Category Archives: Photographs

Steel Stacks

Photographs

Bethlehem, PA.

An especially cynical comedian must have named the towns of Bethlehem and Nazareth in Pennsylvania, for if ever there were dark satanic mills they would be found in the heart of this once industrial epicenter. Generations of immigrants, in search of freedom from religious persecution and seeking a better life for their children provided the labor at Bethlehem Steel and its enormous steel works here and if you have crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, or been inside the Empire State or Chrysler buildings then you will have experienced the results of their labors firsthand.

While any number of economic studies over the decades have conclusively confirmed that immigrants only ever make our nation more prosperous, it’s ironic to realize that the very descendants of the immigrants who worked at Steel Stacks are the very same who would today deny their latter day cousins the right of entry and of freedom of worship in the greatest nation there has ever been.

Further, if your parents were eastern European refugees like mine, then you probably owe your very existence to these towns and their industry for, at the height of the war effort, the last war America won, Bethlehem Steel was providing enough steel to build one ship every day. After Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese realized they had woken a sleeping giant, they may not have realized that he made his home in Bethlehem. Yet, by the end of the millennium, Bethlehem and its environs were so many dead cities, the labor exported to lands where the value of life was lower and the wages lower still.


Billy Joel got it right. Allentown is nearby Bethlehem. The story is the same for both cities.

We stayed overnight in Bethlehem en route to Princeton University with the goal of seeing America’s once mighty industrial center. The main Bethlehem Steel mill (the company entered bankruptcy in 2003, having been #8 in the Fortune 500 in 1955) is a rotting ruin, purportedly preserved for tourism with a few gantries and walkways. In reality these front for an adjacent gambling casino and the site was suitably deserted when we visited. Still, while true Urbex is not possible owing to all the locks and fences, what remains accessible is still a photographer’s paradise.

As for the demise of Bethlehem Steel, and American steel in general, there are any number of studies which tease out the causes, but you can glean much from the knowledge that wages rose 900% in the last 50 years of Bethlehem Steel while cold rolled steel prices rose but 220%. Unions saw to it that “if we can’t have it, you can’t have it” and equally corrupt management was to suffer as much as its workers by 2003. Both found themselves unemployed. The American worker wanted a Chevy and a color TV set; his Chinese counterpart was happy to make do with a bowl of rice.



In typically American fashion, obsolete properties are just left to rot rather than being properly remediated. This lack of ‘pride in place’ is one of the worst characteristics of the American character. This building housed Bessemer converters, large kettles which converted pig iron to steel, until the technology was obsoleted by larger mills.


Nature slowly does the job man failed to do.


The new mill which replaced the old one in the foreground around the beginning of the twentieth century.


The noise and heat must have been overwhelming when these kettles were bubbling full of molten steel.


A photographer’s paradise.


If this was a phone box then it’s some testimony to the products of Western Electric!


The same workers who built the mill went on to make the steel which poured though these giant pipes.


This fully integrated facility included a rail line which would receive the newly poured ingots for transport to the steam hammers where they were forged into I beams or steel plates for everything from battleships to railcars.


Using beads of weld, proud workers placed their names in the structural steel making up the mill.


The scale of the plant is very large indeed.


Thousands of rivets testify to the uncompromising structural integrity of one of the kettles.


Industrial beauty.


A visit to America’s former heartland of heavy industry is recommended to all interested in the nation’s history.

Vassar College

Colleges

A fitting end to our tour.

For an alphabetical index of the New England College series of pieces, click here.

By now I must be sounding like a broken record, each college we visit an exercise in the use of superlatives in an attempt to describe the sheer beauty of our surroundings so, dear reader, you will not be at all surprised when I tell you that Vassar – the last in our magical, month long voyage of discovery – may be the best yet. Sure, the Recency Effect may be playing havoc with my judgment, but this series will allow re-visits to be put in perspective.

Matthew Vassar founded the school in 1861, the first to grant degrees to women. (Think about the courage it took to do that in a male dominated age). The school became co-ed in 1969 and the genders are now balanced, though many still mistake this for an all girls school. The latter are represented in New England by Mount Holyoke (MA), Wellesley (MA), Smith (MA), Bryn Mawr (PA) and Barnard (NY), each boasting the highest academic standards.

