Urban Agenda New York City, April/May 2015 by Witherspoon Media Group

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Jack Kerouac’s New York

2015

April/May 2015

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APRIL/MAY 2015 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Lynn Adams Smith CREATIVE DIRECTOR Jorge Naranjo ART DIRECTOR Jeffrey Edward Tryon GRAPHIC DESIGNER Matthew DiFalco CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Linda Arntzenius Stuart Mitchner Anne Levin Ellen Gilbert Ilene Dube Gina Hookey Taylor Smith ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Robin Broomer ACCOUNT MANAGERS Jennifer Covill Kendra Russell Monica Sankey Cybill Tascarella Erin Toto OPERATIONS MANAGER Melissa Bilyeu PHOTOGRAPHER Tom Grimes URBAN AGENDA: NEW YORK CITY Witherspoon Media Group 4438 Route 27 North Kingston, NJ 08528-0125 P: 609.924.5400 F: 609.924.8818 urbanagendamagazine.com Advertising opportunities: 609.924.5400 Media Kit available on urbanagendamagazine.com Subscription information: 609.924.5400 Editorial suggestions: editor@witherspoonmediagroup.com

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contents

Jack Kerouac’s New York BY Stuart mi tchner

The McGil l Sisters Fashion Photography Pioneers BY ellen gi lbert

april/MAY 2015

Architect David M. Sul livan Art by Design BY anne levi n

New Yorkers Love Their Dogs by Li nda Ar ntzeni us

Urban B ooks Design B egins at Home BY Stuart mi tchner

Digitizing Einstein BY ellen gi lbert

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Calendar 52

Urban Shops A Wel l-Designed Life 22

Cover Image: Jack Kerouac, by photographer Tom Palumbo, 1956. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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Courtesy of Beatscene.net

Portrait of Jack Kerouac by Allen Ginsberg.

Jack Kerouac’s New York

by Stuart Mitchner

ack Kerouac’s earliest published writing on New York City appeared under the name John Kerouac, a formal touch reflected in the glossy, soft-focus, dust jacket photo and the relatively buttoned-up narrative style of his first novel, The Town and the City (Harcourt Brace 1950). When he celebrates the city as “the one place in all the roundway world where everything is different from anywhere else, simply because it happens in New York,” the only hint of vintage Kerouac is in a term like “roundway.” A long passage meant to suggest the mounting excitement felt by someone coming into Manhattan for the first time depends on generic expository prose about “the vital and dramatic heart” of the place and “the magnitude, the beauty, and the wonder of the great city,” phrases as detached from the spirit of his style as “John” is from the “Kerouac” who wrote On the Road. In The Town and the City the excitement of arriving in New York is formally presented, as “an event of the most wonderful importance.” In a key passage from On the Road, excitement comes to life with characters who dance “down the street

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like dingledodies ... mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved...who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

Ever the Transient In the key writing years from 1943 to 1955, when Kerouac was celebrating Manhattan with the passion of an insider, he made his home, such as it was for a self-described “lonesome traveler,” in Ozone Park and Richmond Hill, Jamaica. Whether living with his mother in Queens, or returning from his travels, he was always something of a transient in the city that was so central to his life and work. He hammered out the first teletype-scroll incarnation of On the Road between April 2 and 22, 1951 while staying in his second wife’s Chelsea flat, and when the New York Times told the world that On the Road in its published form was “an historic event” and Kerouac “the principal avatar” of the Beat Generation, he was temporarily based in a girlfriend’s apartment on the Upper West Side. The fact is, The Town and the City and most of Visions of Cody (a prequel to On the Road), not to mention the long seminal letters to Neal Cassady, were written in the Kerouac family apartment above a drug store (since replaced by A Little Shoppe of Flowers) at 133-01 Cross Bay Boulevard (for more about Kerouac in Queens, see Patrick Fenton at insomniacathon.net). Meanwhile, The Subterraneans, Maggie Cassidy, and Book of Dreams were written at 94-21 134th Street, off Atlantic Avenue, a stone’s throw from the Van Wyck Expressway. It was there, in a frame house a long way from the urban architecture of Manhattan, that Kerouac gave Allen Ginsberg a lesson in writing “spontaneous prose.”

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Courtesy of Beatscene.net

Jack Kerouac with a group of avant garde American creative artists, known as the Beats, gather around a table at a restaurant.

of his vision of the city come into play along with fictional versions of himself (a seaman named Jack), Ginsberg (Leon Levinsky), Herbert Hunke (Junkey), Lucien Carr (Kenneth Wood) and William S. Burroughs (Will Dennison). It’s also at this point in the narrative that you begin to hear the familiar Kerouac music as he writes of Junkey resuming his “pale vigil” at the window of a 42nd Street cafeteria, “the same anxious vigil... from which the watchers of the Street could never turn their eyes without some piercing sense of loss, some rankling anguish that they had ‘missed out’ on something.” Even there, given the constraints imposed by editors and copyeditors at Harcourt, he’s still working with relatively “commonplace” terminology, especially compared to what happens in Visions of Cody when he opens his fiction to the hyped-up conversational cadenzas of Neal Cassady that will enliven and carry On the Road almost from the first written word.

Bonding with the City Ginsberg and Kerouac’s paths first crossed on the Upper West Side, as you learn in Bill Morgan’s The Beat Generation in New York City: A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac’s City (City Lights), which begins on the Columbia College campus, “where the Beat Generation first appeared like a wild seed in a city garden.” Acccording to Kerouac’s autobiographical novel, Vanity of Duluoz (1968), however, it was during his prep school year (19391940) in the Bronx at Horace Mann School for Boys that he bonded with the city he traversed every morning on complicated two-hour subway rides from his step-grandmother’s house in Brooklyn. Besides enjoying the fullest measure of football glory he would ever know, he developed a taste for things that became features of Beat culture as he defined it. Introduced to jazz by a fellow student with whom he saw the big bands of Jimmy Lunceford and Count Basie at the Apollo in Harlem, he later interviewed Basie and Glenn Miller for the school paper. The Beat world of Times Square’s “junkies and criminals and whores” led him to skip school now and then to take in matinees at “huge carpeted movie film palaces” like the Paramount (“sitting right down in the tenth row front to watch the huge neat screen and the stage show that follows”), or watching French films starring Jean Gabin or Hollywood reruns with Errol Flynn at second-run movie houses on 42nd street. When Kerouac introduces Times Square in The Town and the City, all sides

Hanging Out On Camera Access “Beats in New York” on YouTube and you’ll see five minutes of Ginsberg and Kerouac hanging out on a summer’s day in 1959 in front of the Harmony Bar & Restaurant on the corner of Ninth Street and Third Avenue, a block up from St. Mark’s Place. Also shown are the family of the man presumably doing the filming, photographer Robert Frank, his wife Mary and their kids, along with Lucien Carr, who met Allen and Jack at Columbia, his wife Francesca and

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Jack Kerouac, courtesy of Beatscene.net

his kids (one of whom, Caleb, grew up to write The Alienest). First view of Jack, cigarette in hand, he’s pushing a doorbell and then gazing impatiently up, easily the most expressive, cinematic presence, the star of the scene, mugging, playing for the camera that the others, except the kids, are mostly ignoring. You see him again clowning inside the Harmony, making Ginsberg look studious by comparison. Kerouac provides a picture of the same street corner in Visions of Cody: “Building is ancient red—1880 redbrick—three stories— over its roof I can see cosmic Italian old-fashioned eighteen-story office block building with ornaments and blueprint lights inside that reminds me of eternity, the enormous house of dusk where everybody is putting on their coats—and going down black stairs like fire escapes to eat supper in the dungeon of Time.” The Harmony appears “in crimson neon upon the gray sidewalk” in the next paragraph.

All Around Town Bill Morgan’s Beat Generation in New York remains the most enlightened and useful guide to Kerouac’s city. Here are some somewhat reconstituted highlights from a quick tour of the book; with few exceptions like Joyce Johnson’s description of Kerouac, most of the quotes are from the guide: Dodge Hall/McMillin Theatre, where Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky and Ginsberg read from their work (Kerouac didn’t show up) on February 5, 1959, “the first acknowledgment of the Beats by Columbia.” 421 West 118th Street, a six-floor yellow brick apartment building where Kerouac lived with first wife, Edie Parker, and said “the happiest days of his life were spent.”

