Creative Design Concepts

By ERIC GIBSON

National Gallery of Art/Helen Frankenthaler

‘Nature Abhors a Vacuum’ (1973)

In 1953 Helen Frankenthaler, who died this week at age 83, received a visit from Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, two artists from Washington who were stuck in an Abstract Expressionist rut. In her studio they saw “Mountains and Sea,” of the year before, a characteristically abstract work painted by pouring pigment onto a canvas laid on the floor.

The poured-paint technique had been pioneered by Jackson Pollock a few years earlier, but in this work the 24-year-old Frankenthaler made it her own. In place of the older artist’s looping and whipping lines of gray, black and tan, her imagery consisted of spreading pools and washes of luxuriant pinks, blues and greens nudged here and there with a sponge. The painting was a revelation to the two men—a “bridge between Pollock and what was possible,” Louis later said. Her novel technique, combined with a chromatic freedom and mastery unprecedented in recent American art, helped launch them, and others, on their own paths of color abstraction, thus ultimately changing the course of American art.

It’s an oft-told tale and one that’s true in every respect. Except that, to the extent that it’s used to sum up Frankenthaler’s achievement as one of the most important American artists of our time, it tells only part of the story. For over the course of a six-decade career, Frankenthaler jump-started American painting not once, but twice.

Frankenthaler belonged to the second generation of the New York School, whose guiding light was the critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg held that the essence of modern painting was the expunging of all references to the visible world and an emphasis on painting’s purely formal elements—the flatness of the canvas support and the colors arrayed across it.

Frankenthaler’s works were true to this so-called formalist aesthetic. You can’t emphasize the painting’s support more emphatically than she did with her technique of staining, which bonds the pigment to the warp and weft of the canvas. Yet she was never limited by formalism’s dictates, unlike some of her colleagues.

For example, there were audible gasps in 1977 when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened a retrospective of Noland’s work. Along the ramp were arrayed a selection of the artist’s signature abstractions—multicolored targets, chevrons, stripes and the like. Time had not been kind to these icons of 1960s and ’70s art. They were beautiful, to be sure, yet suddenly they seemed plagued by a decorative emptiness. Overnight, it seemed, heroic American abstraction had devolved to nothing more than college-dorm eye candy. Greenberg was a brilliant critic, but his view that the proper subject of art was art itself was too narrow and insubstantial a foundation on which to erect an enduring vision.

Frankenthaler herself sailed dangerously close to this aesthetic reef. This was particularly true in the ’60s, when paintings consisting of a few simple forms and a heavy use of primary colors created a kind of Marimekko effect—works that made attractive backdrops but didn’t compel a long gaze.

But three things saved her. One was her engagement with nature. Art needs to be about life; otherwise, it’s just occupational therapy. For all its abstractness, “Mountains and Sea” is fundamentally a landscape painting, and nature—its forms, its moods and above all its unbridled power—remained a recurring metaphor in Frankenthaler’s art.

Then, beginning in the early ’70s with “Nature Abhors a Vacuum,” her work began to change. Basso notes appeared with the introduction of deeper tones—dark purples and umbers, grays and even black. This adjustment amounted to a kind of adult supervision of her otherwise boisterous and flighty palette. Her paint handling became more nuanced and textured. These combined changes made her work more emotionally resonant and visually absorbing. Rather than simply reveling in color’s hedonistic pleasures, she seemed to be striving to express profounder truths. In this way she rescued abstract painting, making it once again an instrument of meaningful expression rather than an end in itself.

Frankenthaler did not limit herself to working on canvas. A retrospective of her prints at the National Gallery in the 1990s showed her to have been as innovative in this medium as she had been in painting. She even tried her hand at sculpture. And she remained on top of her game well into her 70s. Her extraordinary “Warming Trend”—nature again—from 2002 in the Kemper Museum in Kansas City, Mo., is a seven-by-eight-foot work consisting of diaphanous veils of blue and lavender, here and there inflected with the smallest touches of red and pink. The effect is of looking into a pool, as if Frankenthaler were painting her response to one of Claude Monet’s water lilies.

