Latinos In America

By ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

New York

When I first saw the Commissioners’ Map of 1811 many years ago while researching Manhattan history, my reaction was shock and disbelief. This was no charming antiquarian depiction of Old New York. It was a bold plan for the city’s growth—a tight, rectilinear network of streets overriding natural terrain and private property, extending far beyond the small early settlement at the foot of the island into its wilder open reaches. It seemed ruthless and unreal, visionary or hallucinatory. Farms, homes, hills, valleys, woods and streams had disappeared under a relentless geometric overlay of right-angled streets: the famous Manhattan grid.

When I saw the map again in the current exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, “The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011,” I still found it an unsettling combination of the visionary and the pragmatic. This amazing document, the centerpiece of a show celebrating its 200th anniversary, is responsible for the Manhattan street system and a city unlike any other in the world.

The exhibition opened quietly last December and has been so popular (who knew? a lot of old maps and photographs?) that its original April closing has been extended through July 15. Sponsored by the Office of the Borough President of Manhattan in collaboration with the museum, the New York Public Library and the Architectural League of New York, the show follows Manhattan’s radical transformation through original documents from city archives and historical collections, beautifully researched and organized by its curator, Hilary Ballon, university professor of urban studies and architecture at New York University, and expertly installed by Wendy Evans Joseph. The excellent book-length catalog, edited by Prof. Ballon, is a surprising historical page-turner. A coda of eight proposals selected from a competition held by the Architectural League suggests where the grid could go from here.

It’s a fair guess that New Yorkers want it to stay exactly the way it is. In a video at the entrance, people chosen at random state their home spot on the grid, confident that in their comfortable Cartesian world no one has to ask “Where?”

The miracle is that the plan actually got built. An explosion of wealth and population in early 19th-century New York prompted the Common (later City) Council to ask the State Legislature to establish a commission to “develop and choose a master plan to channel and direct” the city’s future expansion. Three commissioners, Gouverneur Morris, Simeon De Witt and John Henderson, were appointed in 1807 with a mandate to complete the work in four years. The measuring and mapping was done by the commission’s secretary and surveyor general, John Randel Jr., and the finished product was delivered slightly ahead of schedule in 1811.

The plan was accepted and implemented immediately as a massive public-works project employing armies of workers over the next 60 years. It was financed by assessments on adjoining property owners for the “improvements” of paved streets and utilities, a practice that met with violent resistance but proved profitable in the end. An early version of eminent domain allowed the city to take the land, reimbursing the owner at market rates, a cost made up for by assessments and sales.

The Commissioners’ Plan, nearly nine feet long, is flanked by their seals and by impressive portraits of the three substantial, serious men who held the future of New York in their hands. A sampling of the 93 large “Farm Maps” Randel made later, at a scale of 100 feet to 1 inch, records the topography and property boundaries underlying the grid. His handwritten field notes show street by street calculations in “chain lengths,” a painstaking process that used metal chains and heavy brass compasses, theodolytes and geodesic transits to reconcile the difference between true north and magnetic north readings. Most of Manhattan was measured in that way, an inconceivable feat in the age of Google.

No deviations from the grid were considered necessary. It ended at a nonexistent and hypothetical 155th Street, with everything neatly numbered; avenue names came later. The surrounding rivers and a few token spaces were expected to satisfy health and recreational needs. The commissioners were openly dismissive of ceremonial boulevards leading to monumental institutions like those being constructed in Washington according to Pierre l’Enfant’s plan. Because no one was able to anticipate the automobile or the city’s enormous future growth, the 1811 plan inevitably led to gridlock, New York’s notorious addition to the English language.

The grid was denounced for its obliteration of the natural landscape and fought as a taking of private land; later criticism focused on the lack of open space and the way the division into standard lots turned the island into negotiable real estate. Surveyors were driven off as trespassers; temporary street markers were removed until stone posts replaced them. One remaining stone column stands unmoored in the show. The grid’s unyielding regularity left an estimated 39% of existing houses in the middle of a proposed street. Many were demolished and about 900 buildings were moved. Clement Moore, whose large holdings were in what is now called Chelsea, denounced city officials as “men who would level the seven hills of Rome.”

