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SALUTES
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SALUTES: June
Many sculptures in Manhattan are linked to important dates in U.S. or world history. Here are a few for June.
June
7, 1893: Death of Edwin Booth
* Edwin Booth as Hamlet, by Edmond T. Quinn, 1917. Gramercy Park, between 20th and 21st Sts. at Lexington Ave. (The park is accessible only to residents of surrounding buildings, but there’s a good view of the statue from 20th St.)
In the early 19th century, if you went to see Edwin Booth’s father Junius, another noted American actor, playing Shakespeare’s Richard III, these would have been the opening words of the Duke of Gloucester, soon to be Richard III:
Now are our Brows bound with Victorious wreaths,Our stern allarms are changed to Merry-meetings,Our dreadfull marches to delightful measures. …Then since this Earth affords no joy to me,But to Command, to Check, and to Orebear such,'As are of Happier Person than my self,'Why then to me this restless World's but Hell,Till this mishapen trunks aspiring head'Be circled in a glorious Diadem --
These were not, however, the opening lines of the performance: before them came a long scene in which Henry VI was told of his son’s death in battle.
Had you attended Richard III performed by Edwin Booth in his maturity, the curtain would have risen to these lines by Gloucester:
Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York; And all the clouds that lowered upon our house In the deep bosom of the ocean buried. Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths, Our bruised arms hung up for monuments, Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings, Our dreadful marches to delightful measures. …
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
The first set of lines above is from an adaptation by Colley Cibber (1671-1757), actor, theater manager, playwright, and poet laureate of England. From 1700, when Cibber wrote it, until the late 19th century, Cibber's was the preferred acting version of Richard III. (For more on Colley Cibber, who was lampooned in Pope's Dunciad, see http://search.eb.com/shakespeare/micro/128/20.html ; for his adaptation of Richard III, see http://www.columbia.edu/~tdk3/cibber.txt .)
Edwin Booth 1833-1893), one of America’s most famous actors, is credited with reverting to Shakespeare’s original texts when performing Richard III and King Lear. The role for which he was famous, however, was Hamlet, in which character he’s represented in the Gramercy Park statue. In New York’s Winter Garden Theater in 1864, Booth set a record of 100 consecutive performances of Hamlet, and he played Hamlet as the last performance of his career, in 1891 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
In 1864, for the first and only time, Edwin appeared on stage with brothers Junius Brutus Booth, Jr. and John Wilkes Booth, in Julius Caesar. Although Edwin retired temporarily after his brother’s assassination of Abraham Lincoln in May 1865, audiences welcomed him back to the stage in early 1866 with cheers and applause. He remained one of America’s most famous and most beloved actors.
To facilitate meetings between actors and other prominent Americans, Booth founded The Players Club in 1888, in his elegant brownstone at 16 Gramercy Park. The Club is still there; Booth's statue faces it. See Stephen M. Archer. "Booth, Edwin Thomas"; http://www.anb.org/articles/18/18-00132.html ; American National Biography Online Feb. 2000. For more on this sculpture, see Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan.
June 16, 2005: Salute to the
City Beautiful Movement (part 1)
* Pulitzer Memorial Fountain (a.k.a. Pomona or Abundance), by Karl Bitter; setting by Thomas Hastings, of the architectural firm Carrere and Hastings. Dedicated 1916. Fifth Ave. at 59th St., just east of the Plaza Hotel.
Pomona, the young lady swinging her basket of fruit atop the multiple basins of the Pulitzer Fountain, owes her prominent location to the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. (See Forgotten Delights: The Producers, Essay 2.) The "White City" was built with the collaboration of America's greatest architects, including Richard Morris Hunt, Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, and McKim, Mead and White. Frederick Law Olmstead, landscape architect of Central Park, laid out the grounds. Sculptors Augustus Saint Gaudens, Karl Bitter, Frederick MacMonnies and Daniel Chester French contributed their efforts as well.
When the Fair closed, after six months and 20 million visitors, many visitors vividly remembered the thousands of works of art displayed, or the Midway with its exotic exhibits, or that gargantuan new invention the Ferris Wheel. Others recalled the sights, smell and ambience of the Fair. It was clean, well-lit and safe - the opposite of American cities such as New York and Chicago. Think Disney World vs. the South Bronx.
Memories of the White City spurred the City Beautiful Movement, which lasted from the 1890s until World War I. In part it was a drive to improve cities physically – to make them safer, cleaner, more sensibly laid out. But it also aimed to improve the cities' residents morally and intellectually. Many of New York's grandest public buildings date to this era: the New York Public Library at Fifth Ave. and 42nd St., the Customs House at Bowling Green, Pennsylvania Station, Grand Central Station, and the Brooklyn Museum. The sculpture that decorated these buildings, or was erected at the time in Central Park or other public venues, was meant to edify passersby with illustrations of patriotism, good government, technological progress, civic harmony, etc. Wealthy and cultured residents felt that the floods of immigrants (in 1900, 41% or about 850,000 residents of New York City were foreign-born) needed to be shown the values and virtues of American citizens.
Sometimes, though, the statues were not didactic, but simply meant to elevate the minds of passersby by their beauty. Pomona is such a sculpture. Money to erect the fountain was the bequest of Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911), enormously wealthy editor of the sensationalist New York World and the man who endowed the Pulitzer Prizes.
Karl Bitter's other works in New York include Carl Schurz at Morningside Heights, Henry Hudson at Spuyten Duyvil (Bronx), and Franz Sigel (Riverside Dr. at 106th St.). Bitter was a protege of William Morris Hunt: the Hunt Memorial at Fifth Ave. and 70th St. includes a small replica of Hunt's Administration Building for the Columbian Exposition, complete with tiny copies of Bitter's sculpture for it. (More on the Hunt Memorial and Bitter in my forthcoming book on 55 outdoor sculptures in Manhattan, due out from New York University Press in 2006.)
