The Hispanic Society of America. Part 2

The Hispanic Society of America was founded in 1904 by  Archer Milton Huntington to establish a free museum and research library representing the culture of Spain and the peoples it has influenced.  It is located in  the  neoclassical building on West 155.  Museum is open every day except Monday and is free. Just try to avoid in   hot summer -there is no air conditioning in the museum.

 I wrote about the history of museum a week ago, and now I'd like to talk about its' wonderful collection of the paintings,  ceramics and sculpture.
In the center of the museum there is a beautiful  two-story terra cotta main court  with a  the light-filled balcony  lined with paintings. The most renowned painting in the collection is Goya's portrait of the Duchess of Alba. There are three  portraits of Velasquez, "Saint Jerome"  and "Holy Family" by Domenikos Theotokopoulos, called El Greco and a lot of others, maybe not so well known paintings  on the walls.  


 There is a separate room with spectacular murals by the Spanish artist Juaquin Sorolla. Early in 1911, Sorolla visited the United States  with the exhibition and met museum founder Archer Huntington.     Later that year Sorolla   signed a contract  with Huntington to paint a series of oils on life in Spain. He completed the final panel by July 1919, was  by his own admission, exhausted   and  suffered a stroke in 1920, while painting a portrait in his garden in Madrid.



Paralyzed for over three years, he died on 10 August 1923. 
The Sorolla Room  opened to the public in 1926.  The room closed for remodeling in 2008, and the murals toured museums in Spain for the first time and had a great success. The Sorolla Room reopened in 2010, with the murals on permanent display.  The  murals range in size from 12 to 14 feet in height, and total 227 feet in length and are really  stunning. Each panel in Sorolla room is a beautiful scene of Spain. The murals are remarkable and amusing: luminous dancers, market sellers, paraders, penitents, cowboys, sheepherders.
  Sorolla murals reminded me  Thomas Hart Benton's "America Today Mural Rediscovered"  - the exhibition in the Metropolitan museum. "America Today"  depicts a panoramic sweep of rural and urban American life on the eve of the Great Depression.

Archer   Huntington was fascinated with the ancient past of the Hspanic world. He sponsored significant archeological expeditions near Sevilla, Spain on the site of the Roman city of Italica. Through these expeditions The Spanish society has been able to assemble the most important collection of Spanish antiques outside of Spain.


In addition to Ancient and classical sculpture collection contains extraordinary works dating from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century.
The collection of Spanish ceramics,  in the narrow hallways on the second  is one of the largest collections both in the U.S. and in Spain. The collection is arranged chronologically. The display begins with works in the Hispanic-Moresque style made in Al-Andalus (Moorish Iberia) during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and ends  with the piece from the twentieth century adorned with flapper and art deco zeal.





The museum has early first-century mosaics, medieval furniture, tomb effigies and a wonderful collection of 15th-century door knockers. There are also wood carvings, ivories, examples of hand-crafted gold and silver, as well as contemporary works.
I visited the museum last fall on a weekday. The museum was almost empty- really a well hidden secret...

Gun Hay Fat Choy! Parade in Chinatown

Gun Hay Fat Choy! That’s how you say “Happy New Year” in Chinese. According to Chinese astrology, each year (starting from Chinese New Year) is associated with an animal sign, occurring in a 12-year cycle. 2015 (4713) is the Year of Sheep (in some countries it is considered as Year of the Goat). The new year marks the beginning of the spring, the rebirth of the Earth. The Chinese words for New Year means “spring festival".

Chinese New Year starts with the New Moon on the first day of the new year and ends on the full moon 15 days later. Every day has it's own meaning. The first day   is “the welcoming of the gods of the heavens and earth”. On the second day, the Chinese pray to their ancestors as well as to all the gods.  The third and fourth days are for the sons-in-laws to pay respect to their parents-in-law.
 The entire house should be cleaned before New Year.  On New Year’s Eve, all brooms, brushes, dusters, dust pans and other cleaning equipment are put away.  Sweeping or dusting should not be done on New Year for fear that good fortune be swept away. 


New York has one of the oldest Lunar New Year celebrations in the U.S. It has survived a six-year ban on fireworks from 1997-2003—which is basically a six-year ban on banishing evil spirits.
Last year Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill into law that will allow New York City schools to have the option of closing in observance of Lunar New Year. Whether or not the school will close is left up to the discretion of each individual school.

