The Cathedral of Art (1942–1944, unfinished). Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
When Florine Stettheimer died in 1944, at the age of 72, the New York artist, poet, and salonnière, was still putting the final touches on
The Cathedrals of Art, the last in a series of four monumental paintings devoted to New York’s cultural, social, and economic temples. Identical in scale, each painting measures five feet tall by just over four feet wide.
The series, which includes
The Cathedrals of Fifth Avenue (1931)
, and
The Cathedrals of Wall Street (1939), was a winkingly aware homage to places of worship in the city she’d called home for all her adult life. For the deeply private artist,
Whitney Museum wins bond-market reprieve from Covid hit
Bloomberg
The Manhattan art museum, founded in 1931 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, completed a debt refinancing this week that will prevent a $50 million principal payment from coming due next year by pushing it to 2031 with newly issued bonds, according to Fitch Ratings.
The refinanced bonds were initially sold in 2011 to help finance its new $422 million facility located in the Meatpacking District, which opened in 2015 and features about 50,000 square feet for indoor galleries, outdoor terraces facing The High Line, and a 170-seat theater.
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The Whitney, which had to close its doors for about six months in 2020 due to Covid-19, is one of the many borrowers that have rushed to the municipal-bond market to seize on low interest rates to cut debt costs or push payments into the future. Even governments, museums and other agencies hit hard by the pandemic have had little trouble selling debt, with cash flowi
Whitney Museum to refinance bonds that backstopped new building bondbuyer.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bondbuyer.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.