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Apartment 62, an unofficial hangout for the Beats, was where Lucien Carr brought William Burroughs up to meet Kerouac and where Kerouac and Ginsberg first met. West End Bar, Broadway between 113th and 114th, which Ginsberg called “a replica of a Greenwich Village dive,” is where he first meets Neal Cassady, is rolled down the street in a barrel by Carr, and gets into a fight with two sailors defending Carr’s girlfriend. New York Public Library main branch, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, which houses “one of the best public collections in the world of books and manuscripts” by Kerouac, Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Burroughs, and Corso, who, as a boy, wrote his first poem there. Bickford’s Cafeteria, 225 West 42nd, but long gone, was “the greatest single stage on Times Square” says Kerouac, who hung out there with Ginsberg, Burroughs, Carr and hustler poet Herbert Hunke, this being the nameless cafeteria mentioned in The Town and the City where Hunkey (Junkey) spent 18 hours a day sitting at the front window. It’s said that Hunke coined the term “Beat Generation.” Hector’s Cafeteria, Times Square, also long gone, replaced by twin Cineplex movies, gave Neal Cassady his first glimpse of New York, with its “glittering counter,” and “decorative walls” and “noble old ceiling” of “ancient, almost Baroque (Louis XV?) plaster now browned a smoky rich tan color” (from Visions of Cody). Rockefeller Center, where Allen Ginsberg worked as a copy boy for the Associated Press Radio News Service during the time he was having visions of William Blake in his apartment at 321 E. 123 Street in Harlem. 450 West 20th, Chelsea, where Kerouac lived with Joan Haverty and wrote the first draft of On the Road on teletype paper. Look down 20th east toward Seventh Avenue for a view of corner where Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarity) turns

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Images from Beatiﬁc Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road, by Isaac Gewirtz.

on his way to Penn Station when last seen by Kerouac (Sal Paradise) at the end of On the Road. 92 Grove Street, where Carr lived and Kerouac often stayed. Writing in Desolation Angels, Kerouac called it “the most beautiful apartment in Manhattan...with a small balcony overlooking all the neons and trees and traffics of Sheridan Square.” White Horse Tavern, Hudson and 12th, though mostly associated with Dylan Thomas, was also a hang-out of Kerouac’s from which he was sometimes given the bum’s rush. It was also the site of a confrontation between two of his girlfriends, Helen Weaver and Joyce Glassman, who prevailed. Marlton Hotel, 5 West 8th Street, where Kerouac typed up the final manuscript of Tristessa, his short novel set in Mexico City. Eighth Street Bookshop, 32 West 8th, corner of MacDougal, “Greenwich Village’s Famous Bookshop,” the East Coast equivalent of City Lights, and the publisher of the early poetry of Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Leroi Jones, as Amiri Baraka was then known. Howard Johnson’s, Sixth Avenue near Greenwich and West 8th, where Ginsberg arranges for Joyce Glassman to meet and “rescue” Kerouac, who was down and out, this being January 1957. In her introduction to Desolation Angels, writing as Joyce Johnson, she describes her first sight of him “at the counter.... in a red-and-black-checked lumberjack shirt. Though his eyes were a startling light blue, he too seemed all red and black, with his ruddy, sunburned complexion and his gleaming dark hair.” Gas Light Café, MacDougal Street, the first café with poetry readings. Poets included Ginsberg, Corso, Jones, Diane DiPrima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Ray Bremser.

The San Remo, “a center of Kerouac’s N.Y. social life,” according to Ginsberg, who conversed with Dylan Thomas there. In The Subterreaneans, Kerouac placed the San Remo in San Francisco and changed the name to the Mask. 222 Bowery, where William Burroughs lived for six years in an windowless apartment he called the Bunker. 170 E. 2nd, 206 E, 2nd, 704 E. 5th, are among the East Village apartments Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky lived in between 1958 and 1965, in between long periods in India and Tangiers. It was at 704 E. 5th that Ginsberg took his last photographs of Kerouac. Tompkins Square Park, between Avenues A and B, another real-life meeting place Kerouac moved to San Francisco in The Subterraneans. 408 E. 10th, Apt. 4C, where Ginsberg and Orlovsky lived from 1958 through 1965. Ginsberg wrote some of his bestknown poetry there while becoming politically involved and internationally famous. 404 E. 14th, above the McDonald’s, a building owned by painter-poet Larry Rivers. Ginsberg bought a loft here in the fall of 1996 with the money made from selling his archive to Stanford. In March 1997, at Beth Israel Hospital on E. 16th, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He died at home, “surrounded by family, friends, and old lovers,” on April 5, 1997. Inspired by Ginsberg’s breakthrough poem, the East Village’s HOWL! Festival was founded in 2003 “to honor, develop, create and produce” and to “preserve, and advance the art, history, culture, and counterculture unique to the East Village and Lower East Side.” Jack Kerouac was born, March 22, 1922, and died October 21, 1969. His hometown, Lowell, Mass., planned a series of events to celebrate to what would have been his 93rd birthday.

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THE M GILL SISTERS C

Frances McLughlin-Gill on left, Kathryn Abbe on Right

BY ELLEN

GILBERT

F SHION PHOTOGRAPHY

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A flock of girls just arrived at arrived at our house,” Frank McLaughlin told friends on September 22, 1919. While not exactly “a flock,” the new arrivals were a multiple: identical twin girls named Frances and Kathryn. They grew up to be known as Kathryn Abbe and Frances McLaughlin-Gill, and became remarkably successful photographers who published pictures of high fashion models and celebrities like the young Jacqueline Bouvier in the late 1940s and 1950s. They passed away within months of each other in 2014. The McGill sisters were born in Brooklyn as a result of their having arrived two months early and “were snugly wrapped and placed near a warm oven,” according to a later account by Frances. She couldn’t have remembered, of course, and the affluent Connecticut upbringing that immediately followed suggests that the humble modesty of that description may not exactly have been accurate. Photographs of the twins as beautifully outfitted babies, young bathing beauties, visitors to 1939 World’s Fair, and later, as on-location professional photographers, show them to be as glamorous as any of the subjects they depicted over the years. APRIL/MAY 2015

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COLLABORATORS The collaborative nature of Abbe and McLaughlin-Gill’s 2008 book, Twins on Twins is striking. Using photographs and text, the sisters set out to examine “the eternal fascination of twins.” (The handwritten inscription, “Happy 40th from you pin twister 7-25-81,” in this writer’s second-hand copy of the book, was an added nuance.) The book portrays 30 sets of twins, ages 14 months to 100 years. A few of the photographs, particularly those of older twins made up and wearing precisely the same thing may be, for just a moment, uncomfortably reminiscent of Arbus-land. The almost scholarly nature of the book, which includes additional text by Julie Szekely and research by Victoria B. Bjorklund, is impressive. Historical considerations of twins include sections on “Twins in Mythology” (including Castor and Pollux; Romulus and Remus, and Esau and Jacob), and “Twins in Art.” “The Biology of Twinning” and “Twins in Other Cultures” receive serious treatment in the section on “Twins Now,” and background notes, a bibliography, and resource list enrich the effort. “Because of the unity of our work, we have chosen to share the credit for all the photographs,” they write. “We are twins. Our book is an exploration of being twins. As professional photographers since 1941, we have met many twins—as subjects of photo stories, as co-workers, as friends.” It is interesting to note that this intimacy did not preclude pursuing independent careers.

ON FILM Abbe and McLaughlin-Gill were memorialized in a 2008 documentary short, Twin Lenses produced by Nina Rosenblum and written by Dennis Watlington. The film, which begins with the sisters, then in their 80s, reminiscing about their careers, is an expansion of work begun by Rosenblum’s mother, Naomi Rosenblum, author of A History of Women Photographers. “These women [Abbe and McLaughlin-Gill] were true pioneers,” observes Watlington [in the film]. “I loved that I got to study these women triumphing over all the obstacles.” Among their earliest hurdles, apparently, was simply getting to be identified as a photographer. Rosenblum reports that “when Cecil Beaton took the Vogue magazine photograph of the magazine’s current photographers he left her [Frances] out because she was a woman.” “When Frances McLaughlin-Gill became the first to sign a contract with Vogue in 1943 not only did she exemplify the young American woman the magazine was increasingly speaking to, but her work broke with the stilted formality that was the convention of the time,” writes Vogue Archive Editor Laird Borrelli-Persson in a 2014 remembrance of McLaughlin-Gill. “Everyone was wearing beautiful clothes, sitting in an elegant chair, or leaning against a pillar, looking into the camera,” McLaughin-Gill said in a 1996 interview. “In contrast,” writes Borrelli-Peersson, “McLaughin-Gill’s work was more relaxed and infused with an all-American optimism.” Abbe, a free-lance photographer at the time, had McCalls, Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, and Paris Match as clients.

