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Chapter One New York [formerly New Amsterdam]. North American city (population c. 7,000,000). It is the largest city in the USA (and in North America) and the country's financial and cultural centre; it is also the seat of the United Nations. New York is sited mostly on islands at the mouth of the Hudson River on the east coast of the continent, and its development and rise to prominence have been closely related to its location on one of the world's finest all-weather, deep-water ports. New York City originally comprised only Manhattan, a narrow, 20 km-long island bordered by the Hudson River, East River and Harlem River, which remains its commercial, financial and cultural heart. In a series of mergers in 1874 and 1894 the borough of the Bronx became part of New York City, and in 1898 Brooklyn (then the third largest city in the USA), Queens and Staten Island elected to join in the formation of Greater New York, which spreads over c. 830 sq. km. Only the Bronx is attached to the mainland, Brooklyn and Queens occupying the western end of Long Island. Often regarded mainly as a great modern metropolis of glass and steel skyscrapers, New York retains a rich architectural heritage from all periods of its development, during which time it was briefly the capital of the USA (1785-90) and the state capital of New York (1784-96). I. History and urban development. II. Art life and organization. I. History and urban development. 1. Before c. 1790. 2. c. 1790-c. 1870. 3. c. 1870-c. 1920. 4. c. 1920-1945. 5. After 1945. 1. Before c. 1790. The site of New York City was originally occupied by a series of Native American settlements. The first European to record a visit to the harbour (17 July 1524) was Giovanni da Verrazano, an Italian employed by the French. He was followed by Henry Hudson, an Englishman who claimed the area for the Dutch in 1609. In 1621 the Dutch West India Company was granted a charter with exclusive rights to settle New Netherland, and three years later the first permanent Dutch settlers arrived. The Dutch erected a fort at the southern tip of Manhattan Island (which Governor-General Peter Minuit `purchased' from the Indians in 1626), and small buildings were erected on surrounding land, establishing New Amsterdam as the capital of New Netherland. Settlement soon followed in what would become the city's other boroughs. In 1653 Governor Peter Stuyvesant enclosed the Manhattan settlement with a wall across the island from the Hudson River to the East River at the latitude of Wall Street in New York's present-day financial centre. Although no buildings remain from this settlement, the original street pattern survives in the area south of Wall Street. On 12 March 1664 the British sailed into the harbour of New Amsterdam and seized the colony, renaming it New York, although it never became one of the major cities of British North America. Settlement during the British colonial period expanded both on land and out into the water on several blocks of landfill, and Manhattan was connected to the mainland by the construction of the King's Bridge (1693) across the Harlem River. The British erected Trinity (1696; destr. 1776), the city's first Episcopal church, on Broadway and Wall Street and also established the first college, King's College (now Columbia University), in 1754, erecting a building (1756-60; destr. c. 1857) on Park Place. The city was occupied by the British during the American Revolution (War of Independence, 1775-83) and suffered from fires set by revolutionaries and, after the war, from serious depopulation. Only one significant building survives from the old British city: St Paul's Chapel (1764-8; tower, 1794, by James C. Lawrence), Broadway and Fulton Street, one of the most important Georgian churches in the USA. 2. c. 1790-c. 1870. As the city recovered from the war and its population again began to increase, development moved northwards up Manhattan Island. During this process, hills were levelled and swamps and water-courses filled in to create the relatively flat landscape of the present city. The lack of a coherent plan for the laying out of the streets led the New York state authorities in 1807 to establish a commission to plan the unsettled parts of Manhattan. The Commissioners' Plan (1811; see Urban Planning, fig. 9) established the rectangular grid of streets north of about Houston Street that was one of the key determinants of the city's physical form, with avenues running north-south and streets running east-west and numbered east or west of Fifth Avenue. The Dutch street pattern of Lower Manhattan was preserved, as was the layout of the small village of Greenwich on the west side of the island, south of 14th Street. Broadway, originally a part of the Dutch road connecting New Amsterdam with Fort Orange (now Albany), cut diagonally across the island and was intended to survive only as far north as 15th Street in the plan, but it was later preserved, creating small but distinctive open spaces where it crossed the north-south avenues (e.g. at Times Square and Columbus Circle). With the exception of a few open squares, however, no parkland was provided in this plan. The Commissioners' plan was an indication of the increasing confidence of civic leaders in the early 19th century, as was the construction of a new Neo-classical City Hall (1802-12; by Joseph Francois Mangin and John McComb jr), Broadway and Murray Street, one of the most beautiful works of the period anywhere in the USA. New York owed its wealth and dramatic growth in the 19th century to its commercial ascendancy following trade war with Britain (1812-14). Its harbour became the busiest and most prosperous on the continent with the establishment of regularly scheduled trans-Atlantic voyages (1818), the opening of the Erie Canal (1825), which made New York the principal port for goods travelling to and from the West, and close connections with British traders. New York's merchants were responsible for much of the lucrative southern cotton trade, and the convenience of water-borne transport also led to New York becoming the USA's leading manufacturing centre. As a result of this activity the city's commercial core spread from the waterfront into much of Lower Manhattan. Most early commercial buildings were fairly modest, many serving as both residence and office, but after the great fire of 1835 many architecturally distinguished counting-houses, warehouses, banks and other commercial establishments were erected. Wall Street had begun to evolve into a financial centre as early as 1796, when the city's first bank, the Bank of New York, opened there. By the 1830s its pre-eminence as New York's commercial and financial centre was firmly established with the construction of such imposing, stone Greek Revival buildings as the United States Custom House (now Federal Hall; 1833-42; by Town & Davis); and the Merchants' Exchange (1836-41; by Isaiah Rogers; enlarged 1904-10 by McKim, Mead & White for First National City Bank). New York's commercial