Sight Seeing in Lower Manhattan

I did something yesterday that New York residents rarely do.  I went sightseeing in Lower Manhattan.  I took my newly repaired trusty little digital camera and visited the 9/11 Memorial for the first time ever, and the World Trade Center site for the first time in over 10 years.

All the photos except for a couple of historical pictures are mine and are freely available, especially to educators.

1 World Trade Center, now mostly open for business with long lines waiting to pay some absurdly high price to visit the observation deck on the top 3 floors.
I see this building almost daily from a distance in Brooklyn or from the Lower East Side.

What little is left of Kenneth Snelson's original design for the top of 1 WTC.

Tourists around the North Tower Memorial.  The memorial pits were even bigger in real life than they appear in the photos.

The North Tower Memorial and the base of 1 WTC

The North Tower Memorial; the two pits contain the largest manmade waterfalls in the world.

The North Tower Memorial

The South Tower Memorial

The South Tower Memorial

The South Tower Memorial

1 WTC from the South Tower Memorial

The Museum entrance pavilion from the south

The Museum entrance pavilion from the north; I did not go into the Museum for a host of reasons, among them the very long line you see here.  The design of this building is very striking suggesting a fallen World Trade Center tower.

Santiago Calatrava's spectacular entrance skylight for the new Transit Hub is almost finished.

Another view of Calatrava's giant skeletal bird from Greenwich Street, open to Cortlandt Street for the first time in about 50 years.

The Calatrava Bird from Saint Paul's Chapel church yard; I used to work in the Borders Store that was located just to the right in this picture.  Where that giant bird now stands, Borders employees used to go smoke.

#4 World Trade Center

Liberty/Zucotti Park today

The same spot photographed by me October 6, 2011 when it was the hub of Occupy Wall Street.  In the foreground is the improvised lending library that they set up.  They also had a functioning clinic, canteen, broadcast facilities, and a press office in this square.
Some of us haven't forgotten.

Saint Paul's Chapel with its spire under scaffolding, the oldest church building in Manhattan and a little bit of London in Downtown.

Saint Paul's Chapel is the oldest church building in Manhattan and still one of the best in my opinion.

One of the oldest paintings of the Great Seal of the USA from 1781 over Washington's pew in Saint Paul's.

Wall Street

Well of course they fly the flag.  They bought it.  The Stock Exchange.

I remember sitting on the steep steps of the Federal Hall Memorial looking at this flag in the weeks that followed the September 11th Attacks wondering just how patriotic it really is to keep overseas tax shelters in a time of national emergency.

The Federal Hall Memorial, site of Federal Hall, the first Capitol of the United States, and this site of the Inauguration of George Washington as the first President of the USA.  The present building was built in 1842 as the US Customs House designed by Alexander Jackson Davis and is a very exact Greek Revival Doric order on the outside.

The original Federal Hall was built in 1700 and demolished in 1812 on this site.  The giant bronze statue of Washington supposedly stands on the very spot where he took the oath of office.

Inside the Federal Hall Memorial, a not so exact Greek Revival interior.  This is one of my favorite rooms in the city.

Supposedly the very paving stone upon which Washington stood to take the Presidential oath of office.

A 19th century painting in Federal Hall of Washington's Inauguration with Trinity Church in a previous incarnation in the background.

This very small unremarkable little pocket park marks the site of New York City's slave market, one of the biggest in the USA.

Trinity Church, the masterpiece of architect Richard Upjohn who designed numerous churches in New York City and all along the Eastern Seaboard.  Completed in 1846, this is the third church to stand on this site.  The first church was built in 1698.

Trinity Church is the wealthiest church congregation in the USA.  The people who attend regularly are not much different in income than any other church-goers in New York.  The average incomes of regulars at Saint Thomas on Fifth Avenue or Saint Bartholomew's on Park Avenue or Saint Ignatius Loyola (RC) also on Park Avenue are certainly much higher than those of Trinity's congregants.  What makes Trinity so rich is all the land that it owns, among the most valuable in the world.  When the church was founded in 1696, William and Mary granted the church most of the west side of Manhattan and much of the land underneath the Financial District.  The church remains one of the largest and wealthiest property owners in Manhattan funding most of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, and much of the rest of the Episcopal Church.