Frankenthaler’s achievement is to have put the language of abstraction to the service of art’s historic need to address large ideas. As such she occupies an enduring place in the pantheon of American masters. Yet her legacy already seems in peril. There hasn’t been a full-dress retrospective in more than 20 years, and her gallery, Knoedler & Co., suddenly closed last month, leaving no forum for the regular exposure of her work. She deserves better. Greatness abhors a vacuum.

Mr. Gibson is the Journal’s Leisure & Arts features editor.

By DARRELL HARTMAN

Alexander Mustard

DIVE JOINT | The U.S.S. Kittiwake in Grand Cayman.

Underwater diving trips have a way of taking on the slip-away quality of a dream. That’s especially true if you’re inexperienced, as I am—but also when a foray unfolds as easily as a vision.

After a five-minute boat ride from Seven Mile Beach, on the western coast of Grand Cayman, I splashed into Kool-Aid-blue water. In moments I was in a flurry of silver bar jacks, with the shimmering fish swirling all around me. When the cloud of marine life cleared, my breath stopped. Just 50 feet ahead was a mighty ship at rest on the seafloor, as clear and whole and well-lit as a museum specimen.

The U.S.S. Kittiwake, a 251-foot submarine rescue ship, plied the seas between 1945 and 1994. It once “shouldered” a recalcitrant Greenpeace boat, and was the first support ship on the scene when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. After retirement the vessel could have been sold for scrap metal, but last January it was sent to sleep with the fishes in a scuttling that made international headlines. It was dramatic video footage, to be sure, but also the first time a U.S. naval ship had been re-purposed for diving outside the country’s waters.

Resting on the ocean floor, ironically, the Kittiwake may be at its most accessible. Grand Cayman is a 90-minute flight from Miami and a four-hour nonstop from New York; Seven Mile Beach is five miles from the airport. And because its upper decks are some 20 feet down in clear water, the wreck can be explored by beginner scuba divers and even snorkelers.

Clinging to one of the site’s anchor ropes for the first few feet, I descended with my DiveTech guide, Jeni Chapman. We finned along the port deck, passing through shoulder-scraping doorways and into the denuded galley and mess hall, recognizable by the topless table bases. Ms. Chapman pointed out an iron press the crew would have used to spiff up its uniforms. Though we didn’t need flashlights, there was a ghostly feel in the cramped, dimmer quarters where my exhalations created masses of wriggling bubbles on the ceilings. When I caught sight of my own arm in a rusty mirror, my heart jumped.

But there was life there, too. We found a spindly-legged arrow crab wedged into a corner of the pilothouse. An orange squirrelfish flashed its spiny fins as it darted behind a bollard. Horse-eyed jacks circled the mast like creatures on a child’s mobile. A dozen or so snorkelers kicked across the surface above.

Most wrecks don’t become popular dive sites right away—it can take years for colorful sponges, fans and corals to appear, as well as the fish that like them. But the Kittiwake was an almost instant hit, surprising even the local dive operators who led the charge to acquire the ship from the U.S. Maritime Administration.

“People were telling me they’d dive it in a few years,” said Stephen Broadbelt, owner of Ocean Frontiers and part of the Kittiwake committee. “Then they go to the website and see the videos, and they’re saying they’re going to dive it every year.”

By our second dive, some 45 minutes after we’d surfaced from the first, the sun was behind the clouds and the snorkelers had left. I got no greeting from giddy fish. Instead of going deep, I drifted over the ship’s smokestack, whose depths are perhaps the one part of this stage-lit wreck that is completely devoid of daylight.

Gazing into that void, I could feel how gutted the Kittiwake was. In time, though, the emptiness should become rich profusion: Lobsters and octopodes will move into shadowy nooks, cleaning shrimp will set up work stations where sailors once did, extending an invitation of sorts to hungry garden eels and the eagle rays that eat the eels. The Kittiwake will become a coral-encrusted possession of the sea.

