Radio City to close

In a mad, mad moment during the presidential campaign of 1964, President Lyndon Johnson, his open car driving at the head of a long motorcade through some of the dingiest streets of Pittsburgh, stopped the car and before the Secret Service men could grab him, he bounded across the narrow street and into a dingy house and was up the stairs and appeared grinning at an upper window with a half-dressed workman and his astonished wife. We were in a Polish and Czech neighbourhood and it was one of those parcels of American slums of unpainted, wooden houses slumping and crumbling into the sidewalks.

This scene in Pittsburgh, I ought to remind you, happened less than a year after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. What did he think he was doing? Well, he said later, when he saw that couple peering out of their crummy bedroom, he thought in a flash of his own poor boyhood and his own parents and he remembered something – what he remembered was something that none of us would ever guess. He thought of a picture on the wall, the first picture his parents ever bought. 

Now Lyndon Johnson was an expert at second thoughts and in any political brawl, he would try to separate the opponents and soothe them and massage them against the day when they would, as he used to say, 'sit down and take counsel together' and come to some decent compromise. But, and I saw it many times, when he saw very poor people looking in from the outside, he never had a second thought. He plunged at them with some large, instinctive promise. 

He stayed long enough with the Pittsburgh couple to take a cup of coffee and when he came out, he said he'd told them, 'I want every family in America to have a carpet on the floor and a picture on the wall. After bread, you've got to have a picture on the wall.' Now some people will think this fatuous or sentimental or pathetic, but I'm pretty sure there will be people who have taken carpets and pictures for granted all their lives. 

When we were jogging along back to the airport for the next flight to South Carolina I remember, and then on to Miami, I thought of my own boyhood and the obsession of my father with one particular kind of picture. We certainly couldn't afford originals, though a Wesleyan parson in training dabbled quite impressively in watercolours and he gave us, I recall, a study of a cow contemplating the green, but treeless, landscape of the veldt. Otherwise, of course, we had reproductions everywhere of the Pre-Raphaelites, Lord Leighton, G. F. Watts, Burne-Jones. There were languid ladies with necks like giraffes taking a bath, but even in a Methodist household this was all right because they were undoubtedly ladies and they wore layers of pudic draperies. And this was art, wasn't it? 

In the room where I did most of my homework, I looked up a thousand times from the algebra problems or the weird movement of the trade winds or the Battle of Austerlitz or whatever, and there saw another melancholy lady, swathed in towels, sitting on top of a globe and she was supposed to represent Hope. 

Well, only a few years later at Oxbridge I learned that all these painters who my father thought were the high points of high art, I learned that they were pathetic, that they were indeed perfect examples of non-art and whether this was snobbery or not, the Pre-Raphaelites went down and down on the auction blocks of the world, so that some time, in the 1930s I think, you could have bought that long-necked lady on the globe for a few hundred pounds if she'd been for sale. However, 30 years later she was sold for, as I recall, upwards of £200,000. 

The Pre-Raphaelites were back in fashion. So much so that when I was visiting my old college, which had an incomparable medieval chapel where we used to gaze in awe on a vivid, medieval window, now I found a pack of art lovers coming up from London with the single purpose of gazing with more awe on a window done in the late nineteenth century by Burne-Jones. Now this had been an object about which, in my time, the college authorities were very embarrassed and over which the visiting painters and art historians used to stand and titter. 

But, one generation comes to titter and the next to pray. We've just had an extraordinary example of this in New York, of how the wheel can come full circle from ribaldry to reverence. The announcement was made the other day that the Radio City Music Hall is going to close down right after Easter. It has been losing about $3 million a year and it has to go. After a stunned silence, the burgers of New York have risen and let out a long howl of pain. It is as if St Paul's Cathedral were standing in the way of a motorway and would have to be pulled down. Somebody, in fact, has called Radio City Music Hall the secular cathedral of New York City. Much more accurately, it was called through the Thirties and on into our time, the Nation's Showplace, and so it is. 

