Duquesne Amusement & Supply Company founded
in 1904 in Pittsburgh, PA, by Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack Warner, for the distribution of films. The precursor to Warner Bros. Pictures.
Interior, Time Warner Center, Columbus Circle looking east on 59th Street. The dots of red and white at the base of the column are several Santa Clauses, whether posing, auditioning or loitering is unclear.
Columbus Circle, as one of the 28 IRT stops opened in 1904, is today a place that fairly resonates with significance of a year which, as faithful readers will know, is not only when everything important happened Then but a time period which continues to inform and enhance our appreciation of the Now. Only think what the four brothers Warner wrought with that first foray into the Industry we today call Entertainment. What a shadow their legacy now casts across -- well, Central Park!
Needless to say I loitered in the lobby (although I had places to go), hoping I might run into Anderson Cooper, but he must have been out keeping them honest somewhere else and our paths only seemed to cross once again. Or perhaps he was with Dr. Sanjay and that alligator wrestler. Not jealous!
In any event, after admiring a display of espresso cups by ILLY on the mezzanine level, I departed the Time Warner Mall (which reminds me of another urban mall, the Water Tower Place in Chicago) and made my way down to 57th Street and Broadway to the Hearst Building, the base of which was designed by Joseph Urban who also designed the Austrian Pavilion at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904, and later on designed productions for the Ziegfeld Follies and the Metropolitan Opera, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, The William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh and the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York. It was his finesse for the theatrical I believe, which led William Randolph Hearst to commission Urban and sideline Julia Morgan who did so many of Hearst's other projects. And as previously noted, George Randolph Hearst, the first of five sons, was born in 1904 to W.R. and Millicent.
Detail, the base of the Hearst Tower, 57th Street and Broadway, designed by Joseph Urban.
It is difficult to get a good picture of the Hearst Building, the original design of which called for a tower that was not built at the time. The one that now tops off the structure seems somewhat incongruous, to say the least, and as I am sure that everything has already been said about this architectural landmark -- this being New York and New Yorkers being forthright about their opinions -- probably the less said the better, especially as I feel there is little I can add beyond the obvious, that the base looks rather like a box out of which an enormous coiled spring has sprung, and were there a clown's head of sufficient size to place on top, the resemblance to a giant jack-in-the-box would be complete, but as I could not capture anything but pieces of the whole on film, you will have to take my word for it.
I hasten to add, however, that once inside the effect is entirely different and utterly charming. The old Urban structure has been completely gutted and that material recycled into the new structure rising up and out of the old in a thoroughly green and innovative and engaging fashion. You will be relieved to know too that the original Good Housekeeping Dining Room has been preserved intact and is on a high floor atop the city, as it were, surrounded by the Good Housekeeping testing kitchens and laboratories.
And if one were to lunch here, one would have the option of having steak from one of the Hearst cows, as the Hearst Corporation keeps a herd of cattle on hand, presumably somewhere out west, for just this very purpose. Delicious!
New York Magazine opined recently, in a review of the new New York Times headquarters, how it is in an era when so much print seems to be on the way out, replaced by mobile media and Internet technology, that these publishing corporations should be building such imposing new edifices for themselves. Aren't newspapers and magazines and books becoming a thing of the past?
But I take the somewhat contrary view that these structures are all part and parcel of what I call the Beauvais Syndrome -- that their rising up above the urban landscape point to a stage in our evolution where you set out to build the biggest, tallest, highest expression there is of the thing or idea or aspiration at hand. In the case of Beauvais Cathedral it was the biggest, tallest, highest Gothic Cathedral. Ever. The downside being the designers overreached and it wouldn't quite stay up, coincidentally at about the same time everyone decided they'd had enough of cathedral building and moved on to something else, being at that time the Renaissance.
One might I suppose and by analogy, also call our age the Fin de Cialis era, where again, the tallest, hardest, strongest, longest-lasting reaches its peak and then we all breathe a collective sigh of relief and move on to doing something else with our free time. Like reading a book.
Needless to say I loitered in the lobby (although I had places to go), hoping I might run into Anderson Cooper, but he must have been out keeping them honest somewhere else and our paths only seemed to cross once again. Or perhaps he was with Dr. Sanjay and that alligator wrestler. Not jealous!
In any event, after admiring a display of espresso cups by ILLY on the mezzanine level, I departed the Time Warner Mall (which reminds me of another urban mall, the Water Tower Place in Chicago) and made my way down to 57th Street and Broadway to the Hearst Building, the base of which was designed by Joseph Urban who also designed the Austrian Pavilion at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904, and later on designed productions for the Ziegfeld Follies and the Metropolitan Opera, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, The William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh and the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York. It was his finesse for the theatrical I believe, which led William Randolph Hearst to commission Urban and sideline Julia Morgan who did so many of Hearst's other projects. And as previously noted, George Randolph Hearst, the first of five sons, was born in 1904 to W.R. and Millicent.
Detail, the base of the Hearst Tower, 57th Street and Broadway, designed by Joseph Urban.
It is difficult to get a good picture of the Hearst Building, the original design of which called for a tower that was not built at the time. The one that now tops off the structure seems somewhat incongruous, to say the least, and as I am sure that everything has already been said about this architectural landmark -- this being New York and New Yorkers being forthright about their opinions -- probably the less said the better, especially as I feel there is little I can add beyond the obvious, that the base looks rather like a box out of which an enormous coiled spring has sprung, and were there a clown's head of sufficient size to place on top, the resemblance to a giant jack-in-the-box would be complete, but as I could not capture anything but pieces of the whole on film, you will have to take my word for it.
I hasten to add, however, that once inside the effect is entirely different and utterly charming. The old Urban structure has been completely gutted and that material recycled into the new structure rising up and out of the old in a thoroughly green and innovative and engaging fashion. You will be relieved to know too that the original Good Housekeeping Dining Room has been preserved intact and is on a high floor atop the city, as it were, surrounded by the Good Housekeeping testing kitchens and laboratories.
And if one were to lunch here, one would have the option of having steak from one of the Hearst cows, as the Hearst Corporation keeps a herd of cattle on hand, presumably somewhere out west, for just this very purpose. Delicious!
New York Magazine opined recently, in a review of the new New York Times headquarters, how it is in an era when so much print seems to be on the way out, replaced by mobile media and Internet technology, that these publishing corporations should be building such imposing new edifices for themselves. Aren't newspapers and magazines and books becoming a thing of the past?
But I take the somewhat contrary view that these structures are all part and parcel of what I call the Beauvais Syndrome -- that their rising up above the urban landscape point to a stage in our evolution where you set out to build the biggest, tallest, highest expression there is of the thing or idea or aspiration at hand. In the case of Beauvais Cathedral it was the biggest, tallest, highest Gothic Cathedral. Ever. The downside being the designers overreached and it wouldn't quite stay up, coincidentally at about the same time everyone decided they'd had enough of cathedral building and moved on to something else, being at that time the Renaissance.
One might I suppose and by analogy, also call our age the Fin de Cialis era, where again, the tallest, hardest, strongest, longest-lasting reaches its peak and then we all breathe a collective sigh of relief and move on to doing something else with our free time. Like reading a book.
In all the blather that I've read about the Hearst building, I've never encountered the jack-in-the-box image. How right you are! Calling Jeff Koons!
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