Moral of the stories

ArtForum, April, 1999 by Herbert Muschamp

I used to think of myself as the love child of Lewis Mumford and Diana Vreeland. Meaning, architecture critics need a moralistic streak (Mumford's was a mile wide), but we should also know how to wrap and tie it into a fetching bow from time to time. If the ethical dimension of architecture is giving you a headache, Why Don't You . . . wear a headache band?

Everyone of my generation grew up with their heads glued to two previous paperback collections of Mumford's New Yorker Skyline columns from the '40s and '50s, The Highway and the City and From the Ground Up. This new volume of New Yorker columns from the '30s is a useful thing to have. Unlike the earlier collections, it shows that Mumford wasn't limited to major pronouncements on big civic projects. He also had a fine sense of style. Some of the freshest pieces in the book deal with ephemeral designs, like the interior of a new Longchamps restaurant ("vermilion walls are kind to girls' complexions") or the facade of Helena Rubenstein's Fifth Avenue salon ("it is one of the few places on the Avenue that might effectively use a nude figure sculpture or a well-composed abstraction of cosmetic bottles to suggest in austere fashion the holy Corinthian rites that are practiced within").

Shades of Jungle Red. There are also nice short takes on shoe stores and cheap but refined eateries like Schrafft's, the Horn and Hardart Automat, and the Little Whitehouse chain of lunchrooms. Mumford's deftly rendered sketches beautifully evoke New York before World War II and the mass suburban exodus in the decades that followed, when style helped ease the pain of the Depression for rich and poor alike.

Mumford's Skyline columns of the time are emblematic of the city's rise to cultural preeminence in the period between the two world wars. In those years, European architects were mobilizing themselves into the Modern Movement, but New York was eclipsing the European city as the fountainhead of twentieth-century energy. Mumford was the most vigorous writer on architecture since Ruskin, and these pieces are an extraordinary record of that era. Like Ruskin, he can appear wildly off in his critical judgments, but we don't hold it against him. As Pauline Kael observed, "We read critics for the insights. The judgments we can usually make for ourselves."

Of Mumford's journalism from the '30s, I'd read only excerpts from articles he'd written for The New Republic, and these didn't whet my appetite for more. There was a Depression on, and many intellectuals who'd lived through the rollicking '20s, like Mumford and Edmund Wilson, veered toward the radical left. In The New Republic, Mumford attacks individualism as the great American evil. We can't afford individualism anymore. Individualism must be stamped out. In hindsight, you begin to have more sympathy for figures like Philip Johnson and Charles Lindbergh, who careened toward the radical right. Both extremes seem achingly naive and idealistic. Both understood that the economic crisis was a cultural crisis and believed that the only way to resolve it was to attain solidarity of one sort or another If equality could only be achieved at the expense of freedom, too bad for freedom.

Mumford's New Yorker pieces take a much softer line, but his political outlook still influenced his architectural judgments. If he'd had the power, he would have whisked away what we now call SoHo, i.e., the Cast Iron District, formerly known as Hell's Hundred Acres, because it was notorious for sweatshops where nonunion workers toiled in squalid surroundings that often burst into flames. Nor could he stand Rockefeller Center. He viewed it as the ultimate expression of the capitalist jungle that had overtaken American society. In fact, Mumford did not like skyscrapers, period. To him, they represented corporate greed.

Mumford's failure to appreciate tall buildings somewhat cramps his style. Perhaps his column should have been called "The Anti-Skyline." In the '20s, New York came into its own as a global capital and this was symbolized by the convergence of vertical and horizontal forces. The latter were represented by the great transatlantic liners that, as late as the early '70s, one could see along Manhattan's Hudson River piers: beautiful British, French, Dutch, Italian, Swedish, and German steamships, each of them like a city, suckling at the breast of the mother metropolis. This heart-lifting spectacle was a visual reminder of the country's roots in westward emigration, and also a sign that the Old World now paid homage to the New.

The skyscraper boom of the '20s, meanwhile, had accelerated New York's powerful sense of vertical thrust, with new towers like those for Standard Oil, Paramount, and American Radiator, their skyward push captured in the charcoal renderings of Hugh Ferriss. Inertia kept the boom going into the early years following the stock market crash, with the City Services, Empire State, and Chrysler Buildings, and that "series of bad guesses, blind stabs, and grandiose inanities," Rockefeller Center.