Reed, Henry Hope.

Henry Hope Reed Jr. was born in New York City on September 25, 1915 and grew up a few blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the Upper East Side, the eldest of his two brothers, Walter Webb Reed and Joseph Reed. After the death in 1925 of their mother Elizabeth Digby Leeds Reed, Reed’s father Henry Hope Reed Sr., a marine-insurance executive and art and architecture patron, remarried Eleanor Beers Reed. In the late 1950s, the couple moved to Greece, where they became trustees-in-residence at the American Farm School in Thessaloniki. Reed would later describe his curiosity in America’s past of “wood, brick and stone” as being initially “nurtured by generous parents.”

Reed graduated in history from Harvard in 1938, where he befriended architectural photographer Wayne Andrews. His friendships with Andrews, historical preservationist Alan Burnham, and architect John Barrington Bailey (who would design the Frick addition in the 1970s), helped develop Reed’s keen interest in old buildings, especially those with classical elements. Reed subsequently studied in Europe, at the École du Louvre in Paris and the American Academy in Rome. By the 1950s, Reed was publishing articles and mounting exhibitions in New York and at Yale, where he also taught from 1950-53.

Co-written with critic Christopher Tunnard, Reed’s first book American Skyline was “a history of American city planning that lionized…heroic, Classically-inspired urban architecture.” From 1956, Reed was running walking tours for the Municipal Art Society of New York, and would go on to direct these for the Museum of the City of New York from 1960. These walks highlighted the city’s “finest examples of American Renaissance Architecture” and “Classical splendors.” His Walks in New York was published by Harper Books by 1960, the same year he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship to support his study of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. From 1962-63, Reed penned a weekly “Discover New York” column in New York’s Sunday Herald Tribune.

Through his writings, lectures, exhibitions and walks, Reed rose to prominence as a vociferous critic of modern architecture, declaring the “The Modern is Dead” in 1957. He attacked modernism’s obsession with originality and its “past-deprived palette”, and championed a forgotten, more holistic tradition of architecture, ornamentation and city planning: “Only the classical has given America its greatest mural decoration, its greatest squares and avenues, its most beautiful gardens and its most splendid city.” Throughout the 1960s, Reed extended his output to guides for sites such as New York’s City Hall and Appellate Court. More books followed: The Golden City in 1959, which attracted derision for its side-by-side comparisons of old and new buildings; Architecture in America: A Battle of Style s (co-edited with William A. Coles) in 1961; and Central Park: A History and A Guide (co-written with Sophia Duckworth) in 1967. Over the next decades, his work would include books on Palladio, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the United State Capitol, and New York’s Beaux-Arts architecture.

Reed was named curator of Central Park in 1966 and campaigned to preserve and promote classic features of the park, while denouncing changes to its “rural, rustic and reposeful” mission. His language in both his walks and writings remained impassioned and colorful: canned music at the Wollman Memorial skating rink was an “incredible vulgarity”; a new comfort station was “a ghastly pimple on the Olmstedian landscape”; the sight of grass erosion filled his soul with “hideous melancholy.” Reed raised funds and researched maps for the park, which perhaps triggered his work on a vast book in 1969 and into the early 1970s, The Parks of New York City, which would remain unpublished.

In 1968, Reed founded Classical America with Bailey, Pierce Rice and other like-minded classicists. The society signed up members, offered classical drawing and drafting courses, ran conferences, established chapters in other cities and states, and published a regular newsletter and, eventually, its own booklist: the “Classical America Series in Art and Architecture.” The group received support from people like Tom Wolfe, Raymond Rubinow and Arthur Ross, whose name was attached to a yearly award. Classical America merged with the Institute of Classical Architecture in 2002.

Reed’s strident criticisms of “the Modern” often led to his being seen as a contrarian: in 1956, architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable described his ideas as being “ludicrously out of character with contemporary life.” By the 1980s and 1990s however, interest in Reed revived. Once described as a fuddy-duddy and a crank, Reed found himself a “faith keeper” and “prescient hero,” as interest in classical architecture appeared to return. In 2005, Reed was the Laureate for the inaugural Henry Hope Reed award, given in conjunction with the Driehaus Prize by the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame.

Reed’s first marriage was to Joan Aucourt in 1959. In 1968, he married New Yorker staff writer, Constance Culbertson Feeley, with whom he remained until her death in 2007.

Reed died in New York City on May 1, 2013.

Sources:

Curriculum Vitae, Henry Hope Reed

Gray, Christopher, “Streetscapes/Henry Hope Reed; An Architecture Critic Who Still Loves the Classics,” New York Times, September 19, 1999

Kahn, Eve M., “Henry Hope Reed: The Faith Keeper,” Traditional Building, September/October 1995

Reed, Henry Hope Reed Jr., The Golden City, New York, W.W. Norton, 1959 (reprinted 1970)

Reed, Henry Hope Reed Jr., “Discover New York,” New York Herald Tribune, 1962-63

Robertson, Nan, “Historian Irked by Central Park,” New York Times, May 15, 1961

Sanders, James, “After Years in the Cold, A Feisty Critic is Back in Style”, Avenue Magazine, February 1985