PASSIONATE ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHY Success came early: both sisters were finalists in Vogue’s Prix de Paris talent contest in 1941, the same year they graduated from Pratt Institute. At Pratt they began by studying art; partway through they became consumed by photography and, as McLaughlin-Gill says in Twin Lenses, “that was that. We were very fortunate; we knew what we wanted to do.”

Having fun was definitely part of the plan. “Friends were always introducing us to men twins,” they recount in Twins on Twins. “We dated John and Bob Lawson, Yale ’40, and caused riotous confusion when we four appeared at the Yale Prom that year.” They gave up dressing alike when they moved on to Condé Nast. When they settled down, both married noted photographers: James Abbe, Jr. and Leslie Gill. Years later, though, they were still able to create confusion. “Often there were twin mix-ups such as the time a stranger threw his arms around Kathryn in Paris,” they recalled. “It was a shocker whenever it happened. Often the person refused to believe that a twin existed.” Family ties notwithstanding, the twins were known for their own rigorous work ethic throughout their careers. Their cousin, the award-winning children’s book writer and illustrator Tomie dePaola (Strega Nona) recalled being mentored by them; they “gave me the advice of a lifetime when I was just a very young artist-want-to-be: ‘Don’t copy, and practice, practice, practice.’” And work hard: in Twin Lenses one of them can be heard describing the “hard, intense, concentration” required to create successful photographs. “After a couple of hours I feel like I’ve played tennis and then I’m hungry,” she adds. Rosenblum came away from making her film with similar impressions about the twins’ industriousness. “I learned so much from watching [the twins] in action...about the focus that it takes...about making an essence, bringing something down to its essential qualities, the thought process and the visual process.” “The twins broke through the glass ceiling with their cameras...at a time when few women worked as professional photographers,” observes writer Sheila Cosgrove Baylis in a review of Twin Lenses, which she described as “a beautiful and responsible contribution to art history.” Also noteworthy is the film’s depiction of the ways in which both McLaughlin-Gill and Abbe skillfully balanced work with a commitment to family and raising children.

STAYING CLOSE Although their paths diverged after they were married, their commitment to each other remained. The Abbes moved their four children, a dog and a cat to a Long Island farmhouse. McLaughlin-Gill remained in New York City working for Vogue and Glamour. Leslie Gill’s sudden death in 1958 drew the families closer, as is movingly documented in family photographs taken by James Abbe that summer. While they “continued their separate careers,” reported Frances, they shared “children and leisure hours whenever we could. She often arranged country locations for my photographs, and I provided studio facilities in New York when she needed them.” Abbe’s “all-time favorite assignment” occurred when Good Housekeeping asked her to be the exclusive photographer of the Keinast quintuplets when they were born in 1970. “Documenting them year after year led us to many new thoughts about ourselves as twins,” she reported. “These insights and the discovery of the real pleasure of working together on projects led us to the idea of doing Twins on Twins.” “Traditionally,” the sisters wrote, “twins in literature have been used to portray opposites: good vs. evil, light vs. dark, mortal vs. immortal.... Most books about twins treat them as subjects of medical studies. We question that assumption.” New and used copies of Twins on Twins, which was originally published by Clarkson N. Potter, are available online. For more information on Twin Lenses, visit www.rosenblumphoto.org/shop/twin-lenses-dvd. U

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Evan Joseph Photography

seems incongruous that a young designer juggling several high-end projects in Manhattan and other parts of the world is thriving without a website, computer, television, or access to social media. But David M. Sullivan, named “One to Watch” by Architectural Digest in 2013, is as enamored of an old world aesthetic as he is of contemporary ideas. Originally trained as a sculptor, Sullivan, who is tall and striking, runs a design/build architecture firm on Soho’s Crosby Street. It was the Architectural Digest article that caught the eye of one of his clients, for whom he is renovating a two-bedroom apartment on Central Park South. But nearly all of the work that has come Sullivan’s way has been by word of mouth. His list of clients has included such celebrities as rocker Lenny Kravitz and NHL player Brad Richards. “It’s all referral-based, and we want to keep it that way to protect the integrity of the product and to promote organic growth within the company,” Sullivan says. “I’m interested in working with like-minded, creative individuals who have a vision and want to collaborate. I’m intrigued by their interests and backgrounds—the way they see the world. I like combining my vision with theirs.” Sullivan, 38, grew up in New England on a converted horse farm that his California-based father turned into an antique dealership. He spent much of his childhood learning the trade. His mother, a collector of antiquities, is also a fine art framer and artist. Before moving to New York, Sullivan spent nearly a decade exhibiting his work domestically and abroad. During

this time he also traveled extensively and did a lot of rock-climbing, which he credits as a major influence. “Travel continually shapes my view of the world and, subsequently, my work,” he says. “This period in particular really inspired an awe of nature and its infinite forms, shapes, and textures. These naturalistic elements are a signature of my work to this day.” Sullivan worked for a time at Todd Merrill Antiques on Bleecker Street, overseeing the restoration and production of custom pieces. This, he says, gave him the opportunity to explore the market in New York and learn about the unconventional mediums of post-war furniture and design. He established David M. Sullivan Inc. in 2008. The boutique firm specializes in custom architectural build-outs and furniture design, influenced by Sullivan’s degrees in studio art and philosophy. “We follow the design/build model, where we keep all the resources necessary for each of our projects in-house,” Sullivan says. “That gives us a measure of control that is very important in maintaining a level of quality and consistency.” Sometimes referred to as the master builder approach, the design/build model can be an attractive option for homeowners since it streamlines the traditional approach of hiring a designer on one side, and a contractor on the other. With this practice, clients deal with a single entity. It’s a way of working that has a very long history. Among the figures Sullivan admires are Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino, a fellow climber “who found inspiration in multiple disciplines and through travel,” artist and designer Paul Evans, for “transcending

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Evan Joseph Photography

traditional lines between art and design, form and function,” and especially the Antwerp antique dealer, designer and visionary Axel Vervoordt, who follows the Japanese philosophy of celebrating imperfections in nature. “They all challenged paradigms around them to create something new,” Sullivan says. David M. Sullivan, Inc. develops custom furniture and architectural elements for some clients, and entire spaces for others. Current projects include the renovation of the fashion and media company Milk Studios’ flagship location in Manhattan. The project features a 150-foot bronze and walnut monolithic wall. The company is also in the process of restoring the facades and lobbies of two historic landmark buildings in Soho. A duplex on the fifth floor of one building includes a 30-foot-wide beveled bronze wall that conceals a television, fireplace, and ductwork. On the second level, a stone-clad wall divides the master bedroom and bath, which has a copper tub that combines Japanese and French influences. Also being renovated is a penthouse unit in the second building, which will have 20-foot plate glass windows to expose views of downtown Manhattan. Sullivan still travels the world to find materials and salvage, something he watched his parents do as he was growing up. “All of the interiors we do are a combination of found objects, antiques, or pieces I design,” he says. “I often do art curating as well. I was trained as a metal sculptor, but what drew me to this was a desire to create art that is based on experience, rather than just objects.”

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When designing furniture, “each item is custom-made for a particular context with a purpose in mind,” he says. “Creativity is borne out of constraints.” His work follows no particular style. “It can range from modern to very traditional; it’s important to me not to be locked into a particular aesthetic.” Whenever possible, Sullivan draws upon the expertise of local craftspeople, something he feels very strongly about: “The backbone of our business is that we’re really utilizing local people to do what we design in-house. I feel very fortunate to be inspired by master craftsmen who have been working for years to master their skill set. Their acuity combined with our innovation makes for a unique product.” And that, as has been noted, is just one of the singular characteristics that make David M. Sullivan, “one to watch.”

