Elhanan Q. Hackenback (1868-1954) was a an exceptionally wealthy recluse.
He was both exceptionally wealthy, and exceptionally reclusive, even by
American standards. It was his money that built the extraordinary Basilica
of St. Gladys de la Croix in uptown Manhattan (the church whose
phenomenally vertiginous and nightmarishly gothic west tower is featured at
the close of the film version of 'Batman' starring Michael Keaton and Jack
Nicholson).
His father, Cyrus Z. Hackenback (1848-1872) was somewhat wealthy and
reclusive. Both wealth and reclusivity were the direct result of his chosen
profession, as a remover of soil. Night soil, day soil, horse soil, and
human soil. Soil from foundations, from excavations, from graves, from
wells. Soil from the building of roads and railways, streetcars and Els.
Garbage. Ordure.
In steam-age New York the streets were jammed with horses. If it han't been
for Cyrus Z. Hackenback the citizens would have been up to their knees in
the residue. It is a subject incapable of decorus treatment, for which I
apologise, but the Hackenbacks were shit-shifters, and there is an end to
it.
The rutted and muddy roads leading north out of Manhattan were a constant
bottleneck, day and night. Before the completion of the Brooklyn bridge in
1883, and long before the tunnels of the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad or
those of the subways, all land-bound traffic in and out of Manhattan
travelled via the isthmus to the north. Hackenback's malodorous cargoes had
to go by water.
From countless piers round Manhattan, chains of Hackenback barges removed
the waste products of the great metropolis. New York, resplendent on its
granite peninsula, met the modern age in a cloud of steam. Steam from the
engines, steam from the boats, steam from the mains below the street, steam
from the backs of the horses, and steam from Hackenback's stinking open
scows.
No wonder Hackenback was of a retiring disposition. Despite the fact that
he had amassed a fortune large enough to buy his way into any club or
clique he chose, despite his high morals, his bonny family and his charming
character, the nature of his trade left an indelible stain on his public
reputation. The Hackenbacks were not welcome in society. They lived as
outcasts.
In 1872 the family suffered alone when papa died of typhoid fever, almost
certainly contracted after a fall into a barge carrying waste from the
city. His son, Elhanan, was only fourteen. It is reported that the
experience affected him to the core. He had already had to endure the names
and catcalls that fell on the ears of anyone unlucky enough to carry the
Hackenback name. Despite that unfortunate reputation, and the grossly
unfair treatment the family recieved at the hands of all who knew their
vocation, was it not in fact the case that Papa had died keeping Gotham
City clean?
The life of Elhanan Q. Hackenback became even stranger than that of his
father. A lonely and brooding teenager, he took complete control of his
father's business, and turned it into an Empire. By the time he was twenty,
he was handling the garbage of twenty million households in the five
cities. In his early thirties he was removing the spoil from the tunnels of
the newly-built subways. In his forties he helped excavate the great holes
where the skyscrapers would stand.
Elhanan Q. Hackenback's fortune was simply immense, and with it he set
about building a church. On the site of the family house in Washington
Heights he built first a Tomb, then a Mausoleum, then a Chapel, and then a
Church (with a fine organ by Hilborne Roosevelt fitted with the new
'Electric Action'). In 1898 he razed the whole lot to the ground and
started again on a massive scale, blasting a vast undercroft out of the
solid granite and employing Constantine Ziggurat to design the first
Basilica of St. Gladys de la Croix. Dissatisfied with Ziggurat's work,
Hackenback fired him just as he was about to start the Choir vault, and
employed the Guastavinos to continue. As soon as they had completed the
crossing and dome they were thrown out to be replaced by Ranulph Crumb
Addams, who built the transepts and made a start on the nave (altering the
Byzantine framework of Ziggurat's original design as he went along, and
replacing it with his own sombre version of *Very* Late Gothic).
At last Hackenback had found an architect who understod the breadth of his
vision. The new work planned in 1928 caused the donor to make a withdrawal
from his Deposit Account that is rumoured to have started the wave that led
to the Wall Street crash of 1929. A few years later, Addams died in
harness, squashed to the thickness of a dime by the fall of a granite block
weighing a hundred and twelve tons. His sons, Cedric and Cyril Crumb
Addams, continued as far as they could, amid constant arguments with the
now fractious and elderly Hackenback. During the Second World War, and
skimping wildly on materials and workmanship, they flung up the
horrifically tall west-end Campanile, with its Disneyland turrets and
Charles Laughton gargoyles, its desperately unsafe peal of eighteen
Whitechapel-cast bells, and its four-hundred and sixty-four steps made of
low-grade unplaned Bulgarian softwood held together with angle-blocks and
wriggle-pins.
There the hair-raising structure came to a grinding halt, having run out of
money, inspiration and architects. Hackenback retired to a cramped and
freezing apartment at the very top of the Addams-family campanile, where he
lived alone by the light of naked bulbs until his unregarded death in 1954.
Hackenback was nothing if not thorough, and he approached the question of
an organ for his great building with exactly the same obsessive enthusiasm
as he originally devoted to the construction of the building. Today we know
of Rodman Wanamaker and Senator Emerson Richards, but few realise the
extent to which all they ever said and did was simply a response to what
Hackenback had already done at the Basilica of St. Gladys. Always at the
forefront of organ design, always ready to bring out the cheque-book and
write an order for another fifty ranks, Hackenback employed, one by one,
all the great names in American organ-building.
