A transportive work of historical fiction chronicling the life, loves, and larger-than-life successes of Rafael Guastavino, an influential yet largely forgotten Spanish architect of New York’s Gilded Era
Iconoclast. Genius. Womanizer. Architect Rafael Guastavino’s signature vaulted tile ceilings revolutionized Gilded Age New York City. The Oyster Bar in Grand Central, the Prospect Park Boathouse, and the iconic Old City Hall subway stop, number among his masterpieces. But while his works continue to imbue the city with the glamor of a bygone era, the man himself has been largely forgotten. Until now.
Told through the eyes of Guastavino’s son and business partner, Javier Moro’s magnetic prose brings to life the remarkable rags-to-riches journey of this influential immigrant family. Guastavino was a stubborn man, enamored of his own sense of destiny, but he was also a deeply compassionate father, as committed to his family as he was to his work, and equally defined by his successes in the latter realm as by his failures in the former.
Set against historical events including the Chicago World's Fair and the sinking of the Titanic, The Architect of New York is a moving and entertaining father-son story filled with finely developed and deeply researched real-life characters (including figures like Stanford White) that captures the glamor and drama of a bygone era while offering a perrenial glimpse into the human heart.

My Review:

They called him “the architect of New York” in his New York Times obituary dated February 2, 1908. And he was. Or rather, THEY were. The title in the obituary, at the time it was written, referred to the elder Guastavino, Rafael Guastavino Moreno, but even then it could have referred to either Rafael Guastavino, the father or the son he named for himself and trained to be his protegee, his right-hand man, and his shadow.

As told in this fictionalized biography/autobiography, not even the two Rafaels Guastavino could tell where the one ended and the other began. And by the end of this story, it’s clear that, as much as he might have wanted to stand apart from his father as a young man, once his beloved father was gone he wished he’d never been forced to discover where that line was drawn.

The story reads as if it was intended to be a biography of the older Guastavino. But that biography is written as if from the perspective of the younger, and he tells his own story just as much – if not at points a bit more – than he does his father’s. After all, he knows his own story better AND remembers what he thought and felt as the events he witnessed actually happened.

His father was often a closed book, partly because this story begins when the younger Guastavino, called Rafaelito to distinguish him from the larger-than-life persona of his father, was merely nine years old. A boy, recently immigrated to the United States, with his parents and his older sisters, in the midst of his family tearing itself apart due to stresses that he was, at the time, too young to understand.

But also, and more prominently as Rafaelito’s story continues and he grows in maturity and understanding, because the bits of his father’s life in their native Spain that his father reluctantly reveals over the years contains a great deal of truly messy embarrassments and outright scandals, and the father doesn’t want to tarnish the worship in his son’s eyes.

As much as Guastavino senior had been at the (first) height of his career as an architect and builder when he fled Spain for America on borrowed – and possibly swindled – money, as a human being he was a bit of a louse. More than a bit when it came to his relationships with women.

Part of Rafaelito’s growing up included the discovery that his mother was not his father’s wife, that older his sisters were his half-sisters AND that he had older half-brothers (sons of his father’s first and at the time legal wife) that he’d never met, that the woman in New York City who loved him like a mother couldn’t legally marry his father, and that dear old dad cheated on her, too, repeatedly.

Senior also sent the family – however untraditionally it was constituted – into desperate financial straits over and over again because he could not manage money to save either his soul or whatever building company he was operating at the time.

He always meant well, but he didn’t always do well – at least not personally. Professionally, Guastavino senior was a bit of a dreamer – but he was often right and always visionary. His ability to execute those visions, when he was forced to rely on others outside himself, was hampered by his inability to see the way the world really worked.

But his buildings assuredly did – beautifully so – and in many cases, still do.

The elder Guastavino’s story is a compelling one. It’s a riches to rags to riches to rags to riches story told from the perspective of a person who knew him intimately, shared his life, his work, his profession and his company – and loved him much too much to have anything like an unbiased opinion on anything to do with the man he saw as larger than life until long after the end of it.

That their identities became so intertwined that the many, many buildings they created or helped to create, including parts of Vanderbilt’s famous Biltmore Estate, the Boston Public Library, the Spanish Pavilion at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and several glorious and iconic New York City Subway Stations are now often credited to the company they shared rather than either of them individually.

So, in the process of telling his father’s story, a labor of love for a man now old enough to look back and see a bit more of his father’s truth, Rafael Guastavino, Jr. also does a heartfelt and heart wrenching job of telling his own.

Escape/Reality Rating A: To quote Mark Twain, one of the elder Guastavino’s contemporaries, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” The story that Rafaelito tells in The Architect of New York is so wild that it seems over the top at many points – and yet it’s all based on the known facts of the man’s life and the work that he – and his son – left behind all over New York City, most of the Eastern Seaboard and all the way across the country.

Which is why this is both an Escape and a Reality rating. As a reader/listener (mostly listener), I certainly escaped into this story. As someone fascinated with history, that the bones of this story are both true and not well known made for a delightful voyage of discovery. The Guastavino designs remain gorgeous examples of New York City’s Gilded Age and Art Deco periods, with their sweeping vaulted ceilings and glorious ceramic tilework.

At the same time, because this is a fictionalized version of a real life it’s difficult to separate what happened from how it’s being told. I both don’t want to critique the man’s actual life – but I also do because his personal life was, to put it in 21st century terms, a hot mess. One of his own making, at that. While he didn’t actually marry all of the women involved, he did also kind of bypass bigamy on the way to trigamy – just not in a legal sense which would have gotten him in even more hot water than he was already in up to his neck.

By telling the story through Rafaelito it allows the author to put a bit of gauze over the lens of objectivity, and also puts the focus more on the work they did together. It turns the story of a truly wild life into a story about the relationship between fathers and sons, the relationship between the immigrant generation and the more formally educated second generation, and, in a business sense, the relationship between the hard driven founding generation and the softer, more privileged generation that comes after them. Those stories, those relationships, are universal and are beautifully explored here.

Rafaelito’s later-in-life reflections on just how much he STILL misses his father, on how much he regrets their frequent arguments, how heartbreakingly often he wishes he could go back in time and tell his father how much he loved him just once more, will bring tears to the eyes of anyone with a heart – especially those who lost their own fathers before they had a chance to realize everything they would miss.

The Architect of New York is a beautiful, absorbing LOT of a story. The audio, read by Robert Fass, was also very well done. Something in the narrator’s voice allowed me to sink right into the story, and that was just right as the story is more than dramatic enough to the point that too much vocal embellishment would take away from it.

In the end, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book, both for its story and for its peek into the Gilded Age and turn of 20th century America, as well as for its tale of love and independence and fathers and sons. If you enjoy stories of fascinating characters with big dreams, even bigger accomplishments, and feet of clay up to the knees, it’s a compelling journey from beginning to end.

One final note; Throughout my absorption in this book, as I listened to the narrator there was a song running through my head. The song, which has reached earworm status and I can’t get it out, is “Leader of the Band” by Dan Fogelberg. Because, the story in that song, the story of Fogelberg’s love for his own father and appreciation of his legacy, may refer to a different shared profession but is very much the same story. A story about a son whose life “has been a poor attempt to imitate the man” and feels as though he’s “just a living legacy” to the father he loved and worshiped.