someone at the museum told me that next year the museum is going to be open every Monday, as I believe if once used to be. I cannot get enough of the New American Wing. I love the confluence of art and history, especially in the antebellum period before photography when realism was more important for our understanding of society.

I was at a public function last Wednesday where someone mentioned the beautiful Augustus Saint-Gaudens Farragut statue in Madison Square Park. She had recently read David McCullough’s The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris and was especially moved by McCullough’s take on the sculptor’s efforts to bring the artwork to reality. (The short version is here.) This led to a discussion of how much thought, tim, and effort artists expend on and for their work. That conversation was going through my mind when I checked out Gauden’s mock-up for the larger piece:

Admiral David Glasgow Farragut
Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1879-1880)

Speaking of museums, in late spring I mentioned a trip a friend and I took to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The clip below is from an exhibit that opened this week at the New-York Historical Society about New York City during World War 2. I have always been entranced by this time period, partially because of my love for Woody Allen movies and Pete Hamill’s stories and non-fiction. Both saw the war and the city through the prism of young boys’ eyes. I have this one penciled in for Black Friday. It is hard to believe Thanksgiving is just six weeks away.

(images courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, painting (top) promised gift)

Remembering the Great War

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Keith Muchowski