In the wind... The start of a century Cell phones, ATMs, airplanes, power At 10:24 a.m. on October 15, 1947, plants, railroads, and thank goodness, Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager flew icemakers just kept on running. However the X-1 experimental aircraft faster than accurately that moment was defined, it the speed of sound. That’s 761.2 miles was meaningless—a randomly identified per hour at 59-degrees Fahrenheit. It milestone amongst the multitude. was quite a technological achievement. Then we worried about what we call You have to generate a lot of power to those years. The oughts? The Ohs? move a machine that fast. But there was Shifting from ninety-seven, ninety-eight, a spiritual and metaphysical aspect to ninety-nine to oh-one, oh-two, oh-three that feat. Engineers were confident that seemed impossible. I managed, and so they could produce sufficient power, but did you. they were not sure that a machine would survive the shock wave generated by a Centennials machine outrunning its own noise. They The twentieth century started with- supposed that the plane would vaporize, out the computer-induced hoopla, but or at least shatter, scattering Yeager-dust I suppose that our heroes—Widor, Puc- across the landscape. cini, Saint-Saëns, Dvorák, and Thomas In his swaggering ghost-written Edison—watched in suspense as the autobiography, Yeager, he casually men- clock ticked past the witching hour. tions that he had broken ribs (probably The real upheaval happened more than Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building Frank Gehry’s 8 Spruce Street garnered in a barroom brawl) and had thirteen years later. On May 29, 1913, to rig a broomstick to close the cockpit Ballets Russe danced the premiere of water more than 700 feet up. Just think (Episcopal). Three blocks west on the hatch. He took off, flew the daylights out Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring at of that: pulling up to the curb in a shiny corner of 10th and Fifth Avenue stands of the thing, and landed, pretty much Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Stravinsky new 1913 Chalmers Touring Car, and Church of the Ascension (Episcopal). just like any other flight. By the noise, had used traditional and familiar instru- stepping in an elevator to go up fifty- Both are “Gothicky” buildings—Grace and by the cockpit instruments, he knew ments and all the same notes that people seven stories. Those folks in Kansas City is whitish with a tall pointed spire, while he had broken the sound barrier, but to were used to, but the way he arranged would have flipped their wigs. Ascension is brownish with a stolid Yeager’s undoubted pleasure and later the tonalities, the maniacal organization The Woolworth building is still there square tower with finials. Both have comfort, the worries of the skeptics of rhythms, the angular melodies, and a hundred years later. Like The Rite pretty urban gardens. Both are prosper- proved untrue. the radical orchestration set the place of Spring, it’s a staple in our lives, and ous, active places. And both have radical in an uproar. The bassoon that played it seems a little less radical than it did new 21st-century organs. Invisible barriers those haunting melismatic opening solos a century ago. After all, a few blocks Taylor & Boody of Staunton, Virginia, Remember Y2K? As the final weeks could have been used to play continuo away at 8 Spruce Street, by the foot of is coming toward completion of the of 1999 ticked by, residents of the world in a Bach cantata the same day. Legend the Brooklyn Bridge, the new tallest installation of their Opus 65 at Grace wondered if we would survive the magi- has it that the audience couldn’t contain residential building in the Americas Church, where Patrick Allen is the cal, mystical moment between Decem- itself and there was wild disturbance. (seventy-six stories and 876 feet), Organist and Master of the Choristers. ber 31, 1999, and January 1, 2000. Of How wonderful for a serious musical designed by Frank Gehry, towers like a In 2011, Pascal Quoirin of Saint-Didier, course, the world has survived some composition to stir people up like that. maniacal grove of polished corkscrews. Provence, France, completed installa- twenty-five changes of millennia since I haven’t seen people so worked up Gehry took the functional aesthetic of tion of a marvelous instrument at Church we started to count time, but this would since the Boston Bruins failed to win the the glass-and-steel Seagram Building of the Ascension, where Dennis Keene is be the first time with computers. The Stanley Cup. (375 Park Avenue, designed by Mies Organist and Choirmaster. myth that computers would not be able van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, built Both of