Empire, State, & Building

   Kiel Moe finds a sort of imperialist doctrine in Manhattan’s buildings. He thinks that every time something great gets built, some part of history is lost (though some might say that when a tree dies, a thousand flowers bloom) and the buildings are an encroachment. His first example is the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, which started out as the Waldorf, then the owner bought out the nearby Astor hotel, and merged them. With the new tall buildings came the need for structural engineering, and the building trusses had to be specially designed.

The author then goes into the destruction aspect of the buildings. The new Waldorf-Astoria used doors and paneling from the old building it replaced, but that was as far as the salvage went. When the 34^th street hotel was demolished in 1929, it ended then and there. But that doesn’t mean that everything went to waste; the steel and copper were recycled, and the elevators were installed elsewhere. The industrial materials were more valuable at the time than the décor, and during the depression, I don’t know how many people had the money to buy antiques.

Moe’s research brings up old photos of Manhattan’s grid, which despite the size of the plots, did not favor large buildings. The original pots were meant to favor the small row houses (that cost a fortune nowadays). Large mansions were strictly for the rich who could afford them, and a lot of those mansions were eventually sold off and torn down, making way for the rich people who wanted small apartments. The other problem was the height of the buildings; before the elevators came along, you couldn’t have a ten-story building. The materials weren’t even local; the stone was from upstate New York, the fancy bricks were from Pennsylvania, and the fancy furniture and marble fireplaces were probably from Europe.

This book is stuffed full of silly nostalgia. Most of the buildings in this book, lamented by the author, were just playgrounds for the rich. Only rich men could build mansions, and their heirs didn’t want them. The Vanderbilt mansion on 5^th Avenue was torn down by the 1930’s, and the gates are now used in Central Park. The Rice Mansion is now a school (Yeshiva HaKetanah) and God knows where the original owner’s descendants are now. Do the mansions of magnates represent the city or the people? Are they important to us, even though they contribute nothing?

On a lighter note, the Astor hotel was built to spite the rich. There was a mansion owned by Mrs. Astor, of the Astor dynasty, who declared that she alone could be called “Mrs. Astor,” and when her nephew’s wife started using the title, she had him cut from the family. To piss her off, he bought the property next door, tore it down, and built the Astor Hotel on the site. What could be worse for an old-money sow than the have a hotel next door to her royal palace? The construction and traffic ruined her life and forced her to move.

The bottom line is, nobody is nostalgic for a rich man’s souvenirs.