Statue of Liberty – The Intelligent Collector Magazine

Even the World’s Architectural Wonders Once Had Their Critics

black and white photograph — Frank Horvat’s ‘Stern, Chaussure, a Shoe and Eiffel Tower, Paris’, 1974, sold for $3,585 in a November 2011 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

When we lived in Central London in the 1990s, #10 Walton Street became a convenient place to host our American friends and family. We had plenty of room, one block from the world-famous Harrods department store, and the Walton Street restaurants were some of the finest in London. Our neighbor in #12 owned the superb Osteria San Lorenzo restaurant that Lady Diana claimed was her favorite, perhaps because it was three doors down from her exclusive couturier and go-to designer Bruce Oldfield. Michael Caine shopped at our Italian bakery, and Ringo Starr sightings were frequent.

However, it soon became de rigueur to tack on a side trip to Paris via the new Eurostar high-speed trains that attained 180 mph under the English Channel that connected France and England. Once there, a pleasant lunch awaited visitors to the Eiffel Tower and the elegant Le Jules Verne, a one-star Michelin restaurant on the second level. It had a dedicated lift some 240 feet (thankfully).

The 360-degree view of Paris is wonderful at lunch and spectacular at night. “The City of Light” (La Ville Lumiere) derives from the city’s role in the Age of Enlightenment and the extensive use of gas lights on streets (56,000) and monuments. Located on the Champ de Mars, the Eiffel Tower was built as the entrance to the 1889 World’s Fair. It was named for the man who designed and built it. Gustave Eiffel had started working in a family vinegar factory owned by an uncle. When the business failed he switched to engineering, which proved to be quite rewarding.

He built bridges, viaducts and railway concourses that were awe-inspiring in addition to burnishing his reputation. It worked so well he won the commission to build the interior of the remarkable Statue of Liberty in 1884 that ended up being a gift from the French people to celebrate the founding of the young United States.

Sculptor Frederic Bartholdi generally gets credit for “Liberty Enlightening the World” and, of course, it was his design. However, without the ingenious interior engineering to hold it aloft, it was a hollow structure of beaten copper one-tenth of an inch thick. What Eiffel contributed was the ability of the 150-foot structure to withstand the wind, rain, snow, heat, cold and all the other physical weather assaults 24 hours, seven days a week year after year. These were all engineering challenges that Eiffel solved with a skeleton of trusses and springs that support the copper skin and is worn like a suit of clothes. It marked the invention of curtain wall construction, the most important building technique of the 20th century, but with little credit to the man who conceived it.

This new technique enabled the building of skyscrapers and the design of wings for airplanes. Eiffel’s contributions were about to be recognized for this breakthrough when he received the commission for his big project in Paris that we now call the Eiffel Tower. There were over 100 other proposals submitted, including a 900-foot-high guillotine, presumably as a tribute to France’s contribution to popularizing decapitation during the French Revolution.

Then, predictably, many scoffed at Eiffel’s design since it was so enormous and, on the surface, useless. It appeared to be an oil derrick but without any oil. Many people detested it, and unfortunately that included artists, architects and other high-profile notables. This highly influential group wrote a scathing petition on Feb. 14, 1887, denouncing “the grotesque mercenary invention of a lowly machine builder” and signed it “Artists against the Eiffel Tower.” Today we know just how totally wrong they were as 20 million people actually pay admission to tour what is probably the world’s most recognizable landmark-monument.

A similar controversy was roiling San Francisco in 1969, when we moved to San Jose, over the new Transamerica Pyramid. One critic called it “the most portentous and insidiously bad building in The City.” The San Francisco Chronicle’s architectural critic simply called it an abomination, while the Los Angeles Times called the spire gratuitous and compared it to a dunce cap. Angry mobs demonstrated by Mayor Alioto’s office to protest, but it was all in vain. The building was finished in 1972 and has gradually become a cherished, iconic symbol of the SFO skyline.

I wonder if the pyramids had to suffer through similar periods of rejection or ridicule? Retract that musing — I totally overlooked the presence of the Pharaohs. It is much easier to gain consensus when decision-making doesn’t involve others.

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is president and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as chair and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

Coney Island Represents America’s Fascination with Outrageous Entertainment

A collection of about 45 historical photographs of Coney Island, from the American Heritage Publishing Archives, went to auction in January 2016.

By Jim O’Neal

Typical stories about Coney Island usually start with some version of huddled masses arriving on America’s Eastern shore at the turn of the century and, before seeing the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge or the newborn skyscrapers, encountering a welcome beacon of bright wonders spread along the sands of the southern tip of Brooklyn. It is a dramatic way to introduce that star of light called the “City of Fire” and some even take it to the next level by comparing it to the bush Moses encountered on Mount Horeb … which burned, but was not consumed.

That does put Coney Island in a revered historical context, but in reality, it is wrong.

From 1885 to 1896, the Elephantine Colossus, a seven-story building (that included a brothel) shaped like an elephant, was actually the first thing immigrants saw when arriving in New York. Designed by James Lafferty – who died broke in 1898 – the 31-room building served as a hotel, concert hall and amusement bazaar. It was built two years before the Statue of Liberty at an estimated cost of $250,000.