This year the 16th Annual Chinatown Lunar New Year Parade in New York took place on Sunday, February 22.  More than 6,000 people  marched in  parade, that started at Mott street. Approximately half a million spectators lined the streets of Chinatown.  It was really crowded. I arrived a little bit later than I planned  but was able to find an excellent spot near the very end of parade so I made several pictures for my blog.



The Hispanic Society of America. Part 1

Only in New York  a cultural site of such   significance can go  mostly unnoticed -  and not only not only by tourists, but by New Yorkers as well. This is really a hidden gem in Washington Heights. If the museum, and especially the courtyard,   were near Central Park, it would be one of the City's most visited attractions. By the way, it is free!

You'll very likely be alone viewing works by Goya, Velasquez, and El Greco as well as a stunning collection of Spanish earthenware from the 16th through the 19th centuries. Walking into the complex from the street, there was  almost a ghostly feeling permeating the atmosphere. 


The Hispanic Society of America was founded on May 18, 1904, by Archer Milton Huntington, the stepson of railroad magnate. It  is located on Audubon Terrace between 155 and 156 Streets in the Upper West Side in the Beaux-Arts building  that dates from 1908.
Huntington had been thinking about building a museum since he was a child, when he used boxes as gallery rooms and pictures cut out of magazines. Archer spent a year learning Arabic and Spanish in preparation for his first journey to Spain.   He traveled often to Spain, collecting books, manuscripts, art, ceramics, textiles and coins. The master plan for the site was drawn up by his cousin, architect Charles P. Huntington. 


Archer Huntington took a deep personal interest in the details of every aspect of the building and design, even going so far as to design his own cases for the museum’s collection.
In 1904, Huntington’s collection included not only sculpture, paintings, maps, and archeological artifacts but also an extensive library, containing approximately 40,000 books .

The museum location was very remote. Archer   assumed that other museums would soon join him.  However the elevator and steel frames changed  the direction of real estate development in Manhattan at the beginning on the 20th century.  The city began   to develop vertically instead of going north as it was in the 19th century- so most of the organizations which located on Audubon Terrace were headed by or strongly connected to Huntington.
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Audubon Terrace was named   for naturalist and artist John James Audubon.  His book  "Birds of America" , printed between 1827 and 1838,   contains 435 life-sized watercolors of North American birds, all made from hand-engraved plates, and is considered to be the archetype of wildlife illustration.
With the success of the book, Audubon purchased a 14-acre estate along the Hudson River north of New York City. Part if his estate he  donated for the Trinity Church Cemetery in which he is now buried.
 The museum sits behind two sets of wrought-iron gates in a   plaza with   a   statue of El Cid(a Castilian nobleman and military leader in medieval Spain ) created by   Anna Hyatt,  the wife of  Archer  Huntington.  This heroic equestrian figure is surrounded by four smaller bronze statues of seated warriors. On either side is a small reflecting pool linked to the sculpture group by two flagpoles on bronze bases, also designed by Anna Huntington.

There are also  reliefs of Don Quixote and Boabdil  done by Anna  She was the first woman artist to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Initially the complex  included American Numismatic Society, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Geographic Society and the Museum of the American Indian, each housed in its own magnificent structure on Audubon Terrace. The New Yorker declared that Huntington had created a veritable “Parnassus.”

Soon  the Museum of the American Indian, the American Geographical Society and the American Numismatic Society  relocated, leaving behind only their deteriorating buildings.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters remains on the terrace but is open to the public only a few months a year. Boricua College, a private school, occupies the former Geographical Society building.


Between 1907 and 1930, The Hispanic Society of America was the foremost institution promoting Hispanic culture in the United States. When the Met sought to display the very best artifacts in its new Islamic galleries, it went to the Hispanic Society to arrange loans for 27 of its works.
The museum averages now are only 20,000 visitors a year, down from about 50,000 annually in the mid-1950s.  What a shame!
In my next post I'll tell more about museum collections - paintings, ceramics, sculptures.