The Lowdown: Grand Cayman

Getting There: You can fly direct from many major U.S. cities to Grand Cayman’s Owen Roberts International Airport.

Staying There: Cobalt Coast, on the northwest shore, is a low-frills resort with tidy oceanfront rooms and an outdoor restaurant; it’s also home to DiveTech (from $230 per night, cobaltcoast.com

). The six-year-old Ritz-Carlton Grand Cayman is a plusher alternative on Seven Mile Beach (from $299 per night, ritzcarlton.com
).

Diving There: More than 30 operators offer Kittiwake excursions. DiveTech’s owner led the effort to create the wreck site ($120 per person for a two-tank trip, divetech.com

). Ocean Frontiers, in the secluded East End, runs a weekly trip for $95 per person (
oceanfrontiers.com
).

By NAT HENTOFF

In May 2009, I received an email message to call someone I didn’t know: “I’m Ehsan from northern Iran.” He wanted my permission to translate into Persian and publish “Jazz: New Perspectives on the History of Jazz,” a book I edited with Albert McCarthy in 1974. Then, last year he asked to do the same with “At the Jazz Band Ball: Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene,” which I had just published. I gave my enthusiastic assent to both requests. He had discovered my books in one of the private libraries featuring prohibited materials maintained by private citizens in Iran, and had found out how to contact me via a Facebook page set up for me by one of my children.

As Ehsan had expected, Iran’s censors forbade publication of the first book. And when he found a copy of the second one on the Internet in a PBS edition and printed it out by himself, he didn’t, as is required by law, let the censors know because, as he said, “they’d accuse me of being paid by the West to propagandize Western values.”

Ehsan is Ehsan Khoshbakht, 29, a young Iranian dissident and jazz aficionado whose blog, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” is dedicated to spreading the jazz gospel as a voice for freedom inside his native country, where certain types of music and other arts are prohibited. Mr. Khoshbakht’s initial contact with me blossomed into a continuing dialogue via the Internet and telephone in the years since. In our conversations, I learned how this young man became so determined a member of what he calls “the jazz family,” even under a dictatorship as closed to this music as Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia were.

Mr. Khoshbakht says he named his blog (which can be found at ehsankhoshbakht.blogspot.com) after the famous Duke Ellington composition because, “I love Duke, and I see jazz as that train. Living in Iran, the only notion I had of freedom was listening to these jazz people, especially Duke Ellington.”

“On the Web,” he continued, “I read passages from your books and play music by the players you write about. Billie Holiday, Jo Jones who plays like the wind, Charlie Mingus and his cry for freedom. I was born late so I lost the chance of hearing Duke, Basie, Thelonious in person. But in your books, I see you as one of those people.”

That beats any award I’ve ever received.

Mr. Khoshbakht was born in 1982, three years after the revolution, in a small town in northeast Iran. In 1996, his family moved to the religious city of Masshhad, which “in the gloomy days of post-Revolution Iran was possibly the most impossible place to live in,” he says. “Restrictions on arts and entertainment were suffocating throughout the country. No screening of foreign films. No Western music. But in Masshhad, there was no music of any kind, even Iranian traditional and folk music.”

Then, in 1998 Mr. Khoshbakht discovered jazz when he came across a compilation cassette. “What changed my life was Louis Armstrong. When it came to Pops it was like somebody put me on fire,” he says. “Jazz became my religion. It was a way of escaping from the bitter realities of the outside world.”

Beyond the sheer pleasure of the music, Mr. Khoshbakht found a larger lesson in jazz. “If out of the worst imaginable situations and the most horrifying in the history of African Americans—slavery—such a graceful music can emerge, why can’t I be a decent and free human being in the circumstances of Iran’s troubled history of repressing freedom?”

In one of my books, “The Jazz Life,” Mr. Khoshbakht had read about Ellington telling me how, when he and the band were performing in the South in the depths of segregation, they had traveled in rented Pullman cars to get around the problem of being denied hotel accommodations, among other forms of official segregation.

