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NYT Syndicate
New York City has nearly 750 museums and galleries that showcase paintings, dinosaurs, ships, firetrucks and gangsters, to name a few. But when it comes to a certain category of lost New York, the most intriguing collection is in a museum 175 miles away: stone fragments that once adorned city buildings.
They are a throwback to an era of embellishment ” scores of exuberant faces positioned cheek by jowl, sometimes literally; angels and sea monsters; griffins and goddesses; smiling cherubs and stern knights in helmets. They now reside in the Anonymous Arts Museum, in a hamlet where the soundtrack outside, when there is one, is not taxis honking or bicyclists shouting"Get out of the way!" It is roosters crowing.
The museum is a shrine to decoration from the days before long smooth walls of glass. But the museum's home is not made of the materials it celebrates: granite, marble, limestone, sandstone and various kinds of terra cotta. The building is all wood.
The artefacts on display came from demolition sites in New York, starting in the late 1950s. They were salvaged by an art dealer, Ivan Karp.
He was known in the art world for pioneering the way for galleries in SoHo and for promoting Pop Art pillars like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg. But he also lamented the loss of the cityscape he had grown up with.
So, operating as a self-described"rubble rouser," he set out to save what he could, driving around in a beat-up Jeep in search of cornices, capitals and gargoyles. Many were high up. A few would have been right at eye level for a second-story man.
Karp stashed some of his finds in the basement of his gallery on West Broadway, but in the 1980s, he and his wife bought a building and opened the museum. They called it the Anonymous Arts Museum because they never found a signature on any of the artifacts they retrieved.
Like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it has its presidential portraits. Abraham Lincoln, in limestone, came from a long-gone building in Brooklyn. So did Chester A Arthur, the Vermont-born vice-president who moved into the White House after James A Garfield's assassination.
It also has Joe Dahms, who did the carpentry work and installed the artifacts, and is stronger for having lifted them all.
"Everything was start-to-finish heavy," he said one morning last month as he stood in front of an ornament labeled"Biblical head amidst vegetal ornament, c. 1880."
"It took four guys to lift that off the floor," he said."That thing was on a building."
Some would say this is actually stolen New York, since the artifacts were usually taken, sometimes after small cash payments to guards at demolition sites. Some would call the cash payments bribes. Preservationists would say that the items were destined to be destroyed, and that hauling them off to Charlotteville, about an hour's drive west of Albany, was a way of saving them.
But Marilynn Gelfman Karp said her husband's scavenging had the blessing of Mayor John V Lindsay.
"Mayor Lindsay gave us a letter, so that if we were stopped by the police, if the police tried to stop us from saving the ornament that was being smashed willy-nilly, we could show the letter," she recalled."It said, in mayorly terms: 'Cease and desist. These people have permission.'"
A stroll through the museum is an immersion in an era that began around 1875, when the city was beginning to climb skyward. That era lasted until just before World War I. Many of the carefully carved keystones and classical column capitals lasted until the heyday of urban renewal a couple of generations later, when wrecking crews pried them off.
"They weren't saving anything," Gelfman Karp said."When a building was under demolition, Ivan would go up to the foreman and say: 'See that up there? Bring it down gently.' Ivan would give him $10 and go back at the end of the day, and the foreman would tell him where it was."
The adventures of Karp, who died in 2012, fuelled the recent novel The Gargoyle Hunters by John Freeman Gill, a freelance writer who has contributed to The New York Times and The Atlantic. He took the title from the headline on a 1962 article in The New York Herald Tribune's Sunday magazine that he said described"a subculture of folks who haunted demolition sites to salvage endangered architectural sculptures during that period of sweeping urban renewal." Gill said his mother had done some gargoyle hunting. He said he had heard about Karp from her, and tracked him down in 2009.
The museum is open only three hours a week, from noon to 3 pm on Sundays, and only three months of the year, from Father's Day through August. Charlotteville is so far from the madding crowd that no one from New York"actually makes a trip here," Dahms said. He added that local residents come for the second floor, a separate museum about Charlotteville itself that Gelfman Karp assembled.
The Karps spent summers in Charlotteville, but at first Karp did not publicise where the museum was because"he didn't want artists besieging him with slides" to look at, Gelfman Karp said. The town had shown promise before the Civil War, with a couple of colleges and five general stores, but the colleges burned and the general stores foundered. Later a photographer from Vogue redid the town's one hotel"as a getaway place for the models," Dahms said, but he married one ”"and she decided she wanted a castle in France, and they moved on."
