It was never the tallest or most elaborate building in the city, but it is nevertheless one of its most prominent landmarks. Just as Saint-Gauden’s statue of Diana once stood as a shimmering beacon in the skyline, the gold spire of the majestic “Cathedral of Life Insurance” reflects the sunlight by day and by night is one of the most recognizable silhouettes in the city’s illuminated skyline. Rising high above Madison Square, the New York Life Insurance Company Building is an appropriate symbol of the ingenuity, technological advancements, artisanship, imagination, and enduring legacy of the Beaux-Arts during the American Renaissance.

The interior of the General Grant National Memorial, the final resting place of President Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia, and the largest mausoleum in North America, which opened in Morningside Heights in 1897. Designed by John Duncan.

The exterior of the New York Public Library, which is the second-largest public library in the U.S. (behind Washington, D.C.’s Library of Congress) and the fourth-largest in the world. Designed by Carrère and Hastings, it opened in Midtown in 1895.

The interior of the Woolworth Building, designed by Cass Gilbert. Located in Tribeca, it was the tallest building in the world from 1913 (the year it opened) to 1930.

A statue outside the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, built by the federal government to house the duty-collection operations for the Port of New York. (The Founding Father’s name was added in 1990.) It was designed by Gilbert and opened in the financial district in 1907.

The interior of the Joseph De Lamar mansion, built for a Dutch-born merchant seaman who had the residence built as his entry into New York society. It opened in Murray Hill in 1902 and was designed by Gilbert.

The interior of the Samuel J. Tilden House, a historic town house built in 1945 for the former governor of New York and, since 1906, the headquarters of the National Arts Club, in Gramercy Park.

A view of the Woolworth Building from the Manhattan Municipal Building, one of the largest governmental buildings in the world, simply called the Municipal Building at the time of its opening, in 1914. The Manhattan Municipal Building was designed by the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White.

A statue at Woodlawn Cemetery, founded in 1863, during the Civil War, by some of the city’s most prominent families, in the Bronx. Authors Herman Melville and Dorothy Parker and musicians Miles Davis and Duke Ellington are among those buried there. Architects who designed mausoleums at the cemetery include McKim, Mead & White; John Russell Pope; Edwin Lutyens; John Merven Carrère; and Thomas Hastings.

Enter the Beaux-Arts

A new book highlights the gilded Beaux-Arts architecture of turn-of-the-last-century New York City

It’s a fitting irony that New York City’s crowning architectural idiom bears not an English name but a French one. No one could argue, though, that the Beaux-Arts style—which was imported by students of the Parisian école of the same name and reigned in the then nascent American metropolis for nearly half a century, until about 1920—belongs to New York any less than it does to Paris.

Everywhere you look in Gotham, there’s a Beaux-Arts building: Grand Central Terminal, the Pierpont Morgan Library (now called the Morgan Library & Museum), the Frick Collection, the Woolworth Building, and so forth. The effect of spotting one is something akin to déjà vu as one begins to piece together the eclectic historical references—Renaissance, neoclassical, Baroque—that combine to approximate the feeling of something that’s at once ancient and thoroughly modern.

In Phillip James Dodd’s glorious new book, An American Renaissance: Beaux-Arts Architecture in New York City, you’ll find buildings whose own names were serially preceded by their architect’s in common conversation—not out of some formal, Gilded Age sense of obligation but because they deserved to be.

Put simply, the period’s architects and underwriters found in the style a formula for diversity that was worthy of the city itself. This fact is reaffirmed on the frieze of one of the Beaux-Arts’ nonpareil monuments—the Washington Square Arch, designed by Stanford White. Its inscription, taken from the lips of George Washington and suspended over Greenwich Village since 1891, reads, “Let Us Raise a Standard to Which the Wise and Honest Can Repair.” More than 100 years later, that standard endures. —Nathan King

Nathan King is a Deputy Editor for AIR MAIL

Photos: Jonathan Wallen

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