A standard 200-foot block-front was established for the avenues, with narrower side streets and wider cross streets at irregular intervals. The blocks were divided into 20- and 25-foot house lots with a 100-foot depth, a module that could be assembled for a variety of configurations. Vacant land was sold at public auction, and speculation, fraud and corruption flourished as buying and selling lots became the biggest game in town. In the 1830s, John Jacob Astor transferred his fortune in beaver pelts and international trade into real estate, to become New York’s largest landholder and richest man.

It must have been hideous to live through. Workers dug and blasted earth and rock to reduce everything to street grade, leaving mounds of rubble behind. The process is recorded in surreal detail in photographs from the museum’s collection. There are views of new streets that seem to have been dropped from outer space. The Dakota, completed in 1884, stands in an uptown wilderness of streets to nowhere.

So what did we get besides gridlock? New York is a strange city of serendipitous side effects, where what seems wrong often turns out to be right. The first lesson of the grid is that scale is everything. The plan was scaled to 19th-century life and dimensions; it predated the automobile, which it accommodates badly. But what it gave us, with its short, 200-foot block lengths and small, 20- to 25-foot lot sizes, its direct and easy navigability, is a walkable, personal city at human scale, where every street is an endlessly varied and inviting series of visual experiences, of constantly changing shopfronts, restaurants and buildings of infinite styles and uses. When that scale and mix is threatened, we know it; if a revitalized, increasingly affluent area has an influx of look-alike chains demanding increased street frontage, we will use zoning restrictions to maintain scale and avoid what Manhattanites perceive as the mall-death of boring redundancy. Newness, novelty and the next thing are all encouraged by small-scale opportunities. This doesn’t happen in big boxes. Or parking lots.

When land is scarce and expensive you build close and high, and Manhattan is an island of solid street walls and shoulder-to-shoulder skyscrapers. The streets that border them are public social space; they are full of life and activity and the promise of whatever lies around the corner. Urbanist Holly Whyte found that people instinctively gathered on the most crowded parts of sidewalks, bypassing plazas. The worst idea that architects and planners ever had (what were they thinking?) was the superblock; we are still trying to knit the streets of the grid back together. Some are being restored and reconnected in the rebuilt, sterile superblock of the World Trade Center site.

Because the grid is a total democratization of space, with no area designated as more important than any other, every neighborhood creates its own distinct identity, with the capability of reinventing itself, like people, and moving on. That flexibility is unique to the grid. It has also accommodated major incursions and amenities like Central Park. Twice yearly, an accident of solstice, orientation and geometry sends golden shafts of setting sun straight through the grid from river to river, west to east, an occasion that would be celebrated by people less in a hurry.

The architect Rem Koolhaas has defined New York as a “culture of congestion,” and it is that close interaction of people and ideas that has produced one of the city’s greatest strengths—call it a culture of creativity. There is much to celebrate about the grid.

Ms. Huxtable is the Journal’s architecture critic.

A version of this article appeared March 28, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Crosshatching a Miracle.

By NANCY KEATES

Jesse Chehak for The Wall Street Journal

On six acres, the compound is in the hills overlooking Santa Fe.

Santa Fe, N.M.

“Rage,” “Victims” and “Twisted” are some of the titles of the gory, graphically detailed best sellers written by Jonathan Kellerman. The corpse-filled novels by his wife, Faye Kellerman, have titles like “Gun Games” and “Stalker.” The couple spend most of their time in Beverly Hills, Calif. But when they want to write without distractions, they retreat to their adobe-style compound in the serene hills overlooking this artsy town.

The couple said they’re inspired by the openness and nature here. “It’s so quiet all the time. Just look at these views,” said Mr. Kellerman, 62, pointing out the four mountain ranges he can see from his living-room windows. “It’s almost like Switzerland.”

