Hochschild Gallery

The Museum of the City of New York, one of the few civic museums in the country comparable to similar institutions in London and Vienna, last week opened a most important department: the Berthold Hochschild Gallery of New York Architecture. Dedicated to preserving every aspect of the history of New York City, the museum has acquired in the 13 years since its founding a vast collection of drawings, plans, models of important New York buildings, both extant and vanished. Through the children of the late Berthold Hochschild, one of the founders of American Metal Co., a room soon to be doubled in size has been provided to show a portion of these publicly. On exhibit in the Hochschild architecture gallery were four microscopically exact models, made by unemployed architects under the Architects' Emergency Committee, of Manhattan buildings important in the development of U. S. architecture: cupolaed Federal Hall, on whose balcony George Washington took his oath of office as President; the brownstone St. John's Chapel; Hamilton Grange, a typical Manhattan country house of 1800; Fraunces' Tavern, still standing, the headquarters of the Sons of the Revolution in the State of New York.

For its first temporary exhibition, the Hochschild gallery showed a full size cement model of Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Diana of Madison Square Garden, and pulled from its archives drawings and plans of special interest to architects. There were preliminary drawings for the pompously domed Astor's Hotel, pride of lower Broadway in the 1830's. There were the competition drawings by Architects George Martin Huss and John Henry Buck for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. One of the four finalists, the Huss & Buck Gothic cathedral was finally beaten out by the Romanesque plans of Heins & Lafarge, but bears embarrassing resemblance to the cathedral as redesigned and now being built by Ralph Adams Cram.

These drawings will be on view only for a few months. Later, museum authorities will substitute the history of the Manhattan skyscraper from the Tower Building of 1889 to the Empire State; famed private houses, from Peter Stuyvesant's "Great Bouwery" Farm to the Vanderbilt chateaux; the development of church architecture, retail stores, etc., etc.

In the Museum's basement last week was another show, even more amusing to the general public. Entitled "New York at the Turn of the Century," it presented: a 1902 single-cylinder Oldsmobile, driven by a couple in dusters, goggles, veils, and beside it the elegant open caleche of Mr. Harris Fahnestock containing a frock-coated dandy and his feather-boaed wife. A tandem bicycle with a boomer girl in front, a Norfolk-jacketed scorcher behind. An exhibition of the iron-clad blue serge bathing suits suitable for Far Rockaway in the days of Theodore Roosevelt. A genuine Morris chair, a cylinder phonograph, a pianola. Photographs of Olga Nethersole as Sappho, Ethel Barrymore in Captain Jinks, Maude Adams as L'Aiglon. First editions of When Knighthood Was in Flower and an autographed photograph of John Philip Sousa.

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