A Salon for the Ages, at Least for Now
When Clara Aich, a Hungarian photographer, first stepped inside the old foundry at 218 East 25th Street in Manhattan, the building was a majestic ruin. It was winter 1977, and snow had fallen through the collapsed roof of the four-story, 19th-century brick structure, powdering the ramshackle floor of its main studio space. Most evocatively, the place was filled to the rafters with plaster models of architectural sculptures: gods and gargoyles, cherubs and lions, eagles and nymphs.
No other buyer was interested in the wreck, but Ms. Aich was captivated by it, common sense be damned. ''I'm somewhere in Rome,'' she recalled thinking as she stood in the freezing studio. 'It was just hauntingly beautiful for me.'
Though light on funds, she scrounged up the $15,000 down payment, plus another $10,000 for the architectural ornaments, undeterred by warnings from friends about the daunting cost of repairing the building.
'It was the dream of youth,' she said.
The plaster ornaments, it turned out, were models left behind by Rochette & Parzini, a prolific firm founded by a Frenchman and an Italian that from 1909 to 1972 worked on fine architectural sculpture in that studio for city landmarks like the Morgan Library, the Waldorf Astoria Hotel and St. Patrick's Cathedral.
'For me they were very important,' Ms. Aich said of the ornaments. 'They became part of me when I saw them there.'
Ever since, Ms. Aich has displayed them on virtually every exposed-brick wall, intermingling them with paintings and 'objets d'art' from far-flung lands.
The central space of her building is the double-height, ground-floor studio, which until her retirement a few years ago served her well for commercial photography shoots for clients like Revlon and Estée Lauder. Illuminated by three skylights, it is a place of inviting warmth, where art directors liked to linger and friends dropped by for an espresso, basking in the gracious, Old World ambience.
But Ms. Aich has also long operated the building as a sort of sumptuous, speakeasy salon, hosting intimate musical performances, operas and plays whose performers sometimes wind up using the studio as a crash pad.
Palazzo Parzini, Ms. Aich calls the place, but others have named it Casa Clara.
'I still vividly remember walking in there for the first time because it does feel like a total portal. You walk in and it's almost like Narnia in the sense that you open that wooden door and all of a sudden you're definitely in a different time in a whole different energy,' said Janine Picard, who co-directed an adaptation of 'Romeo & Juliet' there last year. 'All the art that's in there, I feel like really the space itself is breathing with history and artistic history.'
The atmosphere is both bohemian and refined. Antique Kazakh carpets cover the floor, with another draped over a Steinway grand piano. A plaster Bacchus leers across the room at a large-format photograph of street graffiti. Ms. Aich's father, a hussar in an elite Austro-Hungarian cavalry regiment, gazes out impassively from a World War I oil portrait.
The events Ms. Aich has hosted are as eclectic as the décor. There was the German Forum, a program that supported talented young German opera and cabaret singers. There was Kansas City Sound, a group of musicians playing 1930s jazz. And the Egyptian shaman who stayed there for a month, leading meditations. There was the projection on a large screen of an avant-garde opera from the Bregenz Festival in Austria, which drew the Hungarian and Swiss ambassadors to the studio.
'I went a little out of hand with champagne and little Wiener schnitzels, taking them around,' she said.
But all this may soon come to an end. Burdened by a $2 million mortgage, Ms. Aich is poised to list the building for sale for $7.9 million, complete with four stories of unused air rights above it.
'I expect someone will knock it down,' she said, a prospect she finds particularly sad because it took her decades to renovate the building, bit by bit as money became available.
Jonathan Hettinger, who is handling the sale for Sotheby's, said he thought it more likely that the buyer would be a creative professional who would live there and use the main studio space for entertaining or private events.
Ms. Aich said that her first three years in the decrepit building were 'like war times: one hot plate, one light hanging down, a long electric heater my assistant and I would warm our hands with.'
Since then, she has made the building (mostly) watertight, added new skylights in their historic locations and enlarged the bookend mezzanines on either end of the ground-floor studio. She sleeps luxuriously in the front one, in an antique Indonesian bed surmounted by the plaster maquette of a neoclassical pediment.
Creativity is in the very bones of the building. In its early days, it housed the National Fine Art Foundry, established by the sculptor Maurice J. Power in 1868. An Irish native, Power crafted many bronze Civil War memorials around the country.
In 1909, Eugene Rochette and Michel Parzini, who also went by the name Michael, bought the foundry and moved their sculpting and modeling workshop there. The pair had met at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Their arrival in the United States in the early 1890s coincided with the City Beautiful movement and the ascendance of the Beaux-Arts architectural style, which meant plenty of ornamental work for those rare artisans this side of the Atlantic Ocean trained in sculptural modeling and stone carving.
Thayer Tolles, curator of American paintings and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said that Rochette & Parzini were part of 'a phenomenon of immigrant artists who have had relatively ambitious academic, professional fine arts training coming here and realizing that their skills are best put to use working behind the scenes, so to speak, and fulfilling this great demand for architectural sculpture.'
In 1904, the two men founded their own business. The firm's handwritten ledgers from 1905 to 1908, shared with a reporter by a Parzini descendant, show that the pair were quick to find work with some of the city's pre-eminent architects, like Warren & Wetmore and McKim, Mead & White, on richly ornamented buildings like Grand Central Terminal and the William K. Vanderbilt château on Fifth Avenue. (A dollhouse-size maquette of that mansion is tucked into a corner of Casa Clara today.)
Rochette retired by 1921, and Parzini followed in 1938, leaving the firm in the hands of his son, Archie, and his partner, Willie Decker.
'He was the firstborn, very spoiled, very good-looking Italian son of two immigrants from the north parts of Italy,' Lynne Parzini, Archie's daughter, said of her father. 'And even though he was very proud of the work, and I think of his own abilities, I don't think he ever put his heart into it the way it should have been.'
Nonetheless, his studio performed some fine work.
In 1942, a new high altar was consecrated at St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, above which rose an exquisitely detailed, gothic-style baldacchino, or canopy. Designed by Maginnis & Walsh, the baldacchino was cast in bronze from plaster models created by Rochette & Parzini.
Ms. Parzini, who frequented her father's studio as a child in the 1950s, remembers it as a 'magical place' with a 'buoyant atmosphere,' filled with music and the chatter of Italian and German sculptors speaking in their native tongues.
But in the ensuing decades, the demand for sculptural work was swept away by the dominance of modernist architecture, for which the elimination of ornament was a central tenet.
'To my mind,' Archie Parzini told Newsday in 1981, 'every damned building now looks like a factory.'
Ms. Aich met Mr. Parzini once.
Standing in the ornament-filled studio not long ago, as rainwater leaked from a skylight onto her Steinway, she recalled the dazzling impression he made when he visited in 1978.
'He was the most dashing older gentleman out of an Italian film,' she said, 'very, very elegantly dressed' in a dark blue suit with 'a beautiful carnation in his lapel.'
Delighted that she planned to keep the studio intact, he proudly showed her around, explaining which building each plaster model had been made for.
'Archie left an absolutely warmhearted feeling in me,' Ms. Aich said. 'He gave me the feeling: 'I trust you with my building.''
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