It opened 45 years ago and, even then, it wasn't just the size and grandeur of it that caught everybody's breath, except the scornful breath of the artists and architects and aesthetes. An educational fund that gave out 25 fellowships a year to appointed British graduate students made a point of taking the fellows en masse on the first evening in New York to Radio City Music Hall as you might take visitors to India to the Taj Mahal before leaving them to their own devices. I remember on my first night we all piled off to see a new movie with Harold Lloyd but it wasn't the movie that mattered. 

The administrators of the fellowships were very shrewd. Though they could certainly have afforded to put us in the best orchestra seats, they didn't. They booked us into the highest balcony where we could see the enormous vault of the auditorium and peer down on the other 6,175 people present. The movie screen looked like a postcard suspended in the nave of St Paul's. And then, during the interval, we wandered into the immense, grand foyer with its vast, gold-backed mirrors and its 29-foot cylindrical chandeliers and, a little later, before we went on for supper, our hosts gave us a strong hint that we all needed to spend a penny. A penny? A shilling, a pound would have been not too much simply to see the black-and-white marble stalls, the towering ceiling – a sort of Roman bath about one hundred times the normal scale. 

It was this grandeur which in those days mocked all the surrounding bleakness and poverty of the Depression that made sensitive souls, artistic or not, bemoan the very existence of this Babylonian extravaganza. But, as the Depression slackened off and when prosperity came back again, even arty people began to look again and grant, first grudgingly and then openly, and now, enthusiastically that there is no more breathtaking example in the world of the style of decoration peculiar to the late 1920s and the early Thirties. By now it has a name, it is a cult. It is called art deco. 

A very serious double-domed critic has just joined his voice to all the civic-minded people who are begging to have the city, or the federal government through the national endowment for the arts, stop the wrecking ball and save the music hall for the city, the nation and posterity. I, myself, am still in a daze at this revolution in fashion or perhaps in... maybe in just simple perception. I was brought up to lament the existence of the Radio City Music Hall. What is now admired as art deco was then scorned as vulgar and styleless extravagance. 

But, after all, this has been the story of many styles. The most beautiful colonial church in New England in Litchfield, Connecticut – a white miracle of eighteenth-century grace in wood – was removed in the late Victorian era as an eyesore. It was literally dug up and transported whole and planted six miles out of town, dumped into the countryside. It became, in turn, a stable, a chapel, a movie theatre. Till along came my generation, abominating every product of the Victorians and brought the church back again and planted it once more on the town green where it glorifies today the surrounding streets of other eighteenth-century gems. No doubt 20 years from now they will all be torn down to make way for supermarkets (...) or housing projects in grey slabs of King Lear modern. 

But today the art critics, the architects even, have spoken. Radio City Music Hall, they pronounce, is THE masterpiece of art deco and, as one of them has just written, 'along with the Chrysler building, is immortal'. Well, as I say, it isn't. Its mortality has a deadline. After the big Easter show, it will close its doors unless all the missionaries for its salvation win the day. First, of course, the mayor has been appealed to, to have the responsible commission declare it a city landmark, if not a national landmark. 

At this point, however, another and more ominous voice is heard. It is the voice of a man we've never heard of by name, one Felix G. Rohatyn, chairman of MAC, the Municipal Assistance Corporation, which was set up on the verge of the city's bankruptcy in 1975 to handle all city taxes, to sell bonds to save New York's solvency. There are people who believe that Jimmy Carter's election was ensured the day that President Ford said he could do nothing for New York City and the New York Daily News set up its now famous headline, 'Ford to NYC, Drop Dead!'. 

Well, Mr Rohatyn has just told the board of directors of MAC that the city is about to enter a storm fully as dangerous and unpredictable as any we weathered in 1975. In short, the city is running through its borrowings, its federal help and is again teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. And who, with so many firemen fired and policemen sacked and schoolteachers gone to save money, who will come forward to save our picture on the wall? 

Listen in next week, same time, same station, when this exciting cliffhanger will be with you again.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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