What’s in a Name?

On the Eiffel Tower appear seventy-two names of French scientists, engineers, and mathematicians who worked between 1789 and 1889, the latter the year of the tower’s completion. The gilded surnames are set in metal plates on the frieze that wraps around the tower, between the consoles that support the first balcony. Astronomer Jérôme Lalande, mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange, chemist Antoine Lavoisier, engineer Eugène Belgrand, Louis Daguerre, and sixty-seven others — no women.¹ It’s said that each name could be no more than twelve letters — sorry, Étienne Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire! The website of the Eiffel Tower states: “Crowned with the names of illustrious scholars, the Eiffel Tower becomes a kind of scientific pantheon celebrating the power of the human mind.”

A whopping 660 names are inscribed in stone on the Arc de Triomphe. These are of French generals who served between 1792 and 1815, surnames only, the ones underlined being those who died in battle.

But this is nothing compared with another great structure of nineteenth-century Paris, Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (1843–50). Here are 810 — count ’em — names of writers and scholars and seers, from Moses to Jöns Jacob Berzelius 1779–1848. The names don’t appear to be a decorative element added to the exterior of the building so much as the exterior seems conceived for the purpose of displaying the names. Indeed, Labrouste believed buildings were texts to be read. The names on the Bibliothèque are very like the lists of names in Auguste Comte’s positivist calendar, representing a “religion of humanity,” of 1849.² Comte, regarded as the father of sociology, developed the philosophy of positivism, a belief system rooted in science, meant to guide society in the wake of the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. To this end, the religion of humanity would seek to honor those who made a positive contribution to the welfare of humankind. Comte’s name may be little known in today’s America, but his influence was enormous, on George Eliot, on the field of social research, not least in the rosters of names on buildings.

Here are three notable examples in New York.

Laboratory Administration Building, Brooklyn Botanic Garden

One of New York’s loveliest buildings is the Laboratory Administration Building (1912–17) in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. This was designed by William Kendall, a partner in the firm of McKim, Mead & White. He was trained in Paris, at the École des Beaux-Arts, and, like all students there, would have been very familiar with Labrouste’s library, a cultish building among architects. (Indeed, McKim, Mead & White’s Charles McKim, another Paris man, drew inspiration from the Labrouste building for his great Boston Public Library.)

The “pantheon” with which the Administration Building presents us is rather a specialized one: great botanists, and other scientists who contributed to botany. Here are 68 surnames, rendered in Roman square capitals: chemist Jean-Baptiste Boussingault (1801–87), botanist Rudolf Camerarius (1665–1721), botanist Eduard Strasburger (1844–1912), botanist Simon Schwendener (1829–1919) among them, set in panels around the building. Note the names, look them up, and you now know more botanical history than ninety-nine percent of your fellow humans.

General Post Office

Kendall was also the architect of the General Post Office, now known as the James A. Farley Building, in Manhattan, on Eighth Avenue between 31st and 33rd Streets, built 1911–14. This building is most famous for the long inscription in the frieze of the Eighth Avenue entablature, an inscription not of names but of lines from volume four, book eight, line ninety-eight of the Histories of Herodotus: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” This is the architect Kendall’s own translation. It’s a bit catchier than that of the famous University of Chicago classicist David Grene: “And him neither snow nor rain nor heat nor night holds back for the accomplishment of the course that has been assigned to him, as quickly as he may.”³ The line refers to the Persian system of mounted postal messengers under Xerxes I.

Fans of inscriptions will not want to miss those in the attics at the four corners of the original building, which extends about midway between Eighth and Ninth Avenues along 31st and 33rd Streets. Here are the names of great figures in postal history — a niche interest to be sure, but one with its passionate devotees. On 31st Street, we find the names of Cyrus, Persian emperor of the sixth century BCE, and of Augustus. On 31st Street at the Eighth Avenue corner, we find Nerva, Roman emperor who in the first century abolished the postal tax, and Charlemagne. On Eighth Avenue at the 31st Street corner, we find Louis XI, who in the fifteenth century created Europe’s first national postal service, and Franz von Taxis, who in the fifteenth century established postal service throughout the Holy Roman Empire. On Eighth Avenue at the 33rd Street corner we find Cardinal de Richelieu and Pierre d’Alméras, secretary to Henri IV and to Louis XIII, builder of the Hôtel d’Alméras in the Marais, and originator of fixed delivery fees. On the 33rd Street corner at Eighth Avenue we find Sir Rowland Hill, creator of the Uniform Penny Post in nineteenth-century Britain, and Heinrich von Stephan, director of the postal service of the German Empire in the nineteenth century. Finally, on 33rd Street halfway to Ninth Avenue, we find Andrew Hamilton, colonial governor of New Jersey and deputy postmaster general of the colonies in the seventeenth century (not to be confused with the Philadelphia lawyer who defended John Peter Zenger), and Thomas Witherings, founder of the Royal Mail in the seventeenth century. These are rendered in elegant Trajanesque letters with very sharply and precisely etched serifs.