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NEW YORKERS THEIR DOGS ARNTZENIUS

PHOTO BY: SHUTTERSTOCK

BY LINDA

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PHOTO BY: SHUTTERSTOCK

ogs of every shape and form can be seen on the streets of New York City, where they enjoy superior opportunities for civil society than do their suburban and country cousins. Just watch any of the professional dog walkers and their fan-shaped packs as they go about their daily rounds. In that respect, Manhattan dogs are more like their European counterparts than dogs from other parts of the United States. On a recent trip to the U.K., my (human) companion and I visited a small bustling town in the North of England where the local dogs habitually roam free. We were amused, and slightly astonished, to see a pack of five mutts walk purposefully along the sidewalk, with not one master in sight. They stopped at the traffic lights, waited for the signal to change, and then crossed to the other side of the street, where they continued their journey, bothering no-one as they maneuvered through the crowds. None of the locals gave them a second glance. Dogs in pubs and under tables in cafés are a common sight in England. In Paris, even in top restaurants with white table linens and snooty wait staff, you’ll see good dogs at ease at their masters’ feet. Some New York City bars and hotels welcome small dogs; restaurants not so much. Although dogs and

their owners may be accommodated in areas where there is outside seating, they are generally not allowed inside; a restaurant can be closed down if it fails to observe this and other New York City Department of Health Guidelines. Nonetheless, some eateries do, but it’s an ever-changing list so, if that’s what you’re looking for, search online for “dog friendly restaurants in NYC.” City life is bounded by rules, for dogs as well as humans, but it also allows for a great deal of enjoyment. Imagine the scents of the city’s streets to a dog’s nose: food vendors on every street corner and the Central Park Zoo right in the middle of the metropolis. Dogs aren’t allowed in the zoo but the nose knows! The best part of being a dog, of course, is the chance to run free, to meet and greet other canines as only a dog can. New York City has some 29,000 acres of parkland and 53 off-leash dog parks with fenced-in areas for exercise. Dogs properly attired with license and rabies vaccination tags may be let off the leash in designated areas of Central Park (and other city parks) from park opening until 9 a.m., and again from 9 p.m. until park closing. Until recently this privilege was a “courtesy,” allowing dog owners to exercise and socialize their animals. Now it is enshrined in the rules and regulations of New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation Rules. Of course certain standards of dog behavior apply.

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PHOTOS BY: SCVERWAAL (LEFT), ADRIAN CABRERO (RIGHT).

BE A GOOD DOG Many of the Parks Department’s rules are simply common sense and the usual exemptions apply for seeing-eye and trained service dogs. Dogs must be kept under control. They are not allowed to “go” on newly-seeded lawn, a rule that also applies to their owners. Solid waste must be disposed of in the receptacles provided and dogs must be on a leash no longer than six feet, at all times, with the exception of specified areas and dog runs. They should never be left unattended or tied to a bench, fence, or light-pole. And it should go without saying that unsociable or aggressive dogs should always be leashed and kept away from other dogs. It is verboten for dogs to be in playgrounds, ball-fields, basketball/handball/ tennis courts, fountains, swimming pools, and bathing areas/beaches. In the off-season, however, at the discretion of the Parks Commissioner, dogs have been allowed in some bathing areas and on beaches. Fido mustn’t be allowed to drink from park fountains unless it is one that is marked for dog use and mustn’t be allowed to chase birds, squirrels, or other animals. It’s wise for dog owners always to have proof of current rabies vaccination and licensing to show to a police officer, park ranger, or other Parks Department employee, if asked. You risk a fine if you don’t. For many New Yorkers, owning a dog means hiring a dog sitter and/or a professional dog walker. Dog walking came into its own on the streets of New York. In fact that’s where it all started in the early 1960s.

JIM BUCK’S SCHOOL FOR DOGS When Gay Talese, then a New York Times reporter, wrote an article in 1964 about Jim Buck and his unique line of work, Buck had already been earning his living as a dog walker for two years. It was a good living, too better than his former employment selling electronics. “Sometimes he earns $500 a week from dog-walking, dog-training, and dog-sitting. He takes 30 or 40 dogs out for walks, covering 25 miles through the East Side of Manhattan each day, and wearing out the soles of a pair of construction shoes every two weeks,” wrote Talese. At that time, Buck’s $500 a week was more than five times the average American’s salary. Headlined “145-Pounder Walks 500 Pounds of Dogs,” Talese’s article introduced Buck, who died in 2013, at age 81, as a rather unlikely looking dog handler: six foot tall, pencil thin and elegantly dressed. He became a familiar city sight, with the leashes of half-dozen or more dogs in his charge splayed like the spokes of a wheel, prompting Talese to liken him to Charlton Heston in the Ben Hur chariot-race. Thought to be the first professional dog walker in the country, Buck knew dogs. He had raised Great Danes in his youth. When observed by Talese, he was handling a 150-pound Great Dane, a Borzoi, and a pair of Labradors, among others. “He inspired smiles from other pedestrians and nods of recognition from doormen. ‘Hook up a sled,’ one doorman on Madison Avenue called with a laugh as Mr. Buck moved by,” wrote Talese. “New Yorkers who use Mr. Buck’s service usually know when he is coming and leave the dogs with the doormen. Some people, however, will wait for Mr. Buck to buzz their

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bell, then will open their doors and let their dogs loose to run down the steps (or even ride down the elevators) alone: the dogs seem to read the clock and know precisely when to expect Mr. Buck.” Within a few years, Buck had so many clients he took on extra staff until he had about two dozen, mostly women, exercising hundreds of dogs a day. A 1967 black and white photograph by master photographer Alfred Eisenstadt shows a dog walker in Central Park with five dogs in hand, quite possibly one of Buck’s staffers, framed by the triple arches of a stone bridge. Ahead of her another dog walker is visible. Eventually Buck founded Jim Buck’s School for Dogs, the first of its kind, offering training, exercise, and a dock walking service. The business closed when Buck retired after 40 years. With insight worthy of Cesar Milan, he once told The New Yorker that the secret of successful multiple-dog walking was psychologically analyzing each pack, with an eye to identifying different canine archetypes: the leader, the wing dog, the shy dog, the aggressive dog, and so on, and managing them so they learned to get along. He was known to enlist a dog, known as “Oliver the Awful,” when trying out prospective walkers. “Oliver knows when he’s testing someone new, and he can be counted on to leap into the first phone booth along the way and slam the door and wedge himself against it,” he told The New Yorker in 1965. “Brute force is of no avail; the only way to get him out is to remain poised and quietly talk him out.” Today, dog walkers are a ubiquitous part of city life. People, quite rightly, regard dogs as part of the family and are willing to pay for doggie daycare, grooming, and daily walks. It has been estimated that the cost of owning a dog in Manhattan is comparable to raising a child. But as every dog lover knows, it’s worth it.

BEST FRIEND A New York City dog walker in charge of a pack is an entrancing sight. And a dog watching expedition to Manhattan never fails to amuse. I’ve had only one dog in my life. But what a dog. My short stocky lab collie mix, Tinker, sadly no longer with us, loved to visit the city. To my mind, she held her own among her cosmopolitan canine cousins. Sensing that something different was expected of a suburban dog in the city, she would adopt a particular heads-up focused demeanor that expressed an air of “having seen it all before.” Her joy was Central Park and the dog run in Riverside Park, which for old time’s sake, I visit on occasion to see what’s going on, find out where the latest dog-friendly places are, and observe what new breeds are in—there’s always something new following the annual Westminster Dog Show. The 139th annual dog show in February introduced two new breeds: the Coton de Tulear and the Wirehaired Vizsla. It won’t be long before they show up around town. And who can resist the sight of a group of ebullient pugs roaming off-leash at Pug Hill where their enthusiastic owners gather informally every Sunday around noon on a grassy hilltop beside the Alice in Wonderland statue. New York City is a great place for dog watching, even if you have no dog of your own. U

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A SELECTION OF DOG RUNS AND DESIGNATED OFF-LEASH PARK AREAS IN MANHATTAN Central Park The place to see and be seen and although there are no enclosed dog runs there are 23 dog friendly areas where dogs are allowed off leash.

Chelsea Waterside Park Dog Run Eleventh Ave. and 22nd St. Administered by the Hudson River Park Trust.

Sirius Dog Run Battery Park Cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Gateway Plaza. Great dog run with new paving in a beautiful part of the city. West 72nd St. Dog Park Provides a retreat from the buzz of the city. Carl Schurz Dog Park East End Ave. to East River from Gracie Square (E 84th St.) to 89th St. Has two off-leash dog runs and the promenade along the East River is a lovely place for strolling with your leashed dog. Union Square Dog Run Offers opportunities for socializing in designated off-leash areas. Riverside Dog Park Riverside Drive at W 72nd St., W 87th St., and W 105th St. Fenced dog park, with separate small dog area, trees, benches, and a lovely view of the river.

