It was a golden age in American history, sometimes referred to as the “Gilded Age,” an age that witnessed a great industrial and scientific leap forward. At the same time, there was a vigorous cultural flowering in architecture, arts, crafts and industrial design. This relatively short span of fifty years, between the end of the American Civil War and the end of World War I, was exemplified by the City Beautiful Movement and the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Thousands of Beaux-Arts mansions and “cathedrals of commerce” were built, rivaling the beauty of European cathedrals and palaces. Monuments and memorials celebrated American achievement; public architecture challenged the classical gravitas of ancient Rome and Athens. Landscape architects such as Frederick Law Olmsted were re-inventing the public garden. It was a time when the ordinary traveler emerged from train stations that rivaled the Baths of Caracalla and American painters created landscapes infused with transcendent beauty. Even the humblest firehouse and municipal bath in New York City possessed architectural interest. Critics often point out the darker side of its unbridled capitalism and empire building, but if you thumb through the magnificent volumes of New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism in the Gilded Age and New York 1900: Metropolitan Architecture and Urbanism 1890−1915, written by Robert A.M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, David Fishman, Gregory Gilmartin and John Massengale, you see photographs of thousands of beautiful structures that no longer exist, replaced by passionless glass-and-steel boxes. What has changed most in the last hundred years, what separates us most from that golden age is the loss of beauty and civility in the arts, particularly in public art. Lost are the deep moral and spiritual connections to a nation’s past, once provided in the form of public architecture, art, monuments and memorials.