Brooklyn Museum

The third building is the Brooklyn Museum, originally the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, by Charles McKim of McKim, Mead & White. Of the façade facing Eastern Parkway, the wing on the left dates to 1904–06, the center section to 1900–05, and the wing to the right to 1895–97. By now, you might have figured out that this firm had a thing for these lists of names, and that may have its source in the partners’ admiration of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. The Brooklyn Museum outdoes any other building in New York, in the quantity of names, in the obscurity of many of the names, and in the extreme stylization (bordering on lunacy) of the lettering.

There are two sets of names on the building. In the frieze, set between the pilasters of the façade, are well-known names, such as we find on many buildings: Solon, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, etc. But also, reminding us that multi-culti is not new, Buddha, Confucius, Laotse, Mohammed, Kalidasa. These names are set below an attic along which range statues, placed directly above the pilasters, so that the names do not appear directly under the statues and do not refer to the statues. The statues represent abstract ideas or fields of inquiry (e.g., Persian Religion, The Genius of Islam, Chinese Law, etc.), and are not of specific historical figures, though it would be easy for the casual observer to assume that they were illustrations of the names below.

The more intriguing set of names is found on panels below the first-floor windows, and only in the wing to the right of the central section with the building’s portico. Similar panels are to be found to the left as well, but no names have been inscribed. It’s as though they ran out of money and could inscribe only half the panels — or perhaps they ran out of names! Perhaps half the panels were left blank so that one day they could be inscribed with the names of those who, at the time of construction, were not yet born, or not yet “canonical.”

In any event, the inscribed panels feature 126 names. (I had to count them myself, since I could not find that number in any documentation of the building.) Seven panels face north onto Eastern Parkway, two face west. Each bears fourteen names set in parallel rows of seven names each. One row presents us with Hesiod, Theognis, Thespis, Phrynichus, Euripides, Ion, and Agathon. Hesiod and Euripides are well-known names. Theognis? Phrynichus? Yikes. Elsewhere we have Terpander, Stesichorus, Pisistratus, Agesilaus, Epaminondas, Ctesias, Theopompus. I’m happy to see my favorites, Strabo and Pausanius. We should all be happy to see Sappho — a woman! And of course many other names are well known.

Still, these Greek and Latin worthies are, on the whole, more the domain of specialized classical scholars than of general cultural inheritance. Most intriguing of all is the stylized lettering, with T’s and I’s — but, lest we get complacent, not all T’s and I’s — ascending like rocket ships way above the cap line, and O’s placed above the arms of uppercase L’s or in the counters of uppercase G’s. Many letters are randomly miniaturized to make the names fit the space. Throughout, uppercase H’s and E’s are joined as ligatures.

Names of a Different Kind

Rosters of names inscribed on buildings or monuments are sometimes of a different kind. On the piers of Edwin Lutyens’s majestic Memorial to the Missing of the Somme (1928–32), in Thiepval, France, are inscribed the names of 72,000 men lost in fighting in the Somme between 1915 and 1918. The elegant lettering, upper case with serifs, was designed by MacDonald Gill, the brother of Eric Gill of, among other things, Gill Sans fame. On Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in Washington, D.C., are inscribed, in Hermann Zapf’s sans-serif Optima upper case, slightly more than 58,000 names. On Michael Arad’s National September 11 Memorial, at the World Trade Center, are 2,983 names. These are also in Optima.

Few, if any, of these names are of those who had an inkling they might be publicly commemorated. In Thiepval and Washington, the names are of soldiers who volunteered or were conscripted to fight in beastly wars. At the World Trade Center, it’s mostly ordinary office workers — men and women in equal numbers — who in a blink went from staring at spreadsheets to being the names we gaze at to remember, not the deeds of pantheon-dwellers, but of the acted-upon, wrested from the anonymity of the history of our time.

It’s not what Comte had in mind, or Labrouste, or McKim. But I suspect that in our time this is the only form in which we shall see such inscriptions.