Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Architecture
Living in, and with, the universal Midwestern latticework
Likely as not, when René Descartes invented his grid system of coordinates in the 17th century, he did not have Carroll, Iowa, in mind. No matter.
Every town you pass through has felt the impact of the modern historic-preservation movement. Now a founder of that movement discusses what is real and what is fake in preservation efforts.
Twenty years ago nobody thought much about saving old buildings. The phrase urban renewal had an optimistic, forward-looking sound to it, and entire urban centers were razed with little thought of what might be lost in the process.
A biographer who knows it well tours Franklin Roosevelt’s home on the Hudson and finds it was not so much the President’s castle as it was his formidable mother’s.
For better than four years now I have been writing about Franklin Roosevelt’s youth, seeking the sources of the serene selfassurance that served him and his country so well during the two worst crises since the Civil War.
Some of our finest public buildings were designed by a tormented young English architect whom the world has forgotten.
George Hadfield was one of the most distinguished architects ever to practice in this country, yet he is so little known that no book has been written about him and very little has been published in architectural journals.
A trackside album of celebrities from the days when the world went by train
A person used to enter New York City “like a god,” said the art critic Vincent Scully, but “one scuttles in now like a rat.”
On the eve of the Civil War, a Mississippi plantation owner and Philadelphia architect set out to build a massive octagonal mansion in Natchez.
It might seem that building a mausoleum to the great general would be a serenely melancholy task. Not at all. The bitter squabbles that surrounded the memorial set city against country and became a mirror of the forces that were straining turn-of-the-century America.
When Groucho Marx asked, “Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?” on “You Bet Your Life,” he was offering unsuccessful competitors, battered by his heckling and bewildered by the game, a chance for redemption and some easy money.
In designing, the University of Virginia, Jefferson sought not only to educate young men for leadership, but to bring aesthetic maturity to the new nation
ALTHOUGH THOMAS JEFFERSON had evolved very clear concepts of what a modern educational system should be, it was not until 1817 that he had the opportunity to put his theories into practice at Charlottesville, Virginia.
A gathering of little-known drawings from Columbia
University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library illuminates two centuries of American building
ONE OF THE WORLD’S most renowned architectural institutions is named for a virtually unknown architect who died at age thirty-eight, too young to have made more than a promising start in his own career.
It was built by Roebling, connects two cities, is a landmark of American engineering, and looks just like it but is…
IN THE SPRING of 1869 a party of engineers, politicians, and businessmen left Brooklyn and headed west in a special train.
A HERITAGE PRESERVED
The brief mid-nineteenth-century popularity of eight-sided houses has left us a strange and delightful architectural legacy
A GREAT MANY people have, at one time or another, happened to drive past a curious, eightsided house. And most who come across such a building believe it to be unique, the inexplicable architectural whim of a long-dead local.
How a shy millionaire’s peculiar genius transformed his “country place” into an unparalleled showcase of American furnishings
A HERITAGE PRESERVED
SOME SIX MILES north of Wilmington lies a stretch of countryside chiefly inhabited by du Ponts, du Pont servants, and some two dozen major du Pont estates.
It was a suburb of orange blossoms and gardens, of gracious homes and quiet, dignified lives—until a regrettable class of people moved in.
THE IDEA OF HOLLYWOOD as a boomtown would not have surprised those who lived there as this century began, for they worked hard toward that very ideal.
J ohn Wenrich’s original drawings of Rockefeller Center helped attract tenants in the middle of the Depression. Fifty years later they survive as talismans of a golden moment in American architecture .
When John D. Rockefeller, Jr., announced his intention to build a great urban complex in December 1929, the project was meant to be “as beautiful as possible,” but it also had to be a solid business proposition.
You’d never recognize it today. Perhaps this will refresh your memory.
The single-engine plane comes in low over the green hills of Zululand, then bounces to a landing on a grassy strip. The American tourists clamber out into the African sun.
Fort Adobe
The building shown below may look like a low-rise adobe condominium, and in a sense, that is what it is today—someone’s house.
How a brave and gifted woman defied her parents and her background to create the splendid collection that is Shelburne
What do the following items have in common—a peerless collection of old American juilts, a 220-foot steam-driven side-wheeler, last of its noble race, and the exact replica of six beautiful rooms in a millionaire’s Park Avenue apartment?
“I’ll plan anything a man wants,” he said, “from a cathedral to a chicken coop.” The monumental results transformed American architecture
It was common ground among everyone who knew him in the late 1870’s and early 1880’s that Henry Hobson Richardson was one of the great Americans of his day.
This puckish, nearly forgotten California architect built his own distinctive style on the simple principle that beauty alone endures
In the winter of 1953, a few days after his ninety-first birthday, Bernard Ralph Maybeck granted a lengthy interview to a public service radio station in Berkeley, California, the city in which he had lived and worked for six decades.
It sits like an exclamation point at the easternmost tip of Long Island and has done so for 184 years—making the Montauk Point Lighthouse one of the oldest in the United States. It also has the distinction of having been authorized by President George Washington himself.
He could build castles at his whim, but the ancient home of a small band of monks defeated him
During the early summer of the year 1213 Saint Martin of Finojosa was an old man and not in the best of health.
MIAMI DECO
The past has a way of catching up to us in odd and unexpected ways. A friend of mine was once walking the streets of Venice and encountered the smell of sausages cooking somewhere.
History by a Dam Site
The humble structure at the right—as the sign conveniently tells us—is indeed a dam, but it is no ordinary dam.
As a nation we spend a disproportionate amount of time destroying the remnants of our immediate past.
People who have never been to New Orleans usually can name several things that it’s famous for (Mardi Gras, jazz, A Streetcar Named Desire , the Superdome, jambalaya, red beans and rice), but they are apt to have only a hazy notion of what the ci
THE EXTRAORDINARY ORIGINAL DRAWINGS OF THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE
An exclusive preserve of New York’s social elite —its rise, its flourishing years, and its slide into genteel decline
In a gazetteer of the geography of high society, Tuxedo Park, New York, might properly be described as a village (pop. 972), 40 miles NW of the Union Club in New York City, once famous for its rarefied social climate.
The ups and downs of the invention that forever altered the American skyline
Of the mechanical wonders placed on view in the Crystal Palace, the great iron-and-glass exhibition hall erected in New York City in 1853 to house America’s first world’s fair, one of the most popular was a towering machine that was destined to transform the
There are over 3,000 county courthouse across the country -- staunch hometown symbols of our faith in our ability to govern ourselves
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