When best-selling authors Jonathan and Faye Kellerman want to get away and write, the couple retreat to a four-building compound they own in Santa Fe, N.M. Nancy Keates has details on Lunch Break.

Buying their first home here in 2000 for $935,000, the Kellermans kept adding on, and now own four buildings on six acres. Next to their 4,300-square-foot, two-bedroom main home, in 2004 they built a “casita,” a smaller home next door, as an office for Mr. Kellerman and guesthouse for $350,000. In 2008 they bought a 5,500-square-foot main home with its 700-square-foot guesthouse from a neighbor for $1.7 million. They bought the last two homes because wanted to keep their own house private and thought the homes could be a good spot for when their four children and three grandchildren visit.

The properties are now unified by flagstone paths and flanked by small trees and adobe walls that snake along the ridge of the 7,500-foot-high cliff that slopes into a canyon. All four buildings are typical of the area, with low slung, geometric shaped exteriors made of thick, beige clay walls and flanked by covered outdoor porches called “portals.”

Inside the main house, a pink stone-floored entry hall has a large iron chandelier with yellow glass shades that hangs from a 13-foot ceiling. In the living room, with floor-to-ceiling glass doors and large windows that overlook the mountains, a stone fireplace is topped by a white mantle and a round mirror. On one side of the main house is a den where Mr. Kellerman plays guitar. A big, light, open kitchen leads to the office of Mrs. Kellerman, 59. There an old-fashioned wood desk faces a window that looks out on to the mountains.

The flagstone path outside leads to the 1,200-square-foot casita that the Kellermans built to serve as Mr. Kellerman’s office. Its main room has a large bronze antelope head on a white adobe wall that tops a curved fireplace, known as a kiva. There’s a separate bedroom for guests and a portal (the outdoor covered porch) where Mr. Kellerman takes writing breaks, peering down at the canyon below and the mountains beyond.

A path going the other direction leads to the second guesthouse, with a home gym and two guest bedrooms and Mr. Kellerman’s painting studio. The largest house is the least used and is rented out much of the year. A four-bedroom, four-bathroom 4,500-square-foot house nearby is for sale for $2 million.

Santa Fe and its locals sometimes appear in the couple’s work. Half of “Double Homicide,” a book they wrote together, takes place here. And a recurring character in Mrs. Kellerman’s novels—a peripatetic pianist—is based on friend Marc Neikrug, a composer and pianist who lives in Santa Fe.

“Their house is in an area of incredible physical beauty,” said Mr. Neikrug, who added that unlike most second-home owners, the Kellermans are friends with many locals in Santa Fe. He said he hardly recognizes the couple in their work; they never talk about crime or dark subjects with him.

With their laid back, casual style, their 40 years of marriage and their large family, the Kellermans seem like a conventional American couple. They work out in their home gym together every morning. Mr. Kellerman said most crime writers are nice people—they get their dark thoughts out in their writing.

It is mostly incidents he saw in his training in psychology that are the source for his novels. Mr. Kellerman, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Southern California, got his big writing break in 1985, when his first published novel, “When the Bough Breaks,” became a best seller and a TV movie. Since then he has churned out a book or two a year and has more than 75 million books in print internationally. He’s best known for his psychologist hero Alex Delaware, who appears for the 27th time in “Victims,” which came out this week.

Mrs. Kellerman also didn’t start her career as a writer. She has a doctorate in dentistry from UCLA. Her first novel, “The Ritual Bath,” in 1986, was a hit. Her books have more than 20 million copies in print internationally. She’s best known for her detectives Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus.

The novelty and variety in their lives comes from their real estate, said Mr. Kellerman. There’s the big Beverly Hills home with a pool, tennis court, koi pond and lots of art. When they need a break from that, they head to their glass-and-wood house on the beach in Malibu or to their 1,700-square-foot apartment in an Art Deco building on Fifth Avenue in New York. “I love going from the rush of New York to the dead quiet of Santa Fe,” said Mr. Kellerman.