Delmonicos-the first restaurant in New York

There are about 18 thousands full service restaurants in NY  and this number is increasing. It is impossible to believe now that two hundred years ago there were NO restaurant in New York аt all!  In the beginning of the 18th century  the city offered a little more than a the basics to the New Yorker in search of meal .
The Stranger's guide to the city of New York published in 1817 listed no restaurants at all, just hotels and boarding houses. There were taverns and  oyster cellars in the city.  Coffee houses could be found relatively easily, but there were no proper sit down restaurants, no cafes. Local taste ran to beef oysters and bread. Dining was not a leisure activity- New Yorkers eat   fast  - they do not want to waste time.
 Paris at that time  was completely different story.  There were about thousand of the restaurants in Paris in 1815  according to the annual guide Almanach des gourmands.


The history of New York  restaurant started with Delmonico brothers. John(Giovanni)  first came to America  from his native  Mairengo, which was Switzerland's southernmost area, adjacent to Italy.    He set up a wine business in New York. in 1826 his brother Peter (Pietro), the confectioner, arrive.  Two brothers used $20,000 in gold coins they saved  and  established a coffee-and-pastry shop at  23 Williams street.  A small shop  was selling classically prepared pastries, fine coffee and chocolate, bonbons, wines and liquors as well as Havana cigars.



 The number of the European visitors in New York was rapidly increasing   and business was growing. In 1829 brothers  rented a room in the adjoining building, at 25 William Street and by 1830, they rented the entire building, which served as a restaurant next to the cafe.  Building had decorative iron balconies and a marble entrance portico with four columns that were reputed  to be from the doorway of a villa in Pompeii. The new  restaurant represented a cultural shift toward French dining. In 1831 the third brother Lorenzo  joined them.
In 1834 the Delmonicos bought a 220 acre farm in present day Williamsburg, Brooklyn  to grow produce for the restaurant.  The brothers raised many vegetables that were not otherwise available in America and  introduced them to their American restaurant guests.


At the time   at  inns and hotels   you just ate what was on offer that day, for a fixed price, at the fixed times set by the establishment. Delmonico's introduced to America the relatively-new French concept of a menu, with different things you could choose at different prices. The menus were in French with English translations.
In 1837  restaurant issues the first printed American menu and lists "hamburger steak" as one of the priciest items for 10 cents.
When their restaurant burned  in the Fire of 1835, the Delmonico brothers acquired the site at  the corner of Beaver and William streets  and  erected an elegant four-story building that quickly became a favorite gathering place for New York society and visiting dignitaries.

Celebrities that frequented Delmonico's over the years included Samuel Morse, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Astors, Grand Dukes of Russia, Napoleon III, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain.
The business was so successful that from 1865 to 1888 it expanded to four restaurants of the same name. At various times, there were Delmonico's at ten locations.
By 1890, the South William Street restaurant had served since 1837, some 53 years.  In 1890 the Delmonicos replaced that building with the current eight-story building, which provided additional restaurant space as well as several office stories.  It also kept several touches from the original structure , including the Pompeii pillars and cornice that framed the entrance. These columns  had come to be regarded as talismans which patrons touched in passing for good luck.

1914 brought the world to war in Europe, and it impacted Delmonico's Restaurant.  Eating habits were changing. The Restaurant closed in 1923, a victim of Prohibition and rising real estate values in the Grand Central  district.
Wikipedea wrote: Almost immediately after the closing of the last Delmonico's, a number of imitators opened "Delmonico's" restaurants. The Delmonico family attempted to retain exclusive rights to the name, but a court ruled that with the closing of the last restaurant the name had passed into the public domain.
In 1929 a restaurateur called Oscar Tucci opened a revived Delmonico’s at 2 South William Street, which stayed in business until 1977.  Tucci  adopted the original menus and recipes.
Other Delmonicos have operated in the space from 1981 to 1992 and since 1998.


Dishes invented at Delmonico's include Baked Alaska, Delmonico Potatoes, Delmonico Steak, Eggs Benedict and Lobster Newburg.

"Baked Alaska" desert was created by Charles Ranhofer, the French chef of the   restaurant   to celebrate the United States purchase of Alaska from the Russians in 1867.  

Baked Alaska is made of ice cream placed in a pie dish lined with slices of sponge cake  and topped with meringue.

 Today you can still test the famous  desert  in the same restaurant where it was cooked for the first time in the history  in the end of 19th century.
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Fashion Week and the horses in Central Park

Twice a year for  two weeks the fashion crowd  takes over New York.  Twice a year, the world's fashion luminaries descend upon New York for an eight-day, eight-night, four-runway event: Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week.   This winter Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week  started on  yesterday, Wednesday 12.  