June
18, 1959: Death of Ethel Barrymore
* Ethel Barrymore as Ophelia, by Alexander Stirling Calder. Ca. 1927-1929. Miller Building, 1552 Broadway: statues are on the north side of 46th Street, just east of Broadway, second floor.
"For an actress to be a success," said Ethel Barrymore (1878-1959), "she must have the face of a Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of a Terpsichore [Greek muse of the dance], the memory of a Macaulay [19th-c. British historian and literary critic], the figure of a Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros."
Barrymore (1879-1959) had all these, as well as wit and charm. Born into the fourth generation of a theatrical family, she began acting at age 13, had her first big break five years later, and by the 1920s was so famous that the Shuberts built a theater named after her in order to entice her to act for them. (The Shubert organization still owns the Ethel Barrymore Theater, at 243 West 47th St.) After battles with the IRS and alcoholism in the 1930s, she salvaged her career in the 1940s with several acclaimed films.
The best tribute I've seen to her comes from Katharine Hepburn, who often visited the bedridden Barrymore in the 1950s:
She was beautiful to look at ... Wonderful hair - strong hair, lots of it and well fixed. Exquisite skin. Not much make-up and eyes that, well, scared you to death sometimes, and at other times I'd look and think, 'Where have you been and what are the lives you have seen, and what really goes on in your mind' - because although she was a great actress and a great personality and had known everyone in the world, she had a very odd look about her. She was religious. She never talked too much about it, but I think she had great faith in - something .... I don't know what the dickens it was. A kind of faith in life, I think. She made you feel that there was something about the human race that was thrilling. ... I would go away and I'd always come back. And people would say to me, 'You're so nice to go and call on Ethel.' And I would think, 'How lucky I am to be able to see Ethel!' ... I always had a feeling of elevation at having been with her. Every time I went I would look at her and think, 'I might never see you again.' And yet there she was, sitting up in bed and looking as though something wonderful was in her future. (Peters p. 519)
Barrymore is on the same building as Mary Pickford. For more on Barrymore, see Margot Peters, The House of Barrymore (1990), and Benjamin McArthur. "Barrymore, Ethel"; http://www.anb.org/articles/18/18-00063.html ; American National Biography Online Feb. 2000. Barrymore will be discussed in more detail in vol. 4 of the Forgotten Delights series.
June 24, 1821: Bolivar Wins the Battle of Carabobo
*
Simon Bolivar, by Sally Jane Farnham. 1921. Central Park
South at Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Ave.).
The victory of Simon Bolivar (1783-1830) over Spanish royalists at the Battle of Carabobo sealed the independence of Venezuela - after two failed attempts and ten years of war, during which 80,000-100,000 Venezuelans either died or emigrated.
In a letter to Bolivar, Daniel Webster (whose statue stands on the 72nd St. traverse in Central Park) hailed him as “the image of our venerated Washington.” What intrigues me is how unlike Washington Bolivar was. He professed to admire the American constitution, but served in several of the countries he liberated as absolute ruler; and he died at age 47, in exile, with barely the shirt on his back. A month before he died he wrote bitterly to a friend, “America is ungovernable. Those who serve the revolution plough the sea. The only thing to do in America is to emigrate.”
Consider the fascinating history of Bolivar in New York City. No less than three Bolivars have been erected or planned in Manhattan. The first, a gift of the government of Venezuela in 1884, was denounced in the New York Times as “an aesthetic calamity.” Although not everyone agreed, the statue was unobtrusively sited in Central Park near West 82nd St.
By 1893 the Venezuelan government had offered to replace it with one less esthetically offensive. Members of the newly founded National Sculpture Society examined the clay model by Turini (who had recently produced the Garibaldi at Washington Square and the Mazzini in Central Park), and decreed that it “failed to suit the artistic taste of New York.”
The old Bolivar was removed and its pedestal left vacant until 1921, when American Sally Jane Farnham’s new equestrian statue of Bolivar was dedicated there.
By 1949, Sixth Avenue had been renamed “Avenue of the Americas,” and the City was collecting statues of South American heroes to adorn it. The Parks Department wanted to move Bolivar from West 82nd St. down to Central Park South. City elections that year brought a vituperative exchange over funding for a new Bolivar site and pedestal between a candidate for Manhattan borough president and Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (“Ignorance could rise to no dizzier heights … There isn’t one iota of accuracy or decency in your comments”). In the end, the government of Venezuela stepped in with funds to have the piece moved to its present location, where it faces San Martin and Jose Marti.
For more on this sculpture, see Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan.
For more on the South American independence movements, I do not recommend John Lynch’s The Spanish American Revolutions 1808-1826. It’s the worst type of modern historiography: wallowing in concretes, deliberately avoiding value judgments. Reading Lynch, you could discover the percentage of the Peruvian mestizo population engaged in agriculture in 1824, but not the three most important figures in the South American independence movements. Much better is van Loon’s 1943 Life and Times of Simon Bolivar. Some of van Loon’s assumptions and principles are moot, but he gives a broad view of South America during the colonial period that’s invaluable if you’re just beginning to learn about the period. Incidentally, van Loon’s 1921 Story of Mankind is a well written and entertaining world history. Originally directed at young people, it’s also suitable for adults filling in gaps in their knowledge. The Story of Man is in the public domain, and can be downloaded free on the Net; it’s also still in print.
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