The publication of this catalogue offers a suitable occasion to reflect upon the historical centrality of New York urban-scene painting and, at the same time, on its peculiar marginality to American "art." Broadly speaking, the collection of urban-scene paintings in the Museum of the City of New York owes its genesis to New York City's ascendance as a cultural and commercial center in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Two of the nation's earliest and most influential art academies, the American Academy of the Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design, were founded in New York City. By the late nineteenth century, with the formation of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (1859), the Art Students League (1875), the Pratt Institute (1887), and a myriad of other small schools and academies, New York had become the nation's foremost center for art education.¹

Over the course of the nineteenth century, New York also emerged as the nation's center for the production, display, and sale of artworks. The city's elites formed the most important group of American collectors in the first half of the nineteenth century, commissioning portraits and (less enthusiastically) marine scenes, genre subjects, and landscapes. Through the rest of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, however, most painters, working outside the framework of patronage, had to struggle to exhibit and sell their works in an open marketplace amid stiff competition. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, large trade fairs (such as the Crystal Palace Exposition and the Sanitary Fairs), art unions, commercial galleries, auction houses, gentlemen's social clubs, and art dealers provided new venues for display and sales. Artists themselves also worked actively to achieve greater visibility -- through renting exhibition space, distributing publicity flyers, and charging admission fees; buying into cooperative artists' studios (such as the Tenth Street Studio or the Hotel des Artistes on West 67th Street) and advertising their work by throwing open houses; or sending their work to juried shows or art fairs. Late nineteenth-century artists also turned to such dealers as William MacBeth or marketed their work out of their own studios.² The market for American painting expanded tremendously during the twentieth century.

At any given moment, only a small minority of painters achieved professional recognition or financial success. Nonetheless, New York City's abundance of commercial and cultural offerings continually attracted both eminent and aspiring artists. Despite their diverse social backgrounds and styles, all the artists in this catalogue shared this fascination with New York City. The existence of this particular group of works is a testament to the importance of New York City as the locus of numerous art worlds.

To point to the city's centrality as a cultural crossroads may be to dwell on the obvious. Yet for all its vitality as a metropolis and an art center, New York rarely took center stage on painters' canvases. The preeminent national institutions and organizational frameworks that emerged in the city never particularly encouraged painters to focus on local subjects. Art schools, exhibitions, and even art lotteries (held by the American Art-Union in the mid-nineteenth century) all placed primary emphasis on the "bigger picture." Artists were implored to transcend the local and forge a "national," "universal," or "ideal" art. Industrialization, urbanization, and the Civil War left a lingering nostalgia for pastoral imagery in the third quarter of the nineteenth century.³ Training, display, and collecting practices generally discouraged the representation of place when that place was New York, with all its attendant excitement, hardship, and social tensions. Artists certainly did portray the city, as the Museum's collections attest. Yet depictions of life in New York City did not find much individual or institutional support until the early twentieth century, when the "painting of modern life" -- influenced by artistic developments in France and by the expansive physical transformations of the metropolitan landscape -- became more widespread as a national aesthetic priority.⁴

At that cultural moment, increasing numbers of painters working in a loosely painted, sketchy Impressionist and "realist" vein depicted the city's parks, buildings, monuments, and street life in a picturesque fashion. As many later scholars have observed, most such images avoided confrontations with the city's darker side. A growing coterie of dealers (notably, again, William MacBeth) and collectors exhibited and purchased such work, and art critics at New York newspapers and magazines increasingly devoted attention to illustrations and paintings of the city.⁵ The roots of acceptance of urban-scene painting can also be found in local responses to the painters of the Ash Can School. They exhibited around the city, and their professional and social ties to the New York press helped them to secure critical attention in newspapers. Interest in contemporary urban-scene paintings may well also have been piqued, through association, by the activities of men like I. N. Phelps Stokes and J. Clarence Davies, who, in an effort to cultivate and protect urban memory, began to acquire old views of the city's fast-disappearing physical past.⁶

Yet despite the augmented production and accep-tance of urban-scene paintings, they were generally not regarded as a central aspect of the nation's artistic heritage. Relatively few such pictures found their way into museums and private collections until some years later. Only during the Depression -- when many artists on federal relief depicted the city as an expression of their commitment to modernity, locale, and Social Realism -- did contemporary urban subjects become more widely visible as a distinct genre in exhibitions, on the art market, and in private and public collections.

