And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban nights are like the night there.

I have looked down across the city from high windows. It is then that the great buildings lose reality and take on their magical powers. They are immaterial; that is to say, one sees but the lighted windows. Squares after squares of flame, set and cut into the Aether.

Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will. —Ezra Pound.

Pound’s words are from Patria Mia – a series of 11 essays published in  The New Age magazine in 1912.  The manuscript was then sent to Poetry where it was lost. It was discovered in 1950 and published in book form by Ralph Fletcher Seymour, Chicago. The Patria Mia essays are  available to read online thanks to the Modernist Journals Project.

In Patria Mia Pound delivers opinions about America and Americans and about the arts  and the relations between and amongst them.  He had spent eight months in New York after his travels in Europe and he was taken by the vigor and grandeur of the city and by its contrasts and contradictions.

While the city was hectic and hostile, Pound was dazzled by the night skyline and the wonders of electricity that transformed  a tawdry Coney island into a place of magic

America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation. Or, perhaps, it is a nation and has not yet achieved an “ Urbs.” And as yet there has been no nation in the world which could be called properly a nation until there arose within it some city “whereto all roads did lead.” After such city has arisen people forget that what seems one nation had aforetime been many.

New York was that nation-defining city and in the architecture Pound saw the hope for a risorgimento – a cultural and social renaissance establishing the nation with its own distinct identity and aesthetic.

 And this is a Renaissance. As touching the metropolitan tower; the ‘campanile’ form has been obsolete for some centuries. When towns ceased to need watch towers the ‘campanile’ ceased as a living architectural mode. With the advance of steel construction it has become possible to build in the proportions of the campanile something large enough to serve as an office building. This tower is some 700 odd feet 164 high and dominates New York as the older towers dominate hill towns of Tuscany. It is white and very beautiful.

And, beside, it is Dr. Parkhurst’s new church, a gem to be sought from afar. (For God’s sake don’t go in while the assistant is preaching.) This scrap of building has, perhaps, little to do with the future, but it is a re-birth, a copy, as good as anything Palladio cribbed from Vitruvius.

This church was the Stanford White designed Presbyterian church built in high renaissance style in 1906 Not to be outdone by the skyscrapers, its entrance was through a portico supported by six pale green granite columns, fully 30 feet tall.  It was demolished starting in 1919 to make way for an 18-story  Metropolitan Life annex. (The columns were used in the construction of the Hartford Times building in Connecticut.)

Manhattan! Has it not buildings that are Egyptian in their contempt of the unit? For that is the spirit of the down-town architecture, as surely as it was the spirit of the Pyramids. The Egyptian monarch despised the individual slave as effectively as the American despises the individual dollar . And here, not in the contempt, perhaps, but surely in the architecture, is our first sign of the “alba” America, the nation, the embryo of New York. The city has put forth its own expression. The first of the arts arrives. Architecture that has never wholly perished from the earth, that has scarcely ever slept for so long a period as the other arts, has appeared amongst us.

For is she not more closely allied to use and to the sense of property than are the other arts?

Did not the palaces of the Renaissance have an advertising value? Is it anything but normal that architecture should be first to answer the summons? At any rate, in these new buildings the mire of commerce has fostered the beautiful leaf. So commerce has, it would seem, its properties worthy of praise-apart from its utility.

And in our architecture the artist may set his hope, for after a people has learned a fineness of beauty from good buildings, after it has achieved thus the habit of discrimination, it will not be long patient of unsound and careless production in the other arts. And the intellectual hunger for beauty, which is begotten of comparisons, will not rest content with one food only.

Pound also admired the Penn Station building – built in 1910 and demolished to the great distress of many in 1963.  He took strenuous exception to the plan for the New York Public Library that was completed in 1911.

“May God smite all his sort with the pip”

 The plan displeased him, so he went to the architects offices almost daily to shout at them. https://www.nytimes.com/1972/11/02/archives/ezra-pound-a-man-of-contradictions.html

And he objected to the view from his apartment on 4th Avenue (now Park Avenue South)

There is on Gramercy Park, and in sight of what were my windows, a candid and new building. Its ground plan is the 1 shape you would have if you took three rows of three squares each on a checker-board and then removed the middle square of the front row. And as the indenture is in shadow, one seems, in looking down Twenty-first Street and across the square, to see two twin towers. And this also is a very delightful use of the campanile motif. But the ass who built it has set a round water-tank just where it spoils the sky line. And for the next three decades nothing will prevent this sort of imbecility.

It is convenient to have the water-tank higher than the top floor. To build the water-tank as a turret, retaining the lines of the building, is, and will remain, beyond their aspiration.

The new library is another example of botch, of false construction. The rear elevation is clever, it is well adapted to the narrow demand of light for the book stacks. But they have tried to conceal a third floor behind the balustrade. The balustrade becomes false, the third floor shows like an undershirt projecting beyond a man’s cuffs. The shape of the roof is hideous.

As the library is surrounded by tall buildings, the library is constantly seen from above. It violates the basic principle of art which demands that the artist consider from what angle and elevation his work is to be seen.

I found it impossible to make a younger member of the architect’s firm understand any of this. He said they needed the room. He would have said also in the other case that “they needed the tank.”

May God smite all his sort with the pip and send us another generation.

Pound was suffering from jaundice but he was also soured and disillusioned by New York.

When a brilliant person or specialist in London gets tired of a set of ideas, or of a certain section of his conversation, or when he happens to need the money, he refrigerates the ideas into a book. And the London reviewers and journalists review it, and absorb some of the ideas, and dilute them to ten percent. And the American press dilutes the result to ten percent of the derivative strength, and the American public gets the “hogwash”. And if you try to talk on any such exotic matters with Americans, you get the hogwash. And if you have any vital interest in art and letters, and happen to like talking about them you sooner or later leave the Country.

He persuaded his parents to pay for his passage back to Europe. It was almost thirty years before he would return.

Fifteen years later Georgia O’Keeffe moved into an apartment at the Shelton Hotel (New York Marriott East Side) that had opened in 1924. It had been conceived as an enormous 1200 room bachelor hotel complete with a swimming pool, solarium, pool rooms, squash courts and an infirmary. This was one of several New York apartments she shared with Alfred Stieglitz that offered dramatic views of the growing city. 

“One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.”

O’Keefe created more than two dozen images of skyscrapers and skyline including one of the Shelton Hotel.

Her East River from the Shelton Hotel,1928 has a different kind of beauty. It’s bird’s eye panorama of the Long Island City, Queens waterfront across the East River. Smokestacks pour out pollution and the air is hazy and the color diminished. Factory chimneys pour out smoke, the river seems a lifeless slate, the air is thick and the distance grey and smoggy. It’s an industrial scene of smoke and chimneys. Prosperity comes at a price. 

Decades later, another artist painted the view from his NYC hotel room.

There’s another Hockney view of the city through the window in this painting that was sold this in March this year for £37,661,250 at Christie’s in London.

Alice Neel, Edward Hopper and Lois Dodd and many others have painted New York City through the window. Here is a small selection:

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