The Gilded City: Beaux Arts New York

Between the 1880s and WWI, New York was transformed from a provincial brownstone town into a glittering metropolis of dazzling mansions, magnificent hotels, imposing railway stations and world-class museums.

Cornelius Vanderbilt Residence, ca. 1908. MCNY

Join distinguished cultural historian and author David Garrard Lowe for an illustrated lecture about this golden age in the city’s public built environment and the work of beaux-arts architects like Charles McKim, Stanford White, and Richard Morris Hunt, who gave New York its supreme Gilded Age monuments: Pennsylvania Station, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New York Public Library.

The Americans who designed these landmarks were influenced by the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris, which taught that the best design should be based on the classical architecture of ancient Rome and the incomparable edifices of the Renaissance.

Co-sponsored by The Beaux Arts Alliance and presented in conjunction with Gilded New York.

Reservations required.

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