The 2,450 undergraduates studying here are supported by a massive endowment and an academic staff of 290, in Poughkeepsie, New York on a 1,000 acre campus adjacent to the city. Everything here is just perfect, the attention to maintenance beyond compare and the layout of the campus a delight to wander around. There’s a fine Art Museum which mercifully does not adopt Matthew Vassar’s appalling taste in mediocre English painting of the nineteenth century. Vassar is the first college to be founded with a full-scale art museum. We had a blast visiting it, my taste for the modern offset by Winston’s disdain and preference for the traditional. Much argument ensued. What a joy!



The main gate. The Main Building seen through the portal.


From inside the campus.


The Main Building, 1861, had the greatest floor space of any in the US until the US Capitol was built seven years later. The window frames are being repainted here.


The Thompson Library, more cathedral than library. One of the largest undergraduate libraries in the US.


Another view of the masterpiece.


This is what you see on entering.


And this.


A glorious place to study. How can you not get a ‘first’ here?


A wing of the Thompson.


The 2001 Ingram is an addition to the Thompson Library.


Rockefeller Hall, built in 1897, houses the departments of Political Science, Philosophy, and Mathematics. John Davison Rockefeller put up the capital (spare change found in his trouser cuff) and, yes, his daughter attended Vassar!


Mmmmm!


The Vogelstein Center for Art and Film. Vassar has a deep performing arts tradition. The wonderful Cesar Pelli was the architect, one whom I was very fortunate to meet at a lecture in NYC many years ago.


The remainder of the original Avery Hall, one side of the Vogelstein and originally a stable!


The Ferry Cooperative house in the ever miserable architecture of Marcel Breuer.


The Art Museum.


Proof that Victorian architecture can work.


The Shakespeare Garden, laid out in 1916, includes all the plants mentioned in Shakespeare’s works.


The $120mm Bridge for Laboratory Sciences building, added in 2016.


The magnificent sweeping vista inside the Bridge.


Another view.


The architecture of the Bridge works well.


Inside the Memorial Chapel. Note the complex vaulting of the ceiling.


On the main quad. Magnificent.


The Frances Lehman Loeb Arts Center:

The fine art gallery has a small, adjacent sculpture garden which we greatly enjoyed.


Odyssey, 1944, Peter Lipsitt.


Las, 1963, Eugène Dodeigne.


Etang d’ambach, 1992, Frank Stella.


Nude with Drapery, 1930-35, Gaston Lachaise.


Queen of Sheba, 1961, Alexander Archipenko.


Colloquio abulico (Abulic Conversation), 1960, Pietro Consagra.


Samurai, 1971, Dmitri Hadzi. Supremely tactile, this was our favorite.

* * * * *


Our tour ends. Twenty of the best private schools in the world in twenty-five days. An exhausted Winston testifies to our work ethic on the lawn aside the Main Building at Vassar.


Alumni include Edna St. Vincent Millay, Grace Hopper – the computer genius, Meryl Streep, along with famous drop-outs Jacqueline Bouvier, Katharine Graham, Jane Fonda and Anne Hathaway. Oh! and a certain chef named Anthony Bourdain! This is a magnificent setting as a springboard for joining the best of the best.

Princeton University

Colleges

The ne plus ultra.

For an alphabetical index of the New England College series of pieces, click here.

Name a discipline and the chances are good that Princeton in New Jersey will be ranked #1 or #2 nationally. Or internationally, come to think of it. One of the few pre-Revolutionary War schools, dating from 1746, this large 500 acre campus offers every major you could possibly want to its 5,400 undergraduates and 2,800 postgraduates and does so at the very highest academic levels. The endowment at over $22 billion (yes, billion) sees to it that everything is of the highest quality and the many refurbishment projects ongoing during our visit testify to the administration’s intent to keep it so.

And it’s not just academic standards which excel here. The art collection is simply breathtaking, the campus rivals Colgate, Lafayette and Union Colleges for unity of design and sheer quality, if on a much larger scale – it is breathtakingly beautiful – and the adjacent city exudes charm like nothing else. As our tour of many New England private Ivy League schools comes to a close we can honestly report that we have left one of the best to last.

To cap things off, our visit coincided with a perfect, if roasting hot, day and we enjoyed lunch in the college town to break up our meanderings. What follows needs few words.



Ivy League.


The Art Museum.


Rudolf Hoflehner, Human Condition, 1960.


David Smith, CUBI XIII, 1963.


Monet’s garden at Giverny. The collection of Impressionists, Cézannes and Degas is Louvre-quality.


A nice place to marry.


Henry Moore, Oval with Points, 1969-70.


Memorial to the Trumbull and Davis families.


Winston with John Witherspoon’s statue, a key early President of the school.


