Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:46:09 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Francis Morrone :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Francis+Morrone istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/mother-lode-brooklyn/86536/ Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST One year ago, the excellent Web log Curious Expeditions (curiousexpeditions.org) posted a long series of color photographs of some of the world's most beautiful libraries. Among them were Strahov Theological Hall, the Beatus Rhenanus Library in Basel, Biblioteca Angelica in Rome, Duke Humphrey's Library in Oxford, the Boston Public Library, the extraordinary Peabody Library in Baltimore, the Melk Abbey Library in Austria, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven — 93 pictures... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/political-ephemera-through-the-ages/84767/ Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Sometime when I was in grade school, I heard the phrase "Tippecanoe and Tyler, too." Years would pass before I knew what it meant. I knew it was a presidential campaign slogan from way back, but did not learn until later that it was a phrase from an 1840 campaign song for William Henry Harrison (who led the troops who defeated Chief Tecumseh at the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe in Indiana) and John Tyler. What's remarkable is that the phrase has lived on, that its cadence has made it the sort of... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/art-deco-shows-its-roots/86638/ Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST "Art Deco" was not coined until 1968, when the art historian Bevis Hillier used the term in his book "Art Deco of the 20s and 30s." In those times, you might have heard such terms as "le style moderne," or "la mode 1925." The latter refers to the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes that took place in Paris in 1925. (It was also from the name of this exposition that Hillier derived "Art Deco.") Le style moderne was not entirely new in 1925. It had begun to... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/six-centuries-of-theatrical-city-scenes-at-n-yhs/86538/ Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The New-York Historical Society, founded in 1804, is New York City's oldest museum. It has had its ups and downs, and in recent years has been on a dramatic upswing. While such outstanding exhibitions as "New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War" (2006-07), "Life's Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists' Brush with Leisure, 1895-1925" (2007-08), and the Audubon series have drawn from the society's rich holdings, these shows' narrow thematic scope has meant that no one of them has by itself conveyed... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-other-park-slope/86066/ Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The northern part of Park Slope emerged in the late 19th century as an extremely affluent neighborhood. Its wealth of beautiful architecture comes as no surprise. To the south, Park Slope was a working-class neighborhood, at first mainly Irish but later also Italian and Jewish, home to longshoremen and factory workers. This area of Park Slope lacks the architectural cohesiveness of the more affluent parts of the neighborhood, but it definitely rewards a careful look, and yields many sweet... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/sweet-liberty-or-ada-louise-was-right/85584/ Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST 'For a demonstration of New York at its physical best, go to Broadway between Cedar and Liberty Streets and face east." So wrote the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable in 1968. It's 40 years since Ms. Huxtable penned her paean to Liberty Street, and her words still resonate with the architecture buffs of this city. "This small segment of New York compares in effect and elegance with any celebrated Renaissance plaza or Baroque vista," she wrote. On the east side of Broadway between Liberty... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/commanding-the-romantic-century-liszt-in-paris/85151/ Thu, 4 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST When the 12-year-old prodigy Franz Liszt gave his first public performance in Paris in February 1824, two months after his arrival in the city, the audience hailed him as "Mozart incarnate." Not since Mozart, who had died 33 years earlier, had Europe seen such a prodigious talent. From earliest days, Liszt — pianist, composer, superstar — was marked out to command the Romantic century. He lived and worked with a fire the equal of any of his peers, then went many of them one better by living to... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/unexpected-riches-in-two-lower-manhattan-museums/85127/ Thu, 4 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The Financial District has in recent years become home to a number of specialty museums. In 1994, the George Gustav Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian opened in the former United States Custom House at Bowling Green. The Skyscraper Museum, founded in 1997, had rather a nomadic existence until 2004, when it settled down into the mixed-use building that contains the Ritz-Carlton Hotel at the southern end of Battery Park City. I'll write about those outstanding museums in a... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/reconsidering-south-street-seaport/84752/ Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST "Cities are fun!" Those words, accompanied by a picture of the real estate developer James Rouse, appeared in 1981 on the cover of Time magazine. Today, Rouse's handiwork, at least in New York City, is widely considered a failure. In 1981, Rouse was just getting set to open his latest "waterfront festival marketplace," the South Street Seaport. He'd already given Boston its Faneuil Hall Marketplace (1976) and Baltimore its Harborplace (1980). After years of building suburban shopping centers... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/gowanus-where-irony-meets-hope/84295/ Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST In 2004, the Austin, Texas-based gourmet grocery chain Whole Foods Market, which by now has five Manhattan stores, said it was going to open a store the next year on a mostly empty lot at the southwest corner of Third Avenue and 3rd Street in Brooklyn. The next year came, and Whole Foods announced a new opening date: early 2007. Early 2007 came; there was no Whole Foods in Gowanus. In the last quarter, the chain posted a 31% net income loss, and announced it is "revising" — not abandoning — its... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/in-midtown-modernist-perfection-in-a-glass-box/83819/ Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Today, glass is again all the rage in architecture. This is partly to do with innovations in glassmaking that have given us new qualities of transparency and opacity, reflectiveness, and color. Such architects as Jean Nouvel and Herzog & de Meuron revel in the expressive potential of new forms of glass. But the present glassiness also is an homage to the cool glass architecture of early Modernism, when vitreous façades were new — and genuinely excited the public. Call it "Mad Men" chic. The... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/changing-times-changing-notions-progress-at/83813/ Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST As crowds throng the Whitney Museum of American Art to see "Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe," curators Donna De Salvo and Gary Carrion-Murayari had the bright idea to pull from the museum's permanent collection a number of works that could serve as a pendant to Fuller's technological utopianism. "Progress," on view through November 30, exhibits varied artists' works that speak in some way to our changing notions of scientific, technological, political, and artistic progress. The... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/calendar/taking-a-fresh-look-at-columbus-circle/83318/ Thu, 7 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Columbus Circle has, for most of its history, been a mess. Though at its center is one of the city's finest works of public art — the rostral column bearing a statue of Christopher Columbus — the buildings around it have been mostly banal. The circle had until recently been about as appealing to the pedestrian as the shoulder of an interstate highway. For years, the old Coliseum dominated the west portion of the circle, and the space became a yawning chasm separating rather than uniting Midtown... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/letting-carroll-gardens-grow/82924/ Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST For me, one of the principal charms of Brooklyn's Carroll Gardens neighborhood is the architectural diversity, which is in part the result of alterations that might not be permitted in a landmark district. The changes have occurred in a mostly gradual manner, and have given Carroll Gardens the most warmly lived-in appearance of any of Brooklyn's brownstone neighborhoods. There are two ways to lose that quality. One is overdevelopment. The other is overprotection. For now, though maybe not for... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-victorian-neighborhood-remade/82510/ Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST My favorite blocks in Manhattan include the side streets that fill the area between Gramercy Park and Madison Square: 20th, 21st, and 22nd streets between Park Avenue South and Broadway. These blocks were, in the middle of the 19th century, an extremely fashionable residential section. Several houses from that period, since made over to other uses, remain to attest to the days when this neighborhood was the latest fashionable faubourg in upper-class Manhattan's once relentless uptown trek. The... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/lewis-mumfords-brooklyn/82033/ Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST In the last two years we've heard unceasingly about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, figures who, as the Bloomberg administration has rezoned and promoted redevelopment of vast swaths of the city, seem as relevant today as they did when they butted heads over the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway in the 1960s. Moses and Jacobs had clearly differing visions of how urban development should occur. So, too, did Moses and the architecture critic, cultural commentator, and social critic Lewis Mumford... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/savoring-the-brighton-line-a-rare-mta-charmer/81565/ Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The most charming train line in the mostly uncharming New York City Transit system is Brooklyn's Brighton Line, between Prospect Park and Coney Island. The line carries the B and Q trains on the right-of-way of the Brooklyn, Flatbush & Coney Island Railroad, a surface steam railroad that began operation in 1878, connecting Prospect Park to the Hotel Brighton on the Brighton Beach waterfront near Coney Island Avenue. In 1887, it got a new name: the Brooklyn & Brighton Beach Railroad. In its... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-flawed-beauty-of-folk-photos/81599/ Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Until my loved ones convinced me I was insane, I used to troll eBay for families' collections of 35-millimeter slides. Cleaning out attics or basements, people would auction off hundreds or thousands of slides from family vacations or other important events. I was especially interested in family travel slides from the 1950s and 1960s. Unsurprisingly, I seldom got into an intense bidding war, and could score a thousand slides for $10. I justified the practice by saying that I'd sometimes find an... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/flushing-the-new-face-of-the-city/81179/ Thu, 3 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST We're in the midst of the third transformative wave of immigration in New York City's history — the kind of wave that alters non-New Yorkers' perception of what a typical New Yorker looks and sounds like. In the 1840s and 1850s, Irish and Germans arrived here in vast numbers. The Irish were so marked a presence in the city that, by the late 19th century, to all the world the typical New Yorker was an Irishman. The second great wave of immigration came between roughly 1890 and 1924, and... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/americas-birth-papers-at-the-nypl/81185/ Thu, 3 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Americans began celebrating the Fourth of July before the nation had achieved independence, with the first celebration occurring in 1777, in Philadelphia. Tomorrow we celebrate the 232nd anniversary of our nation's birth. And once again, the New York Public Library has placed on display its copy in Thomas Jefferson's hand of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson wrote out this fair copy in the week following July 4, 1776, for submission to the Continental Congress. Of the few copies he... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/water-water-everywhere-olafur-eliasson-the-east/80705/ Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST The most ambitious Public Art Fund project in the city's history, "The New York City Waterfalls," which opens today, places a dramatic frame around a stretch of historic waterway that we may never experience the same way again. In 2005, the last citywide public art project of comparable scope, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "The Gates," in Central Park, worked by reorienting park visitors to Olmsted and Vaux's pedestrian pathways. You could call it a radical artistic gesture in the service of a... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/looking-up-on-72nd-street/80680/ Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST West 72nd Street at Central Park West is where the Upper West Side began — not in time, but in spirit. The myth of the Dakota states that the building was so named because it was located so far from the center of the city. But that isn't true. By the time the Dakota received its first tenants in the early 1880s, Central Park was already the popular attraction it remains to this day. The part of Manhattan stretching between the park and the Hudson River had, for many years, been the scene of... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/calendar/bedford-stuyvesant-out-of-crisis-mode/80247/ Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Not long ago, Americans discussed the "urban crisis." One measure of how little the phrase is used nowadays is that while Wikipedia has entries for "Energy Crisis" and "Urban Sprawl," the online encyclopedia has no entry for "Urban Crisis." It is no longer part of the lexicon of the young, but it was a phrase once much bandied, and its byword was Bedford-Stuyvesant. Life cycles of American urban neighborhoods have been volatile in the age of sprawl. (What sprawl giveth, sprawl taketh away.)... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/julian-schnabels-bold-and-beautiful-designs/79828/ Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST For years, the Gramercy Park Hotel was a down-at-the-heels place notable mainly for the famous houses that were demolished in the 1920s to make way for it. Now, when one enters the hotel from Lexington Avenue onto a red carpet laid over a black-and-white-checked, Dorothy Draper floor, the first things one notices are the carefully composed sight lines, the natural materials, and an over-the-top (though quite beautiful) crystal chandelier. These are some of the fruits of hotelier Ian Schrager's... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/creating-street-level-intimacy-at-nyu/79340/ Thu, 5 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST As New York University has grown in recent years, and frenetically gobbled up space to keep some semblance of pace with that growth, a dilemma has emerged: How to forge the visual identity every university craves? When NYU began in the 1830s, in a single, large building on the southeast corner of Washington Square East and Waverly Place, the Collegiate Gothic style of Alexander Jackson Davis and Ithiel Town's design provided NYU with a powerful image, and proved enormously influential in... