Tempered by Restraint

New York Transformed: The Architecture of Cross & Cross
By Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker
Monacelli Press, $60

Towards the end of his foreshortened career, the late, colorful art historian Henry Geldzahler organized a painting show at PS 1 in Queens called The Underknown: Twelve Artists Re-Seen in 1984.

After leaving his successive posts as first-time curator of 20th century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and as New York’s just-hatched commissioner of cultural affairs in 1978, he turned much of his critical attention to the work of older artists once widely recognized and collected (including by leading museums), but then relegated indefinitely to unseen storage. It was like taking a 30-year-old Whitney Biennial catalog and restaging its content as a way of recalling the once recognized and now ignored, far outnumbering as they do those withstanding the fullest measure of time’s passage.

In a world focused evermore on the young, emerging, and diverse, it was a refreshing curatorial impulse and a sobering reminder of how few era-shapers end up gaining a lasting hold on our collective attention.

An elegant, curved staircase by Cross & Cross at the Links Club in New York (left, center). The crown of the RCA Victor building in New York (right).

Ironically, with architecture, despite its status as the most social and publicly accessible of the arts by dint of formal intent and (excepting secluded private houses) exterior visibility, such credit-giving is stingier still for past and present practitioners alike.

In the history of the United States Postal Service, for example, there has been a single stamp commemorating an architect and in case you have not guessed already it was in 1966 for Frank Lloyd Wright, who also got one for Falling Water, the original Guggenheim Museum, and the Robie House among the measly total of seven stamps that have had anything to do whatsoever with those who shape the built environment. Maybe some of the internationally branded stars anointed more recently and redundantly by critics, like the late Herbert Muschamp, will hold up to long-term scrutiny but it is too soon to tell.

Such lack of attribution and the according anonymity of practitioners, whose contributions are thus hidden in plain sight, helps underscore the important joint contribution of the authors Peter Pennoyer, an architect, and Anne Walker, a historian, with their ongoing series about important “Underknowns” from the first half of the last century. And they come at a time when much of their subject examples still stand in moot contrast to the frenzy of up-zoning and air-rights laden exuberances now taking root across the five boroughs and their surrounding region.

Cross & Cross’ Brick House.

There is no justification for the accomplishments and business practices of these masters to be lost to history, especially if and when the constructed results are overlooked, demolished, or at risk. Yet this backward glance is not a nostalgic yearning for better days past, nor a disguised plea for preservation. On the contrary, by always adding analysis of what building their subjects’ work replaced, they acknowledge the changing social dynamics and economic circumstances imposed on the profession by varying clients. At the same time, however, they refuse
to ignore such precedents and look instead for ways it can inform this inevitable continuum, especially given the sometimes blinding juggernaut of Modernism.

New York Transformed: The Architecture of Cross & Cross (aka brothers John Walter (1878–1951) and Eliot Cross (1883–1949)) arrives as the series’ fourth, following Delano & Aldrich, Warren & Wetmore, and Grosvenor Atterbury. All subject architects are united by success in terms of both design and client engagement in the shadow of the “progressive torpedo,” as foreword writer Robert A. M. Stern puts it, of Modernism’s inexorable concurrent rise so accelerated as it was by the advent of worldwide war. The record of these labors is twice confounded: by their polemical peers as well as by the profession’s relative anonymity in general.

The 35-year duration of the fraternal partnership ranged from the Colonial Revival, which was under way as the Crosses launched their firm (e.g. the Flemish-bonded simple Georgian symmetry of the American Foundation for the Blind, 15 East 16th Street), to the sky-scraping proto-modern art deco of their late career (RCA Victor Building at Lexington Avenue and 51st Street) with its tacit acceptance of new technologies as well as the budgetary trimming born of depression and warfare. There was always a client- and architect-shared tie to the past and an acknowledgement of its best lessons cast anew. Like Peter Pennoyer Architects today, Cross & Cross deployed a broad and varied vocabulary, yet one descending from a rigorous classical point of departure and manifesting in continuously innovative ways.

Bayberry Land gardens and living room. Courtesy Monacelli Press

Enlivening the text are ample blueprints and illustrations, especially in an occasional photographic essay contributed by Jonathan Wallen, of a surviving example of each building typology that defines the volume’s thematic chapters. The Lee, Higginson & Co. tower at 41 Broad Street stands out for its instructive glimpse of structure and ornament in vital symbiosis.

And who knew? Far from their Federally inspired clubs and Cotswold Cottage-inflected homes on Long Island’s North Shore, Cross & Cross landed in 1940 at the stripped down swank of Tiffany & Co. at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street with what was then the largest column-free merchandising hall in the country. Here the window dressers have enjoyed more attribution than those who created the beguiling vitrines of irrepressible yet concentrated attention on the goods for sale: bling for the masses as much as for the potential customer, overall, however, tempered by restraint of the stylistic commission.

Another narrative drive found here, lacking in most contemporary architectural narratives, are lively and unapologetic accounts of the Cross & Cross clients, who, like them, grew up in the small world of interconnected families at the center of wealth and power which, without knowing it, were witnessing the end of this age of birthright privilege. All the Pennoyer/Walker books do so not as gossipy peeks at the rich and discreetly renowned, but as measures of doing business—that can still instruct even as a WASPy upper class hegemony depicted in these pages has long ago yielded to the finance and real estate meritocrats and foreign oligarchs who prove more elusive as illuminating ingredients in the complex business of getting things built.

Ironically, despite their well set place at the exclusive elite table, Cross & Cross, and in particular Eliot, also worked as speculative developers with the associated firm of Webb and Knapp that has evolved into today’s Zeckendorf Development, thriving as never before. While benefitting from the decorous rules of Social Register propriety, Eliot and his profit-minded cohorts simultaneously contributed to its ultimate dismantling by the tools of investment, marketing, and the general free-for-all of accumulated wealth alone as the real drivers of growth.

In this way too, the invisible impact of forgotten trailblazers emerges from the historical shadows as with the authors’ earlier series’ subjects. The profession, like an evermore design savvy public, gains as a result of these insights. Its creative intent is worth sharing for the sake of drawing back a curtain blocking the artistry we inhabit daily whether, frankly, we want to or not.