The glory that was Manhattan

A photo of Manhattan in all its mid-century magnificence is featured at James Lileks’s website. I think, though I’m not sure, that it’s of the Wall Street area. Mr. Lileks isn’t sure when the photo was taken.

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Sam H. writes from the Netherlands:

As a traditionalist conservative, why exactly do you think mid-century Manhattan, that very symbol of Modernity, was “glorious.” Also, doesn’t contemporary Manhattan still look very much like mid-century Manhattan?

LA replies:

All those neo-Gothic spires? All those marvelous Beaux Arts apartment buildings? All those buildings that deliberately invoke a feel of the medieval? All those Art Deco towers that perfectly blend modern soaring efficiency with the motifs of the classical world and the ancient Near East? Twentieth century Manhattan was a cornucopia of traditionalism, reworked into a modern, Anglo-American mode.

It may have been different in Europe, but in America, up until the post war period, what you are calling Modernity was still part of a continuum with the Western tradition(s) in architecture. It was after 1945 that the continuum was broken. Buildings built since then express nothing of the past, unless you consider the post-modern buildings of the ‘80s, but they are subversive, treating architecture as a joke.

In an unpublished manuscript I have a section in which I show a continuum extending from the beginnings of a distinctive Western aesthetic and spiritual motif in the Irish illuminated manuscripts of the eighth century, through the Gothic cathedrals of the High Middle Ages, to the office towers of twentieth century New York.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 18, 2006 01:15 PM | Send