success led to a continuing rapid increase in its population, which grew from c. 33,000 in 1790 to c. 124,000 in 1820; during this period New York overtook Philadelphia as the nation's most populous city, as people moved to the city from the farms of the north-eastern USA and as New York became the major port of entry for European immigrants. Residential neighourhoods began to develop at the northern fringes of the settled area, with the wealthiest quarters almost always along Fifth Avenue and flanking streets. A few architect-designed mansions were commissioned, but the vast majority of New York's early 19th-century residential buildings were terrace houses (row houses) erected by speculative builders. As commerce continued to expand, commercial establishments also began to move north, eventually invading the residential areas and forcing the more affluent to move to new neighbourhoods even further north. This process, which continued until the advent of zoning restrictions (1916) limiting large-scale commercial development to the area south of 59th Street, explains why relatively few early and mid-19th-century residential neighbourhoods in Manhattan survive intact. In the 1820s Brooklyn also began to evolve as a major middle-class residential centre, growing at an extraordinarily rapid pace: a village of c. 7000 inhabitants in 1820, it was incorporated as a city in 1834 and had become the third largest city in the USA by the mid-1850s. This unprecedented growth was stimulated by the advent of safe and reliable ferry services, allowing people to live in Brooklyn and commute to work in Manhattan. Miles of speculative terrace housing were erected in Brooklyn, and, since it had only a small commercial centre of its own, almost all its 19th-century neighbourhoods survive. Small residential communities housing commuters to Manhattan also grew along the Queens and Staten Island shorelines and across the Hudson River in New Jersey. Architecture in New York before the Civil War (1861-5) tended to be rather conservative in nature. The styles and building types popular during the first half of the 19th century generally appeared first in other American cities and were based on European precedents. Until the mid-1840s all but the most imposing structures were built of brick and ornamented with Federal style or Greek Revival details. Only church steeples rose higher than four or five storeys. In the 1840s, however, brownstone began to supplant brick as the principal building material in New York, where it was used for the new Gothic Revival Trinity Church (1839-46; see Upjohn, fig. 1) and for thousands of residences. A type of sandstone, brownstone became popular because it was quarried in parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, convenient for water transport to the city. Commercial and public buildings were often faced with grey Tuckahoe marble quarried just north of the city. The popularity of both brownstone and marble coincided with the population explosion in New York and Brooklyn and a corresponding boom in residential and commercial construction. Between the 1840s and 1860s large Italianate mansions were erected on and around Fifth Avenue (most destr.), and hundreds of Italianate terrace houses were built on streets in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The marble A. T. Stewart Department Store (1845-6; extended 1850-84; later the Sun Building), 280 Broadway, by Joseph Trench & Co. (1815-79) was the first Italianate-style commercial palace, similar commercial buildings subsequently rose throughout New York's business districts. Some of the finest, including the Haughwout Building (1856-7; by John P. Gaynor), 488 Broadway (see fig. 1; see also United States of America, fig. 6), have cast-iron facades modelled to imitate stone. During this period New York became the centre of the architectural profession in the USA when the American Institute of Architects (AIA) was founded there in 1857. Most of its members, including Richard Upjohn, James Renwick and Alexander Jackson Davis, were prominent New York professionals. Nevertheless, only a small number of trained architects were active during this period, and they were primarily responsible for the city's most important buildings, for example the Gothic Revival St Patrick's Cathedral (begun 1858), Fifth Avenue and East 50th Street, the largest Roman Catholic cathedral in the USA (see Renwick, James, fig. 2). The majority of terrace houses continued to be erected by speculative builders without the aid of architects. The mid-19th century was also marked by the genesis of two of New York's most splendid construction projects: Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge. Central Park, occupying the centre of Manhattan Island between 59th Street and 110th Street, was planned as a direct response to the need for open space due to increasing population density and the spread of development north into previously open land. Work began in 1858 on the Greensward Plan by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, which created an almost totally artificial yet naturalistic landscape (see Park, fig. 2). Olmsted and Vaux also designed Prospect Park (1865-73), Brooklyn. Brooklyn Bridge (see fig. 4 below), a suspension bridge across the East River from Lower Manhattan, was designed by John Augustus Roebling (see Roebling, (1)) and was finally begun in 1869 after years of planning and debate. Construction was completed in 1883. The bridge created a physical link between New York and Brooklyn that ultimately led to their political union. It also dramatically cut commuting time and led to the conversion of farmland far from the river into new residential neighbourhoods. 3. c. 1870-c. 1920. After the Civil War, which hampered growth in New York as a result of the loss of the cotton trade, the repudiation of Southern debts and contraction of Atlantic trade, there was a short period of prosperity followed by a severe depression beginning in 1873 that brought building to a virtual halt. Recovery late in the 1870s led to a boom lasting until World War I with only short interruptions (notably following a financial panic in 1893). During the final decades of the 19th century New York's population increased at an enormous rate, reaching c. 3.4 million in Greater New York by 1900, stimulated by the arrival of waves of immigrants who generally settled in overcrowded tenement districts; sections of Manhattan's Lower East Side had a population density thought to have been the highest in the world at that time. In contrast, the wealth of New York's more affluent residents reached unprecedented levels, reflected in the scale and grandeur of the residences, clubs, churches and other buildings erected for the social and financial elite. The economic boom of the 1880s coincided with a change in architectural taste as the restrained brownstone palazzo style lost favour and was replaced by more dynamic eclectic forms; the houses (1888; by C. P. H. Gilbert; see fig. 2) at 675-9 St Mark's Avenue, Brooklyn, for example, typify