Old money, new money: Beaux Arts style gets attention on HBO

NEW YORK — “What surroundings, Mrs. Russell. We could be at Tsarskoye Selo,” exclaims Nathan Lane’s snooty Ward McAllister at his first glance of her opulent Fifth Avenue mansion on “The Gilded Age.” The social arbiter’s reference to an 18th century palace outside St. Petersburg, Russia, is lost on the new-money Bertha, but the point was made: The HBO Max series has brought alive America’s post-Civil War renaissance and New York City’s cultural awakening in all its Beaux Arts glory. The term, which translates simply as “fine arts,” was anything but simple in the hands of the city’s wealthiest figures of the time — names like Astor, Carnegie, Frick, Morgan, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and more. Beaux Arts at its best includes buildings like The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library & Museum, the Woolworth Building, Grand Central Terminal, Pennsylvania Station, the main branch of the New York Public Library, The Frick Collection, Grant’s Tomb and select mausoleums in Woodlawn Cemetery, where some of the players rest. His “An American Renaissance: Beaux-Arts Architecture in New York City” is a massive, meticulous book delving into the homes, monuments and public buildings that robber barons and industrialists ordered up in an over-the-top vein as the city gained its cultural footing.