Forgotten but Not Gone: Great Art Decays in Early Hall of Fame

Abraham Lincoln has a black smudge on his nose. Mark Twain has a yellow streak down his forehead. Thoreau’s face is two colors and Whistler’s is so dirty that his mother wouldn’t recognize him.

Welcome to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, where a great collection of portrait sculpture is slowly disintegrating.

Bronze busts of 102 Americans, from George Washington to George Washington Carver, line the hall’s open-air colonnade on a bluff in the Bronx that overlooks the Harlem River, the wooded hills of upper Manhattan and the Palisades of New Jersey.

This was the nation’s first hall of fame, but today its neoclassical elegance and fine views are mocked by the crumbling neighborhood around it and an indifferent public. Out of space, out of money and out of time, the hall offers evidence in granite and bronze that fame is fleeting indeed.

Operations Frozen

Attendance, once 50,000 visitors a year, is now a 10th of that. No new member has been elected since the mid-1970s, and busts of the last five members chosen still have not been made .

There is, at any rate, no room for them. All the niches in the colonnade are filled and many of the busts are disfigured from neglect. Some of the sculptures have begun to corrode, and within 50 years will be seriously damaged.

“I tried to get the government interested,” said Jerry Grundfest, the hall’s last director, who resigned about 10 years ago. “I got lots of sympathy and no cash.”

The Bronx Community College campus, where the hall is located, isn’t sure what to do about the busts. Even if it were, it doesn’t have the money to do it.

So, in an age when everyone may be famous for 15 minutes, the original hall of fame languishes in obscurity. “It’s a forgotten piece of America,” said Grundfest. “It was a great place, but the world changed.”

Oblivion was never envisioned for “the American Pantheon” at the turn of the century when New York University made the hall a part of its new campus on the highest natural point in the city.

Classical Architecture

The hall’s architecture and sculpture evoked the grandeur of Greece and Rome. Stanford White designed the 630-foot-long, 10-foot-wide arcade to surround one of his own masterpieces, NYU’s Gould Library. The tile roof of the arcade was supported by granite columns spaced between the niches that hold the busts.

Every five years, an elections committee of 100 distinguished Americans chose new members. As Mr. Dooley, Finley Peter Dunne’s character, put it, the hall was “th’ place where the names iv the most famous men is painted . . . an’ on’y th’ dead wans iligeable.”

The busts, scaled slightly larger than life, were made by prominent sculptors such as Daniel Chester French, Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Frederick MacMonnies. The installation ceremonies were attended by the likes of Thomas A. Edison, Herbert Hoover, Gen. John Pershing and Mary Pickford. If a poet recited verse written for the occasion, no one thought it was corny.

Memberships Debated

It was a time when fame meant more than mere celebrity. Arguments raged on editorial pages and street corners, in classrooms and barrooms, over which men--and whether any women--should be admitted to the hall.

There was plenty to argue about, especially in retrospect.

What can one say about electors who, in 1915, chose actress Charlotte Cushman in the artist category over painter John Singleton Copley and landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted? Who, in 1940, picked a poet named Sidney Lanier over Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson and Louisa May Alcott? Who, in 1960, elected composer Edward Alexander MacDowell instead of Winslow Homer or Will Rogers?

Some certifiably famous Americans, such as Henry Ford, were never elected. Others, such as Paul Revere, received not a single vote.

Elizabeth Seton, the first American saint of the Roman Catholic faith, was shut out six times, but she did get some votes in 1920 and 1955. That’s more than can be said for Joyce Kilmer, author of the poem “Trees,” who polled a goose egg on each of five ballots.

Campaigns for Individuals

There were special-interest candidates. Electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla received just one vote in 1970, after years of zealous advocacy by fellow Slavic-Americans. Southerners unsuccessfully championed Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, who would have been the only hall member to have been stripped of U.S. citizenship.

Red Cross founder Clara Barton was not elected until 1976 because of a campaign waged against her by her successor. Eleanor Roosevelt was among those who argued for Barton’s inclusion.

A trip to the Hall of Fame was a regular feature of school life in the New York area. As late as the 1960s, the World Book Encyclopedia devoted more than a page to the hall, including members’ names.

The hall’s decline paralleled that of the southwest Bronx. People moved out by the thousands in the 1960s and were replaced by a larger, poorer population of blacks and Latinos. Crime, especially arson, became commonplace.

In 1973, NYU retreated to its Washington Square campus in downtown Manhattan, leaving University Heights to Bronx Community College.

Some, including power broker Robert Moses, urged the hall’s relocation to Washington or another, more accessible site. But the hall was a political hostage: Elected officials regarded its removal from the Bronx as unacceptable but lacked any other plan for saving it.

Arcade Is Restored

A new board of trustees could not raise enough money to make the hall self-supporting. Grundfest resigned and the membership elections were suspended. In 1981, with the colonnade on the brink of collapse, the Hall of Fame was closed for repairs.

Now, a decade after the installation of the last bust--Carver’s--the state has completed a $2-million restoration of the colonnade. In addition, the college has made a videotape for school groups and trained students to act as tour guides.

Visitors still are few, even though admission is free and the hall is open daily. Tourists and art connoisseurs are reluctant to leave Manhattan and the hall’s surrounding neighborhood--rubble-strewn lots, burned-out buildings, stripped car wrecks and crumbling sidewalks--is not inviting.

Meanwhile, the busts continue to decay.

This fall, sculptor Granville Carter, a former president of the National Sculpture Society, visited the hall for the first time in five years. He said: “The greatest collection of portrait sculpture in this country is gradually eroding.”

The newer busts retain much of the rich, deep brown hues of bronze, but most of the older ones are streaked by limestone drippings from the ceiling or covered with a green patina so thick that it obscures some facial features.

Face Unrecognizable

When a group of Mount Holyoke College alumni visited the hall to see the only known bust of the school’s founder, Mary Lyon, they were horrified: Decades of exposure to air pollution had almost erased her features.

“You don’t see a face, you see a discolored bronze,” says Grundfest.

Acidic air pollution also has invaded the bronzes. A chemical reaction, still largely invisible, slowly eats away at the metal. Eventually it will pit and irreversibly damage the surfaces.

For Carter, walking through the arcade was like running the gantlet: Past the bust of Saint-Gaudens. (“ . . .The dean of American sculptors. What a shame!”) Past Samuel Clemens. (“Poor Mark Twain! It looks like he has egg on his face!”) Past his own bust of social worker Jane Addams. (“I’m ashamed of its appearance.”)

Restoration, he said, could cost $1,500 for each bust, or about $150,000, and should be followed by twice-yearly washing and waxing.

Treasures of Sculpture

The more valuable busts are probably worth $10,000 to $40,000 each, according to museum and gallery curators. Saint-Gaudens’ bust of Lincoln is one of only two in existence; all four busts by French, and all three by MacMonnies, are originals.

Carol Banks, an aide to Bronx Community College President Roscoe Brown, said no expert opinion had been sought on their condition. When told of Carter’s advice, she said the school might seek restoration funds.

Brown, however, opposes moving the exhibit.

Impoverished in a time when sculpture commands record prices and neglected in a city where art and architecture are exalted, the Hall of Fame for Great Americans seems to have an unpromising future.

Yet the hall has a role, Grundfest insists: “In past centuries, fame was for kings and saints. In a democracy, we have the right to decide who the great people are.

“Some things just have to lie fallow for a while,” he adds. “I still get calls about it. There’s still interest out there.”