Never Built New York | News | Architonic

In the summer of 1833, painter Thomas Cole sent Luman Reed, one of New York’s wealthiest merchants, a detailed prospectus for a series of canvases he wanted to display in Reed’s no. 13 Greenwich Street mansion. Cole told his patron that the paintings would chart man’s “progress from Barbarism to Civilization, to Luxury . . . to the state of Ruin & Desolation.” The artist struggled for some time before he devised a suitable title, hitting upon The Course of Empire. The oils, which proved to be a hit, were more than an allegory of a great nation’s or city-state’s rise and fall. In a sense, Cole inaugurated the essential idea of New York City: He self-consciously aligned the fate of his adopted city with that of the Roman Empire. What lay very much on the surface of Cole’s paintings was a teeming mercantile city always edging the brink of collapse. The engine of New York’s economic prowess, he suggested, would invariably outrun the brake of its cultural and social compact. Between these t… continue

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