Towering Glass and Steel - 31 October 2003

Forty years ago last Monday morning, a gentle south-east wind carried up through Manhattan what many New Yorkers at first thought was a series of explosions of some kind.

Pretty soon there came on television what to most New Yorkers was an incomprehensible sight and sound.

The pictures showed jackhammers clawing away at the walls of a famous building and then at slow, rhythmic intervals a huge, airborne shining ball swung and crashed against the long stately Doric colonnade of - were they mad? - the Baths of Caracalla.

Well, yes - not of course the original but a superb recreation of a Roman architectural masterpiece.

Why were they doing this? And who were they?

What we saw was America's most famous railway station - the Pennsylvania Station.

It had been designed at the turn of the 19th-20th Centuries, during the finest hour of the new multimillionaires - especially the robber barons who had made their fortunes in coke, iron ore, railroads - a time when little old Andrew Carnegie was proclaiming the new age of steel.

Once such a man was a millionaire he became eager to advertise the grandeur of his social position by ordering up a new house, a mansion, as like as possible to the mansions not of the new rich of Europe but to the ancient houses of the old aristocracy, especially the nobles of France and Italy.

At that time Goethe had given an encouraging line to the poor or oppressed of Europe who emigrated to America: "Du hast es besser" - You have things better in America.

An American journalist, watching the robber barons fight each other to procure the old master paintings and the models of the old aristocrats' houses, wrote: "Their motto was - they DO things better in Europe".

Such was the temper of the time when the most fashionable architectural firm of the day had an idea beyond the dreams of the culture vulture robber barons.

McKim, Mead and White proposed to the owners of the Pennsylvania railroad that they would like to build, not a mansion for the chairman of the board, but a railroad station for the city.

And to do so they proposed to recreate a jewel of a building of ancient Rome.

Why not, they suggested to the railroad company, have the city's new railroad station a recreation, if not an improvement, on the Baths of Caracalla, the masterpiece of Roman architecture as the Parthenon was the masterpiece of Greece?

Only Charles McKim or his dashing junior partner, Stanford White, would have the audacity and the skill to attempt such a thing.

It was done and in 1910 it was opened to the public who came in awestruck droves to gaze at the block long line of stately Doric columns, which led to the vast waiting room, which was indeed with its splendid vaulted ceiling a huge image of the Baths of Caracalla.

And from there you passed into the great concourse, where without catching breath, McKim had produced a creation of glass arches, domes and fan vaulting with the new steel - a breathtaking development of the glass and iron architecture of London's Crystal Palace.

Americans who were not taking any train came to gaze and marvel at it. And so for a time did the European tourists.

But fashion in architecture, as in everything else, changes and can sometimes change drastically.

By the mid 20th Century the European intelligentsia came and looked at Pennsylvania Station and remained to chuckle and to sneer.

By that time America and American businessmen had been ordered to admire the revolutionary works of a German - Walter Gropius, a rebel against all classical romantic, all Victorian styles of architecture.

He invented what he called an international style.

By his time, certainly, a general reaction had set in against the gaudiness of the Victorian age, the fussiness, the writhing decoration, the lumpishness of furniture, the stuffiness which overtook everything from women's clothes to lampshades.

When the Victorian style first came in the leading Regency architects of the day had called it ugly and barbaric.

And just a hundred years later, by the 1930s, it seems even the ordinary middle classes agreed with them.

And then came the fuehrer of the revolution - this new god of modern architecture, Walter Gropius.

He simply, earnestly, dogmatically reacted to everything that had gone before - from the Greeks on.

He invented the monolith - the large upright plank of concrete - or what an independent American pioneer, one Frank Lloyd Wright, called the new log cabin that misuses steel - "faceless, characterless, god-awful rectangles of concrete and steel", leading, said Mr Wright, to its peak in the United Nations buildings which he called "an anthill for a thousand ants".

Certainly the towering plank of glass and steel took over America's cities.

And when the Second World War was over and building of everything from cottages to skyscrapers could begin again, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe - the so-called Bauhaus School - became almost compulsory for any city contemplating a new airport, a city hall, a big business about to bloom. The god himself ruled from his pulpit at Harvard.

Now, these tycoons didn't have to like the style, it simply became essential to their social standing.

And so by the 1960s Tom Wolfe wrote: "There had never been a place on earth where so many people of wealth and power paid for, put up and moved into glass box office buildings they detested."

By then every child went to school in a building that looks like a duplicating machine wholesale distribution warehouse.

In such an atmosphere there was only one thing more ridiculous than designing a Victorian or Georgian house and that was retaining the huge absurdity of a recreated Roman classical building.

Such is the hypocrisy of fashion that since the end of the Second War I don't recall a visiting friend of tourist ever saying: "I must go down to 34th Street and look at Pennsylvania Station" as their successors would always obediently pad off to the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney.

By that time nobody had heard of the Baths of Caracalla and nobody cared - except the board of directors of the Pennsylvania railroad, who decided in 1960 or thereabouts that their Roman station was an expensive burden and also something of an embarrassment.

They decided to destroy it. And so at 9am on 28 October 1963 the jackhammers clawed and the wrecking ball crashed down on the Doric pillars and soon would demolish what was the last reminder in New York of the grandeur that was Rome.

There had been no pre-emptive campaign of protest that I can remember.

It was only when the noisy fact of demolition assailed our eyes and ears that a collector or two, a startled author, and then the intelligentsia magazines woke up.

To its credit it was the New York Times that first sounded the protesting trumpet. On its editorial page it had a leader calling the demolition "a monumental act of vandalism".

The little spurt of public shame and horror came of course too late. It took three years to destroy the station and on its ashes arose what the excellent blue guide to New York calls "the utterly graceless and unappealing Madison Square Garden" - a 20,000-seat arena in a pre-cast concrete drum, a movie theatre, a bowling alley and an office building.

However, out of this calamity, out of that ill October wind, there came one great and good thing.

In the last year of the demolition, when the long block at 34th Street began to look like a pre-vision of Ground Zero, a small clique of outraged artists, authors, art lovers, citizens, petitioned the mayor and then the city council and formed a body called The Landmarks Preservation Commission.

And since 1965 their agents have snooped around the city with the zeal of the FBI, ticketing period relics of every style of building to be preserved.

There was a big move in the 1970s on the part of the owners of the brilliant and majestic Grand Central Station to have it demolished and replaced by a 54-storied glass and steel Gropism.

The squabble was fierce and prolonged. Thanks however to the tenacity of two members of the Landmark Commission - one was man named Brandon Gill, a witty Irish American staff writer on the New Yorker magazine in its heyday, the other, the presidential widow Jacqueline Kennedy - the fight was taken all the way to the Supreme Court which upheld the protest and in 1978 decreed that Grand Central Station was to be immortal and never to be subject to the jackhammer and the wrecking ball.

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