Unique
Let it, however, be said again that the Colonnade on University Heights is the only one of its kind, and, as New Yorkers put it, the Big Apple of them all. A number of modern American dictionaries have hall of fame entries. Some recent editions carry the “Hall of Fame on University Heights, New York,” as the first definition.
Nowhere else in the nation is there any collection to compare with it, except perhaps Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol in Washington. Though it has been called the first hall of fame, Statuary Hall never bore the name.When it was created in 1864 out of the meeting chamber of the House of Representatives, Statuary Hall was apparently meant to honor two Americans sent by each state. Robert Underwood Johnson had always looked on Statuary Hall with an eye of disapproval. To him it was below standard and suffered from provincialism and bad taste, a “Chamber of Horrors. “Had there been a Federal Art Commission, Johnson felt, this might not have happened. He formed his own private art commission to establish a scale, saying that “The splendid unity of the Colonnade should never be broken.”
The aesthetic effect has drawn praise ever since. There has been no crowding in the Colonnade, no second-rate design, no statues looking down on busts. The overall result is an aura of “noble character.” Director Johnson too had done a “mighty deed.”
At this writing, inside the Capitol building, according to the federal government volume Art in the United States Capitol, are some 179 statues and busts; outside are 19 statues. Of the busts inside, 66 are of politicians. They vary in size from 20” to 40” (not exactly to scale), and include dozens of vice presidents. Ten are presidents, of which four are George Washington, two are Lincoln (one a head of heroic size by Gutzon Borglum), and one mysteriously scowling Zachary Taylor. Add a few other “heads” of state such as Garfield, McKinley, and J.Q. Adams — and so much for presidents. There are also busts of eleven “prominent individuals,” including Aysh-ke-bah-Ke-Lo-Shay and Beeshekee, as well as famous “American” James Bryce, a British viscount who wrote a highly praised book called The American Commonwealth, and Thomas Crawford.
Almost all the statues are in the so-called National Statuary. All but two are gifts of the states, and in their number are Will Rogers, the omnipresent Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Also Jefferson Davis, Kamehameha I, Brigham Young, and Huey Long. It has been said that anybody can get in. In the United States, what can be said will be said but not necessarily done — for lack of space if nothing else. Representations of “famous” people are found not only in Statuary Hall and Rotunda but also “located prominently in designated areas.” Hall of Columns, East Central Hall, connecting corridors of House and Senate, and vestibules. Where next?
Riverside Church in New York, across the street from Grant’s Tomb on Morningside Heights (which residents of the area in moments of euphoria call the Acropolis of America), is of itself a famous hall, and a hall of fame of sorts. Interracial, interdenominational and international, it is a huge beauty, built by Baptists through the cooperation of Harry Emerson Fosdick and the Rockefellers, at great cost. It has an organ “the size of four eight-room houses: and “enough lumber to erect frames for a block of small buildings.” The carillon of bells contains the “largest and heaviest tuned-carillon bell ever cast.” Of twenty-ton weight, it has never been surpassed, and is the first to achieve and exceed a compass of five octaves. The tower is 392 feet high, and “embodies some of the heaviest steel columns and beams ever used in a skyscraper. The elevators of the tower go higher than those of any other church in the world,” — as though trying to verify by emulation the view of Henry Adams in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: “The chief beauty of Gothic is to exaggerate height and one chief qualify is its success in imposing an illusion of size.”
If Pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, let the congregation make the most of it, for the church is a magnificent example of creative anachronism — an old cathedral constructed lovingly in the new world, gargoyles and all. Virtually every stone has its raison d’etre, right down to the pig holding a telephone on a pillar near the phone booths. And to cap things off, there is a special place for women that honors their “traditional virtues.” The Women’s Porch, it is called, suggestive of a seraglio.
Much of the sculpture, however, is on the chancel screen — seventy statues of biblical figures and world-famous followers of Christ, each along one of the seven paths he took through life. To the eye of one sitting in the nave, the figures are remote. They include Hall of Famers Abraham Lincoln, Booker T. Washington, Walter Reed and John Greenleaf Whittier. Sharing the chancel screen with them are two who were nominated but never elected to the Hall of Fame:
— Civil War General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, founder of Hampton Institute whose supporters made four failed tries.
— Baptist preacher Adoniram Judson, who tied Noah Webster in 1900 and thereafter was up and down for every election until 1935. His first wife, Ann, is with him on the screen; his second, Sarah H.B., is not there at Riverside but was put up for the Hall of Fame four times without success. Judson’s greater memorial is a church on Washington. Square.
The statues at Riverside are art for heaven’s sake, and worth the seeing. But on is advised to get a handbook at the desk. Without that, or a tour guide, the sculptures of the chancel are, in effect, seventy attenuated stones — “Giacomettis” — each crying for identity in a crown. Opera glasses would help.