Trinity Church remains a major monument of 19th century Gothic Revival architecture influencing church design around the world.

The grave of Alexander Hamilton in Trinity Churchyard.

An old 18th century grave stone in Trinity Churchyard; thousands upon thousands lie buried in Trinity Churchyard.  Only a few of all of the graves are marked.  Vibrations from traffic and construction frequently force bones to the surface.  The bones are collected in a bone box in the church that is then ceremonially reburied when it gets full.

A pew's eye view of Richard Upjohn's splendid interior for Trinity Church.
The reredos and altar are later additions from 1876 to 1877.  Trinity was originally a very low church parish that forbade Upjohn from designing anything like an altar for the apse of the church (to his great frustration).

The magnificent window above the altar.

The very beautifully designed arcading in the church

More aisles, clerestory, and Upjohn's splendid variation on English vaulting

Our City Hall completed in 1812, magnificently restored and completely inaccessible to anyone except the City council and city employees with clearance.  I can't help but contrast this over-secured building with the Texas State Capitol that is wide open to everyone, especially when the state legislature is not in session (which is most of the time).

A lot of history took place on the steps of New York's City Hall.  Here is a historic photograph of City Hall during President Lincoln's funeral in 1865.

Horace Greely who told all the young men to go west, and who hired a foreign correspondent in London named Karl Marx to work for the New York Tribune.

The Potter Building completed in 1886
This is one of the last elaborate newspaper palaces left on Park Row across from City Hall.  The New York World, The NY Tribune, the NY Times, and others all had big elaborate headquarters along Park Row.

The Woolworth Building finished in 1913, the masterpiece of Cass Gilbert.  So far as I know, this is the only major commercial building paid entirely with cash.  This building began the skyscraper race in Manhattan from about 1913 to the end of the 1930s.  FW Woolworth wanted Gilbert to design the tallest building in New York to get back at Metropolitan Life for some personal slight, and for having the temerity to build such a tall elaborate tower on Madison Square Park.
The unprecedented height of the building caused a lot of widespread anxiety about future buildings of similar height blocking out light and air from the streets below.  The 1916 zoning laws requiring buildings above a certain height to be setback from the street was a legacy of this building.  Today this once tallest building looks like a midget compared to the buildings around it.  Perhaps the anxieties of the early 20th century were not unfounded as the sky-high investment towers going up on Billionaire's Row on 57th street threaten to cast mile long shadows into Central Park and to put the entire southern quarter of the Park into perpetual twilight.

The Tweed Courthouse behind City Hall.
This building was under construction from 1861 to 1881 and cost $11 million to $12 million in 19th century dollars (so many billions now).  The building was never really completed.  It was supposed to be topped by a tall dome that was never built.  Due to all the graft and so many people stealing the building's funds, it took longer and cost more money to build this comparatively small and modest building than to build the British Houses of Parliament in London, a far larger building.

 

Chambers Street with the Tweed Courthouse on the right and the Municipal Building at the end of the street.

The tower of the Municipal Building completed in 1914, designed by William Kendall of the historic McKim, Mead, and White firm.  This was the first building to incorporate a subway station in its base (it's still there and still functions).  This magnificent piece of Beaux-Arts wedding cake would inspire other buildings from the Terminal Tower in Cleveland to the Wrigley Building in Chicago to Moscow University.

The African Burial Ground Memorial.  New York City buried its African inhabitants both slave and free in a separate cemetery outside the city walls beginning in the 17th century.  It was long thought that the cemetery was destroyed during the leveling of Manhattan to construct the 1811 Commissioner's Plan for New York.  Workers in 1991 accidentally rediscovered the cemetery during the construction of a new federal office building under fill from the 1811 leveling.  Archaeologists excavated 419 graves here out of an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 burials in the original cemetery. The Memorial marks only a small portion of a once large cemetery.

Inscription on the African Burial Ground Memorial.

From the African Burial Ground Memorial

From the African Burial Ground Memorial

The courthouses on Foley Square

The Haughwout Building built in 1857.
This is the best of the surviving cast iron buildings made by Daniel Badger's Architectural Ironworks in Lower Manhattan.  These cast iron buildings in Soho, Tribeca, and other parts of Lower Manhattan were precursors to the steel frame construction invented in Chicago in the 1890s.  This one was modeled on the Sansovino Library in Venice by the designer John P. Gaynor, and once housed a very posh department store frequented by Mary Todd Lincoln.
The Haughwout Building also had the world's first successful passenger elevator built by Elijah Otis.

