I'd read about two weeks ago Ada Louise Huxtable's thorough and informative piece about plans to renovate the New York Public Library, so I was surprised to see in The New York Times Tuesday morning that the distinguished architecture critic had died at age 91. Her well-reasoned and trenchant articles in the Wall Street Journal in recent years were a prime example of the Journal's growth as a general interest paper.
Huxtable first gained fame as the pioneering architecture critic of The New York Times, which she left many years ago, a serious loss for the newspaper. She won a Pulitzer Prize at the Times and left after winning a MacArthur grant. The Times cited that, or her age, for her departure, but some wondered if she had grown too acerbically critical of the city establishment's development schemes for the newspaper's taste. She was famous for an essay decrying the criminal destruction of the classic Penn Station on Manhattan's West Side. Puzzlingly, The Times in its obituary doesn't mention her celebrated stance against the rail station's loss.
The Journal gave Huxtable a forum for a brilliant twilight career. I loved reading her sharp pieces in the Journal's Personal Journal section. Huxtable's columns were better than The Times' architectural criticism, if it still exists. I suppose Michael Kimmelman does some meandering, muddled bits from time to time. Huxtable remained the master until almost the end.
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