• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 8083 0

benighted money-grubbing. Culture was as much an “internal improvement” as the Erie Canal, they argued, and equally the responsibility of government. In 1816 the Common Council agreed. New York had “too long been stigmatized as phlegmatic, money making & plodding,” the aldermen admitted, and they determined to “speedily retrieve the reputation of our City,” by providing “municipal aid” to cultural institutions as Edinburgh, London, Paris, and Amsterdam, and other European capitals did. Moving inmates of the Chambers Street almshouse up to a new facility near Bellevue, they gave McComb’s three-story 1797 building a new name: the New York Institution of Learned and Scientific Establishments. The idea, as Pintard put it, was that “by concentrating all our resources we may give a greater impulse and elevation to our intellectual character.”

Seven prominent “establishments” agreed to take up quarters in the Institution: the recently reorganized American Academy of Fine Arts, the New-York Historical Society, the new Literary and Philosophical Society, the New York Society Library, John Scudder’s Museum (successor to the old Tammany Museum), the U.S. Military and Philosophical Society, and John Griscom’s Chemistry Laboratory. (Not all of them actually moved in. The Society Library, for one, kept its formidable collection of twenty thousand volumes down on Nassau Street.)

The leadership of the institution’s member organizations was drawn from a small, frequently overlapping group of affluent merchants and lawyers. As they understood matters, elevating the city’s intellectual character required them not simply to patronize creativity but to ordain and enforce standards for it as well. So in 1816, when John Vanderlyn asked the academy for space to exhibit a reclining nude entitled Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos, the horrified members turned him down on the grounds that the painting offended public decency. Their notions of good art ran to the inspiring historical canvases of John Trumbull, whose full-length portraits of Washington, Hamilton, Jay, and other worthies already graced City Hall—and who, as it happened, had just been elected president of the academy. In 1819, when Trumbull finally completed his Declaration of Independence, destined for the Capitol in Washington, the academicians proudly let the public in for a preview (at twenty-five cents a head).

Vanderlyn, in the meantime, had taken his revenge by soliciting money from Astor and a hundred other gentlemen to build his own gallery on Chambers Street, directly east of the institution. This was the Rotunda, a Pantheon-like building, fifty-six feet in diameter and capped by a thirty-foot dome. Its main attraction, which went on display in the summer of 1819, was Vanderlyn’s own Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles, twelve feet high and 165 feet long. The public wasn’t impressed, and critics advised him to depict American rather than European scenes in the future.

In 1824 the effort to improve the intellectual climate of New York took a new turn when Pintard and a number of its “wealthiest and most learned” citizens met at the City Hotel for the purpose of creating an athenaeum. Modeled on similar organizations in Liverpool (1798), Boston (1807), and Philadelphia (1814), the New York Athenaeum was to be a “genteel place of resort” for the perusal of books, magazines, and newspapers. It would also sponsor lectures, which would be open to women as well as men, by prominent artists, writers, and scientists. The lecture series started up almost immediately in the chapel of Columbia College: Gulian Verplanck speaking on political economy, Professor John McVickar on the philosophy of mind, Professor James Renwick on applied mechanics, and the Rev. Jonathan Wainright on oratory, among others, drawing audiences “distinguished for fashion, beauty, and accomplishments.” As intended, the athenaeum subsequently opened a public reading room at the corner of Broadway and Pine that became quite popular (Tocqueville and Beaumont dropped by almost every day during