Because urban-scene painting was a marginal endeavor from an institutional standpoint, the enterprise never entered the historical record. The major surveys of American art chronicled and recapitulated the values articulated in the art theory promoted by influential art organizations and institutions and imbibed by would-be collectors. Most of the early historians of American art were New Yorkers during some portion of their careers, and all acknowledged New York's contributions to the advancement of the nation's artistic life. Yet their books -- for example, William Dunlap's History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in America (1834), Henry Theodore Tuckerman's Book of the Artists (1867), Sadakichi Hartmann's History of American Art (1901), Samuel Isham's History of American Painting (1905), and Suzanne LaFollette's Art in America (1929) -- slighted images of the city.⁷

Although the methods and outlooks of these surveys differed in significant ways, most sought to invoke, through art, a distinctively national experience; hence they privileged the national over the local. They highlighted artists, genres, and styles that typified American "experience" in a given era: portraiture in the Colonial period; history painting in the Federal period; landscape and genre painting in the mid-nineteenth century; and, circa 1900, ideal and vanguard art (which emphasized formal elements as an integral aspect of content).⁸ Authors of surveys written after World War I (Isham, LaFollette, Oliver Larkin, and Milton Brown), more attentive to "realisms," did mention some urban-scene painters. Only Larkin and Brown, however, who conveyed left-liberal sympathies born out of Depression-era cultural politics, attended to painterly responses to New York actualities and hardships. The prevalent tendency was to ignore visual or textual representations of circumstances that confronted New York historians and painters on a regular basis.

New York urban-scene paintings did not fit neatly into the predominant typological categories, and thus historical surveys rarely mentioned them or their creators. Very few artists achieved "canonical" status in any case (signified by inclusion in the historical surveys); moreover, once an artist was added to the ranks of canonical masters, he or she tended to remain there. Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that only a minority of the artists represented in the Museum's painting collection are household names.

In other words, using the conventional evaluative criteria, it is difficult to assess the significance of the collection of urban-scene paintings at the Museum of the City of New York. Art history has traditionally been concerned with constructing coherent narratives of aesthetic achievement and development; the principal art institutions have reinforced these priorities. Engaged with specific works of art and canonical artists, art history has limited scholars' perspectives of painting practice, implicitly relegating works like those in this catalogue to marginal provincial status. Such an outlook seems hard to reconcile with the fact that most of these paintings were inspired by and produced in the nation's leading metropolis. Clearly, then, if we are to make sense of the paintings in the Museum's collection, we must look at them in another way; we must start from different premises.

The picture changes if we shift our focus from great artists or canonical objects, expressive of national tendencies, to artistic activity and subject matter. Examined from this perspective, the collection of the Museum of the City of New York, representing diverse modes of material culture, offers new ways of conceptualizing the history of art. This alternate strategy acknowledges the centrality of New York City in the production and meaning of images, regards the artists in this catalogue as pivotal and typical actors in the cultural scene, and recognizes urban-scene subjects as crucial to the history of American art and society.