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-stroll-down-125th-street/78814/ Thu, 29 May 2008 00:00:00 EST In April, the City Council voted — 47 to 2 — in favor of the Bloomberg administration's plan to rezone Harlem's 125th Street (and some surrounding streets) between Second Avenue and Broadway to make way for the high-rise development of nearly 4,000 apartments. Many Harlemites feel uneasy about the rezoning. Since half of the housing will be market-rate, some area residents fear that the gentrification already occurring will intensify, and that longtime residents of the community will be forced... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/preserving-stuyvesant-town/76845/ Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 EST These days, when New Yorkers get misty-eyed about Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, it's above all about a faded vision of middle-class Manhattan. The developments, which some residents hope to have designated as city landmarks, have become, for many, a potent symbol of what Manhattan has ceased to be. Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village — more than anything else built in Manhattan — completely altered the physical profile of a large area. Together, they comprise 110 buildings on a... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/new-life-for-litchfield-villa-in-prospect-park/76619/ Mon, 19 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Little by little, the Litchfield Villa, one of the most beautiful houses in America, is coming back from near-death. Situated in Prospect Park, the villa rose between 1854 and 1857 — predating the park itself. The Prospect Park Alliance, which shares the house with the Department of Parks & Recreation, has since 1987 marshaled private and public funds to effect a restoration of Prospect Park as breathtaking as what the Central Park Conservancy has done in Manhattan. The president of the... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/landmark-nod-to-bond-street/76421/ Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 EST The city this week approved a northern extension of the NoHo Historic District, which was originally designated in 1999. The extension, given the nod by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, includes buildings on Bond, Great Jones, 4th, and Lafayette streets, as well as the Bowery. Included is the block of Bond, between Lafayette and the Bowery, that has lately received a great deal of attention for its new architecture, pre-eminently 40 Bond St. by 2001 Pritzker Architecture Prize winners... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/museum-exhibit-explores-catholics-in-new-york/76079/ Thu, 8 May 2008 00:00:00 EST An exhibition opening next week at the Museum of the City of New York will trace New York Catholics' growth from a small religious minority to a politically powerful group with a wide range of institutions spanning the five boroughs. "Catholics in New York, 1808-1946" — organized in light of the Archdiocese of New York's bicentennial celebration — makes its debut on May 16. The exhibit is organized around three key themes: the centrality of parish life, the evolution of church-run schools... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/questioning-the-role-of-preservation/76025/ Thu, 8 May 2008 00:00:00 EST The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission this week denied the request made by St. Vincent's Hospital and Rudin Management to demolish eight buildings in the Greenwich Village Historic District so that they could be replaced by a condominium complex with a 265-foot-high tower, and a 330-foot-high hospital building. The buildings proposed for demolition form the campus of St. Vincent's, the historic, 159-year-old Roman Catholic hospital. St. Vincent's, teetering on the edge of... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/as-buildings-rise-cooper-union-falls-short/75605/ Thu, 1 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Astor Place has the makings of a great urban space. The dominant presence has long been Cooper Union, the original brownstone building of which, from the 1850s, is among the rare Manhattan buildings that is completely freestanding. Frederick Peterson's design was strong enough that the building has anchored its site with admirable authority for a century and a half. All around it, however, is a hodgepodge of structures that has done nothing to make of this the special place it cries out to be... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/new-life-for-the-museum-of-the-city-of-new-york/75402/ Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Almost as soon as the Museum of the City of New York opened at its current site in 1932, the trustees began discussing an addition. This summer, the dream, at long last, will come true. With the 23,000-square-foot addition to the Georgian Revival building, designed by Joseph Freedlander — an underrated architect whose other works include the Bronx County Building (1931-35) and the Andrew Freedman Home (1924), both on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx — comes an ambitious attendance goal... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/mary-cassatt-on-the-outside-looking/75272/ Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST "Mary Cassatt: Prints and Drawings from the Collection of Ambroise Vollard," on view at Adelson Galleries beginning Friday, is an amazing opportunity for anyone who's not quite figured out that Mary Cassatt wasn't just a great woman artist, the creator of classy greeting-card images, or some rich American hanger-on of the Impressionists, but, quite simply, one of the greatest artists of the last 200 years. The legendary dealer Vollard acquired in its entirety Mary Cassatt's own collection of... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/celebrating-the-works-of-dwight-james-baum/75214/ Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST A just-released book — part reprint, part new — reminds me of how much I like Dwight James Baum's architecture. Sometimes I need reminding, because I don't run across his buildings very often. The subject of "The Work of Dwight James Baum" (Acanthus Press) is best known for Ca d'Zan, a house built in Sarasota, Fla., for circus magnate John Ringling and his wife, Mable. Baum is also renowned for his many houses in the Riverdale section of the Bronx — some of them in that neighborhood's Fieldston... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/dargers-disciples/74860/ Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST "Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger," on view at the American Folk Art Museum through September 21, features works by 12 artists who have been inspired by Henry Darger (1892–1973), the extraordinarily prolific, weird, and affecting "outsider artist" from Chicago. The story has been often told of how Darger lived in the same apartment for more than 40 years, and it wasn't until 1973, when he went to live in a nursing home, that his landlords discovered his magnum opus, bearing the... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/st-vincent-de-paul-faces-a-sad-fate/74883/ Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST The Church of St. Vincent de Paul on West 23rd Street, long the spiritual home to the city's French-speaking Catholics, faces the sad fate of being closed by an archdiocese that has painfully had to adjust its priorities and redirect its resources in response to demographic and other changes. While the French of Colonial New York were mostly Protestants, after the American Revolution, when New York became more welcoming to Catholics — and especially after the French Revolution, which wasn't... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/lightning-rod-at-91/74490/ Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Two weeks shy of 91, I.M. Pei, the Chinese-American architect who won the Pritzker Prize a quarter-century ago, is making New York headlines — now as much as ever. The head of the firm that designed the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the Pyramide du Louvre in Paris, has co-designed a luxury condominium, now rising in Midtown, as the city considers landmark status for his concrete residential superblock, University Village. The Centurion, Mr. Pei's first... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/nouvels-new-york/74083/ Thu, 3 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Not long ago, many critics lamented that New York had too insular an architectural culture, in which geniuses from outside the city had great difficulty securing commissions here. That has changed, and Jean Nouvel, who on Monday won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, represents the transformation that has made foreign architects desirable to New York developers who are seeking to cash in on the cachet of hot, heavily touted global designers. Never before in New York has it seemed so incumbent... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/dazzling-design-of-wiener-werksttte/74084/ Thu, 3 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser founded the Wiener Werkstätte in 1903. The two Viennese found inspiration in Britain, where the Englishmen John Ruskin, William Morris, and Charles Robert Ashbee, and the Scotsman Charles Rennie Mackintosh, had championed a kind of neo-medievalism that had little to do with the historical Middle Ages and a great deal to do with fantasies of creative freedom through handicraft — the artist's or artisan's joy in making would be our joy in beholding. The Victorian... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/another-piece-of-the-porcelain-puzzle/73718/ Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Just when you think the 18th century on view in New York today can't get any better, "The Arnhold Collection of Meissen Porcelain, 1710–50," on view at the Frick Collection through June 29, joins with the UBS Art Gallery's "Josiah Wedgwood and His Circle" and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum's "Rococo" to provide us with an even fuller picture of that central century of the modern age. The Arnhold show gathers 100 or so pieces from one of the world's most important collections of early... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/hamilton-heights-to-lose-its-namesake/73728/ Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST History buffs have long bemoaned the sad setting of Hamilton Grange, Alexander Hamilton's onetime Harlem home; it is nestled and blocked in such a way that we have no sense of the spacious grounds it enjoyed when New York's own founding father and his wife, Elizabeth, resided there. To general applause, the Federal-style house, normally operated by the National Park Service as a historic house museum, is currently closed for repairs and restoration. When completed, it will move to nearby St... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/bowerys-scaleless-thoroughfare/73337/ Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST The recent openings of the Avalon Bowery Place, Whole Foods Market, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art have made of Manhattan's legendary and notorious Bowery something we could scarcely have imagined just a few years ago. In 1892 Charles H. Hoyt wrote, in lyrics for Percy Gaunt's "A Trip to Chinatown": Oh! the night that I struck New York, I went out for a quiet walk; Folks who are "on to" the city say, Better by far that I took Broadway; But I was out to enjoy the sights, There was the... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/five-points-of-an-irish-city/72816/ Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST In the 1963 study of immigrant succession in New York City, "Beyond the Melting Pot," Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan wrote that "New York used to be an Irish city." Irish had lived in New York from its earliest days. But not until the famine migrations, beginning in the late 1840s, did New York become "an Irish city." By 1855, nearly one-third of all New York City residents were Irish-born. William Tweed (of Scottish Protestant descent), "boss" of the Tammany Hall Democratic machine in the... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/year-of-the-vase/72682/ Tue, 11 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST In any given exhibition season, the most talked-about shows tend to center on painting or sculpture — that is, the fine arts. The Poussin and Courbet shows now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are examples. Or people buzz about novelty exhibitions such as the Museum of Modern Art's just-opened "Design and the Elastic Mind," which highlights the "successful translation of disruptive innovation." But for museumgoers who care little for blockbusters or novelty, decorative arts exhibitions often... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/sparkling-restoration-at-the-plaza-hotel/72419/ Thu, 6 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST The restored and new public interiors — those that opened over the weekend — at the Plaza Hotel are an unqualified success. Right now, for the first time in the living memory of most New Yorkers, we can appreciate the Palm Court restored to more or less the way Henry J. Hardenbergh, the architect behind the French Renaissance-style building and its interiors, designed it back in the early part of the 20th century. The Fifth Avenue lobby, which has also reopened, dates from 1919–21, when... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/cleaning-up-at-the-art-market/72242/ Tue, 4 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST There are almost always elements of egocentricity and unseemly acquisitiveness in art collecting, and the study of the field can easily become a species of what Tom Wolfe once called "plutography." But one of the most interesting phenomena in Western culture is the two-century-long (and counting) transoceanic movement of the world's artworks from Europe to American cities as diverse as New York and Toledo. The phenomenon, which had already achieved epic dimensions by the late 19th century, is... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/legendary-plaza-remade/72007/ Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST The Plaza Hotel reopens this weekend following a major renovation that saw part of the legendary hostelry converted to condominiums, an expansion of retail space, and the preservation of some designated landmark interiors. This week's column is about the Plaza's history. Next week's will assess the changes. Having opened in 1907, the current Plaza Hotel closed in April 2005 — with an October 2007 target for reopening, in celebration of the institution's 100th anniversary. It didn't work out... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/new-faces-old-at-42nd-fifth/71614/ Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Now is a good time to look at the New York Public Library, on Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd streets. The library has announced an exterior restoration to be completed by 2011, the 100th anniversary of its opening. The architects of the library, Thomas Hastings and John Carrère, worked closely with the library's director, John Shaw Billings, in creating a model of efficiency, rational planning, and beauty. In recent years, we have seen a magnificent renovation of the library's interiors... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/stalking-the-elusive-watercolor/71346/ Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Violence was a daily fact of life in the world of John James Audubon (1785–1851). Animal slaughter, disease, the rigors of backwoods life, and travel all made up close and personal varying levels of violence from which modernity insulates us. Even though Audubon set out with a gun to shoot birds in order to be able to pose them for their portraits, a large part of his life was consumed by tender dreams of birds, which appeared to him in his sleep and fired his imagination with an obsessive...