“That became my way of handling difficulties living in Iran,” he explained. “If they’re not going to recognize your rights, you make your own world that nobody can touch,” he told me. “I was traveling with Duke and his orchestra in the cross-country tours of my mind.”

“After receiving my master’s degree in architecture and urban design in Masshhad in 2009, I never really took that future work seriously in the ugly realities of day-to-day life in Iran,” he says. “Instead, I went on to become a full-time jazz aficionado—listening to that music, writing about it and knowing more about it became my main task. I’d had so little to start with. Finding the line-up of a Billie Holiday record from 1944 was as difficult as a trip to the moon. But I think I made that trip.”

Before the nearly pervasive blackout of “Western values” in Iran, Mr. Khoshbakht wrote articles around 2001 for newspapers and magazines on jazz, as well as film and architecture. He also made a documentary, “Caligari to Libeskind,” on German film and architecture during the 1920s and ’30s and its influence.

“I made it only from archival materials and put it together in my own room, recording the narration in my closet,” he says. “It was shortly after Ahmadinejad took power, so my film, due to references to the Holocaust—ending with Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish museum of Berlin as one of the last embodiments of expressionist art—never found a chance of screening.”

“The whole soundtrack is jazz, from Thelonious Monk to Anthony Braxton and Charlie Mingus’s ‘Fables of Faubus’ [about Orval Faubus, the Arkansas governor, who barred blacks from his state's public schools]. This music has a great role in the film.”

Mr. Khoshbakht explained that he began his blog in May 2009 by making his own radio programs “and putting them on the Web in my blog with qualities that suited the very slow speed and highly controlled Internet connections in Iran, and having folks download them.”

Although his blog and others are blocked by the censors, he says, the people of Iran, especially the young, manage to download them using antiproxy software, he says.

Five months ago Mr. Khoshbakht left Iran for London to start a new life. “It was impossible to live in Iran any longer and try to do anything creative,” he says. “It’s been hard to survive here but the music keeps me breathing.”

In London, he’s engaged in film studies and keeps up with his blog, which continues to reach into Iran and the rest of Europe, receiving around 200 visits per day world-wide.

He’d arrived in London knowing nobody. “But amazingly, a jazz blogger from New Orleans [familiar with the blog] emailed his musician friends in London about ‘a guy from Iran who knows nobody. See what you can do!’”

Thanks to that appeal, a local bass player invited Mr. Khoshbakht to one of his gigs and introduced him to other musicians. “Also, a Spanish blogger based in London emailed me and showed me around,” he says. “That’s when I understood there still is a jazz family.”

Mr. Khoshbakht’s far-ranging view of jazz reminded me of John Coltrane telling me that in his music he was trying to connect with the global cosmic consciousness. I never dug exactly what that meant. I’ve come closer, though, getting to know Mr. Khoshbakht.

“I’m here because I have to swing. I believe I can feel the pulse of the universe when I’m listening to Ellington or Coleman Hawkins. I think swinging is nothing but attuning the jazz music with that cosmic pulse,” he says. “In a post of mine in October 2009 that I called ‘Jazz means Democracy,’ I wrote: ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re old or young; man or woman; a billionaire or a bellboy; free or inside a prison; Muslim or Christian, or Jew. As long as you can be part of this democratic conversation known as jazz, you’re in, and nothing else matters.’”

No wonder the mullahs want to silence people like him.

Mr. Hentoff writes about jazz for the Journal.

By MARION ISSARD

The quiet Parisian suburb of Asnières-sur-Seine has become an essential stop for serious food lovers in recent years. There, the window of Le Couteau d’Argent shows pictures of its famous owner, Yves-Marie Le Bourdonnec, posing naked with meat. But Mr. Le Bourdonnec isn’t a controversial chef or the owner of a hipster restaurant: He’s a butcher.