New York urban-scene painting, then, can be considered as one aspect of the history of artistic activity. Details about the Museum's collection -- biographical data on individual artists and information on the provenance of the Museum's paintings -- are limited. However, sufficient information exists to demonstrate a variety of modes of artists' engagement with the city. Examination of the paintings in this catalogue enables us to outline a range of practices and art-world circuits with which painters were involved.⁹

Painters have had different motivations and purposes. Some artists painted urban scenes for purely personal reasons. Baroness Hyde de Neuville's view of the Bridewell (fig. 26) and Baron Axel Klinköwstrom's 1818 view of Broadway and City Hall Park (plate 3), to name but two, were souvenirs rendered by amateur painters -- cultivated European aristocrats who were touring the city. Other images were commercial ventures painted on commission. Several of these portrayed the products or ventures that either exemplified or contributed to the patron's business success. Thus, as historian Kenneth Myers has demonstrated, Thomas Birch's New York Harbor from the Battery (fig. 27), commissioned by the shipbuilder James A. Stevens, celebrated the vibrancy of an active harbor and the commercial and industrial achievements of water transport made possible by Stevens' construction of the steamboat Albany.¹⁰ The charming anonymous painting of the Bauern Haus and Carousel at Rockaway Beach, c. 1880 (plate 43), Leo McKay's 1898 - 1906 panorama of Steeplechase Park (plate 55), and E. P. Chrystie's delicate watercolor rendering of the 1939 World's Fair (fig. 28) were, when painted, bright paeans to their patrons' accomplishments. They have since taken on significance as commemorations of particular aspects of the city's built environment -- aspects that were dedicated to commercialized leisure and amusement and have since disappeared.

Only a minority of painters worked on commission. Most painted on speculation, and the Museum's collection illuminates some of the varied ways New York artists sought audiences and markets. One method was to create works that were explicitly commemorative in purpose. Rendered in the era just before the ascendance of photography, Nicolino Calyo's Burning of the Merchants' Exchange, New York, December 16 & 17th, 1835 (plate 11) and Albertis Del Orient Browere's view of the 1842 Tombs fire (plate 13) functioned as dramatic visual documents of conflagrations as urban calamities. Such sensational views of the cityscape served varied functions but were especially geared toward tourists and connoisseurs.

Many such images reached broader audiences indirectly, not as paintings but as print reproductions. Calyo's Burning of the Merchants' Exchange, for example, served as a prototype for printed images destined for distribution among the middle class. Conversely, certain paintings were modeled on popular prints. The Museum's anonymous rendering of a clearly idealized City Hall Park, circa 1835 (fig. 29), was either a model for a contemporary print or was itself a modified copy of that print. The print versions of several of these pictures, such as the anonymous view of City Hall Park (fig. 30), were subsequently appropriated by preservationist campaigns in the early decades of the twentieth century. The City Hall Park painting, in its manifestation as an engraving, was reproduced in a host of books and articles; from 1910 until about 1950 it functioned as a favored "memory image" of the park's supposed appearance in the previous century.

Only a small number of artists succeeded in having work reproduced and thus widely disseminated. Most reached a public in other ways, often with the help of commercial brokers. Mid-nineteenth-century painters aspired to have their work displayed in such new art unions as the American Art-Union and the Cosmopolitan Art Association, in galleries, in dry goods stores, at such fairs as the 1853 Crystal Palace Exposition, and sometimes in bars and restaurants. The artists represented in the Museum's collection were no exception. By the late nineteenth century, such artists as Childe Hassam (whose Rainy Late Afternoon, Union Square is in the collection [plate 50]) marketed their art through dealers and auction houses.¹¹ Some artists sold their work directly out of their own lavishly appointed studios; Sanford Gifford, for example, represented in the Museum's collections by the painting Coney Island (plate 37), undoubtedly forged deals in his rooms in the famous Tenth Street Studio building. By the 1930s many painters, including Franz Kline (whose painting Washington Square is owned by the Museum [see fig. 2]), sold their work through juried exhibitions and open-air art shows like the famed Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibition, which had been recently inaugurated to provide help to local artists feeling the pinch of the Great Depression (fig. 31). During the Depression, painters like Anthony Velonis (represented in the Museum by Fulton Fish Market Dock, 1934 [fig. 32]) pursued their craft with financial support from the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. Others, like Reginald Marsh and Ben Shahn, received commissions for murals for public buildings through the Treasury's Public Works of Art Project (the Museum's holdings include Marsh's designs for the United States Customs House and Shahn's WCTU Parade [plate 76] for his Central Park Casino commission ).¹²