Corner of the Haughwout Building

Frontispiece for Daniel Badger's catalogue

The great Chicago architect Louis Sullivan's only building in New York City, the Bayard-Condict Building completed in 1899, one of his most elaborate.  It was one of the first skeleton-frame buildings in New York covered with a surface of glass and terra-cotta.

Detail of the terra-cotta work on the Bayard-Condict Building.  The ornament is all Sullivan's design and as in all of his buildings is integral to the entire building.

Detail from the Bayard-Condict Building

Detail from the Bayard-Condict Building

Detail from the Bayard-Condict Building

A salute to our friends on the Left Coast on Houston Street.  I have no idea what this is about or why it is here.

Self-portrait in the glass of the 9/11 Museum

Marriage

Aristide Maillol, Three Graces, 1930 - 1938

The San Ildenfonso Group (Orestes and Pylades?), circa 10 BC

Marriage equality in the USA (or anywhere) is astonishing and something I never thought I would live to see. We got to this point because the gay/lesbian rank and file wanted it. For a long time, LGBTQ leaders and the activists were too pre-occupied with emergency response and damage control; with AIDS, violence, discrimination, with one crisis after another.  The very idea of marriage wasn't even taken seriously.   Some activists from the radical edges wondered whether we really want equality at all, or if equality was enough.  They argued that we might want something particular and separate in a heterosexist world.  Gay and lesbian relations are indeed different, the radicals said, and that we should embrace what makes them distinct.  Why mimic heterosexual marriage and family life?  Why not find new and more workable ways of forming relationships? And why would any self-respecting sexual minority want to be part of a conventional society that rewarded greed and predation anyway? Radicals regarded marriage as a an antique, a proprietary patriarchal throwback to be consigned to the dustbin of history (and of course, they have a point; same sex relationships are distinct and that simply aping heterosexual models for living together ignores and diminishes what makes them unique).

History seems to have had other ideas. Radical re-arrangements of living together are fine when you are relatively young and come with the means and education to experiment. A lot of the gay-lesbian rank and file, especially older couples, felt discrimination directly in their attempts to form a life together and create a household, and not so much in matters of sexual expression. Law, society, and business were against them in so many large and small ways. The whole matter for them was less about redefining what it means to live together than about very concrete matters such as joint ownership of property, visitation rights and medical rights when one of them got sick or injured, inheritance rights when a partner died, and especially joint custody when children were part of the household.  These were the people who were the real force behind the push for marriage equality.  It turns out that contrary to the conventional image of white, male, and affluent couples with kids living in New York or San Francisco, places like Jacksonville Florida have among the highest numbers of same-sex households with children.  The majority of same-sex households raising children are women, black, working class, religious, and living in the South.
People like this who did not appear on the party circuit or in gay studies seminars created the demand for marriage equality.  The activists eventually figured out that far from a fond fantastical thing, marriage equality was integral to responding to emergencies such as AIDS, violence, and rollbacks of rights, or new penalties.  Couples needed access to hospitalized partners and power of attorney in the face of hostile relatives, hospital staff, and a state apparatus stacked against them.  Marriage equality involved the very matter that distinguished gays and lesbians from the rest of society, sexual attraction.  Couples denied rights and frustrated in their efforts to create lasting homes and families were being punished by society for their mutual sexual attraction.  A little late, but better than never, activists and activist organizations began to push for marriage equality.

 As far as redefining marriage, or even discarding it entirely, I think the heteros are way out front of the gay marriage equality activists. They rethought and remade the institution long before the gay community got a crack at it. The old Victorian Domestic Ideal disappeared in the 1960s with the Sexual Revolution. Over time, marriage as an equal partnership replaced the Victorian concept of the family as patriarchal hierarchy with the father at the head having absolute authority and domain over women and children.  Roles in an equal partnership could be interchangeable -- no longer would women be confined to the role of "angel of the household."  Now men could take on the tasks of child-rearing and home maintenance while women could go out and be the bread-winners.  The roles of provider and parent became so interchangeable that the genders of those entering into such an equal partnership hardly mattered anymore. While the advent of no-fault divorce is blamed for the decline of traditional family life, the other side of the higher divorce rate is an even more dramatic decline in domestic violence rates. Many couples and families in Europe and increasing numbers in the USA question the need for any legal recognition of their family status.
When Bill Paulsen and I traveled to Oslo last year, we visited a lot of couples and families with children (most of them were Bill's relatives).  Out of all of them, the only couple that was legally married was the one gay couple who were our hosts in Oslo.