design inspired by Henry Hobson Richardson's Romanesque Revival style, while other buildings, such as the Century Building (1880-81; by William Schikel), in Union Square, exemplify the English-influenced Queen Anne style. During this period railways brought building stone of various colours from many regions of the country, and brick also returned to popularity. The boldly massed and richly textured buildings of the 1880s and early 1890s were almost all designed by architects, for the profession had by then expanded, and city building codes required that an architect be involved with every project. By the final decade of the 19th century most of the USA's leading architects had offices in New York, many establishing practices there after studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. They specialized in the design of buildings inspired by historic European and American colonial styles as well as contemporary French Beaux-Arts ideals, setting the stage for an academic revival that had a far-reaching influence on American design, particularly in the 1890s and first decades of the 20th century (see United States of America, [sections] II, 3 and 4). This can be seen particularly in the work of McKim, Mead & White, Carrere & Hastings, Warren & Wetmore, Richard Morris Hunt (see Hunt, (2)) and Delano & Aldrich. This mode of design was introduced at Hunt's William K. Vanderbilt House (1879-82; destr.), 660 Fifth Avenue, and McKim, Mead & White's Villard Houses (1882-5), 451-7 Madison Avenue, modelled respectively on Late Gothic/early Renaissance French chateaux and the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome. The construction of such a variety of buildings beside one another, particularly in and around Fifth Avenue north of 59th Street, created what some critics found to be a discordant ensemble; however, it reflected the American desire both for individuality and for buildings comparable in size and grandeur to those in Europe. Meanwhile speculative terrace housing aimed at the middle classes continued to be built on the Upper West Side, in Harlem and in Brooklyn, where new elevated railway lines opened undeveloped areas. Tenement construction also increased as immigrants continued to pour into the city (see Tenement Building). The growing wealth and importance of New York was accentuated at the turn of the century when prominent New Yorkers sponsored a series of monumental public buildings intended to symbolize the city's civic and cultural aspirations. Of a scale and design sophistication rivalling contemporary work in Europe, they included the New York Public Library (1897-1911; by Carrere & Hastings; see fig. 3), Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street; Pennsylvania Station (1902-11; by McKim, Mead & White; destr. 1963-5); and Grand Central Terminal (1903-13; by Warren & Wetmore and Reed & Stem), Park Avenue and 42nd Street. Other educational and cultural complexes included the major additions to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (original building 1874-80, by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, with additions by Richard Morris Hunt, 1894-5; Richard Howland Hunt and George B. Post, 1895-1902; and McKim, Mead & White, 1904-26), Fifth Avenue and East 82nd Street; the new Columbia University (plan 1893-4; see McKim, Mead & White, fig. 3), Morningside Heights; and the New York University (plan, 1892-4; by McKim, Mead & White; now Bronx Community College) in the Bronx. Private funding also paid for impressive building to serve the social needs of the populace, including such churches as the Cathedral of St John the Divine, Amsterdam Avenue and West 112th Street, begun in 1892 with a Byzantine design by Heins & LaFarge and rebuilt after 1912 as a Gothic Revival building (for illustration see Cram, Ralph Adams); and St Thomas Episcopal Church (1906-12; by Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson), Fifth Avenue at West 53rd Street; the University Club (1896-1900; by McKim, Mead & White), 1 West 54th Street; and the New York Yacht Club (1899-1900; by Warren & Wetmore), 37 West 44th Street (see Club, fig. 2). During these years of expansion in the final decades of the 19th century the apartment house and skyscraper office building developed as distinct types and major components of New York's urban fabric. Both were stimulated by increasing population growth and rising land values due to the construction of the subway system (inaugurated 1904) and three more East River crossings, the Williamsburg Bridge (1903; engineer Leffert L. Buck) and the Queensboro and Manhattan bridges (both 1909; engineer Gustav Lindenthal). The former is a cantilever bridge given architectural form by Palmer & Hornbostel, while the latter is a suspension bridge designed by Carrere & Hastings, who also designed the Beaux-Arts-inspired bridge approach on Canal Street, with a triumphal arch (1910-15). In addition, several Harlem River spans connected Manhattan and the Bronx. The new bridges provided avenues for new development in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Before the 1870s virtually the only New Yorkers who lived in multiple dwellings were the poor. As land values rose, single-family houses became prohibitively expensive, and, under the influence of French residential custom, apartment houses came to be an acceptable alternative to individual home ownership. The earliest building of this type was the French-inspired Stuyvesant Apartments (1869-70; by Richard Morris Hunt; destr.), East 18th Street. It was not until the 1880s, however, that such buildings became popular with the middle classes; thereafter stylish, richly textured buildings were erected, for example the Dakota (1880-84; by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh), West 72nd Street, the Gramercy (1882-3; by George da Cunha), Gramercy Park East, and the Chelsea (1883-5; by Hubert, Pirrson & Company; now Hotel Chelsea), West 23rd Street. At the turn of the century enormous French Beaux-Arts style apartment buildings with exuberant carved facades were erected, particularly on the Upper West Side, and in the early 20th century luxury apartment houses for the wealthiest proliferated, particularly after the construction of McKim, Mead & White's 998 Fifth Avenue (1910-12), the first luxury apartment house to rise amid the individual residential palaces of Fifth Avenue. The development of the skyscraper paralleled that of the apartment house, since both were inconceivable without the development of the lift (see Skyscraper, [sections] 2(i)). The building generally accepted as the first skyscraper was New York's seven-storey Equitable Life Assurance Building (1868-70; by Arthur Delavan Gilman and Edward Kendall, with George B. Post; destr. 1912), Broadway and Cedar Street; this was the first office building in New York with a passenger lift and the first to exploit the lift's potential by placing the finest offices on the upper floors. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s a succession of buildings rose ever higher, but all had masonry load-bearing walls; skeleton construction was introduced to New York with the Tower Building (1887; by Bradford Gilbert; destr.), 50 Broadway. Unlike their counterparts in Chicago, who invented a new design approach for skeleton skyscrapers, architects in New York preferred to adapt traditional architectural styles to the structure: George B. Post, R. H. Robertson, Francis H. Kimball and Cass Gilbert, for example, were responsible for buildings with Romanesque, Renaissance, Beaux-Arts, Gothic and other historicist cladding. In the 1890s and early 1900s builders began to compete to produce the tallest building, culminating in the 241-m Woolworth Building (1910-13; for illustration see Gilbert, Cass), 233 Broadway. The succession of tall buildings, mostly erected in the narrow streets of Lower Manhattan, generated a growing concern for their effect on light and air that peaked with the construction of the 40-storey,116,000 sq.-m Equitable Life Headquarters (1912-15, by Ernest R. Graham), covering an entire square block along lower Broadway. In 1916 the city authorities promulgated the USA's first zoning ordinance, which, as well as restricting the spread of large-scale industry and development, required that buildings be stepped back above a certain height to ensure that light and air reached the pavements; this code accounts for the distinctive shape of many of New York's skyscrapers. 4. c. 1920-1945. Although the zoning law had little immediate effect owing to the cessation of building during World War I, in the 1920s its effect was widespread, as an enormous amount of office construction took place in New York, both in Downtown (Lower Manhattan) and in Midtown, a new business centre that developed further north around 42nd Street near the new Grand Central Terminal. Many of the first skyscrapers erected under the new zoning were designed in the academic styles popular before the war. Beginning with the Barclay-Vesey Telephone Building (1923-7; by Ralph Walker), 140 West Street, however, the code began to be exploited to create towers with dramatic silhouettes. The 1920s encompassed a period of both extreme conservatism and great ferment in New York. As the expense of maintaining a private city residence increased and the motor car, together with new bridges, tunnels and parkways, made commuting convenient, affluent people began to move out of the city into surrounding suburbs, particularly to the north in Westchester County. Many mansions and terrace houses in Manhattan were converted or demolished and replaced by apartments; some terrace houses, particularly those in the East Midtown area, were stripped of their brownstone facades, which were replaced with more stylish Colonial Revival brick fronts or streamlined stucco forms, often painted in pastel colours. In other boroughs a large number of six-storey apartment buildings was erected to house a newly emerging middle-class population that was moving out of such slums as the Lower East Side. The design of these apartment buildings, with neo-Tudor, Spanish Colonial, Colonial Revival and Gothic Revival details, echoed the styles favoured for contemporary houses in the suburbs. At the same time, new influences on architecture in the late 1920s were provided by the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes (1925), Paris, which attracted a number of young American architects--among them Ely-Jacques Kahn and Irwin Chanin--who returned to the USA and began adapting the new decorative forms. Kahn's 2 Park Avenue (1926-7) and Chanin's Chanin Building (1927-9; with Sloane & Robertson), 122 East 42nd Street, were among the first of the Art Deco office towers that create the famous silhouette of the New York skyline (see fig. 4). This development culminated with the Irving Trust Building (1928-31; by Ralph Walker), 1 Wall Street, with its dramatic setbacks and tall shaft that appear to be chiselled from a single block of limestone. The Chrysler Building (1928-30; by William Van Alen; see Skyscraper, fig. 2), 405 Lexington Avenue, and the Empire State Building (1929-31; by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon; for illustration see Shreve, Lamb & Harmon), 350 Fifth Avenue, two of the city's most famous Art Deco towers, were erected to be the world's tallest building and came to symbolize New York's vitality. Modernist features began to appear in architecture in New York in the late 1920s, notably in the work of Raymond Hood, for example his Daily News Building (1929-30; for illustration see Hood, Raymond) and McGraw-Hill Building (1930-31; see Building Regulations, fig. 3), both on 42nd Street; a fully developed modernism appeared in the work of Swiss-trained William Edmond Lescaze, his residence and office (1933-4) at 211 East 48th Street being the earliest International Style structure in the city, with its ribbon windows, fields of glass-block and unornamented stucco street facade. Modernist features also appeared at Rockefeller Center (1931-40; for illustration see Rockefeller), designed by Associated Architects and one of the few major projects begun during the Depression, which virtually halted building work in New York (see also Corbett, Harvey Wiley, and Harrison & Abramovitz). Rockefeller Center, which includes the elegant, 70-storey RCA Building by Raymond Hood, is the USA's finest example of a planned urban complex, incorporating offices, theatres, shops and gardens as well as public art projects (see [sections] II below). Several important bridges and tunnels were also constructed at this time: most notable were the George Washington Bridge (1927-31) across the Hudson River connecting Manhattan and New Jersey and the Triborough Bridge (1929-36) connecting Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx, both by engineer Othmar H. Ammann, working in association with Cass Gilbert on the George Washington Bridge and Aymar Embury II on the Triborough. These bridges are part of a large-scale highway system built under the jurisdiction of Robert Moses. In 1939-40 the New York World's Fair was held at Flushing Meadows, Queens, stimulating such associated public works projects as the development of North Beach Airport (1939-40; by William Delano; now La Guardia). 