East River Esplanade 63rd St. Dog Run. Ft. Washington Park Off-Leash Area 165th St. and Riverside Drive. Hudson River Park Dog Run Leroy St. at the NE corner of Pier 40 (Greenwich Village). Pier 84 at W 44th St. (North Chelsea). Madison Square Park Dog Run Madison Ave. to Fifth Ave. (between East 23rd St. and East 26th St.) Marcus Garvey Park Dog Run Madison Ave. and E 120th St. Morningside Park Dog Run Morningside Ave. between 114th St. and 119th St. Tompkins Square Park Dog Run Between First Ave. to Ave. B, and E Seventh St. to E Tenth St.

De Witt Clinton Dog Park W 52nd St. and W 54th St., between Tenth Ave. and Eleventh Ave. Small, fenced dog park right near the water.

FURTHER INFORMATION New York City Department of Parks and Recreation The best source for information on rules and regulations and where to go with dogs, including a downloadable guide. www.nycgovparks.org/facilities/dogareas Off Leash Dog Parks www.bringfido.com/attraction/parks/city/new_york_ny_us

PHOTO BY: SHUTTERSTOCK.

Application for a Dog License Department of Health & Mental Hygiene Citizens Service Center Call 311 Lost or Found Dogs, Pet Adoptions Animal Care and Control 212.788.4000 www.nycacc.org

Report Animal Cruelty American Society for The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) 212.876.7700 www.aspca.org New York Council of Dog Owner Groups www.nycdog.org Central Park Paws www.centralparkpaws.net PuPS Park users and Pets Society www.fortgreenepups.org NYC Pet Owners Guide www.nycgovparks.org

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Le Corbusier

Design Begins at Home

Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye

by Stuart Mitchner

ost of us grow up with an innate sensitivity to architecture and design. This primal design sense no doubt comes to life as soon as your parents hang a pretty mobile above your crib. As you grow up, you’re likely to develop an attachment to familiar objects, as I did, for one example, to the curtains that can be seen in photos of the duplex my parents were renting when I was born. The curtains moved with us from home to home and when we transitioned to a bigger house after I entered seventh grade, I asked that the surviving remnants be hung in my room, even though they were starting to show their age. The colors were warm and cozy, gold and a faded red, with ﬁligree and medallions and knights on horseback; it was the design equivalent of comfort food. It was also a reminder of a happy, secure childhood.

LOUIS KAHN I thought of the curtains when I saw Louis Kahn’s watercolor of a child’s room in George A. Marcus and William Whitaker’s Houses of Louis Kahn (Yale $70). Though the image had no obvious aesthetic relationship to the cozy, colorful disorder I inhabited between the ages of 12 and 19, the ambience felt right. It was less easy to connect with the amusing photograph of Lenore and Bobby Weiss lounging in their Kahn-designed house in suburban Philadelphia, Bobby with his head in Lenore’s lap, amid a dizzying array of imagery and artifacts that would make an amusing New Yorker cover or cartoon. You can see Kahn’s style in the elements of the interior design, but the overall effect is bizarre, beginning with the huge black and white Cubist fantasy of the wall overlooking the happy couple. In the adjacent text, Kahn’s daughter Sue Ann describes his response to her question “Daddy, why don’t you ever design us a house?” His reason was the feeling that his life at home never lived up to his romantic ideal of what a home was. “You don’t build a home,” she remembers him saying. “You build a house,” As the editors point out, home was an elusive concept for someone who had “three children with three different women.”

INFINITELY BROWSABLE Steven Heller and Rick Landers’s Infographic Designers’ Sketchbooks (Princeton Architectural Press $60), with 700 color illustrations, is among the most browsable books of the season; inside, some of the world’s leading graphic designers and illustrators in what the publisher calls the “golden age of data visualization” open their sketchbooks, revealing various idea-generating methods, “from doodles and drawings to three-dimensional and digital mockups.” One of the most interesting projects is Stefanie Posavec’s Writing Without Words, a series of literary infographics primarily focusing on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The effect is that of a passionately devoted reader attacking the text with an array of different colored pencils, “ﬁre engine red for the narrator, soft blue for jazz, taupe for drugs.” The diagrammatic result has to be seen to be believed.

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For younger readers, the same publisher offers Who Built That? Modern Houses ($16.95) by Didier Cornille, a designer, illustrator, and professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Le Mans. The book offers children a tour through ten of the most important houses by the greatest architects of the 20th and 21st centuries. Beginning with a brief biographical sketch of each architect, Cornille depicts the various stages of construction, paying special attention to key design innovations and signature details. The houses range from Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye (1931) and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater (1939) to Shigeru Ban’s Cardboard House (1995) and Rem Koolhaas’s Bordeaux House (1998). Another new book in the same series is Who Built That? Skyscrapers, also by Didier Cornille. Subjects include Gustave Eiffel’s Eiffel Tower (1889) in Paris, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1958) in New York City, and Adrian Smith’s Burj Khalifa (2010) in Dubai. Its name notwithstanding, Princeton Architectural Press is actually located in New York, just down the street from the building at 206 E. 7th where Allen Ginsberg lived. The Press has been around for 32 years and has published everything from theory anthologies to visual portraits of remote Canadian fishing villages. Their first publication, Letarouilly’s Edifices de Rome Moderne (1981), is still in print.

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Steven Heller and Rick Landers’s Infographic Designers’ Sketchbooks

PRINCETON AT THE CENTER Princeton University’s reputation as an epicenter of architectural studies is evident in Retracing the Expanded Field (MIT $34.95), which had its genesis in a two-day symposium in April 2007 at the School of Architecture, in collaboration with the Department of Art and Archaeology. Edited by Princeton’s Spyros Papapetros and Artforum’s Julian Rose, the book revolves around critic and editor Rosalind Krauss’s seminal 1979 essay, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” and begins with a roundtable discussion in which Krauss responds to questions about her work and its repercussions from colleagues and members of the audience. For anyone who might feel challenged by the streams of theory and terminology in full flow here, the back and forth of a panel discussion provides a more accessible format than a formal essay. The book is generously illustrated with maps, diagrams, graphics, and photographs of sculptures, designs, and projects by Brancusi, Serra, Christo, Smithson, and Carl Andre. For baseball fans like myself, one of the highlights of Retracing the Expanded Field is the sequence illustrating the famous “camera eye” and flawless coordination of Ted Williams in the high-speed stroboscopic photos Gjon Mili took of the young slugger, bare-chested and in shorts, showing off his swing, the essence of his art, in September of 1941, the year he batted over .400, the last player to do so. Another early indicator of my responsiveness to design was the “expanded field” of the baseball diamond and the classic St. Louis Cardinal logo of two redbirds perched on the metaphorical branch of a slanted bat. The visual poetry in that image pleases me to this day, and so does the living architecture of Cardinal Hall-of-Famer Stan Musial waiting in the batter’s box, staring over his shoulder at the pitcher. Williams might have had the superior eye but Musial’s batting stance was the most exotic in the sport, sinuous and stylish, and dangerous. More than one sports reporter, including the great Red Barber, pictured Musial at the plate, “coiled like a cobra, ready to strike.”

ARCHITECTS PAST AND PRESENT Jean Paul Carlhian and Margot M. Ellis’s Americans in Paris: Foundations of America’s Architectural Gilded Age (Rizzoli $85) documents the work and history of American architecture students at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the namesake and founding location of the Beaux-Arts architectural movement. Known for demanding classwork and setting the highest standards, the École attracted students from around the world, including the United States, where students returned to design buildings that would inﬂuence the history of architecture in America, including the Boston Public Library of 1888–95 (Charles McKim of McKim, Mead & White) and the New York Public Library of 1897–1911 (John Carrère of Carrère and Hastings). Portraits of the New Architecture 2 (Assouline $75) introduces thirty-two architects and ﬁrms, among them David Adjaye, Asymptote, Annabelle Selldorf, Tatiana Bilbao, and Dominique Perrault. Besides Richard Schulman’s portraits and select photographs of the architects’ projects, as well as sketches and designs, the book features an introduction by former New Yorker art critic Paul Goldberger.

