A Temple on Fifth Avenue

All museum directors thrive on a mixture of acquisitiveness and showmanship. In his first month as director of Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum former New York Parks Commissioner Thomas P. F. Hoving, 36, has put his theatrical talents to good use. To get New Yorkers to take a fresh view of the Met's treasures, he displayed some 600 of them, ranging from the silver portrait of a 4th century Sassanian king to Marie Antoinette's doghouse, under the title "In the Presence of Kings." The array drew 62,000 visitors to the museum on a recent Sunday. Last week Hoving demonstrated that showmanship leads to acquisitions, too.

Up for grabs was the richly carved and graven Temple of Dendur, Greco-Roman Egyptian ruin that has slumbered for 2,000 years in the crystalline Egyptian sunlight, 130 miles up the Nile from Luxor. It was originally dedicated to two Egyptian brothers, Petesi and Pihor, who had been drowned in the Nile. When the rising waters of the 300-mile-long lake formed by the Aswan High Dam similarly threatened to engulf their sanctuary, the Egyptian government had it dismantled into 650 pieces in 1962. The temple was offered to the U.S. in gratitude for a $16 million U.S. contribution toward saving older and larger temples, including Abu Simbel.

Sandpile. As Egyptian temples go, Dendur is a midget. It weighs a mere 800 tons, consists of only three rooms and a monumental entry gate, measures 82 ft. from front to back. Nonetheless, more than 20 U.S. museums, appropriately including one each from Memphis, Tenn., and Cairo, Ill., applied for it. The two leading contenders were Washington's Smithsonian and New York's Met, and the jockeying in what became known as "the Dendur Derby" began right from the start. When the White House asked the Smithsonian to name a committee to award the temple, the Met protested, charging a conflict of interest. To resolve the conflict, the White House last January named a five-man independent commission with three Egyptologists on it.

With the backing of Interior Secretary Udall, the Smithsonian argued before the commission that the temple should be erected outdoors on the banks of the Potomac, for the benefit of the capital's 9,000,000 annual tourists. The Smithsonian maintained that the temple's porous sandstone, which is so soft a man can scratch it with his finger, could be coated with synthetic resins to protect it in the East Coast's soggy climate. The Met cited testimony indicating that any outdoor setting would reduce the temple to a pile of sand and stone stumps in 30 years.

Night Light. Then Hoving delivered his master stroke. He presented renderings done by the Met's architects of a gargantuan, glistening 136-ft.-long glass case (or, as Hoving calls it, a "vitrine") that would extend westward into Central Park from the Met's north wing to house the temple. The showcase would be supported by selfsupporting, interlocking trusses that would be virtually invisible; the whole temple would be lit up at night so that its contents could be seen from afar by passers-by on Fifth Avenue.

The commissioners unanimously recommended the Met to the President, who last week gave his approval. Estimated cost of the wing, half of which will be borne by the City of New York: $2,500,000. Estimated date of completion: 1970, when the Met plans its centennial. Commented Hoving, a performer who likes to throw away a line now and then: "It's a good thing to have."

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