The urban-scene painting collection at the Museum of the City of New York provides additional insights into the nature of painters' lives and their occupations.¹³ The evidence suggests that only a small percentage of artists actually earned a living from sales of their paintings alone. Most of the artists whose work is included in the catalogue were locally trained, were involved with New York City or suburban art organizations, and exhibited in juried, group, and solo shows locally or nationally. Yet most did not achieve great fame or commercial success. Many of the Museum's painters (among them Philip Reisman and Bascove) earned a living as teachers. Many worked in other art-related professions. Johannes Oertel engraved banknotes; John Beverley Robinson and Miklos Suba were architects; Sebastian Cruset and Allen Stone both did artwork for magazines; Cruset also designed textiles, and Stone worked at Grumbacher (research laboratories making oil paints and other artists' supplies); da Loria Norman illustrated books; James Kerr founded Fairbairn Publishers, specializing in art reference materials for schools and higher educational institutions. Others engaged in non-art-related professions: Johannes Oertel was an Episcopal priest as well as an engraver, Victor Gatto was a plumber and steamfitter, and Fanny Holzmann was a judge.

Many of these artists were actively involved in some sector of New York City's diverse art scene, exhibiting work, for example, in group exhibitions or art fairs. Others simply painted for pure pleasure, with no intent to exhibit or sell. Given these facts, and given the sheer numbers of painters at work in the city, it is unsurprising that a number of the Museum's urban-scene paintings entered the collection as donations from the artists or their families (see, for example, figs. 33, 37, and 39) and that some artists' names are unfamiliar. Some of these paintings may never have circulated in the market at all.

Although most of the artists represented in this catalogue have been excluded from the history books, they are hardly insignificant. In fact, they were an integral part of the art worlds of New York and of the nation as a whole. In many instances, these artists were bound up in the same institutional and commercial circuitry as painters who concentrated on other subjects. The contingencies of this broader, complex nexus of cultural production well merit their own detailed study. Such an analysis, however, would extend far beyond the scope of this essay.

Moreover, there is yet another outlook to consider in our effort to reassess the historical importance of New York urban-scene painting: one that considers urban-scene paintings as sites of memory.¹⁴ This second perspective would link urban-scene painting to other modes of visual culture that seek to image "place" -- in this specific instance, "New York City." By the beginning of the twentieth century, New York City was an especially popular locale for such representations; indeed, the city was the center of a veritable picture industry. The rise of an organized tourist trade was one important catalyst. Images on postcards and maps, in advertisements, newspapers, and guidebooks, served as crucial instruments of information, documentation, nostalgia, and promotion; it is thus not surprising that there was a complementary upsurge of painted renderings intended to appeal as both attractions and souvenirs.

We need a comparative history of all such New York images, one that would encompass both singular representations (such as paintings) and multiple or commercial modes of picturing: prints, photographs, print and outdoor advertisements, cartoons, and cinema. Again, such an expansive inquiry falls outside the scope of this essay.¹⁵ I will point to the possibilities, however, by sketching some of the ways select catalogue paintings -- specifically, those focusing on public works and monuments -- created and salvaged a history and experience of New York as place. These paintings shared with other pictorial modes a similar ambition to document, to commemorate, and to "fix" an image of New York City. But as paintings, they also used particular stylistic, representational codes, specific to the medium, to convey the artists' "personal" response to their subjects. The paintings may be absent from the art-history surveys, yet the formal and iconographic components of the works themselves convey historical significance.

