THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022 17
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TRUTHINTELEVISION
GRILLINGTHEG I LT
W
hen HBO announced “The
Gilded Age,” its new series about
a railroad baron and his wife fighting
for social status against the Old Guard
of New York in the eighteen-eighties,
Keith Taillon took note. “I was excited,
but I didn’t want to get my hopes up,”
he said the other day, strolling around
Murray Hill. He’s an expert in the ar-
chitecture of the period. “I don’t want
to sound historically conceited. But I
wanted to be pleasantly surprised.”
Taillon, who is thirty-four and has a
B.A. in history and a master’s in urban
planning, runs the Instagram account
keithyorkcity, where he posts about Man-
hattan history, often sharing tidbits in
a voice out of “Gossip Girl.” (“lol sweep-
ing around the room telling the curtain
seamstress what to do,” reads one “Gilded
Age” post. “Rude.”) On weekends, he
gives walking tours. The show, which
was created by Julian Fellowes (“Down-
ton Abbey”), spent nearly a decade in
development limbo. The set budget is
said to be enormous.
Taillon, who has a generous beard
and round glasses, found the first epi-
sode better than he’d expected, but he
had quibbles. On his walk, he stopped
by spots where real-life dramas of the
Gilded Age had unfolded. At the Mor-
gan Library & Museum, on Madison
Avenue at Thirty-seventh Street, he
pointed out a brownstone mansion from
the eighteen-fifties, noting that it was
the sort of house that “The Gilded Age”’s
Agnes van Rhijn, a forbidding old-
money widow played by Christine Ba-
ranski, would have lived in. It was oneof three adjacent houses owned by the
Phelps-Dodge family, a mining dynasty;
as they died out, the houses were pur-
chased by J. P. Morgan.
“Old money really disdained osten-
tation,” Taillon said. In the show, van
Rhijn lives with her sister and niece on
Sixty-first Street, next to Central Park.
The rapacious robber baron George Rus-
sell (played by Morgan Spector) and his
vulgar wife, Bertha (Carrie Coon), build
a monstrous white mansion across the
street. Russell recalls both Cornelius
Vanderbilt, who amassed the family for-
tune, and his heirs, who were resented
for their gaudy houses and carriages.
Taillon said, “What irks me about
the show is that they portray the van
Rhijns and the Russells living across
from each other, up on Sixty-first Street.”
He headed north on Madison. “And, in
1882, Sixty-first Street was really the hin-
terland, especially for wealthy families.”
(Also a “goat-infested wilderness,” ac-
cording to his feed.) He went on, “My
thing is, if you’re going to tell the story
of an old New York family like the the-
oretical van Rhijns, they probably should
have lived down here, in Murray Hill.”
Taillon’s own history is less rarefied.
He was born in Plattsburgh, New York,
and grew up in Abilene, Texas, near
where his father was serving in the mil-
itary. In middle school, he was assigned
to research an old building and write a
proposal arguing that it should have a
historic marker. “For a lot of kids, it was
just another project,” Taillon said. “For
me, there was a spark there.” He moved
on to researching old shipwrecks. When
“Titanic” came out, in 1997, he was upsetcupied by some thirty three-foot-tall
vintage dolls. “How do you like my pan-
demic family?” she said. “They were orig-
inally all girls. I turned some of them
into boys by cutting their hair and giv-
ing them freckles.” She went on, “I like
putting them into situations. They don’t
move while I’m taking pictures. I’ve been
writing conversations for them, too.”
She bobbed on her couch as she leafed
through old work. “I recently learned
that I have a movement disorder,” she
said. She was reared in Brooklyn. Her
father had a print shop in Brighton
Beach, and her mother made copies of
Old Master paintings. In Resnick’s year-
book from James Madison High, the
class’s “brightest” girl and boy were her
and Charles Schumer. Not her type. A
few years later, her dalliance with a mem-
ber of the Weather Underground led to
an arrest for possession of a suspicious
substance that was actually just boric
acid, for the removal of a foreign object
from her eye. (The mug shots are in
the retrospective.) She split for Califor-
nia to study at CalArts, with the likes
of John Baldessari. On a trip to Ansel
Adams’s house, in Carmel, she found,
in his library, a copy of her favorite book,
of Lucas Samaras’s auto-Polaroids—in-
side which Adams had scrawled, “This
is not photography.” Resnick declared
to herself, “I am not Ansel Adams.” She’d
started painting with oil on her photos,
and experimenting with ways of seeing,
and depicting seeing. She taught a course
in three stages: Fun with Photography;
Son of Fun with Photography; The Re-
turn of Son of Fun with Photography.
She moved back to New York in
1973 and self-published books of her
work. In 1978, she brought out “Re-
visions,” a progression of staged images
based on her adolescence, with accom-
panying text. (“Don’t call them cap-
tions,” she said.) A closeup of a loaf
of bread crammed against a woman’s
crotch: “She first learned the facts of
life from a friend while on a class trip
to the bread factory.”
At the SoHo Weekly News, she had a
regular feature called “Resnick’s Believe-
It-or-Not.” One series featured water-
conservation tips: “Spit at each other to
keep clean.” “Forget all about the boat
people.” “Employees must NOT wash
their hands.” Ripley’s sent a cease-and-
desist, so she changed the name of the Keith Taillon
column to “Resnick’s Believe It.” By
then, she was deep into the “Bad Boys”
project. “Men were always photograph-
ing girls,” she said. “I wanted to take
pictures of men, and turn the tables.”
Johnny Thunders, Richard Hell, Gil
Scott-Heron, Halston’s boyfriend Vic-
tor Hugo, Steve Rubell with Roy Cohn.
Some bad, some bad. Most dead.
—Nick Paumgarten