5. After 1945. After World War II, when many European architects moved to the USA, the International Style began to play a major role in architecture in New York, beginning with the United Nations Headquarters (1947-53; see Government Building, fig. 2), First Avenue between 42nd and 48th Street. The complex, set on a landscaped site, was designed by an international committee of architects directed by Wallace K. Harrison (see Harrison and abramovitz). The International Style corporate architecture of glass was initiated with Lever House (1950-52; see International Style, fig. 2), 390 Park Avenue, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (designer Gordon Bunshaft), and it set the stage for the development of the Midtown area around Park Avenue, Third Avenue and Sixth Avenue into canyons of glass and steel. The International Style reached its apogee in New York with Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building (1954-8), 375 Park Avenue, a tower set in an open plaza; this building became a model for the change in the city zoning code (1961) in which the step-back requirements were replaced by options leading to the construction of many slabs set in public plazas. The race for the world's tallest building continued, leading to the construction of the 411-m twin towers of the World Trade Center (1964-74; by Minoru Yamasaki & Associates and Emery Roth & Sons; see fig. 5), which have load-bearing external walls clad in stainless steel. During the 1950s and 1960s, while most speculative builders and corporate clients were engaged in building glass and steel towers, other organizations, particularly institutions, adopted a more expressionistic approach to modernism; this can be seen in such buildings as the white, spiral Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (designed 1943-56; built 1956-9), 1071 Fifth Avenue, by Frank Lloyd Wright; the abstract, granite-faced Whitney Museum of American Art (1963-6),945 Madison Avenue, by Marcel Breuer; and the shell structures of the TWA Terminal (1956-62; see Roof, fig. 3) by Eero Saarinen at John F. Kennedy Airport. Of the same period, the main halls of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (1959-66), Amsterdam Avenue and West 62nd Street, designed by a board of architects headed by Wallace K. Harrison, are classicist in inspiration (for illustration see Harrison and Abramovitz). In the early 1960s the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (1964; by Ammann) was opened, linking Staten Island to Brooklyn, and the World's Fair (1964-5) was held in Flushing Meadows. A building boom in the 1960s and early 1970s abruptly halted with a severe economic recession beginning in 1973 and New York City's virtual bankruptcy in 1975. Late in the boom, new forms of modernism began to appear, as in 1 United Nations Plaza (1973-6; by Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo & Associates), an office and hotel complex with a variety of geometric forms clad in a taut glass and aluminium skin. This movement continued in the recovery of the late 1970s and the 1980s, notably at the World Financial Center (1981-8; by Cesar Pelli), a series of stone and glass towers, each with a different, geometric rooftop. In 1979 Philip Johnson and John Burgee (b 1933) popularized Post-modern design with the AT&T Building (1978-83, now the Sony Building), Madison Avenue, featuring a Renaissance arcade at the base (since altered) and a `Chippendale pediment' (see Post-modernism, fig. 1). This was followed by a succession of extremely tall buildings with masonry or ornamental glass skins, historicist detail and eccentric rooftop silhouettes; among the finest are works by Kohn Pederson Fox, notably the Heron Tower (1984-7), 70 East 55th Street. Extensive new construction took place during the late 1980s in the Times Square area as zoning incentives attracted massive hotel and office projects. Meanwhile New York's residential population underwent tremendous change as thousands of middle-class families moved to the suburbs and many of the older urban neighbourhoods deteriorated. Residential building in New York in the 1950s and after was primarily limited to the construction of apartment houses in the prestigious East Side neighbourhoods of Manhattan, subsidized apartments in poorer areas and suburban homes at the edges of the city. The 1960s were marked by the emergence of the conservation movement, seen in the establishment of the Landmarks Preservation Commission and two associated trends that had a profound impact on residential development in the city: in the first, artists began to discover the industrial lofts in the depressed 19th-century commercial districts of Manhattan, especially in SoHo, the area south of Houston, and Tribeca, the triangle below Canal Street, which had been left empty as industry moved out of Manhattan after the early years of the century. In the 1970s and 1980s, as loft-living became fashionable, converted industrial buildings became a major component of the city's housing stock. At about the same time, young people wishing to live in the city began to restore the old terrace houses in sections of Manhattan and Brooklyn in a `brownstoning' movement that eventually reclaimed a significant number of architecturally distinguished neighbourhoods; problems of displacement and gentrification nevertheless developed in the late 1970s and 1980s, particularly as speculators became involved in rehabilitation. A new neighbourhood in harmony with the city's older residential areas was created in the 1980s at Battery Park City, built on landfill in Lower Manhattan to a master plan (1979) by Cooper Eckstut Associates. New York's construction boom of the 1980s, stimulated by thriving service industries, resulted in the construction of a vast amount of new office space and many luxury apartment houses. At the same time, however, rising costs forced the departure of other businesses and large numbers of the middle classes, eroding the municipal tax base. Further challenges were presented by the economic recession of the 1990s, which led to high vacancy rates in many of the new office buildings, a virtual cessation of construction and severe cutbacks in the city's services. The city nevertheless remained the architectural centre of the USA and the country's most dynamic urban centre. II. Art life and organization. 1. Before c. 1778. 2. c. 1778-1913. 3. 1913-39. 4. 1940 and after. 1. Before c. 1778. The Dutch settlers who founded New Amsterdam brought with them a strong tradition of art appreciation and a propensity for collecting fine painting and sculpture. Art ownership was a symbol of wealth and power to this mercantile class, and they freely commissioned portraits of themselves and family members, bolstering their positions in society and, at the same time, preserving a historic record for future generations. Since there were no trained artists in the country at this time, portrait commissions were undertaken by `limners'--untrained, itinerant artists--who travelled from city to city. Their flat, linear style was modelled on European prints, which freely circulated throughout the colony. The anonymous portrait of Governor Peter Stuyvesant (c. 1660; New York, NY Hist. Soc.; see fig. 6) is a good example of this early style. The English settlers who arrived in the new British colony of New York after 1664 were predominantly Puritan, with ascetic tastes and strong strictures against the creation of idolatrous images. Neither religious themes nor displays of personal ostentation were allowed, but portraiture nevertheless continued to be popular in New York and its environs during the colonial period: the sitter's status and wealth were subtly emphasized by meticulous detailing in clothing and furnishing. The Protestant preoccupation with death is recalled in the emblems of mortality that appear in both painted portraits and