Right wingers portray marriage as an unchanging timeless institution revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai.  Like so many timeless and unchanging institutions, the man-woman-child biological unit as family that they defend began in the 19th century.
Few institutions have been more malleable down through time than marriage.  For centuries, marriage was a strictly mercenary institution.  Among powerful and wealthy families, marriage was about keeping and expanding wealth and power.  Among the poor, marriage was about insurance for old age and labor for the farm or the shop.  The more children the better and the greater chances for survival for all.  Love was for children, not for spouses.  Marriage was most especially about begetting sons to inherit family lineages and fortunes.  Polygamy flourished among the great and powerful in the ancient world not just out of luxury and license, but to guarantee the generation of sons.  A king could not risk the dynasty on monogamy with an infertile queen.  It is no accident that all of the medieval romances (including Dante's infatuation with the sainted Beatrice Portinari) were adulterous.  For most of history, marriage was simply too important a business to be left to kids.
As for Christian marriage, Saint Paul only very grudgingly accepted marriage as a concession to those unable to stay celibate for the coming Apocalypse (in other words, most people).

People didn't start marrying because they loved each other in large numbers until the end of the 18th century, and even then, only in the West.  It took the three big formative revolutions that made the modern world (American, French, Industrial) to create a space for people to combine their longings and desires with the creation of families and households.  From that point on, as circumstances changed and changed rapidly and without precedent, so people's expectations in life changed, and ways of forming a life together began to alter rapidly.  That evolution will undoubtedly continue.

Andrew Sullivan once dreamed of a world where the distinction of "gay" no longer existed, that "gay" became part of "normal."  It seems at first glance that the assimilationist dream is about to come true.  I suspect that the reality of what is happening is much more complex.  Some radicals are in a state of inner turmoil now that society is embracing the very thing that makes gays and lesbians distinct from everyone else.  But their turmoil is nothing compared to the apoplexy of the homophobic legions at these changes.  The homophobes see in a way that the gay radicals maybe can't that in embracing and legitimizing same sex relationships through marriage that the larger conventional society itself is changing rapidly and dramatically, that heterosexuals are discarding the idea of "normal" and all things normative with as much enthusiasm as their homosexual counterparts.

Same sex couples and the recognition of their legitimacy by the rest of society through marriage is a major and unlikely accomplishment, and another victory for Love over the usual greed and fear that drive most of modern enterprise.
The Episcopal Church recently joined the ranks of churches that now recognize gay marriages and perform same-sex weddings as official policy.  The Christian understanding of marriage too is evolving into something far from Saint Paul's grudging concessions and from a kind of spiritual rubber-stamp on the old Victorian model.  I hope that it will soon become something like the Marriage at Cana where Christ changed the water into wine, into the best wine anyone had ever tasted, and more of it than the party could possibly drink; into Love and Grace unbounded and overflowing.

Paolo Veronese, The Marriage at Cana

Lafayette and Me

 Lafayette in 1791 as a Lieutenant General in the French National Guard, painted by Joseph-Desire Court 



Over the past year or so, I've been doing some serious rethinking of my relationship with the United States, my native country.  A long slow spiral of disillusionment that began with the Vietnam War descending all the way through the Iraq Invasion of 2003 came to a breaking point with the Senate Torture report last year.  What I found to be so shocking was not the report itself or what it said.  The world had known that the USA tortured and killed prisoners of war since the revelations and pictures out of the prison at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and more revelations and pictures out of Afghanistan.  What shocked me was the reaction of many people to the report, including people that I consider old and close friends.  Here we were trashing the very Geneva Conventions that we initiated and drafted after our own POWs were treated so barbarically during the Second World War.  We proudly did the same things for which we hanged people in the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials after the War (the Japanese frequently water-boarded American POWs).  And people were just fine with it.  They were all for it.  Their reasons ranged from anything-to-find-that-ticking-time-bomb to "the bastards got what was coming to them."