Before we embark on this discussion, it should be noted that the very impulse to document, commemorate, preserve, and collect images of New York, so prevalent at the turn of the century, was part of a larger cultural phenomenon characterized by historian Max Page as the dynamic of "creative destruction." The phrase refers to the tensions arising from the city's status as the capital of capitalism, its well-known proclivity to build and rebuild; it alludes in particular to the paradoxical tendency to both destroy and revere the city's physical past. The process was bound up with real estate development and preservation and was manifested as well in the collecting activities of city-builders I. N. Phelps Stokes and J. Clarence Davies (a real estate developer whose collection of old New York City views formed the core of the Museum's early holdings). As Page has demonstrated, the Museum and the Davies bequest, which aimed to educate immigrants and advance civic community, operated collectively (if not fully consciously) to interpret the cyclical destruction and transformation of the city as a "natural" and "benevolent" process.¹⁶ This framework helps to explain the presence of certain prevalent themes -- such as the expansion and destruction of the cityscape -- in many images in the collection. The ensuing discussion thus inevitably recapitulates the categories and themes effectively built into the Museum's mission, collections, and narratives from the very outset. Acknowledging this fact, we may proceed to consider specific paintings as historical statements about urban development and memory.

New York's penchant to build and rebuild was not just a fin-de-siècle obsession. Many of the Museum's oldest paintings highlight the rise and expansion of civic New York. In the views of City Hall Park by Baron Axel Klinköwstrom, Arthur J. Stansbury, and an anonymous painter (plates 3 and 4 and fig. 29, respectively) the artists trained their eyes on an area that had undergone significant transformation in the years around 1800. Formerly a common that housed a British barracks, a gaol, and an almshouse and which abutted the "Negro Burial Ground," the area south of Chambers and north of Fulton was, by 1825, being transformed into an elegant landscaped park and civic and cultural center.¹⁷ The three paintings highlighted New Yorkers' aspirations toward gentility through emphasis on the built environment: the park, promenades, and the primary commercial thoroughfare (Broadway), its beautiful new City Hall (completed in 1814), and its new cultural institutions (the American Museum and the Rotunda in plate 4; the Park Theater in fig. 29). Hippolyte Victor Valentin Sebron's 1855 view (plate 31) depicted the City Hall Park area as a vibrant commercial and tourist district, with the elegant Hotel Astor serving as focal point. Together, then, these paintings accented structures and spaces that marked New York's ascendance as a bustling yet refined civic and mercantile center.

Continued growth depended upon availability of fresh water. Another painting in the Museum's collection (fig. 34) depicts the fifty-foot frontage of the Manhattan Company Reservoir (chartered 1799), which formed part of the northern boundary of the new civic area with its recently enclosed park. Located between Broadway and Centre Street at 31 - 33 Chambers Street, the reservoir supplied water to parts of southern Manhattan until 1842, when it was made obsolete by the opening of the Croton Aqueduct.¹⁸ The structure, anchoring the composition, is shown literally as central to the progress, health, and welfare of the city. Focusing on the reservoir's solid Egyptian-style walls and its classical Greco-Roman iconography, the painting highlights the enduring nature of the reservoir's (and the water company's) mission.

The importance of such a reservoir is made apparent by the numbers of paintings in the catalogue that record destruction of city landmarks due to the capriciousness of fire. The paintings serve as reminders of the fragility and transiency of structures and place; buildings could function as enduring civic monuments only when they did not go up in smoke. John Rubens Smith's watercolor of St. George's Episcopal Church (Varick Street) after the fire of January 6, 1814 (fig. 35), focused on the aftermath of the destruction of a beloved symbol of stalwart Episcopalianism and religious community. The painter depicted the parishioners surveying the ruins and trying to shore up the building. Smith conveyed the loss at hand through a formal contrast (heightened by the sharply angled perspectival recession) between present circumstances -- the monumental ruin in the foreground -- and the past -- the diminutive yet undamaged steeple in the background, a reminder of what St. George's Church once was.

