Serendipitously one day on a Hell’s kitchen tenement wall, I found the Green Man.
For me, this ancient pagan god of vegetation, fertility and good fortune was an unusual discovery. Though the Green Man is easily identified by leaves and tendrils that sprout from his head, nostrils, and ears, the City’s Landmark Preservation Commission and other architectural historians have never mentioned him in their detailed descriptions of buildings, simply lumping the disregarded Green Man with other ornamental grotesque figures.
This failure to recognize him as one of the most popular pagan gods in pre-Christian Europe is difficult to understand. His Magical power over the minds of Saxon, Celtic, and Druid tribesmen was so great that Christian missionaries accepted and transformed the IRREPRESSIBLE deity in order to convert the tribesmen to the New Faith. The evidence for this conclusion can be found in the sculpted heads of Green men displayed today in Romanesque and Gothic churches and cathedrals throughout Western Europe – e.g., the cathedrals of Naumburg and Bamberg in Germany; Norwich and Exeter in England; Rheims and Auxerre in France.
So imagine my surprise when I found not one, but six Green Men decorating a Ninth Avenue Tenement midway between 52nd and 53rd Streets (787 Ninth Ave, built in 1886). Why were no two alike? What accounted for their striking dramatic poses? I pondered these questions until I found the answers. The tenement had been built eight years after the construction of the Ninth Avenue El Railway. The architect had positioned the Green Men at measured intervals along the tenement’s wall at the sight-level of the curious passengers (there were plenty of them) looking out of the windows of trains while trying to peek into other people’s parlors.
Fine, but what was the reason for the Green men’s intense emotional reaction to the passing trains? The answer to this question is a matter of conjecture. Perhaps Jobst Hoffmann, the German-born architect “got a kick out of” paraphrasing a stanza from an old German drinking song: “A little nonsense now and then is relished by the best of Green Men.”
Was Hoffmann smiling merrily when he designed a Green Man sticking his tongue out at nosy passengers (he is at the extreme left of the lower four Green men row)? The second head on his left is exceptional. It is not grotesquified. Is it Mr. Werner, the tenement’s owner, another German immigrant?
Has Hoffmann portrayed his patron as a handsome, self-assured and proper Victorian gentleman with a neatly-trimmed mustache instead of the usual roughly-cut oak leaves? It might well have been. After all, Mr. Werner has left his name on the building’s crowning cornice proudly proclaiming the fact that he has “made it” in the new country.
On Mr. Werner’s left, a Green Man, his eyes squinting in dismay and lips tightly closed, is firmly determined to even the score with the rollicking trespassers on railroad tracks. Next to him another Green Man stares in horror at the huffing and puffing of a steam engine. On the upper left, a Green Man howls with laughter at this new contraption on wheels, while on the upper right, a brooding Green Man, unable to resign himself to an alien environment, longs for his native woods.
After finding the Green Man on the Werner tenement I looked for others on public display. When I found many Green Men returning my stares as I walked around the city, I realized that this god of the pagan past had been revised to satisfy a superstitious belief in his magical power to protect houses against the evil spirits of misfortune.
After all is said and done, in my high-rise apartment house, there is no thirteenth Floor!
by Joe Zito – copyrighted, all rights reserved, original article appeared in the Clinton Chronicle, Jan 2000
1 comment:
I take care of this building. There are two buildings in one..
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