gravestone carving, the only sculpture produced at this time. Gravestones provided a lively form of stone relief-sculpture, incorporating images of mortality in an elaborate iconography that employed skeletons, skulls, hour-glasses marking the passage of time, and animated figures of Father Time. This later changed after the American Revolution (1775-8), when artists were no longer bound to strict Puritan belief systems and began including portrait busts and reliefs of the deceased to mark their graves. During the early colonial period topographical views of New York were also produced, which remain fine documents of the city's architecture. At the beginning of the 18th century, New York was a hub of commerce and contained a burgeoning art community. Although the English influence was felt more strongly than ever, the Dutch style was still retained by painters. Gerret Duyckinck was the first portrait painter to emerge in the early part of the century, employing a straightforward realism with sharp angles in the drapery that was characteristic of the New York style. In the early part of the century partially trained painters began migrating to North America, bringing an academic tradition and skill to their portraiture. John Smibert from Scotland was one of the first emigres: although he settled in Boston, he was patronized by visitors from New York who would also have seen his collection of copies of European works, which had a major influence on American artists in New York. By mid-century English painters such as John Wollaston had arrived. The richest area for portraiture in colonial America could be charted from New York City to upstate New York around Albany, the clients being mostly wealthy Dutch patroon families. Paintings with Classical or religious themes were not generally commissioned, but detailed views of New York harbour were popular in the mid-18th century, of which William Burgis produced many. By the late 18th century many artists were looking to Europe for instruction and experience, and some moved there permanently, seeking a new venue for their art. 2. c. 1778-1913. After the Revolution monuments were needed to create a national identity for the new American nation. Since local sculptors were not sufficiently skilled, European sculptors were commissioned in the 1790s to create the first of these heroic monuments. It was not until the early years of the next century that commissions were given to American sculptors, and a new age of sculpture was born in the USA. The 19th century marked a turning point for American art, as the narrow strictures of previous times were relaxed and academically trained American artists for the first time began to rival their European counterparts. Portraiture, landscape, allegory and history painting became popular. The depiction of landscapes included the 20 aquatints in the Hudson River Portfolio (1820-25), published in New York by William Guy Wall and John Hill. John Vanderlyn, who had been in Paris, returned to paint an enormous panorama of the Palace and Garden of Versailles (New York, Met.), which he exhibited in a rotunda in City Hall Park in 1815. However, the public was not enthusiastic about a depiction of a European landmark. In contrast, when in 1859 Frederic Edwin Church exhibited his meticulously detailed, epic masterpiece the Heart of the Andes (1.68x3.03 m, 1859; New York, Met.; for illustration see Church, Frederic Edwin), showing a vast South American landscape, the public enthusiastically viewed the painting through binoculars in a dimly lit room, as if actually in the depicted terrain. Church's landscapes typified the work of the Hudson River School, begun by Thomas Cole. The evolution of art societies and some of the great museums of New York also began in the early 19th century. The New-York Historical Society, founded in 1804, was the first museum in New York and had numerous sites before settling at its permanent address at Central Park West and 77th Street. The basis of the museum's collection was formed by two of the earliest and most important collectors of American art in New York: Thomas Jefferson Bryan and Luman Reed. Reed, who was one of the most influential art patrons in the USA, opened the first art gallery in the country in 1832 in his mansion in downtown Manhattan. Another institution, the Brooklyn Apprentices Library, started in 1823 in a modest space, but in 1843 it was relocated in the larger Brooklyn Lyceum building and renamed the Brooklyn Institute. A fire in 1890 necessitated a new plan for space for the growing collection, and in 1895 a new building was begun that later became the Brooklyn Museum. Meanwhile, in Manhattan the construction of New York's most distinguished museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, began in 1874 (see [sections] I above). This formidable landmark structure on upper Fifth Avenue gradually achieved status as one of the great museums of the world. One of the first art organizations in New York in the early 19th century was the American Academy of Fine Arts, founded in 1801 by a group of businessmen and amateur painters. In 1825 the National Academy of Design (NAD) was founded there by a group of professional artists, and, under their exclusive management, the artist-members of the NAD held important exhibitions and produced publications that were the highlights of the art season in New York. Modelled on the Royal Academy of London, the NAD also had a school for academic training for young artists and a professional association, membership of which was considered the mark of excellence for painters and sculptors of the day. The formation of this group helped to establish New York as the art centre of the country in the 19th century. Nevertheless, the stalwart traditions of the NAD came under attack by younger artists returning from study abroad in the 1870s, and a splinter group broke with the academy in 1877 to form the Society of American Artists. This had a more liberal policy of inclusion and promised exhibitions to artists based on merit rather than on political alliances, as in the entrenched academy. Walter Shirlaw and Augustus Saint-Gaudens were among the founders of this group, and in 1878 John La Farge was elected President. Shirlaw was instrumental in organizing classes at the Art Students League (ASL) in 1875 while the NAD school was temporarily closed. When it reopened, the ASL continued to operate, and its student body had swelled to more than 1000 by the late 1890s. Its liberal educational policy led the way to a decidedly modern school, and the addition of William Merritt Chase to the faculty in 1878 strengthened its power and prestige. In 1897 the group known as the Ten American Painters broke with the Society of American Artists to stage their own exhibition of American Impressionist work at the P. L. Durand-Ruel gallery, New York; the group, containing artists from both Boston and New York, including Childe Hassam, Edmund C. Tarbell, John H. Twachtman and Julian Alden Weir, continued to exhibit for many years. In the early 20th century Alfred Stieglitz founded the Photo-secession group in New York to fight for recognition of photography as a fine art, and the exhibition of photography at the National Arts Club, New York, in 1902 heralded a new era for this art form. Stieglitz also founded (1905) the gallery that became known as 291 (see ) in New York, showing avant-garde artists from the USA and Europe. Through shows of Picasso, Braque and Picabia, Stieglitz introduced Cubism to the USA, and he promoted the work of such young American artists as Arthur Dove, John Marin and Georgia O'Keeffe. In 1908 the artists known as The Eight (i) led a revolt against the conservative NAD with their exhibition at the Macbeth Galleries, New York. The Eight included a core group of William J. Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, John Sloan and their leader Robert Henri. Their work had been rejected from the academy's exhibition of 1907, and they decided to organize the 1908 show as a counter-exhibition, to include in addition Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson and Maurice Prendergast. Their loosely rendered impressions of everyday life in New York, characterized by gritty realism in urban scenes, earning them the label of the Ashcan School, decisively broke with academic tradition. 3. 1913-39. In 1913 the first large-scale show of European and American modern art, the Armory Show, was held in New York, marking the advent of modernism in the USA and transforming the art market in New York. The show grew out of a desire by members of the Eight (i) to plan an exhibition of artists affiliated with the progressive Association of American Painters and Sculptors to show contemporary trends in American art. Difficulty with funding led them to ask Arthur B. Davies who had exhibited with the Eight in 1908 (see [sections] 2 above) and had solid financial connections, to take charge of fundraising. Davies accepted but envisioned a much different show, and with the aid of Walt Kuhn (1877-1949) and Walter Pach, who had been living in Paris, the original idea was expanded and became the International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known as the Armory Show after its location at the Armory of the 69th Regiment in New York (see fig. 7). Some 75,000 people attended the exhibition (17 February-15 March 1913), which received a lively public and critical response. The outbreak of World War I brought many European artists to New York, and a new era began. Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia arrived in 1915, excited by the energy of the large metropolis that they had first visited for the Armory Show. Their notoriety from the show provided them with an instant audience and standing in the art community with artists and collectors, and they soon became part of the circle formed around Walter Arensberg. An avid collector and poet, he gathered together a group of young American modernists, including Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Man Ray, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler and Morton Livingston Schamberg; through Duchamp, the group had links with the more advanced theorists from abroad. Moreover, Duchamp and Man Ray formed the influential New York Dada group at this time (see DADA, [sections] 2). Sheeler, Demuth and Georgia O'Keeffe were the most significant exponents of the movement known as Precisionism, a Cubist-inspired style. In the 1920s several new museums devoted to modern art were established in New York: the Societe Anonyme was opened in 1920 by Duchamp, Man Ray and Katherine S. Dreier, establishing a permanent collection of important European art (now at New Haven, CT, Yale U. A.G.); and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) opened in 1929, gradually developing a major role in defining modernism and helping New York to establish a base in the international art scene. The Whitney Museum of American Art, which opened in 1931 on West 8th Street, Greenwich Village, was headed by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Juliana Force and was dedicated to showing American art from both the past and present. This policy continued after the museum moved to its permanent building (1966) on Madison Avenue at 75th Street and in its satellite museums dispersed throughout the city. Other important museums were established on Fifth Avenue, including the Frick Collection (opened 1935), housing art from the Renaissance to the 19th century. Solomon R. Guggenheim's collection was partly opened to the public in 1939 in the Museum of Non-objective Painting, East 54th Street, but in 1960 it found a permanent home as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Frank Lloyd Wright's spectacular building on upper Fifth Avenue. The Great Depression of the 1930s particularly devastated New York's art world. The New Deal, the plan for recovery devised by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, instituted the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to solve unemployment in general, and the Federal Art Project (FAP) to employ artists who would create a positive national identity and engender a sense of pride in the USA. Hundreds of artists in New York were employed to paint murals. Artists as diverse as Stuart Davis and Thomas Hart Benton all worked together on the FAP, painting murals in schools, post offices and various government buildings. The Art Deco Rockefeller Center (1931-40), for example, was decorated with many large murals, exterior wall reliefs and free-standing sculpture by FAP artists. Important murals were also created by African American artists involved in the political, literary and artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance (see African American art, [sections] 2), and the Community Art Center established (1937) in Harlem by Augusta Savage became an influential focus for African American art. The political and social realities of African American life were explored by such artists as Jacob Lawrence (b 1917), who arrived in Harlem in 1927 and learnt about the history and art of African Americans at the 125th Street Public Library. His compelling narrative paintings, characterized by a strong Cubist vocabulary, explored the political and social realities of the USA for African Americans. By 1934, according to estimates by the College of Art Association, 1400 artists were living and working in New York, indicating the rapid growth of the artistic population, which by the late 20th century numbered tens of thousands. Many political artistic organizations were active during the 1930s: for example the John Reed Club (founded 1929), the Artists' Union (founded 1933) and the Communist-affiliated American Artists' Congress (founded 1936), which declined in 1940 after its apparent support of the Soviet invasion of Finland. Political concern continued in the work of the social realist painters William Gropper, Peter Blume, Philip Evergood and Ben Shahn, who expressed outrage at social injustice. The decade ended with the World's Fair of 1939, in which the work of the FAP artists was exhibited. 