Cloisters and Cardiff

Janet Cardiff's 40 part Motet closed this past weekend at the Cloisters. The installation was crowded but the piece still effective. The vocal work at its center is called Spem in Alium or “Hope in any Other” by Thomas Tallis, composed c 1570 for eight choirs of 5 voices. It was written as a progression of voices— sometimes singing in unison, sometimes in call and response. Cardiff's piece, as you may know, consisted of 40 freestanding speakers, each approximately six feet tall, set up around the Cloisters’ Fuentiduena chapel. Each speaker projects an individual voice, (the 40 were recorded separately) so that as you move around the space you experience each voice intimately. You are at the center as the music is projected back and forth across the space.

The Cloisters itself— a faux medieval abbey which houses much of the Metropolitan Museum's medieval collection—can strike one as characteristically American. If you think too long on its conception it can color your visit, or at least it did mine: rich diletante (George Grey Bernard) collects bits and pieces of medieval architectural details from around Europe and imports them here; a medieval pastiche financed by another rich American (John D Rockefeller) is constructed to house them; land both immediately surrounding the complex as well as across the river along the New Jersey palisades is bought up to preserve the view. A testament to American wealth and cultural boldness— buying up history wholesale and bringing it home. Thus the Fuentiduena chapel is actually an apse from one location, statuary from another, and a fresco from yet another, inserted into a "chapel" built in 1938. Throughout the building there are door frames from France housed with pillars from Spain flanking rooms made from Netherlandish accoutrements. Still, I dont really mean to criticize. Its a lovely haven in Manhattan and the gardens with researched, period-appropriate plantings are wonderful in and of themselves.

Recognized in Passing, Part II

Mott Street at Canal, c 1905

Mott Street at Canal, 2013

c.1940

Not my most elegant post, perhaps, but it makes up with raw enthusiasm what it lacks in style. I happened to be down in Chinatown, crossing Mott street where it meets the Bowery, and stopped in my tracks. I recognized the view. I knew I had stashed away a vintage image (by way of Shorpy, "the 100 year old photo blog.") of a funeral processing down that very stretch of street, c. 1905. Once you study it, you realize quite a few of the buildings remain, they're just encrusted with a visual blight of signs, altered by bad storefronts and obscured by a welter of street furniture. And of course the cars.

In the first 2 photos, the building at far left with arched windows even retains the shutters and the very same fire escape. Further on (second from bottom photo comparison) you'll see the 2 tenements with ornate cornices as well as their plainer neighbors and the church remain. The Church steeple has lost its ring of tiny dormer clerestory windows on the slanted roof but its otherwise unchanged.

Most puzzling is the fate of the building mid-block on the left, identified in the vintage shot as #5, the Imperial Restaurant. It has beautiful ornate iron grillework on the second story balcony and is hung with paper lanterns. On street level is a pagoda-style entry. It's a 6 story building. Today the stunted yellow structure at number 5 stands only 4 stories tall. Oddly, it too is a restaurant ("Buddha Bodai Nature Kosher Vegetarian Restaurant") and has a second floor balcony, but for no apparent reason. Could it be a remnant of the former building left during remodelling—rather than a new building? Nothing about 5 Mott Street seems particularly logical or planned (a blocked up 4th floor for instance) which led me to think it might be the original building, with an expedient, rather than sensitive, overhaul. A quick look on Emporis lists the construction date as 1910. Although thats notoriously unreliable it does indicate the building is "old." Further research finds the building was described as "new" in 1903. The image, bottom, from the Museum of the City of NY shows the building, full height, in 1940.

Check out my previous Recognized in Passing with Elizabeth Street.

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire remembrance

The smoldering Asch Building-- The Triangle Shirtwaist Co. (sign circled) occupied the top 3 floors.
Today it is the Brown Building, part of New York University.

 

Bodies placed in caskets on the scene nearby

Identifying bodies at the 26th Street morgue.

Mass funeral procession and memorial on April 5th, 1911

Funeral procession and memorial on April 5th, 1911

Obituary I saved for one of last 2 survivors, from 1999. Oddly, the last survivor died two years later,
also at 107 years old and also in February.