“No one in France can compare his meat to mine,” he said recently, sporting his organic-cotton butcher’s apron. “My côte de boeuf is one of a kind. No one here dry-ages it for 60 days.” His Christmas order book was full in August.

France has been known for its three-star chefs for decades. Now, French foodies are name-dropping their suppliers, moving a step down the food chain to crown celebrity food providers. From foie gras producer Robert Dupérier to star butter-maker Jean-Yves Bordier, being able to cite the name of food providers has become proof of traceability and quality.

“You want to be sure that what you eat is not going to kill you, but with a trendy touch,” says Caroline Champion, the head of restaurant consultancy Convergences Culinaires. “Food providers are increasingly seen as artists, with signature products.”

“The Bohemian Butcher,” as Mr. Le Bourdonnec calls himself on his business cards, is the most eccentric of the new celebrities. Besides the naked pictures, featured in a charity calendar, he is known for turning down Michelin-starred chefs who want to buy his beef. Next month, he’s scheduled to open a steak house in Paris—part of ambitious expansion plans just four years after buying his business out of bankruptcy court.

When he restarted his business, Mr. Le Bourdonnec focused on local customers instead of high-profile chefs. Selling to restaurants “turned into a business thing, everything started to be too expensive. If you tell me my meat is too expensive, I get angry,” he says. (He sells his iconic cut, the côte de boeuf, for €75 a kilo.) Now, 80% of his business comes from the Paris region, 10% from the rest of France and the remainder from abroad.

“People today want quality products,” says Mr. Le Bourdonnec, “and they’re willing to pay what it’s worth.” A recent study by market research company Ifop showed that 90% of French people today pay attention to the quality of the food they buy, compared with 58% in 2004, and they favor local products.

The son of a former priest, Mr. Le Bourdonnec grew up on his aunt and uncle’s farm in Brittany, where he raised goats and a pony. Though he hated to slaughter animals, by age 9 he decided he wanted to be a butcher. Ten years later, he bought Le Couteau d’Argent (“The Silver Knife”) from his boss. Today, the 43-year-old butcher still has the same tiny, old-fashioned shop, open only four days a week.

Though his shop was out of the way of Paris’s best restaurant suppliers, a few years after taking over the butchery he was discovered by France’s most famous chef, Alain Ducasse. Mr. Ducasse had tasted a steak cut by Mr. Le Bourdonnec and contacted him. The young butcher began inventing new cuts of meat for Mr. Ducasse, which gained him early credibility among France’s haute cuisine. He later gained other high-profile clients such as Le Meurice’s Yannick Alléno.

Mr. Le Bourdonnec has plenty of expansion on his plate. With partners, he is set to open his first restaurant, the Beef Club, in Paris next month. It will only serve British meat, which he argues is raised more ecologically than French cows.

Elsewhere, he uses French beef. With a French breeder, he recently bought a historical butchery in Paris, set to reopen in March.

A third shop, in Montreal, is in the works for summer, and will deal in American and Canadian beef. His 17-year-old son Paul, the second of five, will run it. “I was so hoping he would become a butcher,” Mr. Le Bourdonnec smiles.

By ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

New York

When the twin towers of the World Trade Center fell in 2001, it seemed like the end of the race for the sky. It was inconceivable that anyone would want to build, or inhabit, such a conspicuous terrorist target again.

But history is rich in ironies; if the age of the skyscraper was over, it was only because the age of the superskyscraper had already begun. Advances in structural engineering, materials and technology, global financial shifts and the timeless incentives of ego and profit have created gigantic towers that are shattering all previous records for size. They are changing skylines and lives around the world.

I, for one, am not in thrall to size; build very big and you can build very bad—and the very bad will be inescapable. I always felt that the twin towers disrupted New York’s scale and skyline without compensating grace. They were more a sign of the Port Authority’s zealous desire to enter the city’s high-stakes real-estate game—while overreaching its transportation mandate—than an indicator of New York’s greatness.

