Creations of Class: Antiquity in New York City PETER AICHER Leafing through the American Institute of Architects’ New York City guide with an eye on classical influences, one’s attention will be arrested on almost every page by a thumbnail photograph of a classical column, cornice , pediment, or frieze, its heritage sometimes acknowledged with brief commentary: “A sliver with a meticulous Ionic-columned Roman Temple on top. Peer upward” (The Baudouine Building, Broadway and 28th ).1 Clearly more is called for. But how to select, from among the thousands of potential and hundreds of worthy examples, the individual subjects for a fuller treatment of their heritage, how to arrange them, discuss them, and weigh their significance, either singly or as parts of a larger narrative or argument? These are some of the challenges that confront Macauley-Lewis’s (M-L) archeologically informed study Antiquity in Gotham: The Ancient Architecture of New York City. The antiquity at play, M-L stresses in the introduction, is not limited to Greece and Rome but includes among the sources of inspiration the antiquities of Egypt and the Near East. These traditions form a combined category the author calls the Neo-Antique. This makes eminent sense: ancient Egypt and the Near East are also part of the dialogue carried on by antique forms in the streets, cemeteries, parlors, and parks of the city, with each ancient culture contributing some characteristic association and lending import to a building arion 29.2 fall 2021 Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis, Antiquity in Gotham: The Ancient Architecture of New York City (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2021), 280 pages with 114 b/w and color figures. 152 celebrating the invisible or monument. M-L emphasizes that these values and associations were never monolithic or stable. The contributions of a building’s ancient heritage varied according to social and political conditions that could raise or lower the stock of an ancient culture, as its characteristic values (these too variously conceived and fluctuating) shifted in response to historical circumstances and changing ideals. The challenge, then, for the author of Antiquity in Gotham becomes the integration of these historical and ideological components of the study with a structure and approach focused on the individual entries selected for comparison with their ancient sources of inspiration. More on this tension later. Foundational to the book’s approach and contribution is its arrangement. Rather than proceeding historically—from a discussion of buildings in the Greek Revival style of the early 1800’s, for instance, to those of the neo-classical Beaux Arts movement that channeled imperial Rome at the end of that century—or arranging the material topographically—this is not a guidebook, the author cautions—M-L creates nine chapters that each treat a type or genre of a building’s function . Somewhat like Vitruvius organizing his material into sections on temples, forums, theaters, private buildings, walls, aqueducts, etc., M-L groups her entries into chapters on infrastructure , civic buildings, commercial buildings, funerary monuments, commemorative structures and so forth, with some historical progression prevailing within each chapter. Classical literary scholars will be familiar with this approach from the numerous studies that arrange and consider texts by genre on the grounds that individual works of epic, lyric, drama, and satire generated meaning by carrying on a special dialogue with others of their own kind. Some of that is at play here. For instance, within the same decade, both Columbia and New York University constructed, as showpieces for their new campuses, libraries based on the Pantheon. Both buildings in turn were part of a larger dialogue channeling the prestige of the Pantheon through a previous American Peter Aicher 153 incarnation, the rotunda designed by Thomas Jefferson for the library of the University of Virginia eighty years earlier. As M-L presents the discourse among individual buildings in New York, however, or between them and the ancient buildings they drew on for inspiration and effect, the dialogue was far more impressionistic than the tight intertextual weave we labor to elucidate in ancient texts. This is New York City after all, where the dominant mode relating one building to another is more demolition than dialogue. The author’s curation...
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Mar 15, 2024
Tomasz Knepka 
Open Access