UPDATE: The 102nd anniversary of the Triangle Factory fire this week brings a call for entries to design a memorial to the victims and establish symbolic recognition for the changes in labor and safety laws. Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition is holding an international design competition, to be judged by Deborah Berke and Daniel Liebeskind and other notables, for a memorial on the facade of the Brown Building (see below).

On the afternoon of Saturday, March 25, 1911, the workday was ending at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, housed on the 8th, 9th and 10th floors of the Asch Building off Washington Square. Pay envelopes had been handed out when fire flared up in a scrap bin under one of the cutters' tables on the 8th floor. As fire devoured the bolts of cloth and wicker baskets of trimming, many of the men and women working there panicked as a key exit door had been locked, and many didnt even know there was a fire escape. Not that knowing about the single fire escape helped: it was extremely narrow and rather flimsy and gave way under the strain of dozens of workers fleeing. The elevator operator was able to make 3 trips before the cables stopped functioning. A few women jumped onto the elevator cable and tried to slide down. Several people were able to make it to the roof. Sixty-two died by jumping or falling from the ninth floor. The fire department arrived quickly but was unable to stop the flames, as there were no ladders available that could reach beyond the sixth floor. Their safety nets tore as the jumpers hit them. In 18 minutes 146 people died.

The company's owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, had fled to the building's roof when the fire began and survived. They were later put on trial, but the jury acquitted. They lost a subsequent civil suit in 1913 and were held accountable for compensation in the amount of $75 per deceased victim. The insurance company paid Blanck and Harris about $60,000 more than the reported losses, or about $400 per casualty.
The Asch Building is now the Brown Building of science, a part of New York University (NYU).//

Cornell University has created an incredibly thorough and comprehensive site on the Triangle fire and the resulting union, safety and legal implications. Several of the images here are from the site. There are transcripts of interviews with survivors conducted 46 years after the fire, in 1957. So many small details that really make it real (italics are mine):

When we came downstairs, the firemen were not there yet but the first thing we saw were girls lying on the sidewalk. We thought they had fainted and one of my girl friends said, "Thank God we are not like them, we're alright. She went over to one of the girls lying on the sidewalk and bent over her and she was hit by another falling body and killed.

I remember my father was in a barber shop getting a shave and somebody ran in and said, "Your daughter is coming and her face is all with blood". You know, in those days when a fella asked a girl to marry him and she said no, they would cut up her face. So while we were walking down the block, rolling from side to side, Frank was a little drunk, we were hurt, my father came running out of the barbershop with the towels hollering who did it, who did it - I'll kill him. My mother upstairs looked out of the window and saw me with blood on my face and my father hollering I'll kill him and she came down running into the street wringing her hands and crossing herself and crying "Who, Who?"

The elevator had made several trips. I knew this was the last one but it was so loaded that the car started to go down. The door was not closed. Suddenly I was holding to the sides of the door looking down the elevator shaft with girls screaming and pushing behind me. It was the old style elevator -- cable elevator ... That cable was at the side of the elevator shaft. I reached out and grabbed it. I remember sliding all the way down. I was the first one to slide down the shaft. I ended up on top of the elevator and then I lost consciousness. Others must have landed on top of me. When the rescue workers came to the shaft they pulled me out and laid me out on the street. I had a broken leg, broken arm. My skull had been injured. One of my hands had been burned by friction. Editors NOTE: (apparently this is a case in which the victim, taken for dead, was removed with the other bodies but separated from them when life was detected in time.)

I think that the girl right in back of me had her hair singed by flames -- that's how close the fire was to us. I don't remember how I got down that narrow staircase but I was cold, wet and hysterical. I was screaming all the time. When we came to the bottom I could not get out of the building. The firemen held us back in the doorway. The bodies were falling all around us and they were afraid to let us go out because we would be killed by the falling bodies. I stood there with the other girls screaming until the men saw a chance for us to get across and I remember they let me across the street and took me into a Chinese importing house where they tried to quiet me down and gave me milk to drink. I could see through the window how the bodies were still falling and would hit the sidewalk with a bounce.