If they symbolized anything, it was the personal ambition of the Port Authority’s then-director, Austin J. Tobin, to construct the world’s tallest buildings, something he was free to do because the Port Authority’s independent status allowed it to override the city’s zoning, code and height regulations. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki, whose forte was delicacy on a small scale, the result was the world’s daintiest, most characterless big buildings until disaster restored the city’s more familiar skyline. Symbolism was conferred on them posthumously by death and destruction.

So where does the Empire State Building fit in the age of the superskyscraper? The record today is held by Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, at more than twice the Empire State Building’s 1,250 feet—a height almost as nostalgic as its dirigible mooring mast. Eighty years old, the Empire State Building is a city and national landmark. In New York’s class-conscious office market, where buildings are graded from A to C, it was subjected to minimum maintenance and disfiguring “modernizations” by a series of owners, to the point where agents stopped bringing clients to its outmoded offices. But it never lost its popular appeal. Souvenir models continue to sell, and when a King Kong remake in 1976 was transferred to the taller World Trade Center, the film was as flat as the tops of the towers. It remains an iconic image for many New Yorkers and for much of the world.

An iconic image is about much more than the brutal breaking of scale. Architecture transforms and fixes a city’s identity; symbolic architecture is more than a conspicuous addition. New York has massed its generic glass towers around its two enduring Art Deco masterpieces—the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, and one of the most successful works of skyscraper place-making in recent history, Rockefeller Center. Try imagining the city without them. This dramatic combination has given New York an internationally recognized signature style.

But by 2006 the Empire State Building was part of a money-losing package of buildings of steadily declining value and appeal that simply could not compete with the sleek new towers. An older building, even a celebrated older building, must pay its way. They were controlled by the estate of Leona Helmsley and W&H Properties, now Malkin Holdings LLC. The Malkin family supervises the properties and manages the Empire State Building through its Empire State Building Company LLC. (Don’t ask—New York’s byzantine real estate investment syndicates defy simple, or any, explanations.) Anthony Malkin, a third-generation member of a family long involved in the industry, believed that the older buildings had “good bones.” But he was faced with the decision of whether to cut the losses by selling the entire portfolio, including the star property, or whether to invest heavily in bringing the buildings up to code and up to date. He decided to invest.

Exterior brickwork was cleaned. Circulation and office space were reconfigured. Elevators and mechanical systems were replaced. Dropped panels and fluorescent fixtures that had been punched into decorative ceilings were removed, and damaged details were restored or reproduced. “Renovating an existing property is one thing,” Mr. Malkin explains. “Renovating its image is another. You bring back the original luster or a reasonable facsimile.”

For the Empire State Building he went the extra mile. The upgrading program was announced in 2007, and more than $550 million has been spent on retrofitting and restoration between 2009 and the present, with refinements continuing. Much has been written about the advanced energy-saving installations carried out by experts, and how small, shabby offices more suggestive of shady detective agencies or fly-by-night financial operators were replaced by “prebuilt” high-tech interiors to attract prime corporate tenants.

But it is the strategy of this turnaround that highlights the crucial difference between those who advocate for old buildings on the basis of art and history and those who deal in them as commercial commodities. Real estate has a succinct language of its own that serves as a defining and selling tool. The process began with “branding.” To quote Mr. Malkin, “branding elevates the Empire State Building to a world-wide standard of excellence.” It transforms an old, deteriorating, below-market property from a liability to a “prewar trophy building.” This requires “repurposing” the building for contemporary needs and a higher class of better-paying—or, as Mr. Malkin puts it, “credit-worthy”—tenants.

Preservationists refer to the process as “adaptive reuse,” but their more intangible aesthetic and historical arguments just don’t cut it; for the industry, this is a pragmatic, quantifiable procedure determined by the values of the marketplace. It’s all about costs and return. Mr. Malkin is a businessman focused on the bottom line. His objective was to turn the Empire State Building into a state-of-the-art property with a restored image that would give it a unique competitive marketing edge.