To add to the seeming perfection of our visit, there was a magnificent recital of Olivier Messaien‘s organ music in progress in the Chapel, the latter gloriously built in the Gothic style of the 14th century. The organist, name unknown, was truly world class …. and we were but two of four people present. Messaien, Princeton, world class musician, full throated, wide range organ. How do you improve on that?


Jacques Lipchitz, Song of the Vowels, 1969. Compare with the like piece at Cornell.


Another snap of the Witherspoon statue.


The Walter Augustus Wyckoff Quad. Princeton has more quads than you can count.


Remembrance, Toshiko Takaezu, in honor of alumni murdered on Nine-Eleven.


Neo-Parisian scenes in town.


The town is immediately adjacent to the campus.


Simply charming.


More French style.


It’s hard to know where to start when detailing alumni and faculty of Princeton. Alumni include Presidents Madison and Wilson, VP Aaron Burr and First Lady Michelle Obama, three sitting US Supreme Court Justices (Alito, Kagan and Sotomayor), Pete Conrad (Apollo 12), Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Jimmy Stewart, José Ferrer, Booth Tarkington, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neill, Richard Feynman, Lee Iacocca, John Nash, Alan Turing, JFK, Robert Mueller (pig investigator), Cornell West, Carl Icahn, George Will and accidental billionairess Meg Whitman. Faculty include Joyce Carol Oates, Cornel West, Johnny von Neumann, Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman, Tony Morrison, and Woodrow Wilson.

You have to be very smart to get admitted here, with but one in sixteen applicants making the grade. That’s how it should be.

Lafayette College

Colleges

Design perfection.

For an alphabetical index of the New England College series of pieces, click here.

Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (phew!), (1757 – 1834) was one of America’s greatest patriots, fighting with distinction in the Revolutionary War against the British, though French born. Maryland’s legislature honored Lafayette by making him and his male heirs “natural born Citizens” of the state, which made him a natural born citizen of the United States (Wikipedia). Lafayette College in Pennsylania is named after the great man who somehow managed to die in his bed, surviving the French Terror, the guillotine, despite being of noble birth and being around at the time heads were rolling. A republican for the ages.

Lafayette College in Easton was formed in 1826 and is set in a truly glorious site atop College Hill. We were very fortunate to be able to tour it on a warm day, assisted by the best tour guide booklet yet. There are 2,445 students here, taught by 215 full time faculty members, 99% of whom hold a doctorate or other terminal degree. The 340 acre campus is home to 60 buildings, with a separate 230 acre athletic campus, all supported by a solid endowment.



The Admissions Building.


The great man.


Transcendence, 2008, honoring David McDonogh, the first African American to be granted a degree from the college, in 1844.


Watson Hall, one of the dorms.


The Hugel Science Center for physics, chemistry and biochemistry.


Scott Hall, the Dean’s home.


The Kirby Hall of Civil Rights.


Inside Kirby Hall.


A view of the main quad in all its summer glory.


South College, the largest dorm, home to 220 men and women.


Van Wickle Hall houses the Departments of Geology and Environmental Geosciences. Completed in 1900.


The David Bishop Skillman Library, a recipient of the Excellence in Academic Libraries Award in 2014.


Inside the Library.


The Farinon College Center is the center for student activities.


Hogg Hall (pronounced ‘Hoag’) is the Office of Career Services.


From the College’s extensive sculpture collection.


Another.


Yet more.


The Simon Center for Economics, named after former US Energy and Treasury Secretary, William E. Simon. Bill was my boss in his merchant bank during the period 1988-93.


This hyper-kinetic man wore bottle lenses which served to amplify his already piercing eyes.


Pardee Hall, designed by John McArthur, Jr, the architect of Philadelphia City Hall. Designed in the Second Empire style it burned to the ground in 1879, being replaced with an identical building in 1881. They built them fast back then. The Hall houses the College Writing Program and German studies.


Grossman House, a special residence hall for students interested in global topics.


The Williams Center for the Arts includes a 400 seat theater and concert hall.


Lafayette has one of the oldest competitive sports records with nearby Lehigh University, the football rivalry dating back to 1884.

Notable alumni include Bill Simon, Henry Kissinger, Stephen Crane and Joel Silver.

Newport mansions

Photographs

From the gilded age.