It was the second of three elephant buildings built by Lafferty, and on May 30, 1885, The New York Times reported on its opening: “C.A. Brandenburg, manager, hosted a dinner, followed by a tour to the top where he pointed out ‘the spray from Niagara Falls, the Mississippi River, a clump of trees in Yellowstone Park, Rio Janeiro [sic], the Bay of Biscay and even the steeples of London and Paris – remarkable, and all for 10 cents!”

This was Coney Island, three great amusement parks – Steeplechase, Luna Park and Dreamland – each outlined and adorned with yet another fresh and wondrous sight: the electric light bulb. When the sun went down, what appeared to those prospective new Americans was the whole island, strung with frozen pearls of fire, spinning and plunging and whirling. Coney Island, even in daylight, was a stunning experience.

By 1910, just inside Luna Park’s main gate were two crosses plunged into a red heart in some transported bit of Catholic iconography; pilgrims entered a fairy-tale ramble of minarets and onion domes, turrets and colonnades, lagoons and trellises. It was Frederick Thompson’s architectural jungle: grossly extravagant amusement created for the hell of it. The moody alcoholic designed many of Coney Island’s rides like the Steeplechase Ride – a relatively minor jaunt on mechanical horses, until suddenly challenged by an obstacle course that included a dwarf in a harlequin suit taking a swing at legs with a cattle prod. Crowds of New Yorkers in bleachers got a big laugh out of it.

Still other exhibitions reflected the era’s less politically correct sense of entertainment, like revelers watching actual premature babies struggling for life in a sideshow that featured the country’s first incubator. You could visit a year-round village filled with dwarfs and midgets, and view African tribesmen living in actual grass huts. Even the furies of the latest global disasters were introduced on huge stages – hurricanes, floods, volcanic eruptions and war. All products of a time when Americans liked their entertainment tinged with a taste of danger.

Coney was more than a Sunday outing. It was a place where immigrants were literally assimilated in the roiling holiday mobs, a place where they could watch the pageant of their lives displayed like a movie. A conductor-driven rollercoaster called the “Rough Rider” once went ripping through the retaining wall, killing three passengers. It was up and running again the same day. To its wide-eyed audiences, Coney Island was close to real life. Was it any wonder one of the most popular attractions was a fake tenement building that was set on fire and the fire put out by fake firemen – every day, day after day – for a viewing public that itself lived in fire-trap tenements and lived in constant fear?

Coney Island finally played with fire too long, with Dreamland burning in 1911 and Luna Park closing after a fire in 1946. Steeplechase closed in 1964. But the Coney spirit lived on, imitated by the World’s Fairs in Chicago (1933) and New York (1939-40 and 1964-65), and in names of deteriorating amusement parks on the outskirts of many cities. None, though, can hold a candle to that frozen fire that once burned so brightly along the sands of Long Island.

We are left with car chases, oil spills and hurricanes on CNN.

Immigrants Have Made Traditionalists Uneasy, But Controversy Will Soon Pass

A Roy Lichtenstein screen-print, *I Love Liberty*, 1982, sold for $27,500 at an October 2014 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Immigration is back in the news and it’s easy to forget this is not the first time. Out of the enormous industrial growth in the middle of the 19th century came an almost insatiable appetite for unskilled labor. The result was a tremendous wave of immigration, landing 26 million here between 1870 and 1920. They came from all over the world.

However, this was a new kind of immigrant, fashioned for an industrial society, and it made traditionalists uneasy, just as Thomas Jefferson had once been uncertain about the mixing of the American population. Prominent economists voiced concerns about people wholly incompetent as pioneers mixing with independent proprietors and threatening the democratic theories of the founders.

In 1870, over half of Americans toiled on the farm (close to Jefferson’s vision of yeoman farmers) and yet in the first decade of the 20th century, two-thirds of workers were in factories – semi-intelligent work described by Henry Ford as a job “the most stupid man could learn in two days.” The old immigrants of home-seekers had become new immigrants of job-seekers. A nativist movement was inspired to protect America for people of Anglo-Saxon stock.

This was not the first expression of this sentiment. In the 1850s, a secret society in New York City, the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, morphed into the Know-Nothing Party, which inveighed against the arrival of Irish and German Catholics and with them “popish alliances.” Although the Know-Nothings disappeared after 1860, the tendency toward defining Americans according to ethnicity came roaring back after the Civil War.

Today, we hold up the Statue of Liberty as our beacon to the world, but it was originally intended to be a symbolic gift from sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi over admiration for American liberties, not a statement about immigration. It was only after Emma Lazarus’ give-me-your-tired sonnet was added to the statue 17 years later that the image of America as an asylum for the oppressed and poor of the world would emerge.

And even this was followed by the Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918, which allowed the government to prosecute pacifists, socialists and left-wing organizations, all of which had sizable immigrant followers. Then the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 imposed strict quotas to preserve America as an Anglo-Saxon nation. For the next 40 years, immigration slowed to a trickle and in the 1930s there were years when more people left America than came to live here.

It is a complicated story, but we have thrived as a nation due to the many, many contributions of immigrants. I predict this controversy too shall pass … as it has every time in the past.

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is president and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as chairman and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].