Santa Fe has some action—the animal kind. The Kellermans hear coyotes howling, see rattlesnakes and bears—and occasionally run away from bobcats they bump into on walks around the neighborhood. They like seeing the lights from homes on the hills across the canyon. “It can get spooky at night,” said Mrs. Kellerman.

Write to Nancy Keates at nancy.keates@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared March 2, 2012, on page D8 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Crime (Writing) Pays: Authors’ Desert Retreat.

Portrait by Mark Leong

FAR FROM HERE Artist Kehinde Wiley in his studio in Beijing, with works from his recent Armory Show. He lives part time in China, where he is able to paint free from distractions.

Painter Kehinde Wiley, 35, has enjoyed the kind of meteoric career that led Andy Warhol to quip about 15 minutes of fame. When he was a child, his mother, a linguist, enrolled Wiley and his siblings in art and literary programs as a way to help keep them safe in the rough South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where they lived. Early on Wiley gravitated toward the visual arts; when he was 12, he went to the U.S.S.R. on an arts exchange program, thanks to a foundation grant funded by financier Michael Milken, which ignited his interest in global politics.

After Yale’s MFA program, Wiley got a coveted residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where he started establishing himself as an art-world luminary. Drawn in by the “peacocking” of Harlem street life, he began making luxurious, Old Master–influenced portraits of young black men in street clothes. Subsequently, in his “The World Stage” series, he broadened his focus to include large-scale portraits of young men from regions around the globe. His work references Titian as easily as it does pop culture, and addresses stereotypes of race and class, power and history.

Unlike other artists, Wiley is not interested in art for art’s sake. His work shares his lively sense of humor, and he believes it’s important for African-American kids to see pictures of people who look like them on museum walls. And he continues to break down boundaries. He collaborated with Givenchy’s Riccardo Tisci on his latest project, “An Economy of Grace,” which will open at New York City’s Sean Kelly Gallery this month. The two chose paintings from the Louvre to serve as inspiration for a series of portraits of African-Americans in couture gowns they designed. Wiley’s work, now more than ever, pushes the lines between design and high art, reinventing classical portraiture for a contemporary world.

—Meghan O’Rourke

I think the central narrative of my early childhood had to do with growing up in a family where my mother had to raise six kids alone and do graduate school, while figuring out how to keep us from becoming products of the environment that we were living in. I grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the ’80s, back when it just wasn’t a cool scene. But my mother had the foresight to look for a number of projects that would keep us away from the streets.

One that was particularly fortuitous for me was called the Center for U.S./U.S.S.R. Initiatives. It was a program set up to create an educational exchange between American and Soviet youths, with the idea that there would be a sort of ping-pong politics style—so that perhaps Soviet children would become envious of our way of life. We had 50 American kids hanging out in the forest outside of St. Petersburg. We had to study Russian for the year, and we did art in the forest.

Most of the kids came from very well-heeled families. But my tuition for the program was covered by the Milken Family Foundation. Milken’s contribution to my early development was seminal, in the sense that it opened the whole world up to me—the possibility of seeing other cultures, and envisioning a world beyond the confines of Los Angeles, certainly. It brought up race and different modes of language and expression.

When my mother was working her way through college, we kids helped her run her junk store. It was like “Sanford and Son.” We’d go through the streets finding things, and people would donate things knowing that she would take them; we’d be pulling in old furniture and redoing it and selling it to people on the streets. Most of the clientele was Spanish and we learned to speak Spanish on the streets. A lot of the furniture had this really heightened, decorative, late–French Rococo, old-lady sensibility that was really annoying to me at the time. But I remember in later years feeling an affinity with the hyperdecorative because it had a sense of nostalgia, in a way.