In the pre-photographic era, paintings recorded fires and other urban catastrophes and memorialized the ensuing losses of life and property. Smith represented the aftermath of such a disaster. In Burning of the Merchants' Exchange (plate 11), the Neapolitan-born Nicolino Calyo sought to convey a greater sense of drama and immediacy by painting the cataclysmic destruction of a magnificent symbol of New York's civic and commercial vitality. (Calyo, who had studied at the Naples Academy of Art, was obviously familiar with that city's tradition of "Vesuvius erupting" paintings.) Asserting the authenticity of the visual account, Calyo inscribed his presence as witness ("Painted on the spot") above his signature. Using dramatic contrasts of scale, light and shadow, and hue, the painting evoked the sublimity of the inferno; the tiny figures are powerless to combat the flames that engulfed the Merchants' Exchange and surrounding buildings. Calyo's sensational image thus enabled the viewer to experience vicariously the spectacle of destruction. It also commemorated a devastating civic and economic loss.

Like the Merchants' Exchange, the Crystal Palace building (constructed in 1853 to house the nation's first world's fair) was regarded as an expression of civic pride, technological ingenuity, and commercial progress. W. S. Parkes's rendering of the cast-iron and glass exhibits building (fig. 36) was likely painted as a fair souvenir. The crowds, spritely clouds, and sparkling iron structure depicted in the painting presented the Crystal Palace as the embodiment of spectacle: a monument to display and an ethos of consumption that were then finding expression in enormous new dry goods stores like the one built by A. T. Stewart just a few doors down from the former site of the Manhattan Company Reservoir. The supposedly fireproof Crystal Palace building burned down in 1858. Thus, like Smith's and Calyo's pictures, this painting also commemorated an ephemeral structure -- the antitype to the conception of building as monument. The painting's transient subject allies this work with others in the museum's collection.

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century painters continued to render buildings and monuments in order to highlight municipal expansion and its transformation of the past and the cityscape. John Beverley Robinson's 1881 Jefferson Market Courthouse (see fig. 33) depicted one outgrowth of New York City's exploding population and of the city government's determination to maintain law and order.¹⁹ The Jefferson Market Courthouse, one of several new courthouses built during the last third of the century, reflected the enlargement of the city's court system and the efforts to solve the problem of overtaxed courts and overcrowded prisons. Robinson's watercolor disregards the more depressing connotations, however, favoring instead a positive vision of the four-year-old building. The image shows a picturesque contrast of turrets and finials towering playfully over low-rise buildings and telegraph poles.²⁰

Robinson's painting revealed the beauty of the new modern-style courthouse. Victor Wilbour's desolate view of the Tombs, circa 1900 (fig. 37), eulogized an outmoded relic of a building and penal system. The 1898 consolidation of the five boroughs served as a stimulus for enlargement of the apparatus of governmental oversight and control through the construction of new correctional facilities. Set on the stage of an eerily unpopulated Centre Street against a backdrop of office buildings, the 1833 Egyptian-style prison stands as a monument to New York City's crime-ridden past, soon to give way to a new, more serviceable, and philosophically enlightened structure.²¹

Modern municipal development engendered not only new courthouses but also numerous other civic projects that transformed the cityscape. The Municipal Building, constructed to house new city offices, was finished in 1915. The Museum's collection includes two works that show the structure in very different ways. Everett Warner's Municipal Building (plate 60), painted right around the time of the building's completion, sets up a contrast between a present of an expanded, centralized, impersonal, and powerful city government (epitomized by the massive new office building) and an older urban order of individual contacts and small businesses signified by horses and carts, small commercial structures and dingy tenements, and narrow streets.²² The future of this past was indeed uncertain. During this period, plans were underway to demolish the areas west and north of the Municipal Building to make way for a civic center.

By contrast, Allen Stone's Municipal Building (fig. 38) honed in on the building's western entrance, with its triumphal arch portal. The entrance was rendered as passageway to the city's true civic center, the bustling Chambers Street. In contrast to Wilbour's and Warner's views of the areas on the periphery, Stone's scene is teeming with people and traffic. Crowds and congestion evoke the mundane noise and movement that so many paintings of civic New York evaded.

In the eyes of painters, municipal public works could also stand as enduring monuments to progress, place, and modernity. James Monroe Hewlett's New York Connecting Railroad Bridge at Hell Gate (plate 64) celebrated a crucial engineering achievement: when completed, the structure was the nation's longest steel arch bridge. Providing a vital rail link between the Bronx and Queens, the bridge was an integral part of the new systems of circulation and the new rapid transportation that were transforming modern urban life and traditional concepts of place.