these organs have as their to count to 2000 had us hyperventilat- Everything’s up to date in in 1958), and gave it a Cubist ethic by cores large tracker-action organs based ing as we ran to ATMs to grab as much Kansas City twisting the surfaces to create the sig- on historic principles—and Principals. cash as we could. People refused to About five weeks before Stravinsky nature rippling effects. And both have large romantic divisions make plans that would have them aloft tried to ruin the theater in Paris, the How poetic that the Woolworth inspired by nineteenth- and twentieth- in airplanes at that horrible moment, Woolworth Building designed by Building and 8 Spruce Street, opened century ideals. Both are exquisite pieces supposing that cockpit computers would Cass Gilbert was opened on Lower almost exactly a century apart, stand just of architecture and furniture, and both fail and planes would fall from the sky. Broadway in New York, April 24, 1913. a few blocks apart, trying to out-loom have been built by blending the highest The collapse of the world’s economy was Like Stravinsky, Cass Gilbert used a each other. I took these photos of them levels of traditional craftsmanship with predicted. Public utilities would cease to traditional vocabulary—the prickles while standing in the same spot on City modern materials and methods. function. Nuclear power plants would and arches given us by the Gothic Hall Plaza. At Church of the Ascension you can overheat, and soufflés would fall. cathedrals. But Rodgers & Hammer- Frank Woolworth made a fortune in play the core organ from a three-manual As the clock ticked closer to midnight stein’s “gone and built a skyscraper retail, the Sam Walton of his day. F. W. mechanical keydesk, and the entire on New Year’s Eve, we waited breath- seven stories high” was not as high as Woolworth stores dotted the country, instrument from a separate four-manual lessly. Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen…some- a building ought to go. Cass Gilbert making goods of reasonable quality electric console. At Grace Church, the times it causes me to tremble…eleven, went fifty-seven stories—792 feet; the available to residents of small towns. whole organ plays from a four-manual ten, nine, eight, seven…all good children building remained the tallest in the However, I doubt that anything sold detached mechanical console, and con- go to heaven…four, three, two, one… world until 1930. Gilbert hung those in his stores would have been found in tacts under the keyboards allow access Humpf. classic Gothic features on a high-tech his houses. His principal residence, also to electric couplers and the few high- I have no idea how the venerable structure and startled the world of designed by Cass Gilbert, was at the pressure windchests that operate on astronomers settled on how to organize architecture and commerce. corner of Fifth Avenue and 80th Street electric action. the calendar and define our concept of Besides the technical achievement of in Manhattan, across the street from the A more detailed account of the time. I imagine a committee of bearded supporting a massive structure that tall, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among organ at Church of the Ascension has and wizened wise men gathered in a pub, the building had thirty-four newfangled dozens of priceless artifacts was a large been published (see The Diapason, throwing darts at a drawing of a clock. elevators. The engineers executing Gil- three-manual Aeolian organ. Woolworth November 2011) and no doubt, we can However they did it, they didn’t fool us. bert’s design had to figure out how to get was one of Aeolian’s prime customers, expect one about the Grace Church and, rare among that heady clientele, he organ—so I’ll limit myself to general could play the organ. observations, and let the organbuild- His estate Winfield (the “W” of F. W. ers and musicians involved speak for Woolworth) on Long Island boasted the themselves. I admire the courage and first full-length 32-foot Double Open inventiveness exhibited in the creation Diapason to be built for a residence of these two remarkable instruments. organ. Now that would shake your cham- I expect that purists from both ends pagne glasses. of the spectrum will be critical, or at Woolworth’s funeral was held in the least skeptical of these efforts to bridge Fifth Avenue mansion. Frank Taft, artis- the abyss. But I raise the question of tic director of the Aeolian Company, was whether purism or conservative attitudes on the organ bench. are the best things for the future of our instrument. We study history, measure The twenty-first-century pipe organ pipes, analyze metal compositions, and There’s a lot going on here in lower study the relationships between ancient Manhattan.