I rushed with the other girls but just as I came to the door of the elevator it dropped down right in front of me. I could hear it rush down and I was left standing on the edge trying to hold myself back from falling into the shaft....Maybe through panic or maybe through instinct I saw the center cable of the elevator in front of me. I jumped and grabbed the cable. That is all I remember. My next thing I knew was when I opened my eyes and I was lying on my back and I looked up into the faces of a priest and a nun who were trying to help me. I was in St. Vincent's Hospital. ...I don't know how long I stayed in St. Vincent's but when I was well the Red Cross came with my clothing which they got from my family and took me straight to the mountains for a rest. At the same time, the Red Cross paid my family $10 a week for 10 weeks. I never got a dime's worth of help from the company.

Champagne Wishes, Caviar Dreams

A good portion of the residential advertising in the collection might be considered aspirational...

Very Don Draper!

The brochure (c. 1969) for 111 Livingston Street, a commercial office building in Downtown Brooklyn,
touted it as "5 minutes from Wall Street" (see below) with "high-speed, computer-controlled elevators,"
"prestige design", and "Its own energy system"— generators, water, the works... I can almost imagine the sleek, space-age "machine for living" (or working) they thought they were crafting.
The reality today is a stained and dog-eared International Style/Brutalist hybrid that's parked like a loiterer in Brooklyn Heights.

"attended lobby with message receiving service"...

"Manual for Tenants"... c. 1954

I stumbled across the online New York Real Estate Brochure Collection in Columbia's Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library. It comprises 9,200 advertising brochures, floor plans, price lists, etc documenting residential and commercial real estate promotion in New York City from the 1920s to the 1970s. The collection was compiled over the years by the printer of these brochures.They were actually printing samples! While the collection is only as good as the caliber of work associated with this particular printer—and you need to have a fascination with floor plans to really get excited—there are some noteworthy pieces. I especially liked the iconic (might we say cliched?) mid-century advertising lettering. Also of note are the hundreds of leaflets for red brick and later white brick mid-rise apartment blocks. (And I do use that word in a considered fashion.) Untold legions of these buildings pockmark the city. Not nearly as bad as today's Fedders Buildings, they are a sad lackluster lot none the less. Ok, yes, I might possibly be able to appreciate a few of the formerly reviled white brick apartment buildings. (When they're good, they're actually a step up in a "That Girl", zingy kind of way.) It is the red brick buildings, typically with terraces, utilitarian to the extreme and without any hint of flair, that are, in a word, soulless. I know, I grew up in one.

a typical Outer Borough, mid-rise red brick apartment block

Guess who's coming to dinner

Skull and Level, a spectacular memento mori from Pompeii, 1st century, Naples Museum.
This and the skeletons below are thought to be emblema, the central panels of decorative mosaic flooring
found in Roman dining rooms.

An interpretation of the Skull and Level is animated at the very beginning of the opening credits
to HBO's Rome from a few years ago

skeleton with scythe, the inscription "gnothi seauton"— know thyself—is in Greek.
Roman, circa 1st century.
Interestingly, the skeleton reclines very much like a Roman dinner guest.

skeleton with wine jugs, Naples Museum — a two-for-one carpe diem and memento mori.
Love this guy.

restored fragment of unswept floor from Aquileia. image: mosaico ravenna

More mosaics, more unswept floor:
The previous post introduced the asaroton or unswept floor decoration that cropped up periodically in ancient Roman dining rooms. The debris-strewn look— trompe l'oeil mosaic food scraps, fish heads and the occasional animal gnawing on banquet remnants— remained a popular conceit for centuries. Explaining this motif as a sort of display of wealth (as it commonly seems to be in my cursory investigations) seems rather facile to me. If bourgeois ostentation is the goal why not simply create a mosaic larder heaped with edible riches that guests can trample on their way in to eating even more bounty?

A reader, Mosaicos La Pasera, commented:

I recall reading about the unswept floors in an article that explained the remnants of food on the floor represented and offering to the ancestors within the household.

There may be the germ of something there. I read somewhere about the GREEKS who didnt sweep crumbs because they were "offerings" for the fallen (heroes/warriors). Also there was a type of Roman slave whose specific task was to sweep the food detritus on the floor, but I cant now find reference to it. Perhaps the asaroton was a way of venerating ancestors, fallen heroes and the like without, you know, making the place reek. Although I have yet to find a backstory that rings true on this, one thing is certain—the Ancients definitely had a way with wit and whimsy. 

