60. Old New York Evening Post Building
A.K.A.: The New York Evening Post Building
Location: 20 Vesey Street
Built: 1906
Architect: Robert D. Kohn; Gutzon Borglum (statuary)
National Register Number: 77000963
Listed: August 16, 1977
Visited: March 27, 2008
Journalism. New York journalism. Brash, brawny, manly journalism. Muckraking! Sensationalism! Totally making shit up! A take-no-prisoners attitude that lives with us today.
Modernism. Viennese modernism. Radical, intense, stylized modernism. Egon Schiele! Josef Hoffmann! Gustav Klimt! A rejection of things past that fed the future.
The Old New York Evening Post Building: New York Journalism + Viennese Modernism. Two tastes that should taste really weird together. But!
I can't find many definitive words on why the newspaper-eventually-to-be-known-as-the-New York Post would seek an Art Nouveau headquarters building, but the Post was owned by Oswald Garrison Villard, a man with lefty views on race, suffrage, labor, and pacificism (which eventually made him mad unpopular during World War II, as you can imagine). Even wrote a book on John Brown. As such, it's not hard to imagine him betraying some sympathy towards contemporary art movements--though I'm too ignorant to know if turn-of-the-century liberalism really was some kind of natural ally of early modernism. Actually, it's even easier to think of this building, ruled as it is by lithe and fluid lines, as a statement of oneupmanship over all those other newspapers and their elephantine buildings on Newspaper Row and uptown. Iconoclastic man, iconoclastic building: the building's so iconoclastic that it was described by the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission as one of the few Art Nouveau buildings in the country, forget about the city.
Incidentally, this was building was listed on the National Register the day Elvis died. This is one way you can tell I'm still a rock critic.
Location: 20 Vesey Street
Built: 1906
Architect: Robert D. Kohn; Gutzon Borglum (statuary)
National Register Number: 77000963
Listed: August 16, 1977
Visited: March 27, 2008
Journalism. New York journalism. Brash, brawny, manly journalism. Muckraking! Sensationalism! Totally making shit up! A take-no-prisoners attitude that lives with us today.
Modernism. Viennese modernism. Radical, intense, stylized modernism. Egon Schiele! Josef Hoffmann! Gustav Klimt! A rejection of things past that fed the future.
The Old New York Evening Post Building: New York Journalism + Viennese Modernism. Two tastes that should taste really weird together. But!
I can't find many definitive words on why the newspaper-eventually-to-be-known-as-the-New York Post would seek an Art Nouveau headquarters building, but the Post was owned by Oswald Garrison Villard, a man with lefty views on race, suffrage, labor, and pacificism (which eventually made him mad unpopular during World War II, as you can imagine). Even wrote a book on John Brown. As such, it's not hard to imagine him betraying some sympathy towards contemporary art movements--though I'm too ignorant to know if turn-of-the-century liberalism really was some kind of natural ally of early modernism. Actually, it's even easier to think of this building, ruled as it is by lithe and fluid lines, as a statement of oneupmanship over all those other newspapers and their elephantine buildings on Newspaper Row and uptown. Iconoclastic man, iconoclastic building: the building's so iconoclastic that it was described by the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission as one of the few Art Nouveau buildings in the country, forget about the city.
Incidentally, this was building was listed on the National Register the day Elvis died. This is one way you can tell I'm still a rock critic.
Labels: Civic Center, Robert D. Kohn, Tribeca
posted by Michael at
11:30 PM
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