Vanderbilt Celebrates Himself

In his posting of June 12, John Steele Gordon speaks of the bronze freize that Commodore Vanderbilt commissioned to celebrate his life and works on the facade of his new freight depot in downtown Manhattan. It is perhaps not surprising that this project wasn't unanimously embraced by the shareholders of the Hudson River Railroad, who, after all, had footed the bill; many would have agreed with George Templeton Strong’s condemnation of this hideous group of molten images. But I tend to agree with the New York Herald writer that John quotes: This beautiful work is a monument of the genius and progress of the age.

I say this on the evidence of a stereoscopic view I bought some years back. It seems to have been issued soon after the depot was finished in 1869, and it shows a slice of the center of the high-relief bronze. In the middle stands its only surviving detail, the statue of Vanderbilt, opening his left hand as if to say, Look what I have summoned. To his left, a big, oceangoing walking-beam side-wheeler trails brazen gouts of smoke; before it a pier is heavy with nautical fixtures—an anchor, a windlass—and bales of cargo (atop one of which mysteriously crouches either a big dog or a small bear). On the proprietors right is the mighty complement to his maritime enterprise, a passenger train passing what appears to be Grand Central Terminal. The Heralds man is right, I think; whether or not Vanderbilt’s intention was solely to celebrate himself, he succeeded in making a tribute, both literal and allegorical, to the heroic creative industrial energies of the nineteenth century, and its destruction in the heedless 1920s seems an much an act of civic vandalism as the leveling of Penn Station a generation later.