Death of Hastings

As it must to all men, Death came last week to Thomas Hastings, architect, of the firm of Carrere & Hastings, in Manhattan. In. a crowded memorial chapel, his coffin stood covered by autumn leaves overlaid with roses. Beside it, the Cross of the Legion of Honor lay on a plush cushion. Around it stood Architects Cass Gilbert, William Adams Delano, Chester Holmes Aldrich; Banker Thomas William Lament, Sculptor John Flanagan, many another notable, friend, relation. They sang "Rock of Ages," composed 100 years ago by Architect Hastings' grandfather. Someone recited Shelley's "Ode to a Skylark."

Architect Hastings was born in Manhattan in 1860 of an old Dutch-English family, in America since 1634. He studied for a while at Columbia University and went to Paris in 1880, entered the Ecole des Beaux Arts where he studied architecture in the atelier of Jules Andre. In Paris he became imbued with the great French tradition but, never an academician, he returned to the U. S. with an open mind bent upon adapting his learning to U. S. limitations. In the firm of McKim, Mead & White, where he spent his apprenticeship, he shared a draughting board with John Merven Carrere. They quit McKim, Mead & White and hung out their own shingle. Soon they had a commission from Henry M. Flagler, pioneer Florida exploiter, to build two hotels in St. Augustine, the Ponce de Leon and the Alcazar. Wide was the comment aroused by their romantic, freely adapted Spanish style. More commissions came and the rirm was established.

In 1897, Carrere & Hastings won the prize in the countrywide competition for the New York Public Library. In 1911 when the building was opened to the public John Carrere was killed in a street accident. In his will, Architect Hastings has left $250,000 to remodel the library's facade, with which he was never quite satisfied.

Other Hastings work included Arlington Memorial Amphitheatre to the Unknown Soldier, the Senate and House of Representatives office Buildings in Washington, the Manhattan Bridge, the Manhattan Victory Arch, the interior of the Metropolitan Opera House. He did not approve the theory of Manhattan skyscrapers, but he redesigned the Ritz Tower, smart apartment hotel. He believed that the inflation of real estate values necessarily brought about by skyscrapers and the subsequent deflation of vast areas of "unimproved" ground, made for economic instability. Of tall architecture he said: "Most of our skyscrapers . . . [are] elongated packing boxes, the architecture of whose midriff sections had best be passed over in haste. Many make me think of plum puddings whose raisins have settled on one or two sides. Certainly no one can say that recessing back a skyscraper makes for beauty." Never an official, never pedantic, Architect Hastings believed that the creator of a design should follow it through with the draughtsmen, landscapists and constructors. He was al ways enthusiastic about his projects, especially large public fountains or memorials. He believed that modern architects should not try to imitate what has gone before but at the same time should keep in the traditions, that the radical work being done in Germany and France today is of little import because of its lack of artistic foundation. When he was asked to design the St. Ambrose Chapel in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, he made a Renaissance design, saying that Gothic, in which the Cathedral is built, was a splendid form but had no bearing on the 20th Century.