 Last year in September horse carriages in the Central Park were used  to signal the start of Fashion Week for the first time.   Fashion designer Vincent de Souza  placed his models  in the buggies.  De Souza previously called the horse-drawn carriage "the epitome of style," and said "there is no better canvas for a runway show than a carriage ride through Central Park."  
Vincent de Souza model
At the end of 2013  Mayor of New York City de Blasio said at  education press conference:  "We are going to get rid of horse carriages, period ".   Mayor wanted to replace the horses with the electric retro cars and animal rights activists supported him.  I published several posts about   the horses in Central Park and I do not support de Blasio. 
Last year Vincent de Souza showed his support for the city’s beloved horse carriage industry. “I grew up with horses. I understand what they’re saying but these horses are obviously well taken care of,” said one of his models.   
Just to month ago in December 2014  Council members Daniel Dromm and Ydanis Rodriguez introduced legislation  aimed at banning the city’s horse carriage industry, which would fulfill a campaign promise from Mayor Bill de Blasio. The animal rights activists chanted: “Hey hey, ho ho! We love Mayor de Blasio!”
 
Yesterday    fashion designer Viktor Luna  kicked off Fashion Week in the Central Park.   He placed his models on a  carriages.  The protesters,   had run after the carriages while they carried the models in a short circuit around the park — yelling and waving signs the entire time.
Luna said he grew up around horses as a kid in California, and thought the carriage horses’ riding gear dovetailed perfectly with his designs, predominantly high-end leather outerwear.  "The animals are being taken care of, I’ve done my research.", Luna said.
Victor Luna Lookbook
The Newspaper Daily News run the campaign "Save our horses!" .  Daily News said: The horse-drawn carriages of Central Park have become a high-profile target since Mayor de Blasio took office, vowing to make good on his campaign promise to ban the beloved industry.Animal rights groups insist the horses are mistreated — despite city-enforced regulations and oversight that protect the horses, which aren't allowed to work in extreme heat or cold, get regular vet check-ups, have large stalls, and get five weeks' vacation annually. The protest groups — spearheaded mainly by NYCLASS, a financial backer of de Blasio during the mayoral race — have angered many horse rescue groups, who say there are hundreds of equines in far worse situations that need to be saved.

New York Events February- March 2015

Ice Festival in the Central Park
 February 14, 2015, 3:00 pm to 7:00 pm

  Naumburg Bandshell, Mid-Park at 72nd Street

This Valentine’s Day, celebrate your love of Central Park at our fourth annual Ice Festival. Witness ice-carving artists from Okamoto Studio  use electric chain saws, chisels, and picks to transform more than 3,000 pounds of ice into a glistening replica of the Park’s most romantic statue  ― Romeo and Juliet by Milton Hebald (1966). Free.


Society of Illustrators ,128 East 63rd Street, New York, NY
Sketch Night on Tuesday February   10, 17, 24 from 6:30 - 9:30pm
with live music. Models will be nude with an occasional accessory.$15/ $7 seniors + students with I.D. There is a museum and a dining room in this old carriage house built in 1875


Camellia House Weekend, Long Island Arboretum
Saturday, February 21st and Sunday, February 22nd   11:00am – 4:00pm 
Come and enjoy our Annual Camellia House weekend featuring live music and activities for children in the Camellia House with one of the best collections of flowering camellias in US . 


New York City Restaurant Week, February 16 - March 6, 2015

The twice-annual discount dining event NYC Restaurant Week offers cheap dining deals at more than 300 restaurants in New York
Enjoy gourmet, 3-course $25 lunches and $38 dinners! 
Saturdays excluded, Sundays optional.
 You can make a booking here.

Ballet Flamenco  "Voces, Suite Flamenca"  at the City Center
30 West 56th Street, New York, NY
Mar 4 - 7, 2015


Direct from Spain, the reigning flamenco queen Sara Baras will lead a company of 15 performers in Voces, Suite Flamenca, a hugely entertaining show that captures all the drama and passion of flamenco.
Pre-show dance classes are free for ticketholders and open to all levels. Head to our beautiful grand tier lobby 90 minutes before curtain for an opportunity to mingle, dance, and enjoy tapas and Spanish wines.