Da Loria Norman's 1929 Holing Through (plate 68) focused on new transportation systems as well. The painter orders and monumentalizes the process of subway construction, appearing to visually equate the tunnel's huge steel armature with a classical temple. Norman locates the viewer dead center to invoke the immediacy, dangers, and thrill of construction and the promise of rapid transit. In contrast, Maurice Kish's The End of an Epoch (plate 89), depicting the dismantling of the Sixth Avenue El, positions the viewer as an outsider, removed from the discrete "epoch" that the El's presence signified. The viewer witnesses the making of a ruin, a casualty of urban progress.

Emily Noyes Vanderpoel's 1927 Fifth Avenue (fig. 39) commemorates a different aspect of the built environment of municipal public works. Like her counterparts in postcard photography (fig. 40), Vanderpoel depicted the five-year-old traffic control towers that facilitated the free flow of traffic and goods above ground. Placed at strategic intersections along the avenue beginning in 1922, they helped to alleviate traffic congestion and the dangers of crossing the street.²³ In contrast to the postcard, Vanderpoel's nuanced rendering consciously transformed the signals into art. The picturesque plays of light enhance the sense of the ephemeral. Yet those same patterns, in conjunction with the vertical towers that anchor the vista down the street, also create an aura of timelessness in tension with the rapid movement that is the towers' raison d'être. In hindsight, the invocation of the ephemeral was fitting. By 1930 hanging lights and underground wires would become commonplace, rendering traffic towers obsolete. The scene captured so exquisitely by Vanderpoel would soon become a memory, much like the El in The End of an Epoch.²⁴

The triumphal arch, already noted in Stone's Municipal Building (see fig. 38), is a common motif in this catalogue. Triumphal arches were among the numerous public monuments built at the turn of the century. They were expressions of the same aesthetic and social impulses that produced the Municipal Building and other civic structures. With their explicit allusions to Rome's Arch of Constantine and Paris's Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile, New York's triumphal arches asserted the city's achievement, power, and stature on a par with the great cosmopolitan capitals of Europe. Three paintings of the Washington Arch, painted by Paul Cornoyer in 1900 (plate 56); by Carton Moore-Park, circa 1913 (plate 61), and by Franz Kline in 1940 (fig. 2), commemorated the well-known landmark, if not specifically the histories it embodied. Built to honor the centennial of Washington's inauguration as first president, the arch was a particular favorite among artists, many of whom lived near it. The Museum's three paintings captured the arch from varied vantage points and at different times of day. All three treated the arch in picturesque fashion (note, for example, how trees frame the arch in each painting). By minimizing sculptural detail and emphasizing the arch's basic structural outlines, all three rendered the monument as a timeless, enduring marker of place, even though the three paintings were made at different times. Cornoyer depicted a merely five-year-old arch. Moore-Park's painted landmark marked the heart of Greenwich Village as emergent center of social and cultural radicalism. The arch painted by Franz Kline had become an artistic cliché. The stock in trade of participants in the Washington Square Outdoor Art exhibitions, it signified Greenwich Village bohemianism commodified for the tourist trade.²⁵

The Museum's other paintings of New York City arches, those showing temporary arches celebrating war victories, represent a notable contrast to the pictures of the permanent stone Washington Arch. Samuel Landsman's Dewey Celebration at Madison Square, 1899 (fig. 20), and Jane Peterson's Victory Arch at Madison Square, 1919 (plate 62), depicted commemoration in a literal fashion; they sought deliberately to record ephemeral commemorative monuments and moments. Symbols of the city's monetary clout and material egotism as well as of national triumph, these temporary arches also illustrate New York's penchant for tearing down and rebuilding. The paintings highlight the arches' monumental presence along with the rituals and traffic they engendered. In contrast, and perhaps in reaction to many contemporaneous photographs (fig. 41), the artists did not focus on the elaborate sculptural groups that were an integral part of the nationalistic programs of both monuments. The pedestrian and automotive activity is at odds with the stasis of the arches and the very medium itself; that tension is heightened further by the awareness that such movement, like the temporary structures that inspire it, is also transitory.²⁶

