Garbo Walks: Into The Modern

When Garbo walked to the intersection of 53rd Street and Park Avenue in 1953, she would have encountered the brand new Lever House (1950 - 1952), a glass-box modernist building by Gordon Bunshaft of the firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. At the time it opened, the Lever House, designed in part to showcase the cleanliness of Lever's soap products, heralded the much-delayed arrival of the International Style in the U.S. Fifty years or so after its construction, the green-tinted Lever House looks humble in the company of nearby giants. I am less than crazy about the placement of Damien Hirst's Virgin Mother in the plaza courtyard, but I look forward to seeing his shark at The Met.

During Garbo's first few years on E. 52nd Street she would have lived with the construction of the Seagram Building (1954 - 1958) by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (and Philip Johnson) at the corner of E. 52nd and Park Ave. The steel and bronze skyscraper, set back from Park behind sleek fountains, stands as a paradigm for the well-made modern glass office building.

In 1953 the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at the Museum of Modern Art opened at 21 West 53rd St., just one part of a series of additions to MoMA over the course of the 1950s and 1960s.

The Whitney Museum opened on Madison Ave. at 75th St. in 1966. Designed by Marcel Breuer to explicitly look unusual on the street, the Whitney's upside-down pyramid construction nevertheless seems understated. I have walked passed it a few times thinking it looks refreshingly simple and small.

Throughout the mid-century decades, Garbo walked by and around these modernist design revolutions, just as we, too, await the clearing of the pathways around our own high-tech and curvy glass-sculptured buildings. I like how the older moderns have settled into the landscape over time. I only hope ours can fare as well.

Image: E. 52nd St. at Park. The Seagram Building on the left, looking east down E. 52nd toward Garbo's apartment building, The Campanile, at the far south end of the street.

See complete Garbo Walks.