Second Empire Look

“then we would go into what he called his ’study’, whose walls were hung with some of those engravings depicting, against a dark background, a fleshy pink goddess driving a charriot, standing on a globe, or wearing a star on her forehead, which were admired during the Second Empire because they were felt to have a Pompeiian look about them, were then hated, and are beginning to be admired for one reason, and one reason only, and that is that they have such a Second Empire look about them.”
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way.
Davis Translation.

I don’t want to get too far into a discussion of art, architecture, and politics, of 19th Century France, or anything, but…
Actually, there is nothing more that I would like to get into but a discussion about those three things, because I fuckin’ live for that shit, but I have a feeling that there is a slight chance that I’d come off sounding like a pretentious blow-hard, and we can’t be havin’ that, n’est pas?
So, at the risk of that, I’ll explain the Proust quote and why it struck me, at 8 in the morning on September 19th, and what I’ve been mulling over here and thereafter.
One of the two reasons that I live on the Upper West Side (there areally aren’t that many) is the architecture. I love it. Old doorman buildings from the 20’s that look like the unholy spawn of a pile of bricks and an Italian Renaissance palace, beefed-up Beaux-Arts buildings like the Ansonia and the Dorilton with hulking mansard roofs that curl and crest, in my mind at least, up heaven itself…just absolutely glorious. I mean, gorgeous if you’re into that sort of thing. I am.
Just around the corner from me, there is a whole block dedicated to ecclesiastic buildings, with the church of St. Paul and St. Andrew on the south side of 86th and West End, and the church of St. Ignatius on the North. St. Paul and St. Andrew, with it’s octagonal bell tower, empty niches, red-tile roof, and arched buttresses, is French Neo-Classical-ish, while St. Ignatius crosses the channel and looks Anglican Gothic. It’s hard to peg, because it’s all sort of a mish-mosh of different styles and countries, that for the newly-monied upper middle class that settled this fine rocky farmland in the mid 19th Century, it probably made them feel right at home. At home in the Europe that they had, a generation before, escaped because of persecution and/or poverty. Who knows?
What I’m getting at is that all of this great architecture up here that I love so much is all a pretense. The brownstones are just deftly carved mud, last-centuries stucco. The canyon of ten-story brick buildings that line Central Park West and West End Ave, without their little flourishes of limestone rosettes and anonymous Greek deities in profile, would be nothing more than a bleak shadowy brick canyon. Don’t get me wrong, I love walking past them and keep a mental catalogue of all the different faces and gargoyles that emerge, for example, from the foliage of a round balcony, extending all of two feet out, below a brownstone’s bay window. It would be pretty bleak if they weren’t there, but in an of themselves they’re pretty superficial.
And that’s where this goes back to Prousts’ uncle. Like his uncle’s study, which we find out later is nothing more than a setting for illicit trysts with debauched courtesans, the old architecture of the UWS that I know and love, is really all a sham. None of it existed during the Second Empire, before the 9th Ave El, and most of it was filled in by the 20’s. Does that make it all insincere and artificial? Who’s to say? I grew up in Austin, and I’ve never been around so many old buidings, even if most of them are just under 90 years old. Am I some sort of poser, then? That’s your call. The jury is still out on that one, and while it’s deliberating you can find me underneath my stove-pipe hat, monocle firmly clamped beteween my left brow and creased cheek, wearing a double-tailed suit and wandering amongst the brownstones in luminous reverie, a flaneur searching for a past that never was.