The scales fell from my eyes and I realized that the country that commanded my lifelong loyalty and allegiance was an aggressive imperial state, and that it always had been.  It built an empire out of the North American continent upon conquest, slavery, and genocide.  The United States in the end was but one more empire in a long list, that it was nothing more than one big organized smash-and-grab like all the other empires before it.

So how to square this reality with the vision contained in its credal documents that still holds my very deep loyalty and affection?  Do I abandon the whole thing all together?  Should I pick up and leave my native country for someplace else, maybe better, maybe not?  Should I resort to sedition and treason?  Or, should I just give up, quit any kind of civic involvement (including voting) and let the whole empire slide into inevitable decline and destruction while I get on with my own life?

I decided that exile was futile.  There is no country on earth that doesn't have some measure of crime in its history that affects its present.  The very far right in this country seems remarkably eager to resort to sedition and treason these days (e.g. any number of secession movements from Texas to the Confederacy).  Since they can't get their way, they eagerly betray the country that they profess to so super-love.  Besides, I despise treason and betrayals of all kinds.  So that's out.  Simply staying at home on election day and avoiding all civic involvement is ultimately irresponsible; a negligence of duty to my neighbors, my communities, to my home, and to myself.

So, what to do?

Lafayette, the Hero of Two Worlds, rides to my rescue.  Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette I think shows me the path that I am looking for.

I'm not really interested in the Lafayette of the American Revolution, though that is an attractive and fascinating character.  He was one of the few Champions of Liberty from that time who was not tainted or compromised by slavery.  I relish the vision of the 19 year old Lafayette telling General Washington to free his slaves and to provide each of them with land to make an honest living.

The Lafayette I'm interested in is the Lafayette of the French Revolution and its long aftermath, an older more worn and frayed character than the fresh-faced young hero of the American Revolution.

Lafayette assumes command of the French National Guard at the Fete de la Federation, July 14, 1790.  The ceremony took place on the Champs de Mars in Paris where the Eiffel Tower now stands.  The child standing to the right is Lafayette's son George Washington.  The bishop on the far right is Talleyrand, then Bishop of Autun.

Lafayette enthusiastically embraced the Revolution in his homeland and eagerly participated in it.  He commanded the National Guard that defended Paris from monarchist reactionaries and Austrian invaders.  He designed the French Tricolor.  He introduced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen to the National Assembly, a document that he helped to write with consultations from Thomas Jefferson.  Lafayette emerged as a born-again true believer in Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.

And he continued to believe fervently in Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite despite finding his name on the death lists of both radical Jacobins and monarchist reactionaries.  He remained loyal to those principles despite fleeing to Belgium, capture by the Germans, and spending many years being passed around from one German prison to another.  When Napoleon finally sprang Lafayette from his last prison in Austria, Lafayette very ungratefully turned on Napoleon when he made himself dictator and eventually emperor.  Lafayette endured Napoleon's defeat, the Bourbon Restoration, Charles X, and came to life again in the July Revolution of 1830.  He supported the campaign to make the Duc d'Orleans king despite his republican sympathies.  Lafayette wanted to avoid the civil war that caused the downfall of the first Revolution, so he supported King Louis Philippe.  He turned on the king when Louis Philippe started becoming more and more autocratic and anti-liberal.

Lafayette spent most of the later part of his life in prison, under house arrest, or under police surveillance.  He remained deeply loyal to those original liberal ideas of the American and French Revolutions.  He remained a steadfastly loyal servant of France and of the ideas of Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite to his dying day long after France betrayed them, and betrayed him.

For me, he was a hero then and remains a hero now.
And so I remain deeply loyal to the credal statements of the United States; the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, and ML King's Dream.  I remain loyal to them even when the American Empire wipes its ass with them.  I can still Pledge Allegiance to Liberty and Justice for All even in an empire made great by greed and racism.

"Loyalty to country always," said another fighting liberal Mark Twain, "loyalty to the government only when it deserves it."


  

A portrait of Lafayette in old age painted by Samuel FB Morse (the same one who invented the telegraph) commissioned by the City of New York during his triumphant grand tour of the United States in 1824 - 1825.