religion was growing at such a pace that Mark Twain compared it to Standard Oil. Like Unitarianism, Christian Science offered a moderately comfortable halfway house for Jews willing to go beyond Ethical Culture. They could say (to quote Jonathan Millerâs famous comment in the satiric revue Beyond the Fringe ), âIâm not a Jew. Iâm Jew- ish . I donât go the whole hog.â
To my mind Riverside Drive was still the cityâs most beautiful promenade and vista, maybe even the hemisphereâs. Coming home after work downtown I emerged from the grimy IRT subway station and walked west toward the dazzling open spaces of the Hudson. From our eleventh-floor apartment at Ninetieth Street and the Drive we looked out at a long stretch of the river to the George Washington Bridge five miles to the north. At night you could see the lights of Palisades Amusement Park and its Cyclone roller coaster. Wintry gusts coming off the Hudson were strong enough to blow pedestrians and baby carriages around the corner. It was hard to understand why so many New Yorkers ignored the visual splendors of Riverside Drive and Central Park West, preferring, it could only be for snobbish and conformist reasons, stodgy Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue apartment houses and East River views of Rikers Island, the largest jail facility in the country, and a commercial wasteland in Astoria, marked by giant illuminated signs advertising Crisco and Pearl-Wick Hampers.
The skyline of Central Park West had always delighted me. From the parkâs moated Belvedere Castle at Seventy-ninth Streetâa delicious Victorian-Gothic anachronism overlooking the Turtle Pond and the Great LawnâI could see a two-mile stretch of apartment houses, punctuated by the gabled Dakota and the immense, turreted bulk of the American Museum of Natural History. Whatever I knew of medieval Europe had come from Sir Walter Scottâs Ivanhoe, Mark Twainâs A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurâs Court, Howard Pyleâs novels about Robin Hood and the Knights of the Round Table, and my visits across the park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, mainly the halls of arms and armor. The arrays of bourgeois apartment houses stirred fantasies of castles and fortresses, even though the inhabitants were clearly not lords and ladies, pushed baby carriages instead of riding chargers and palfreys, and sent their cooks out to buy meat, milk, fruit, and vegetables on Columbus Avenue. Still, whether these buildings had authentic grandeur or were merely stage sets and architectural pastiche, it was not too much of a wrench to think, however fleetingly, of Camelot and sometimes Oz.
Dominating the scene were three towered and intricately embellished structures, each a somewhat watered-down example of imitation Renaissance, Baroque, or Art Deco. They had glittering names, each with its own aura of associationâSan Remo (the Italian Riviera), Beresford (British nobility and military heroes), Eldorado (conquistadors, Sir Walter Raleigh). These three buildings had been put up between 1929 and 1931, a last exhalation of prosperity on the eve of the Great Depression. (For devastated high rollers in the stock market, the motto on the Beresfordâs heraldic elevator doors was prophetic: FRONTI NULLA FIDES ââDonât Trust Appearances.â) The Beresford (the largest apartment house of its day), Eldorado, San Remo, and dozens of other buildingsâamong them the Normandy (Renaissance towers with an Art Moderne base), the Mayflower Hotel, originally festooned with balconies, and the vaguely Mayan-looking Ardsleyâwere all the work of one architect, Emery Roth. His buildings on the West Side were as iconic, as expressive of the cityâs style of grandeur, as Henry Hardenberghâs Dakota Apartments and Plaza Hotel. Roth did most of his important work on the West Side, lived there, and died (in 1948) in one of his buildings, the Alden on West
To my mind Riverside Drive was still the cityâs most beautiful promenade and vista, maybe even the hemisphereâs. Coming home after work downtown I emerged from the grimy IRT subway station and walked west toward the dazzling open spaces of the Hudson. From our eleventh-floor apartment at Ninetieth Street and the Drive we looked out at a long stretch of the river to the George Washington Bridge five miles to the north. At night you could see the lights of Palisades Amusement Park and its Cyclone roller coaster. Wintry gusts coming off the Hudson were strong enough to blow pedestrians and baby carriages around the corner. It was hard to understand why so many New Yorkers ignored the visual splendors of Riverside Drive and Central Park West, preferring, it could only be for snobbish and conformist reasons, stodgy Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue apartment houses and East River views of Rikers Island, the largest jail facility in the country, and a commercial wasteland in Astoria, marked by giant illuminated signs advertising Crisco and Pearl-Wick Hampers.
The skyline of Central Park West had always delighted me. From the parkâs moated Belvedere Castle at Seventy-ninth Streetâa delicious Victorian-Gothic anachronism overlooking the Turtle Pond and the Great LawnâI could see a two-mile stretch of apartment houses, punctuated by the gabled Dakota and the immense, turreted bulk of the American Museum of Natural History. Whatever I knew of medieval Europe had come from Sir Walter Scottâs Ivanhoe, Mark Twainâs A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurâs Court, Howard Pyleâs novels about Robin Hood and the Knights of the Round Table, and my visits across the park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, mainly the halls of arms and armor. The arrays of bourgeois apartment houses stirred fantasies of castles and fortresses, even though the inhabitants were clearly not lords and ladies, pushed baby carriages instead of riding chargers and palfreys, and sent their cooks out to buy meat, milk, fruit, and vegetables on Columbus Avenue. Still, whether these buildings had authentic grandeur or were merely stage sets and architectural pastiche, it was not too much of a wrench to think, however fleetingly, of Camelot and sometimes Oz.
Dominating the scene were three towered and intricately embellished structures, each a somewhat watered-down example of imitation Renaissance, Baroque, or Art Deco. They had glittering names, each with its own aura of associationâSan Remo (the Italian Riviera), Beresford (British nobility and military heroes), Eldorado (conquistadors, Sir Walter Raleigh). These three buildings had been put up between 1929 and 1931, a last exhalation of prosperity on the eve of the Great Depression. (For devastated high rollers in the stock market, the motto on the Beresfordâs heraldic elevator doors was prophetic: FRONTI NULLA FIDES ââDonât Trust Appearances.â) The Beresford (the largest apartment house of its day), Eldorado, San Remo, and dozens of other buildingsâamong them the Normandy (Renaissance towers with an Art Moderne base), the Mayflower Hotel, originally festooned with balconies, and the vaguely Mayan-looking Ardsleyâwere all the work of one architect, Emery Roth. His buildings on the West Side were as iconic, as expressive of the cityâs style of grandeur, as Henry Hardenberghâs Dakota Apartments and Plaza Hotel. Roth did most of his important work on the West Side, lived there, and died (in 1948) in one of his buildings, the Alden on West
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