Woolworth’s Cathedral (July/August 1989 | Volume: 40, Issue: 5)

Woolworth’s Cathedral

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Authors: John Steele Gordon

Historic Era: Era 7: The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930)

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July/August 1989 | Volume 40, Issue 5

Ever since technology began to permit it, men of power have sought immortality in stone. Knowing that their deeds, however important, were ephemeral in the nature of things, they hoped that their tombs and statues and palaces might remind the world of their greatness. Shelley, in his haunting sonnet on Ozymandias, showed the essential barrenness of this idea, but that hasn’t stopped men in the least from erecting monuments to their own memories.

Before the Industrial Revolution, politics and military conquest were the main roads to power. With the advent of the steam engine the instruments of choice by which men sought power began to change, as did the means by which they displayed it. The opportunities for military conquest shrank nearly to the vanishing point, but the opportunities to make a great fortune in business vastly expanded.

As early as 1868, James Gordon Bennett noted in the New York Herald how much things had changed and yet stayed the same. “Men no longer attempt to rule by the sword,” he wrote in an editorial, “but they find in money a weapon as sharp and more effective; and having lost none of the old lust for power they seek to establish over their fellows the despotism of dollars.”

If the vast wealth created by the Industrial Revolution never quite amounted to a “despotism of dollars,” it certainly allowed the building of an unprecedented number of monuments to the glory of the creators of the new fortunes. The building of a suitable palace was usually the first step. The parade of mansions that slowly marched up New York’s Fifth Avenue in the nineteenth century, each grander and more elaborate than the last, was a fantastic and now largely lost example.

Cornelius Vanderbilt was, in his day, the king of kings of American railroading and the richest self-made man in the world. He was quite comfortable living downtown in his relatively modest house on Washington Place and left Fifth Avenue to his children and grandchildren. But he couldn’t entirely resist the temptation to immortalize himself. In 1869, he built a new freight warehouse in lower Manhattan for his New York and Hudson River Railroad, and he arranged for a grand monument to himself to be part of it. It amounted to nothing less than his autobiography, written in 100,000 pounds of bronze. The pediment of the building, thirty feet high and one hundred fifty feet long, was filled with depictions, in high relief, of Vanderbilt’s career in ships and railroads. These flanked a central statue of the Commodore himself, fully twelve feet high and weighing four tons.

 

Even before it was unveiled, the astonished observer from the Herald noted that “it is not so prodigious as the Pyramid of Cheops, nor so lofty as the Colossus of Rhodes, but it will do.” (Vanderbilt’s monument, alas, has also suffered the fate of Ozymandias’s. Today only the central statue survives, placed high