 
The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec: Prints and Posters at Museum of Modern Art till March 22, 2015
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of an artist whose work came to define the bohemian Belle Epoque in Paris. In the late 1800s, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec won fame by depicting the performers, prostitutes and hedonistic patrons of the French capital's thriving dancehalls.  Before his death in 1901, at 36, he produced an enormous oeuvre, including more than 700 paintings and 368 prints and posters.Museum of Modern Art  presentsapproximately 100 of his printed works, selected from the museum’s permanent collection


Moscow City Ballet's Don Quixote at Brooklyn College
Sunday, March 15, 2015 at 3pm.
Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College continues its 60th Anniversary Season with Moscow City Ballet's Don Quixote ,inspired by Miguel de Cervantes' classic story.
 Tickets are $36-45 and can be purchased at BrooklynCenter.org or by calling the box office at 718-951-4500 (Tue-Sat, 1pm-6pm).
 

St. Patrick's Day Parade, March 17
The St. Patrick's Day Parade is one of New York City's greatest traditions. On this day, everyone is Irish in the Big Apple!  The Parade marched for the first time on March 17, 1762 - fourteen Years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence and today it is the largest Parade in the World. The parade marches up Fifth Avenue past St. Patrick's Cathedral at 50th Street all the way up 79th Street  and the Irish Historical Society, where the parade finishes around 4:30 - 5:00 pm



NYC Craft Beer Festival - at Lexington Avenue Armory  
68 Lexington Avenue (between 25th & 26th St)

Friday, March 14 Saturday, March 15 
 
Each attendee will be given a tasting glass and have the opportunity to try unlimited 2 oz tastings of approximately 150 craft beers from all over the country. Food will be available for purchase for all attendees and there will be a selection of retail vendors on-site



Beyond Rubik's Cube, Liberty Science Center  Liberty State Park
 222 Jersey City Boulevard  Jersey City, NJ 07305
The world's first museum exhibition about the Rubik's Cube.
7,000 sq ft of games, puzzles, history, art, and engineering, all inspired by Ernő Rubik's best-selling masterpiece.








Synagoge, Pope and Soviet Jews

In  1890, the Orthodox synagogue at East 67, designed by German-born architects Ernst Schneider and Henry Herter, opened its doors. Over the door way engraved in granite and written in Hebrew is a verse from Psalm 100. "Enter into His Gates with Thanksgiving and into His courts with praise."

The orange-brick and terra-cotta Moorish Revival building  has a magnificent rose window  and bulbous cupolas set at   different  levels. 

Moorish architecture is a variation of Islamic architecture. It  is named after the Moors, North African people who conquered the Iberian Peninsula in the 700s. The Moors controlled what is now Spain, Portugal, and the Pyrenees region of France for hundreds of years. The Moorish style evoked a high point in Jewish life in 11th century Spain when Jews, Christians and Muslims lived peaceably together. It was a time when Jewish intellectual and spiritual life flourished.   
So it is not a surprise that a lot of synagogues all over the world were built in  the  Moorish Revival Style.   
Since 1962, the synagogue's rabbi has been Arthur Schneier. Rabbi   was born in Vienna in 1930.  His family  fled in November 1938 from Vienna to Budapest, where Arthur survived the Holocaust in the Budapest ghetto. In 1947 he moved to the United States.  Schneier became a Rabbi and was awarded an honorary doctorate in theology at Yeshiva University in New York City.
To protest religious repression in the Soviet Union, Rabbi Schneier recruited a group of civil rights leaders, politicians and members of the clergy for an Appeal of Conscience rally. On the synagogue balcony across the street from the Soviet mission to the United Nations, Rabbi Schneier displayed a bronze plaque,     inscribed in English and Hebrew with the biblical phrase, ''Hear the cry of the oppressed. The Jewish community of the Soviet Union '' .    
I wrote about  the Soviet Mission  building  at  the corner of East 67 and Park Avenue in one of my posts.
23 years later, in 1988, rabbi Schneier said that  New York Jews should greet Gorbachev respectfully ''in recognition of the increased opportunity for Jews in the Soviet Union to emigrate and practice their religion and their culture at home.'' The same year Rabbi  visited  Moscow, Russia where he  met with Soviet officials about religious rights.
Twenty years later, in April  2008, Pope Benedict XVI paid a 22-minute visit to the Park East Synagogue   — the first papal trip to a United States synagogue. He presented the synagogue with a replica of a medieval Jewish manuscript from the Vatican library and received three gifts: a seder plate, a Passover haggadah and a box of matzo.  The visit was only the third known visit by a pope to any synagogue. There is also a plaque on the wall of the building memorizing this event.
There is Early Childhood Center and  Lower School, grades kindergarten through grade five at the synagogue. There is also a Sunday Shkola   that   educate Russian Jewish children about their heritage.