LIVING IN DESIGN Although the curtains that gave a coziness to the rooms I grew up in are long gone, the “comfort food” notion is still in effect. I’m still happy to be surrounded by a lot of pleasant clutter, most of it in the form of books. And while the macrame crochet Rue de France “cat curtains” on the windows, picked by my wife when this was my son’s room, are the lacy opposite of those dusky childhood fabrics, it so happens that a real cat spends a lot of real time peering through them, and there’s nothing like the presence of a purring cat to make “a house a home.”

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G N I Z I T I G I D IN

E T S N EI ew N t n a t r o n Imp tal i a g f i o D e o t G o Taking N : Einstein Papers GILBERT N BY ELLE Resource

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In June 26, 1935, Einstein encourages August Hamelberg to publish an anti-Nazi article (LEFT). In this July 23, 1935 typed and signed letter, Einstein offers continued praise for German-American anti-Nazi publications (RIGHT).

he December 2014 announcement of the launch of the Digital Einstein Papers (einsteinpapers.press. princeton.edu) was greeted with huzzas from scientific circles as well as the popular media. “They have been called the Dead Sea Scrolls of physics,” began one article about the project by New York Times science writer Dennis Overbye. They will, he said, enable readers to “dance among Einstein’s love letters, his divorce file, his high school transcript, the notebook in which he worked out his general theory of relativity and letters to his lifelong best friend, Michele Besso, among many other possibilities.” John D. Norton, a University of Pittsburgh professor of history and philosophy of science who wrote his dissertation on the history of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, weighed in on the project from the academic world, declaring, “The best Einstein source is now available to everyone, everywhere through the web. This is a great moment for Einstein scholarship.” The official announcement, released on December 4, tidily summed things up: “The Digital Einstein Papers is an unprecedented scholarly collaboration that highlights what is possible when technology, important content, and a commitment to global scholarly communication are brought together.”

JOINT EFFORT When Einstein died in 1955, he left behind a trove of letters, notebooks, diaries, papers, postcards, notebooks, and other archival material in attics and shoeboxes around the world. Princeton University Press and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to whom Einstein bequeathed his copyright, almost immediately embarked on “the Einstein Project,” a quest to collect and assimilate all the documents. The first volume of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, published by Princeton University Press, sponsored by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and supported by the California Institute of

Technology, appeared in 1987, and thirteen volumes of the series, which is currently edited by Diana Kormos-Buchwald, a professor of physics and the history of science at the California Institute of Technology, have been printed so far. When completed, the series will contain more than 14,000 full text documents and will fill an expected thirty volumes. Along with Tizra, a digital publishing platform, these same institutions are also responsible for the online project, with additional support from the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. endowment, the California Institute of Technology, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Arcadia Fund, U.K.

THE ELECTRONIC ENVIRONMENT Paper vs. electronic? There is no end in sight to the arguments that can be made for digital, like wider accessibility, wonderfully flexible search capabilities, as opposed to print volumes, which have, for many, greater aesthetic appeal and whose readability is not contingent on the availability of specific equipment. The digital pages of Einstein’s Collected Papers “look” identical to the print versions, say its producers. “One of the reasons we chose Tizra is that we wanted to preserve the look and feel of the volumes,” said Kenneth Reed, digital editions manager at Princeton University Press. “You’ll see the pages as they appear in the print volumes, with added functionality such as linking between the documentary edition and translation, as well as linking to the Einstein Archives Online, and the ability to search across all the volumes in English and German.” Other practical considerations came into play; “when you actually look through the content, there are a lot of equations, a lot of physics, a lot of detailed work that’s gone into the printed page,” Reed notes. “To duplicate that—creating XML and HTML—would be very labor-intensive and costly and take years to develop.”

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Draft pages of Einstein's letter to President Roosevelt regarding the use of Uranium as a new source of energy, and experimentations in laboratories. “Einstein belongs to the world,” Reed adds. “I’m excited for the open access part of this—that this is a scholarly text that will be available for the world. It’s a way to preserve the texts.” Additional material will be available on the website approximately eighteen months after the print publication of new volumes of The Collected Papers. “Eventually,” say its creators, “the website will provide access to all of Einstein’s writings and correspondence, accompanied by scholarly annotation and apparatus.” Looking ahead, Kormos-Buchwald is pleased that the online papers “will introduce current and future generations to important ideas and moments in history. I very much hope that historians will access the papers, because Einstein is a major figure in German academic life, intellectual life and eventually political life. He’s become a public persona.” With a long history of publishing books by and about Einstein, Princeton University Press has a particular stake in the digital project. “We are delighted to make these texts openly available to a global audience of researchers, scientists, historians, and students keen to learn more about Albert Einstein,” says press director Peter Dougherty. “This project not only furthers the mission of the Press to publish works that contribute to discussions that have the power to change our world, but also illustrates our commitment to pursuing excellence in all forms of publishing—print and digital.” Reed describes the project as a “first foray” into online publishing for the press. Other candidates for future digitization include the Press’s similar series of collected writings of Thomas Jefferson, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, and Henry David Thoreau.

BRILLIANCE AND HUMANITY While there is undoubtedly “a lot of physics” in The Digital Einstein Papers, there are many documents that testify to the casual, slippers-wearing persona that has always been part and parcel of the Einstein mystique. “This material has been carefully researched and annotated over the last twenty-five years and contains all of Einstein’s scientific and popular writings, drafts, lecture notes, and diaries, and his professional and personal correspondence up to his forty-fourth birthday,” says Kormos-Buchwald. “Users will discover major scientific articles on the general theory of relativity, gravitation, and quantum theory alongside his love letters to his first wife, correspondence with his children, and his intense exchanges with other notable scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, and political personalities of the early twentieth century.”

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There are those who will want to read “On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light,” the paper on the hypothesis of energy quanta for which Einstein received the Nobel Prize. Recent college graduates struggling with today’s tough employment scene, though, may be reassured to see that although he graduated from university in 1900, the notice of Einstein’s first job shows an appointment as a technical clerk at the Swiss Patent Office, dated June 1902. For inspiration there is “My Projects for the Future,” a high school French essay, in which the seventeen-year-old Einstein comments that “young people especially like to contemplate bold projects.” Speaking of “bold projects,” he undertook in the future, there is the telegram that reached Einstein, then travelling in the Far East, telling him that he had won the Nobel Prize. Any element of grand surprise, however, is tempered by reading a clause regarding the prize’s disposition in a preliminary divorce agreement from Mileva in 1918, indicating that he had long been expecting the award. There are the Four Lectures on the Theory of Relativity held at Princeton University in May 1921 during his first trip to the United States, as well as letters to friends like Heinrich Zangger, a professor of forensic medicine at the University of Zurich, to whom Einstein complained about the vicissitudes of being famous, “worshipped today, scorned or even crucified tomorrow.” He tells scientist Max Planck that he is unable to attend a scientist’s convention in Berlin because he is “supposedly among the group of persons being targeted by nationalist assassins,” and mixes the personal and professional in a letter to his mother, Pauline, in which he shares the news that his prediction of gravitational light bending was confirmed by a British eclipse expedition in 1919. “It is exciting to think that thanks to the careful application of new technology, this work will now reach a much broader audience and stand as the authoritative digital source for Einstein’s written legacy,” observes Kormos-Buchwald. Indeed, one is struck by the fact that The Digital Einstein Papers (or any other online enterprise, for that matter) is possible at all is largely because of Einstein himself. As recounted by his biographer Jurgen Neff, Einstein’s publications during 1905 (his annus mirabilis) set in motion “a theoretical revolution with technological implications that have had a major impact on mankind today. It has given rise to the high-tech world of microelectronics, cellular phones, digital photography, computers, chips, the Internet, superconductivity, nanotechnology, and modern chemistry.” U

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THE HAND OF THE ARTIST WHEN SCULPTORS WANT TO MAKE SOMETHING LARGE, AND THEY WANT IT FAST, THEY GO TO THE DIGITAL ATELIER BY ILENE DUBE

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Photography by Jason Wyche, courtesy of Creative Time, 2014.