The organ by Roosevelt, a perfectly adequate four-manual instrument with
five manual divisions (the fifth being an Echo organ concealed under Cyrus
Hackenback's sarcophagus), was moved into the new Basilica in 1898 and
revoiced and altered by Carlton C. Michell. In 1901 it was rebuilt
completely by the Los Angeles Art Organ Company under the direction of
George Ashdown Audsley. In 1903 the whole thing came down again for a
radical rebuild by Hope-Jones. By now the main organ, divided either side
of the chancel, had grown to six manual divisions. The Echo organ under the
Hackenback tomb behind the high altar had grown somewhat, becoming a fully
fledged three-manual and pedal orchestral section with a string organ for
Rodman Wanamaker to drool over.
Hope-Jones added a few dozen of his own idiosyncratic voices to the main
organ, but reserved his own special contribution for the newly built
transepts. Here, against the north and south walls of the facing transepts
and in the spaces below the vast rose windows, he built two vast sixty-foot
high chambers of steel and concrete, fitted with huge arrays of aluminium
sound-trap shutters. He turned the clergy out of the undercroft in order to
build a blowing plant run directly by a turbine on the high-pressure steam
main. Employing the same contractors who laid the pipe for Edison Steam,
he ran cast-iron main round the entire church, to deliver twenty-five and
fifty-inch wind to every quarter. In the north transept chamber he
installed a Diaphone unit down to sixty-four-foot C on the fifty-inch wind,
and a vast open wood Tibia to thirty-two-foot C on the twenty-five inch.
On the south side the high wind carried a Contra Trombone of wood down to
the CCCCC pitch, and the 'low' wind had a monster metal violone rank to
CCCC. High above the crossing in the oculus of the dome, Hope Jones laid
out his double-tongued quadruple-harmonic Tuba Mirum in the open air,
before he was unceremoniously fired by Hackenback in 1904.
In 1908 it was E.M.Skinner who took over, replacing chests and action
throughout the instrument, re-naming many ranks and replacing others,
re-voicing and re-balancing the main ensembles, and adding many of those
characteristic voices with which he made his name: the Erza"hler chorus on
the north Choir section, the huge Solo *Flauto Mirabilis* and its matching
Bombarde *Flauto Stupenda*; the lovely little family of English Horns in
the south Choir, and the Wagnerian Brass Organ added to the east-end
Orchestral scetion beneath the Paternal Catafalque (with its several French
Horns and unique 'Cornet des Cors de Champ VI'). In the transept chambers
Skinner began to build on the noble foundation laid down by Hope-Jones,
eliminating the inartistic extension and providing a fully independent
foundation on both sides, of large Diapasons, Flutes, Trombas, Horns and
Tubas.
Skinner visted the organ on and off until about 1920, at which point work
stopped while the construction of the building entered its next and
greatest phase. With the opening of the nave in 1934 the full length of the
church was revealed for the first time - some seven hundred and fourteen
feet - together with its astronomic sixteen-second reverberation.
Hackenback was already well aware of what Emerson Richards had been up to
at Atlantic City, but paused for a moment in his onward flight. It is
rumoured that he went to Atlantic City when the organ was quite new, and
had Ruben Midmer show it to him without Richards' knowledge. According to
one of Midmer-Losh's employees, who witnessed the visit, he arrived in an
enormous Duesenberg J with shaded windows, was scruffily dressed, and
toured the entire organ in compete silence. He then sat at the console,
drew every stop in sight, and played 'chopsticks' rather slowly. Scowling
at Midmer, he spat out a single bitter sentence:
'Sounds like shit! Nothing but a military band with a red-hot-poker up its
backside! It may be bigger than mine, *but it ain't worth a flyin' fart*!.
With that he turned on his heel and left.
Hackenback may have pretended not to be impressed, but over the next year
or two he clearlly took renewed interest in the craft of organ building. He
was rumoured to have been seen at the openings of several important
instruments by G. Donald Harrison, and by 1938 he had secured the services
of Harry Willis, the English-born grandson of Father Willis and son of
Vincent, who had worked on the Atlantic City organ and knew the secrets of
the Double-Langward Diapason and of Brass-Weighted Tongues.
During the war Harry Willis worked almost on his own and in total secrecy,
adding yet more to the Elhanan Q. Hackenback Organ at the Basilica of St.
Gladys de la Croix. Exactly what he added, no-one ever knew. A huge
drawstop console, with six manuals and vast curved jambs almost envelopping
the player, was completed in 1942, but the knobs were never engraved and
the wiring never started. A great deal of new material was added to the
various chambers, but no-one knew what, because Willis voiced at night and
allowed no-one into the organ.
By the time Hackenback died in 1954, Willis was dead also. The Basilica
was out of money and out of luck. Unfinished, grotesque and folorn on its
rocky northern promontory, increasingly isolated in an unsympathetic and
sometimes dangerous locality, the church was almost forgotten and the organ
with it. Harry Willis's workshop in the basement was locked and forgotten.
He in turn had sealed the shutter fronts of the transept sections,
protecting them against the dust caused by the final chaotic building
campaign of 1942-6. The cast-iron wind-lines had fractured and rusted.
Temporary blowers were rigged up in the north chancel section. Limping
along on its five-manual Skinner consle and action, with only a few
departments capable of wheezing life, it was an unwanted and unloved
monster. The transept organs were probably derelict. A tarpaulin hung over
whatever Willis had been putting up at the west end. The Hope-Jones Tuba
Mirum sagged unhappily among the pigeons in the dome. The entire Orchestral
Organ was silent, decayed into breathless and dusty obscurity under the
huge bronze tomb of the Hackenbacks, Father and Son.
(To be continued)
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Note: opinions expressed on PIPORG-L are those of the individual con-
tributors and not necessarily those of the list owners nor of the Uni-
versity at Albany.
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