Memento mori: Another, mordant, take on Roman home decor: the memento mori. The term of course refers to that broad theme of art which crossed many genres, the purpose of which was to nag people "remember you will die." I associated the motif more with the self-denying, bummer obsession of medieval to early 19th century Christianity, but evidently it turns up rather jauntily in pagan times. These mosaics are thought to be the emblema or central panels from decorative flooring in Roman dining rooms.

The "Skull and Level" at top is absolutely riveting both in its look as well as complexity of symbolism. As described on the web site of the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence:

....its naturalistic depiction of a skull and the tools of a mason, expresses allegorically the transience of life and the impending nature of death. It is the libella, the level, from which hangs the plumb-line—the instrument that serves to control the levelling of a construction- that symbolises all equality. From its ends hang in perfect equilibrium the symbols of power: the sceptre and royal purple on the left, and on the right, the sack and the stick, symbols of poverty...

Note that the skull sits atop a wheel (of Fortune!) and a butterfly, signifying the soul...
---> WOW. //

Also, take a look at an early post of mine on memento mori in fashion advertising.

unswept and unwelcome

Trompe l'oeil debris was a popular Roman and Hellenistic mosaic theme for dining rooms floors.
Discarded fish and fruit: fragment of an asaraton, or unswept floor mosaic from Aquileia.

detail of a 5th century floor mosaic of a Roman triclinium (dining room) which itself features
an unswept floor mosaic

the entire banquet scene shows the asaraton floor design — or does it?
Mosaic on display at Chateau de Boudry

asaroton signed by Heraklitos, from Vigna Lupi, Rome, 2nd century, in the Vatican Museum
photo by magistrahf

detail of Heraklitos mosaic above, Vatican Museum

mouse and walnut— look at the shadows!

chicken foot on the floor!

"Have" (a variant of "Ave" meaning “Hail”) is a charming mosaic greeting at the entrance to
the House of the Faun, Pompeii

Much more common, it seems, was the Cave Canem/Beware of the Dog entry hall mosaic
A popular sort of "unwelcome mat".
This well-known example is from the House of the Tragic Poet, Pompeii.

Unswept:
Asaroton (or asarotos oikos, "unswept room") is a great term I discovered regarding ancient Roman and Hellenistic mosaic work. The word is Greek but it was a common Roman genre in which the floor of the triclinium, or dining room, would be decorated with food scraps seemingly cast onto the ground from the very dining tables at which guests would be seated. The realistically modelled debris included fish bones, snails, shrimp heads, fruit rinds, nutshells, and the occasional vermin.

The fascinating room scene at top is believed to be from a 5th century dining room floor. It shows an actual dinner in progress with an asaroton floor design in the room—OR does it show a dinner with a very messy bunch of people who have actually thrown their food on the floor? Its quite a "meta" take on the style.

The first explanation of the asaroton comes from Pliny (c.77-79 AD) describing a notable work in Pergamon, probably from the 2nd century BC:

The most famous in that genre was Sosos who laid at Pergamon what is called the asarotos oikos or unswept room, because on the pavement were represented the débris of a meal, and those things which are normally swept away, as if they had been left there, made of small tesserae of many colours. - Pliny, Natural History

So from the 2nd century BC they were still doing the unswept thing in the 5th century AD. Obviously interior design trends cycled more slowly then.

Unwelcome:
Just about everyone is familiar with the cave canem dog mosaic shown above, from Pompeii. I hadnt realized how commonplace these snarling decorative canines were. I also hadnt realized that the dogs one was to cave are thought to be the Molossus, an ancient breed now extinct. The dogs were eponymously named for the Molossians, a tribal people from Northwestern Greece and what is now lower Albania. Molossian shepherds of Epirus in the mountains of northwestern Greece were renowned for vicious hounds which were used to guard their flocks and for hunting. The Molossus is considered to be the ancestor of today's Mastiff-type dogs and ostensibly contributed to the development of powerful modern breeds such as the St. Bernard, Great Pyrenees, Rottweiler, Great Dane, Newfoundland, and Bernese Mountain Dog... I have to say I'm a little dubious because these mosaic doggies seem rather too sleek and jackal-like to be "vicious guard hounds."

The Ancients had quite a sense of humor—who knows maybe these are the equivalent of pink garden flamingos. //

See next mosaic post on memento mori at (or under) the table.