If Landsman and Peterson sought to commemorate acts of remembering by depicting recently constructed temporary monuments, other twentieth-century painters concentrated on the imminent destruction of ostensibly "permanent" structures, in an attempt both to generate memory and to deter or lament its annihilation. Edward Lamson Henry's Old St. John's Church on Varick Street, 1905 (plate 15), typified growing efforts at the turn of the century to represent memory on behalf of preservation politics. Depicting the church and surroundings as they purportedly appeared in 1840, Henry implicitly contrasted past glory with present-day physical and spiritual deterioration in order to rouse public opposition to the impending desecration of a part of New York's early heritage (regarded as especially scandalous because Trinity Church owned the property). As pictorial persuasion, the painting serves as a counterpoint to paintings like New York Connecting Railroad Bridge at Hell Gate (plate 64) or Holing Through (plate 68), which celebrated civic development.

Mary Mintz Koffler's The Aquarium in Destruction, 1947 (fig. 1), depicts, with under-stated irony, a fait accompli: the demolition of a beloved family attraction, motivated, insisted critics, by the sheer hubris of New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses.²⁷ As with Everett Warner's earlier Municipal Building (plate 60), the statement hinges on a visual contrast, in this case between the cavalcade of modern, smoke-spewing (and hence occupied) skyscrapers and the abandoned wrecks of the old aquarium and Castle Clinton -- itself a time-honored symbol of civic vigilance, strength, and community. In Calyo's Burning of the Merchants' Exchange (plate 11), crowds toil unsuccessfully to prevent the destruction. By contrast, Koffler's desolate landscape invokes the tragedy of political arrogance and indifference. Dan Gheno's Lost Highway, 1988 (fig. 42), offers an updated, "postmodern" memorial to a once-celebrated manifestation of the city's modern system of circulation, one of the causes of New York's centrality. The West Side Highway (Miller Elevated Highway), an engineering feat completed in 1948, is depicted as a ruin. The painting underscores the fragile and abbreviated life span of New York's built environment. A casualty of neglect and political impasses, the highway is a road to nowhere.

The elegiac sentiments conveyed in these paintings resonated with many New Yorkers in the era after World War II, a period of significant urban development. Like Edward Lamson Henry earlier in the century, preservation-minded citizens campaigned to ensure that the myths and monuments of the old (modern) civic metropolis would remain present and palpable, not merely transformed into memories and images.²⁸ The Museum's collections include representations of several success stories for preservationists. Frank Mason's Old Police Headquarters, 1979 (fig. 43), depicts a Beaux Arts-style landmark on Broome and Grand Streets. Its drum, dome, and lantern tower triumphantly over neighboring rooftops, highlighting the building's monumentality. Silhouetted against a sunset, the Old Police Headquarters is rendered as both a timeless monument and a nostalgic memorial to the grandeur of a lost, yet mythical civic New York.

The publication of this catalogue is important for reasons that go beyond its achievement of documenting the holdings of a major cultural institution. In addition, this book will enable readers to understand both art and New York from crucial new vantage points. The information in this catalogue encourages readings of paintings as manifestations of complex artistic processes; it thus enables us to construct a more comprehensive picture of urban artistic practices. Moreover, the paintings recorded herein represent an important effort to make sense of the events, places, and experiences that have constituted "New York City." Individually and collectively, they contribute to a heightened awareness and understanding of time and place, history and memory, in ways impossible to achieve through other modes of picturing. Thanks to this publication, the artists' renditions of the city are assured a longevity that has eluded many of the landmarks and places they depict. Together, words and paintings contribute to a history of urban-scene painting that is a vital aspect of the histories of New York City and national cultural life. See Notes