Lingering Icons of Empire

In retirement, one has more time to stare--stare at just about anything. And so, as I waited for my wife outside of a shoe store in Rockefeller Center, I looked up at a building I had known all my life, passed by many times, and never given much thought to. It was the door that caught my attention at first. It took me a while to figure out what was going on. Ultimately, I got the idea. What I was looking at was the "British Empire Building," constructed in 1932, the year the complex of buildings went up.

What most caught my attention was the series of bas-reliefs, awash in gold leaf, situated over the door and just below the crest of the Empire. Based on the nature of the art work, the building was devoted to trade and therefore immortalized--in personified form--the commodities that had helped to create the large fortunes for the empire. Depicted were salt, wheat, wool, coal, fish, cotton and tobacco--the essential products upon which a people's very survival depend.

Now, as I say, I have more time on my hands nowadays. Born in Brooklyn, I have spent over fifty years making excursions into "the city" and exploring its almost infinite wonders--from the glitter of Times Square to the quietude of the reading room at the Public Library. Every district--I could almost say every "block"-- of the city's many districts holds memories for me. They are memories associated with early adolescent excursions, (in the fifties, subway exploration was a safe enterprise for twelve year olds), going out on dates to the big movie houses or Broadway theaters, later, taking my own children in to explore the museums and cultural centers... A real list would be too long.

Each passage in life, however, gives one different "lenses" through which to view one's environment, and, of late, given our nation's tendency to empire, I am impressed by the icons of power that surround us. They have been with us for a long time, now. Many are overhead: the Con Edison beacon, the Chrysler Building's car ornament "griffins," the seemingly endless symbols of a not so secret Masonic "trust" that guides the economies of the Anglo-American Empire--from the murals in the Museum of Natural History to the golden pyramids (echos of our dollar note) that cap so many of the city's nineteenth and early twentieth century skyscrapers.

What jars me into another level of consciousness on this particular day is the special form that these personifcations of such basics as sugar, salt, fish and wool take on the art work atop the entry way to the British Empire Building. I am glad to have taken my camera with me so that I can capture these images and study them at my leisure. Often, I find, my initial reaction is one of shock or amusement. "How do they get away with this?" is a thought that has entered my mind more than once standing in a New York City street. Of course, we are fortunate that there has been no itinerant gang of political correctness police tearing down the politically incorrect art work that we have accumulated over the years, like some post-Soviet squad tearing down the glut of Lenin's statues. Whether we consider a given work art or artifact, the work often has value as history and should be preserved.

Yet, I suspect looking up at these particular doors that the only thing that has saved them is that they have become so part of the landscape that few pause to notice. It is a little bit like so-called white noise--it's there but it is "whited out" in the torrent of other sounds. It is tobacco and cotton that I here find most fascinating. How otherwise account for the fact that these racist images linger over our heads on New York's most prestigious shopping street? It is a bit a like the bare-breasted third world beauties that once (and to some extent still) populate the pages of the National Geographic. These girls are not just bare-breasted. This is not about that, that is, it is not just about art. They are slave girls. And then I think, am I being too sensitive here? Perhaps this door honors the women who once--in chains--harvested the cotton and tobacco of the Anglo-American empire.