A Subtlety, Kara Walker’s sphinx, with exaggerated African features, was accompanied by 15 “sugar babies” – molasses boys bearing baskets.

ast year, visitors lined up at the former Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to view A Subtlety, Kara Walker’s homage to the African American slaves who built the sugar industry. Her giant white sphinx coated in 40 tons of sugar towered over its visitors at 75 feet tall. This was the first sculpture for the artist, a 1997 MacArthur Fellow previously known for two-dimensional silhouettes. The sphinx, with exaggerated African features, was accompanied by 15 “sugar babies”— molasses boys bearing baskets of bounty. Under all that sugar were 330 enormous cubes of Styrofoam that had shipped on 18 wheelers from the Hamilton, N.J.-based Digital Atelier. The Digital Atelier is a state-of-the-art mold-making facility. In space leased from the Johnson Atelier, the for-profit company uses laser scanning, CNC (computer numeric control) milling and coating technologies for artists, architects, museums and the entertainment industry. Walker’s slave children were molded in rubber, then cast in sugar that slowly melted— video records of the installation show brown molasses dripping into puddles on the floor. When A Subtlety closed, 240 of those Styrofoam blocks were shipped back to Hamilton to be recycled. And should Walker ever want to re-create A Subtlety, the master file can be used. In addition to Walker, Digital Atelier clients include Do Ho Suh, Kiki Smith, Carole Feuerman, Gordon Gund and Jeff Koons. For Walker’s project, the Atelier began by scanning her 12-inch model to make an eight-foot model. Lasers scanned the object and collected data to make a three-dimensional file. “Once we have the file we can manipulate it the way the artist asks,” says President/CEO Jon Lash. Although there are many hands on the project, the artist exerts final control. “It’s the latest greatest revolution,” says the salt-and-pepper-haired Lash, with all modesty. The final work can be milled in materials from acrylic, nylon and wood to metal and plastic. Sculptor Matthew Day Jackson supplies the Atelier with the repurposed materials from which his work is to be milled. Using video cameras and computers, Jackson watches the milling from his Brooklyn studio and directs the process. “We don’t see people that often,” says Lash, sitting in a room with computers. “They come for the finishing. Most projects come in as small models or maquettes and we talk over the phone.” The Atelier is currently bidding on a project for John Portman, the

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architect known for creating the Atlanta skyline. Lash zooms in on a detail to show how it’s made up of small triangles, what he calls a point cloud, or points in space. The software fills it in, he says, to create a polygonal model. He is assisted by John Rannou, an engineer, and Brad Warner, a programmer. “We hire people from art and engineering schools,” says Lash. “Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania have combined art, architecture and engineering programs.” Out on the milling floor, monitors surrounding the project send data from the lab to the foundry. Lash’s son, Sawyer, is working in his father’s company while on break from the School of Visual Arts at Tucson, Arizona. With an interest in animation and three-dimensional manipulations, he is learning programs so, as his father says with a grin, he’ll have something to fall back on.

FROM ART TO ARCHITECTURE Architectural restoration projects have included crumbling facades. Stone walls for Longwood Gardens are being milled in foam so that a committee can preview the project and make decisions before its final execution in stone. For Paramount, the Digital Atelier fabricated a David-like statue of Sacha Baron Cohen and backdrops for Men in Black. Other projects included work on Shrek and Miss Piggy for Henson Studios and fabricating cars for Disney. Also underway is a re-creation of the Porsche James Dean drove to his death in 1955. The fire melted all but the steel frame of the original, which is being restored in cherry wood with an aluminum body. “Conservators come to us with projects,” says Lash, giving an example of a masthead for the Naval Academy. “Most museums are now scanning important pieces, so if they are damaged they can be restored digitally.” Conservators for an underground mural in Nicaragua that was compromised by changes in humidity worked with the Digital Atelier to scan and reproduce it, preserving the original colors. After it travels, the reproduction will be installed outside the cave in Nicaragua. “You know that David outside the Uffizi is not the real David,” says Lash. “The real David was attacked by chemicals in the air.” Lash gave a talk on digital sculpture at Florence’s museum. “Over the next 50 to 100 years they’re going to remake all the sculpture in the Milan Cathedral. The European Union is giving the money to train digital carvers. It preserves the apprentice program and starts a new business,” he says.

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Photography by Jason Wyche, courtesy of Creative Time, 2014. Images courtesy of Digital Atelier

(TOP) A Subtlety, Kara Walker’s homage to the African American slaves who built the sugar industry. (ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT) Walker’s process sketches; Carved Styrofoam blocks provide foundation for sugar; Reﬁning the sculpture, coated in over 40 tons of sugar.

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Images courtesy of Digital Atelier

(below) Confrontational Vulnerability, inspired by Manet’s “Olympia,” J. Seward Johnson; (right) Digital isometric of Olympia; Sculpting process.

THE EYE OF THE ARTIST Lash started as a sculptor and apprentice in the Johnson Atelier, and it is where he met his wife, Dona Warner. She headed the metal finish department and became director. In his own work, Lash began as a figurative artist who eventually turned to abstraction. As an apprentice he worked with Georgia O’Keeffe on casting and enlarging her aluminum sculpture in the 1980s. He was promoted to staff, then worked in every department before becoming supervisor and director of special projects. “I saw the sculpture world changing and went to Seward [Johnson] and told him about sculpting through digital means. Much of what was formerly done by hand and took months, if not years, is now possible to accomplish in weeks with fewer steps and less labor. He asked, what would I need to do that? He met with the board and they said ‘no way.’ A $100,000 grant was then received to develop a start-up within Johnson Atelier, from within Atlantic Foundation.” This was in 1998, and no one else was doing this, says Lash—which meant learning by trial and error. “By 2002, the Digital Atelier had taken off, and we went to the board and said we have a problem —we’re making money.” Making money can be problematic for a not-for-profit. “The IRS said it would allow the Sculpture Foundation to have a for-profit subsidiary for four years” but then it would have to be liquidated. Johnson was supportive of the idea all along, says Lash. In 2011, the Digital Atelier was sold to Lash, who leases space from the Johnson Atelier. Although he can’t talk much about it, Lash says he is working on a project with Jeff Koons that is of an experimental nature. Koons wants to make his piece out of an expensive stone. “To check the tool paths, he is doing it on a dense urethane first so the stone will not be ruined. We’re working closely with his studio.”

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Digital Atelier made prototypes for the Jeff Koons studios of Big Gorilla and other pieces in urethane and other foams before the final pieces were made by his studio in their final medium. “He likes to see the object first at full scale. He has his own computer modeling staff that can make changes before it goes into the final material.”

A FAMILY AFFAIR The former Stone Division of the Johnson Atelier, which became the Digital Stone Project, was bought by Koons, who moved it to Morrisville, Pennsylvania, where it operates solely for his own use. Lash’s wife now works as a manager for Koons. Lash and Warner keep a studio at home, but have little time for their own work. “This keeps me going 12 hours a day,” says Lash, who stays awake at night answering e-mails from Korea, Belgium and China in the wee hours. But, he says, it sates his artistic passions. A customer calls to find out how much lead time is needed for a project. Lash asks his assistant to say three weeks. “People are looking for new materials, and they’re looking for a recommendation on what materials to use. I tell them if it won’t work in wood, or what changes they’d need to make to make it work in wood. “They always control the project,” continues Lash. “You learn to use someone else’s hands. Jeff [Koons] says he doesn’t touch his own work but he’s a total control fanatic. He doesn’t take ‘no’ – someone in the world can do it the way he wants.” Big Gorilla, Jeff Koons. Kiki Smith is more hands on. “She comes to do sanding and detail work,” reports Lash. “Tom Otterness likes to do everything. He does all the surface finishing. We make the armature, then the artist can put a fingerprint on it. “The argument,” continues Lash, “is that sculpture will lose its heart if it is made by machine. But sculpture has always been made by machine.”

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Images courtesy of Digital Atelier

Image courtesy of Scoboco

(clockwise from top-left) Tomb, Matthew Day Jackson; Fluke, Gordon Gund with his work in the University Medical Center of Princeton’s meditation garden. Photo courtesy of Princeton Healthcare Systems; Carole Feurman working on Cocoon; Milling the head of Don Myhre’s Walt Disney; Kiki Smith, modeling.

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calendar highlights Monday, April

Friday, May

Sotheby’s Designer Showhouse. Ten interior designers will each design a room within a house using a diverse selection of fine and decorative art ranging from European furniture to modern paintings. www.sothebys.com Julliard Composers Concert at The Julliard School. This free event debuts new works by Julliard student composers. www.julliard.edu

Thursday, April

Art Expo New York at Pier 94. The event hosts hundreds of art publishers, gallery owners, and artists from around the globe. Art Expo New York has been the world’s largest fine art trade show for more than 37 years. http:// artexponewyork.com

Wednesday, May

Saturday, May

Opening day for the new Whitney Museum of American Art. Designed by architect Renzo Piano, the building is situated between the High Line and Hudson River. http://whitney.org.