What has received less attention than the building’s “greening” is how it was returned to its 1930s Art Deco style, much of which had been lost to a misguided 1960s makeover. Mr. Malkin went to the firm of Beyer Blinder Belle, restoration architects for Grand Central Terminal and other landmark structures. Using the original drawings of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon and old photographs, it took two years of research by Frank J. Prial Jr., an associate partner, and Richard Metsky, the architect in charge of the project, to identify and replace what was gone. Fragments of colors and details found under layers of dirt were analyzed. Every decision had to be integrated into the new technologies and security systems without compromising the architects’ original intent. (It took less than two years for the Empire State Building to be completed; the construction log kept by the building engineers, Starrett Brothers & Ekin, was recently discovered and republished by the Skyscraper Museum.)

Unlike the lush, elaborate, French-inspired, high Deco romanticism of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State’s massing and design is a more simplified, commercial evocation of the Machine Age, a favorite theme of the time. The stylized mural of the original high, arched, Fifth Avenue entrance, a geometric abstraction of industrial gears and wheels executed in gold and aluminum leaf, had been painted over and partly destroyed by a hung acrylic ceiling and fluorescent fixtures. Aluminum was an expensive and fashionable new metal in the 1930s, and although silver leaf is more commonly used and cheaper today, Mr. Malkin went for aluminum and authenticity in the restoration by EverGreene Architectural Arts.

By now, Mr. Malkin was on a roll. Chandeliers that had been designed in the 1930s but never executed were produced during restoration by Rambusch Studios, the firm responsible for much of the original decoration. The ceiling’s restored cove lighting has been dimmed to its 1930s levels, bringing out a variety of subtle tones in the book-matched marble walls, long killed by the harsh fluorescents. A specially commissioned lighted-glass mural by Denise Amses backs a newly designed desk for the entrance now located on the “repurposed” 34th Street side that separates business activity from the lines for the perennially popular observation deck.

Real estate is all about risks and rewards, and by any measure Mr. Malkin’s ambitious and expensive gamble paid off. The restored and revitalized Empire State Building has some of the highest rents and most sought-after office space in the city. Its new tenants include leading financial, law and communications firms. Preservationists see it as a win for the city’s architectural heritage. Mr. Malkin views it with enormous personal pride. “I’d rather be known for making the building a great success than to be known for selling it as a failure.”

Jaded New Yorkers, join the international tourists—go. Don’t miss the plaques identifying the workers who constructed the building in the 1930s and those who have re-created it for the 21st century. Stop for a quick pizza, or stay for a late cocktail at a cool, upscale bar; both are behind redesigned storefronts in the refurbished side corridors. You might even have your picture taken next to the illuminated model below the celestial celebration of the Industrial Age. Enjoy it all. It is our building, and still the most famous office tower in the world. It is New York.

Ms. Huxtable is the Journal’s architecture critic.

Topps Company, Inc.

Satchel Paige, pitcher for the St. Louis Browns

Major-League Pioneers

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through June 17

In “Breaking the Color Barrier in Major League Baseball,” the Met has drawn 60 baseball cards from more than 30,000 that are part of its Jefferson R. Burdick Collection.

Those pictured are some of the earliest players to have moved from the Negro Leagues into the majors, beginning with Jackie Robinson in 1945.

City of (Gauzy) Light

Museum of Modern Art, New York, Monday through April 9

The dreamy works of French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927) caught the attention of surrealists Man Ray and Tristan Tzara. The show title “Documents Pour Artistes” (there are more than 100 photos) refers to the sign on Atget’s studio door: He considered his photos—of overgrown parks, Parisian gardens and store windows—as reference material for other artists.

Streets of Alabama

The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Sunday through May 13

Self-taught artist Bill Traylor spent the end of his life sitting on the sidewalks of Montgomery, Ala., making drawings on found cardboard about city life and his past as a slave. The more than 60 drawings, including “Man, Woman” (circa 1940-’42) will go later this year to the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tenn.