 

 

 

 

Diana of the tower and O'Henry

Diana in Metropolitan Museum
O. Henry , one of the most famous American short story writers lived and died in New York.  In his  story "The Lady Higher Up" he wrote about two statues, so famous   at that time that every  New-Yorker understood what O'Henry was talking about.

Diana on the top of
Madison Square Garden Building (demolished)
"Three hundred and sixty-five feet above the  heated asphalt the tiptoeing symbolic deity on Manhattan pointed her   vacillating arrow straight, for the time, in the direction of her exalted  sister on Liberty Island(...).Had that arrow sped truly and horizontally  it would have passed fifty feet above the head of the heroic matron whose  duty it is to offer a cast-ironical welcome to the oppressed of other lands (...)"Ah, there, Mrs. Liberty!" called a clear, rollicking soprano voice through the still, midnight air. "Is that you, Miss Diana?"
Madison Square Garden (demolished)
 "The Lady Higher Up"  was published in the New York World Sunday Magazine  on  July 24,  1904.  I already wrote about Mrs. Liberty - the statue of Liberty on the Liberty Island in New York Harbor. Everybody could see it and even climb inside the crown. And what about Diana? Where is it now?
 In 1891, Madison Square Garden, designed by Stanford White, opened to the public . The architect wanted to have a revolving wind  vane for his tower.   And he was the friend  of the famous American sculpture Augustus Saint-Gauden.  So  White asked Augustus to create a statue.
  Julia Baird   was the model who posed for Diana's body.  Julia   had modeled for any number of majestic figures in her time. She said:  ''The thrones I haven't sat on are so few that you could count them on your fingers.'' No, she didn't mind posing in the nude - ''in the 'toot and scramble,' if you choose to call it that.''  
 
The first version  of Diana  was  unveiled on September   1891  It was 18 ft (5.5 m) tall and weighed 1,800 lb (820 kg).  The statue was too heave to be a rotating wind vane and was  removed and replaced by a smaller      version in 1893. The  large Diana was sent to be displayed on the top of  the Women's Pavilion at the 1892 World's Columbian Exposition, but   Women's Christian Temperance Union in Chicago protested against the nude statue, and it was placed on the top of Agricultural Building.  Unfortunately this large Diana did not survive.  So it was not the first version of the statue in O'Henry story.
Here is what  Wikipedia wrote about the second  statue of Diana:  "The second, smaller version was completely redesigned by Saint-Gaudens to have a more elegant pose with a different thrust of the body, a thinner figure, smaller breasts and more feminine angle of the leg. To better fit the top of Madison Square Garden, the proportion was also scaled down to 13 feet tall. It was hoisted on top of the Garden on November 18, 1893.  This version was mounted as originally planned on its left toe and was made of hollowed, gilded copper, which made it light enough to rotate with the wind as originally designed. At 347 feet above street level, the "Diana" statue was the highest point in New York City at the time. During the day, the gilded figure caught the sun and could be seen from all over the city and as far away as New Jersey. Electric lights, then a novelty, illuminated it at night; it was the first statue in history to be lit by electricity."

Giralda Tower in
Sevella, Spain
Statue in the Art Museum
of Philadelphia
 Diana was installed on the  tower, 32 floors high,   dominating  Madison Square Park.  This tower     was modeled   after the tower of the Giralda which adjoins the cathedral of Seville in Spain. At that time this tower was the second  highest  building in New York  and the main hall was the largest in the world  with permanent seating for 8,000 people. In 1925, Madison Square Garden was demolished.  Diana  was removed just prior to the building’s demolition  and in seven years  adopted by the Museum of Art in Philadelphia in 1932. The statue  was cleaned and repaired before it was installed in the grand staircase.
In  2013–14  conservators repaired and preserved   copper structure and restored  original gold leaf finish of the statue.   
Metropolitan Museum of Art had acquired a six-foot copy of the second  Diana reproduced from original casts for its collection in 1928. This copy    now stands in the center of the  Charles Engelhard Court in American wing of the museum.