4. 1940 and after. The fall of Paris to the Germans in 1940 had an overwhelming effect on that city's role as the international centre of modern art. As an influx of European artists moved to the USA, artistic attention turned to New York. The emigres included Fernand Leger, Piet Mondrian and such Surrealists as Max Ernst, who profoundly influenced artists in New York, especially the Abstract Expressionists. Abstract Expressionism was promoted by Peggy Guggenheim, Ernst's wife, who opened the Art of This Century gallery in 1942, with interiors designed by Frederick Kiesler (see fig. 8). The Abstract Expressionists were particularly influenced by the Surrealist concept of Automatism, linked with an interest in chance and the notion of the unconscious developed by Sigmund Freud. Their loosely connected movement formed the New York school, comprising the gestural painters (Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning) and the colour field painters (Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still). They began showing their work at artist-run cooperatives on 10th Street, near their studios. Many of the Abstract Expressionists were members of The Club on West 8th Street, which had sprung up in 1949 and included Rothko, Still, David Hare, Robert Motherwell, and the musician John Cage. They met weekly to discuss art in general and, in particular, the place of the American artist in the international art world. In the 1950s the economy of the Cold-War era fostered a new group of galleries in New York; the small artist-run galleries of 10th Street were supplanted by the large galleries of 57th Street and upper Madison Avenue, which began showing the Abstract Expressionists. In 1951 MOMA presented the exhibition Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America, which affirmed American dominance in the art world, and in 1958-9 it mounted The New American Painting, which marked the first official recognition of Abstract Expressionism by a major museum. The shows travelled to Europe, strengthening the art market in New York. The socio-political changes of the 1960s were reflected in artistic developments in New York as abstraction gave way to the new figurative style of Pop art. This had been anticipated in the 1950s by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whose work, using found objects, photographs and popular imagery, was influenced by both Abstract Expressionism and Dada. Pop art, whose exponents included Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg, used popular imagery in order to comment on contemporary society: it emerged in the USA in 1962 in the New Realists exhibition at New York's Sidney Janis Gallery, and also received exposure at the New York World's Fair of 1964-5. Another development was the foundation of the African American group Weusi (Swahili: `blackness') Nyumba Ya Sanaa, in Harlem in 1965, whose work relied on African iconography. In the 1960s many artists' studios relocated to the industrial neighbourhood in SoHo, south of Houston Street, and to its eastern border on The Bowery (see [sections] I, 4 above). The galleries soon followed, moving to new, larger SoHo quarters on West Broadway and its environs. Towards the end of the 1960s Conceptual art and Minimalism emerged to challenge the vision of American life explored in Pop art, with a return to elemental abstract forms and purity. A major exhibition at New York's Jewish Museum, Primary Structures (1966), showed the work of sculptors Donald Judd, Robert Morris (ii) and Tony Smith. Later, the post-Minimalist work of sculptor Eva Hesse opened up these developments to a broader discourse. In the late 1960s such artists as Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim, and Robert Smithson, who derived many of his ideas from visits to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, filled galleries with boxes of earth, rocks and broken glass, for example, which were augmented by photographic documentation of works made in the western USA and in Canada (see Land art). In the 1970s work continued to be produced by conceptual and performance artists, who used the gallery space to conduct a direct dialogue with the viewer. Politically inspired work by Hans Haacke called into question the power-structure of museums, collectors and the large corporations who generally sponsored art exhibitions; the highly popular performances of Joseph Beuys recalled the `Happenings' of Allan Kaprow in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the mid-1970s a shift to the Tribeca area, south of Canal Street (the boundary of SoHo), was begun, because of inflated rents in SoHo: Tribeca soon contained new galleries and performance spaces, as well as artists' lofts. In 1979 the museums and other cultural institutions in upper Fifth Avenue formed a consortium to encourage cooperation among themselves, and in 1981 their section of the Avenue was renamed Museum Mile. This contains the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museo del Barrio, dedicated to Hispanic art, the Museum of the City of New York (founded 1923), the International Center of Photography (founded 1974), the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Design (founded 1897), The Jewish Museum, the National Academy of Design and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was given a new wing for contemporary art. New York art life in the 1980s erupted with a return to an expressive figuration or neo-expressionism that was being pursued by young artists in the East Village. The area's gallery scene first began in the apartment in 9th Street of Joanne Mayhew-Young, a young artist who hung some work in her bathroom and opened it to the public in 1983. People came, including critics who took the idea seriously, and the Gracie Mansion Gallery was born. The low rents drew many young dealers, who showed the new figurative work at affordable prices, and the well-attended openings of exhibitions attracted great attention. Soon, better established galleries from other parts of Manhattan were opening branches here, and the area became a centre for all types of art for several years. However, its novelty wore off, resulting in a retreat to the more acceptable venues of lower Broadway, on the eastern edge of SoHo. Due in part to the inflated New York art market of the 1980s, a proliferation of art movements quickly came and went. These ranged from appropriation art to the diverse Neo-Geo group epitomized by Sherrie Levine's rigid, geometrical work and the luminous abstractions of Ross Bleckner (b 1949). A visionary abstraction developed c. 1990 in the work of Susan Laufer, Bill Jensen (b 1945) and Donald K. Sultan (b 1951) and in the mysterious painted boxes of Lawrence Carroll. The Decade Show in 1990, presented jointly by the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, showed the art of the 1980s in a broader context. It presented a wide spectrum of significant art production, demonstrating the cultural diversity of artists in New York and across the USA.