Free lecture at The Frick Collection on “Coypel: Staging Don Quixote” with Esther Bell of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. www.frick.org

A Year With Children 2015 at the Guggenheim Museum. This annual exhibition features artwork by elementary school students participating in the Learning Through Art Program (LTA). The program brings cutting-edge art and design into New York City’s public school curriculum (through June 17). www. guggenheim.org.

Friday, May

Monday, May

Nature’s Fury: The Science of Natural Disasters at the American Museum of Natural History (through August 2015). www.amnh.org.

Sunday, May

Amazing Moms: Sea Otters at the New York Aquarium. Celebrate mothers everywhere while learning about these amazing marine moms, the sea otter (one day only). www.nyaquarium.com.

The Brooklyn Half Marathon presented by the New York Road Runners Club. www.nyrr.org.

The Madison Square Park Conservancy Presents “Party in the Park,” honoring artist Toby Devan Lewis. More than 400 guests are expected to gather on the Oval Lawn between Madison and Fifth Avenues. The event raises funds for the display of public art and sculpture in Madison Square Park. www. madisonsquarepark.org

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Saturday, April

The Brooklyn Botanical Garden’s Annual Cherry Blossom Festival, Sakura Matsuri. Guests will enjoy walking the Cherry Esplanade at the height of cherry blossom season. www.bbg.org.

Tuesday, April

Balanchine Black & White performed by the New York City Ballet at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. http:// lc.lincolncenter.org

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Sunday, May

5/10

Last day to see the New York Spring Spectacular performed by the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. Includes brand new dance numbers, 3D special effects, and an exciting soundtrack. www. newyorkspringspectacular.com

Tuesday, May

5/16

A discussion of Charlie Chaplin’s lifetime of work at the 92nd Street Y. View scenes from the films that made Chaplin so admired. Part of the Y’s Legendary Film Stars series. www.92y.org

Tuesday, May

Vincent Van Gogh’s Irises and Roses opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (on view through August 16). www.metmuseum.org

Thursday, May

The Frieze New York Art Fair on Randall’s Island, one the world’s leading contemporary art fairs (through May 17). http://friezenewyork.com.

Tuesday, May

Bal du Printemps Gala presented by the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation at The Metropolitan Club in New York City. Willie Geist, co-anchor of NBC News’ “Today Show” and co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” will be the Master of Ceremonies for the evening. www.pdf. org/gala

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Wednesday, May

Fleet Week 2015, a celebration of America’s Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. There will be numerous military demonstrations and displays. Visitors will have the opportunity to meet with Tri-State area sailors, marines, and coast guardsmen (through May 26). www.fleetweeknewyork.com.

Wednesday, May

Saturday, June

Shakespeare in the Park returns to Central Park with The Tempest (through July 5). www.shakespeareinthepark.org.

Friday, May

Sunday, June

The 2015 Brooklyn Film Festival in Williamsburg. Award-winning films at the Brooklyn Film Festival have gone on to be nominated and awarded at both the British Academy Awards (BAFTAs) and at the American Academy Awards (through June 7). www. brooklynbookfestival.org

The American Crafts Festival at Lincoln Center (also on June 7, June 13, and June 14). www.craftsatlincoln.org

American Theatre Wing’s 69th Annual Tony Awards, a celebration of the best productions and performances in live Broadway theatre. www.tonyawards.com

Art Exhibitions: “Bjork;” MoMA “Life, Death, and Transformation in the Americas;” Brooklyn Museum “Captain Linnaeus Tripe: Photographer of India and Burma, 1852-1860;” The Metropolitan Museum of Art “Coypel’s Don Quixote Tapestries: Illustrating a Spanish Novel in Eighteenth Century France;” The Frick Collection “Masterpieces and Curiosities: Nicole Eisenman’s Seder;” The Jewish Museum “Nature’s Fury: The Science of Natural Disasters;” American Museum of Natural History “Gateway to Himalayan Art and The Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room;” Rubin Museum of Art “Roman Vishniac Redisovered;” International Center of Photography “Lincoln and the Jews;” New-York Historical Society “Sinatra: An American Icon;” The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts “Yves Saint Laurent & Halston: Fashioning the 70’s;” The Museum at FIT

5/27

6/5

6/13 5/20

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Parts I and II; Winter Garden Theatre

Larry David’s Fish in the Dark; Cort Theatre

Sanctuary for Families hosts the annual “Zero Tolerance Benefit” at Pier Sixty, Chelsea Piers. The group is New York’s leading service provider and advocate for survivors of domestic and gender violence. www.sanctuaryforfamilies.org

Friday, June

The Governor’s Ball music festival on Randall’s Island. This year’s lineup includes Florence and the Machine, The Black Keys, Lana Del Ray, Drake, and many more (through June 7). www.governorsballmusicfestival.com

Sunday, June

Cheftopia: The 30th Annual Chefs’ Tribute to New York City’s Citymealson-Wheels. The event includes the gardens, esplanades, and restaurants at Rockefeller Center. www.citymeals.org/ cheftopia

Saturday, June

Big Apple Barbecue Block Party at Madison Square Park (also on June 14). www.bigapplebbq.org

Vincent Van Gogh’s Irises and Roses opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art april/may 2015

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You Can’t Take it With You; Longacre Theatre The River; Circle in the Square Theatre Chicago; Ambassador Theatre Skylight; John Golden Theatre On the Twentieth Century; American Airlines Theatre Matilda; Shubert Theatre Disgraced; Lyceum Theatre Nevermore – The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe; New World Stages

june

Tuesday, June

Theatre Performances:

URBAN AGENDA New York City

4/10/15 10:54:58 AM

HILARY MANTEL’S

WOLF HALL/BRING UP THE BODIES

ARRIVES ON BROADWAY SMITH

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY Photography by Johan Perrson

BY TAYLOR

Lydia Leonard as Anne Boleyn dances with one of her male suitors.

URBAN AGENDA New York City

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APRIL/MAY 2015

4/10/15 10:50:11 AM

Photography by Johan Perrson

(Clockwise from top, right) Lydia Leonard as Anne Boleyn; Ben Miles as Thomas Cromwell furiously scrawls a plan; Nathaniel Parker as King Henry VIII; Cardinal Wosley played by Paul Jesson has an audience with King Henry VIII.

riter Hilary Mantel has claimed the Man Booker, Olivier, Tony, and BAFTA Awards for her novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Working with dramatist Michael Poulton and director Jeremy Herrin, Mantel brings the story of Henry VIII and his lascivious Tudor Court to the New York Stage. The play has already experienced several sold out runs in London’s West End and opened on April 9, 2015 on Broadway. A BBC TV version is also currently being filmed. The play is broken into two parts to reflect Mantel’s two separate novels; Wolf Hall serves as Part I and Bring Up the Bodies as Part II. Mantel and Poulton have succeeded in translating almost 1,300 written pages into a theater production running 5 hours and 30 minutes. This impressively compact adaptation is presented by The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) of Stratford-upon-Avon. Every member of The RSC seeks to create a vibrant world on stage, from the actors to the costume designers and technicians. Past RSC productions on Broadway include Les Miserables (1987-2003 and 2006), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1971 and 1996), Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1987), to mention just a few.

Multi-part staged productions are not unheard of on Broadway, but they are an event not to be missed. The last sweeping historical epic that ran on Broadway was Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia, which won the Tony for best play in 2007. Alan Aychbourn’s The Norman Conquests won the Tony Award for best revival of a play in 2009. British and American TV audiences will immediately recognize actor Ben Miles from his appearances in “The Forsyte Saga,” “Coupling,” and “The Government Inspector.” Miles takes center stage as secretary Thomas Cromwell who coldly sends several people to their death in order to delay his own fate. Nathaniel Parker portrays King Henry VIII, alongside Paul Jesson as Cardinal Wolsey, Lydia Leonard as Anne Boleyn, Lucy Briers as Katherine of Aragon, and Leah Brotherhead as Jane Seymour. Wolf Hall/Bring Up the Bodies is expected to run for a limited time only through early July 2015. Ticket prices represent admission to both Parts I and II. To purchase, contact the Winter Garden Theatre Box Office at 212.239.6200. For additional information, visit wolfhallbroadway.com. U

APRIL/MAY 2015

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URBAN AGENDA New York City

4/10/15 10:50:28 AM

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4/9/15 2:30:30 PM