I have a fondness for making paintings that go beyond just having a conversation about art for art’s sake or having a conversation about art history. I actually really enjoy looking at broader popular culture. So, for example, in my last book of photography, the lighting was inspired as much by Tiepolo ceiling frescoes in Venice as it was by Hype Williams’s early-’90s hip-hop videos—both having a sense of rapture, both having a sense of this bling. One more sacred, one more profane.

My father is Nigerian; my mother is from Texas and African-American. My father was the first in his family to go to university. He flew from Nigeria to Los Angeles in the ’70s to go to UCLA, where he met my mother. They broke up before I was born, and he returned to Nigeria. She destroyed all the photos, and I’d never met the guy. So, when I turned 20, being fatherless, and also being profoundly interested in portraiture and wanting to know what he looked like physically, I decided to hop on a plane. Without the experience in Russia, I don’t know if I’d have had the guts to do it because it was just so outsize for my life experience. I had a very youthful sense of invincibility. There were warnings all over the Internet from the State Department not to go into Nigeria at that time.

I went looking for one man in the most populated nation in all of Africa. I think there was a sense of curiosity, a psychic necessity. Just who is that other thing? What’s my other half? And to stare this other guy in the face and be like, wow, that’s weird.

I found him. But it was tough. All I knew was his first and last name and what he’d studied—architecture. I went from architecture department to architecture department looking for this guy. Finally, I took the ethnic route and went to the area where his last name comes from, to the major university there. His name’s on the door of the architecture building. He heads the department.

I began a series of portraits of him. Once I get a project in my head, I start getting really obsessive about it. I studied how art-making practices have evolved in Africa, and how they’ve influenced art-making practices in the States and in Europe, specifically with people like Braque and Picasso, who were experiencing this feeling of the uncanny when looking at African art objects, which has a lot to do with historical European notions of the black body. And, conversely, I started going back to Africans thinking of themselves through the mirror of how someone else thinks of them.

All of those different perspectives and shattered ways of thinking were incredibly helpful to me. Later on when I was studying art theory, first in San Francisco and then at Yale, this sort of postcolonial postmodern condition of shattered identities and fractured selves, I didn’t have to look very far. You know? This is not conceptual; this is actual life lived. In terms of how I started putting one foot in front of the other in my own art-making process, I didn’t—my job was always to absorb and learn as much as possible and then just be in the world.

I went to the Studio Museum in Harlem and became the artist in residence there, and began this process of street-casting. And so in terms of designing a practice or designing a life, I’ve always had certain goals in mind: find the father, build the studio in this country, or what have you. But then you just let go and you allow radical contingency to take place, and that’s where the magic sort of happens. You think you know what you’re going to do when you hit the ground, but then the actualities show themselves.

The work is also about the power of letting go. So much of portraiture has to do with powerful people: powerful white men in powerful poses in big, powerful museums. So what happens when portraiture is about chance? Absolute chance? Someone who just happens to be trying to get to the subway one day now ends up in the painting that goes to one of the large museums throughout the world!

For the new project, Riccardo Tisci and I pulled some connections and got a private audience at the Louvre. The poses of the women, all of whom came from the New York metropolitan area, were taken from specific paintings that we saw in the Louvre, as were the gowns that we designed together. Couture is a symbol of wealth and excess, and that’s what art has been. There’s a certain guilt associated with it—desire and guilt—it’s always more sexy when you feel slightly guilty about it.

I think one of the things that must happen in the work is for it to become class-conscious. You’ll never be able to exist within this marketplace without recognizing that paintings are perhaps the most expensive objects in the art world. It’s not going to change anyone’s life. But what it does function as is a catalyst for a different way of thinking. The very act of walking into the Los Angeles County Museum and seeing Kerry James Marshall as a kid gave me a sense of, Damn, maybe I can do this. And, so, symbols matter. One of my interests is in having the work in as many public collections as possible. When I go to the Brooklyn Museum or the Metropolitan Museum and see my stuff, I’m aware that there are other young kids who don’t have access to anything like it.

—Edited from Meghan O’Rourke’s interview with Kehinde Wiley