Measured rationally – say by the percentage of wealth or income to US Gross Domestic Product – the fortunes enjoyed by the capitalists of the Gilded Age (1870 – 1900) were perhaps the greatest since the Pharaohs. Marxist dogma notwithstanding – and one should withstand utter nonsense – the industrialists of this age raised a vast army of immigrants to middle class status, their children going on to enjoy education and prosperity. Their capitalist employers, meanwhile, tried to outdo one another by building magnificent mansions in Newport, Rhode Island, easily accessed by sea from their plantations or coal mines in West Virginia and points south.

These nouveau riches came to be mocked by the landed gentry of western Europe until it came to marital vows, of course, at which time their complaints about vulgarity turned to enjoyment of yet another jeroboam of Chateau Mouton Rothschild at the wedding feast. Then as now money attracted money and the failing fortunes in the old world saw to it that they latched on to the much greater ones in the New World.

We toured two of these mansions yesterday on a picture perfect day with our friend from Lexington, Santo W. and had an absolute blast. While the bargain deal is the ticket to see all five of these which are open to the public, we kept it down to two as any more would have resulted in total visual overload. When you gaze at the sheer sizes of these homes you will understand why. Add in large amounts of period art and decoration and overload comes quickly.

The Breakers:

Cornelius Vanderbilt II (1843 – 1899) made money the smart way. He chose his parents well and inherited it from his father (1784 – 1877), the legendary railroad and shipping magnate with the grade school education. The latter started his commercial life by running a precursor of the Staten Island Ferry where his work ethic and drive earned him the sobriquet ‘Commodore’, one which stuck for the remainder of his very long and productive life. Along with Carnegie he is probably the second wealthiest American in the nation’s history, after J D Rockefeller, using that GDP metric.

CV II built the 62,000 square foot Breakers, right on the ocean. It has 70 rooms and was completed in 1895 after a mere two years. Labor unions had not yet destroyed the work ethic. If the sheer size and gaudiness of the Breakers overwhelm, it’s still worth a visit for the guilty pleasure of wallowing in so much excess. Would you like to live here? Well, if 30 foot ceilings and cavernous, poorly lit bedrooms are your thing, have at it.



The entry ticket atop our strategic New England tour map.


A full parking lot did nothing to detract from a fine visit, with a classy crowd largely devoid of tattoos.


62,000 square feet plus a like amount of formal garden.


Home made clouds.


Opulence.


The cast iron balustrade is capped with a bronze hand rail. The quality is breathtaking.


One of many dozens.


Mantle piece.


Another.


In the pool room.

Tiles, not oils.


Immigrant artisans saw to it that the work was of the highest quality.


Vaulted ceiling with cherubs.


Visual overload.


A sitting room with fresh cut flowers.


From the second floor balcony. The servants’ quarters are on the top floor.


Coat hangers in the master closet.


The wife’s bedroom. Separate bedrooms were the order of the day.


The landscaping disappoints with no formal floral garden, unlike the magnificence of Filoli.


Painted ceiling.


The tapestries, by Flemish Karel van Mander II date from 1619, and are on a gargantuan scale. Old man Vanderbilt at left.


This beautiful staircase leads to the china storage area above the main kitchen.


The main kitchen. Industrial scale parties called for a like place to prepare meals.


The unadorned grounds.


The Elms:

The coal baron Edward Julius Berwind (1848 – 1936) kept a low profile which is why you have probably never heard of him, but he put his vast wealth to good use in creating the Elms, completed in 1901, where he spent only the weekends from July 4th through August, such were the demands of coal mining. Berwind’s interest in technology saw to it that the Elms was one of the first Newport mansions to be electrically lit and like the Breakers the home is built on a steel frame for longevity.

Much smaller than the Breakers the sense of design and taste here is also much superior, and while there is no oceanfront setting, this carbon copy of a French chateau is far more welcoming.



Santo and Winston at the main gate.


French chateau style, a copy of the Chateau d’Asnieres in Asnieres-sur-Seine, France


The damask wall covering is French.


French furniture abounds.


A rare lapse in taste this really should be moved to the Oval Office.


Painted ceiling.


Woof!


Statuary abounds.


Santo informed us that the guided tour recording states the lions are the symbols of Venice. You know, the one in Italy, not in Los Angeles.


A drawing room.


Many sets of china in storage above the kitchen.


The technology focus is reflected in the fire hose system inside the home.


The rear of the home.


This lion appears to favor poultry ….


…. while his partner works on a crocodile.


Son and dad on the rear patio. Snap by Santo.


A visit to the mansions of Newport, Rhode Island is recommended. Park in the free main lot at the Breakers and take the free bus to the others, as parking is at a premium in the small, crowded city.