Gramercy Walking Tour – MISHKIN GALLERY Blog

Gramercy Walking Tour Reflection: The Concurrent Beauty and Functionality of Public Art

By Emma Minkoff

On a brisk, sunny Saturday morning in late February, seventeen people met outside the Baruch College Administrative offices on E 22nd St and Lexington Ave in front of the Mishkin Gallery. Alaina Claire Feldman and Alexandra Tell, the gallery’s director and manager, were about to lead a walking tour of public art around the Gramercy neighborhood.

Stop 1: Baruch College Administration Building

Starting the tour off, Alex informed us our first stop was actually the building right where we were standing; we crossed the street to get a better view. The Baruch College Administration building, built between 1937-1939, was originally built as the Domestic Relations Court building and designed by architect Charles B. Meyers as a New Deal project. The building next door was built a few years earlier in 1912 and housed New York’s Childrens Court. In 1933, New York combined the Children and Family Court to establish the Domestic Relations Court. For the first time, private domestic disputes would be handled in a public space. The Domestic Relations Court was actually the first court in the United States to be presided over by a black female judge, Judge Jane Bolin, who was appointed by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia at the court’s opening in 1939. For the next twenty years, she was the only black female judge in the country.

HP Camden, the sculptor of the building’s façade reliefs, was an army veteran who later became a sculpture professor at the University of Oregon and then Cornell. Camden typically sculpted images of typical nuclear families that symbolized a certain ideal of American domestic life of the WWII period.

As a court building, the design was relatively austere and the style was more functionally administrative than the civic grandeur of the downtown courts. The building relied on its sculptural elements, like its reliefs, to communicate its importance. The reliefs that integrate motifs of family life with civic symbolism, like the scales of justice and the eagle, still remain, but are obstructed today by scaffolding. The building was converted to a Baruch College building in 1983, but artifacts from the past remain, including a “cell room,” formerly a jail cell complete with iron bars and now a tutoring center.

As we looked at the exterior of the building, I found myself frustrated with the view blocked by the scaffolding. The view of the reliefs that are unblocked look beautiful, but are hard to notice if not intentionally looking. Coincidentally, Alex then told us she tried and failed to find a photo of the building without the scaffolding! A picture is passed around with the earliest photo she could find of the building from 1940, and sure enough, there is the scaffolding, permanent as ever. What other beautiful exteriors lie just beyond our eyes, blocked by scaffolding?

Stop 2: Madison Square Post Office

We then walked over to the Madison Square Station Post Office, just around the corner on 23rd Street. Before going in, Alaina asked us all to notice the exterior of the building. Five bronze art-deco sculpture reliefs line the building front, originally created by sculptors Edmond Amateis and Louis Slobodkin. Even though I walk past this building at least once a week, I realized I had never fully appreciated the intricate and majestic exterior.

Inside, Alaina pointed out Kindred McLeary’s “Scenes of New York”, a series of eight tempera on plaster panels around the main lobby of the post office. These social realist murals represent different New York City neighborhoods: Lower East Side, Broadway, Central Park, Harlem, Greenwich Village, Wall Street, Park Avenue, and one titled ‘Immigration’. In each neighborhood shown, someone is depicted doing a mail-related activity such as reading or sending letters.

Kindred McLeary (December 3, 1901, Texas – May 29, 1949) was an American architect, artist and educator. He is now known for his public murals such as “America the Mighty” installed in the lobby of the US State Department building in DC, as well as murals at a number of other post offices across America. These eight murals were funded by the Treasury Department’s New Deal-era Section of Fine Arts Program in 1937. In the 1930s, as America was struggling with the effects of the great depression, the federal government searched for solutions to provide work for all Americans, including artists. During this time, government-created agencies supported the arts in unprecedented ways. By commissioning artworks in public buildings, the government allowed for art to be made accessible to the public. At the time of its debut, this post office processed approximately 1,000,000 letters a day.

As the group wandered around the lobby viewing the paintings I realized no one else in the lobby had looked up. Then I thought about all the times I’ve been in this exact lobby, sending a letter or package, never noticing the paintings until now. It felt as if a physical veil had been lifted and I was now able to finally experience the post office in its entirety, as a spectacular feat of humanity instead of a given part of daily infrastructure.

Stop 3: School for Deaf P.S. 347

For our last stop on the tour, we stood on the corner across the street from P.S. 347. At first, I didn’t understand what we were supposed to be seeing. Alaina told us that the school is The American Sign Language & English Lower School, and immediately after I spotted it: a bright yellow traffic sign, with stylized hands spelling out “School For Deaf” in sign language.

PS 347 is a dual language school dedicated to bridging the Deaf and hearing communities in New York City. The 3K through 8th grade students come from every borough in New York City. Deaf, Hard of Hearing and Children of Deaf Adults (CODAs) all attend PS 347 to perfect their ASL and be taught a rigorous curriculum.

Martin Wong, the artist behind the traffic sign, was an openly gay Chinese-American artist, a leading figure in New York’s East Village art scene of the 1980s, and a precursor of the identity-driven work of the 1990s. He was 53 when he died of AIDS in 1999 in San Francisco, where he had initially grown up as a child and spent the last 5 years of his life. Wong created paintings that focused on displacement in the face of gentrification, homoerotic fantasies, tenement-style brickwork, and American Sign Language.

In 1991, the Public Art Fund commissioned Wong to create a number of traffic signs for hearing-impaired schools throughout the city. The artist was in residency with the Department of Transportation sign shop where he created signs for schools in all five boroughs, including the Lexington School for the Deaf in Queens, the New York School for the Deaf in Manhattan, and the St. Joseph’s School for the Deaf in the Bronx. These works draw on Wong’s personal aesthetic, which comes from his work as a graffiti artist, to utilize the manual alphabet of the deaf to convey messages. In this series of artworks, illustrated hands depicting each signed letter spell out “ONE WAY,” “STOP,” and “SCHOOL FOR THE DEAF.”

Through Wong’s sign we are able to create a more accessible society and beautify the streets simultaneously. I wonder, what other ways can art be utilized to create a more equitable experience for all, in small and large ways?

As we left the street corner and headed to a diner for some coffee, I realized I was reevaluating my surroundings, searching out for more artwork I may have missed previously. So rarely do we take intentional time to notice our environment, stuck in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. When I typically think of public art, large scale murals or sculptures usually come first in mind. Through this walking tour, I expanded my concept of public art – peeking out from behind scaffolding, inside a public service lobby, or on the street with a functional purpose.

Additional Readings:

Our Lives, Under Construction – NYTimes