Some buildings in New York are so stunning, they make you stop in your tracks. The Knox Hat Factory, at Grand Avenue and St. Marks Place in Prospect Heights, is that kind of building
It almost looks like a castle, with the yellow brick factory walls fortified to protect the interior, and a corner watchtower to help spot and vanquish invaders.
But of course this is Brooklyn, and in 1890 when the hat works opened as the world’s largest hat factory, it was just one more manufacturing building in a city filled with companies that made things.
As companies go, however, Knox Hatworks has a long history in Gotham. “Founded by Irish immigrant Charles Knox, the Knox Hat Company began operations in lower Manhattan, selling beaver hats in a small store he opened in 1838,” states the Brooklyn Public Library.
“Through promotion and word of mouth, the business built an impressive clientele, including Abraham Lincoln, who purchased a new Knox stovepipe right before his 1860 speech at the Cooper Institute.”
After Charles Knox—aka “Knox the Hatter”— died, his son, Civil War hero Edward, became the head of the company.
In the ensuing years, the original Knox store on Fulton Street burned down. Edward Knox relocated the hat shop to 212 Broadway, then to the posh Fifth Avenue Hotel on 23rd Street.
In the 1880s, he decided Knox should get into the manufacturing business. A letter published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1952 recalled the factory’s early days.
“When this plant first opened, all the men who worked there wore high hats to and from work,” stated the cheeky letter writer. “What a time we kids had during snowball weather.”
Knox Hatworks continued production through World War II, but eventually the building was abandoned, according to the Brooklyn Public Library. “In the mid 1980s developers bought the building and converted it to apartments.”
The Brooklyn Public Library’s post about the factory included a photograph dating to 1905—showing a spectacular clock tower with a mansard roof, now removed.
It’s unfortunate, but at least the developers kept the terra cotta panels at the corner of the building, which gives a little backstory on the building and company that curious passersby love to know. (Though the founding date of the company carved into terra cotta is wrong, per Lost New York City.)
PHOTO OF THE DAY
IMAGES OF KNOX HATS
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Ephemeral New York
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
In April 2009, the heirs of Berlin-born George Grosz filed a restitution lawsuit against New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) claiming that three paintings by the artist held in the museum’s collection rightfully belong to the family.
The trustees resisted the call.
The contested art works included a portrait of Max Hermann-Neisse (1886-1941). What is the story behind this remarkable painting and how did it end up in Manhattan?
What links the sitter to the socialite Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, whose Royal Suite furnishings at Manhattan’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel were put under the hammer by Kaminsky Auctions in October 2020?
Painter & Poet
The painter George Grosz (1893-1959) suffered badly from Nazi policies driven by Joseph Goebbels to control cultural manifestations. Party officials confiscated about 300 of his works held in museums and galleries, some were stolen and sold, others burned (seventy paintings vanished without a trace).
One of the paintings seized by zealots was a stunning portrait of his friend, the poet Max (Macke) Herrmann-Neisse.
Born on May 23, 1886, in Neisse, Silesia (now Nysa, Poland), into a Jewish family of innkeepers, Max Herrmann was a physically disabled child and grew up with a powerful sense of otherness.
Having studied art and literature in Munich, he turned to writing. Influenced by Expressionist authors, Herrmann published poems in various German avant-garde periodicals. In 1914, Fischer Verlag issued his first collection Sie und die Stadt (She and the City).
In May 1917, Max married Leni Gebek. The couple settled in Berlin where they immersed themselves in the city’s vibrant mix of artistic and political activities. From that time onward he added his place of birth to his name.
Mixing in bohemian circles, Herrmann-Neisse was a known figure in the city’s bars, theaters, and seedy cabarets. He was Berlin’s literary version of Toulouse Lautrec, creating an ever-expanding oeuvre of poetry, stories, and cabaret pieces. In 1924 he received the Eichendorff-Preis and three years later the Gerhart Hauptmann Award.
In 1925, George Grosz displayed his first portrait of the poet with hunchback and bald head at the “Neue Sachlichkeit” (New Objectivity) exhibition in Mannheim. Today, this painting is on display at the city’s Kunsthalle (museum of modern art).
Two years later he produced an even more stunning portrait. In 1933, the Nazis purged this painting from Berlin’s legendary Flechtheim Gallery, condemning it as a prime example of “degenerate” art.
They closed the gallery as its founder Alfred Flechtheim was Jewish.
Litany of Bitterness
Two days after the Reichstag (the seat of government) Fire in February 1933, Max and Leni fled Berlin in fear of their safety as a decree had been issued that permitted the regime to incarcerate opponents without charge.
Via Switzerland and the Netherlands, they arrived in London in September that same year. A few months later, the Nazis burned his books.
Unable to speak English and deprived of German citizenship, his poetry became an expression of utter isolation. He applied for British national status, but his request was denied.
Herrmann-Neisse continued to write. Some poems created in London are among his best, but there were few opportunities for publication.
As a young man he had visited every bar and joint in the streets of Berlin. Socially and psychologically, he was inextricably bound up with the city. The loss was unbearable. “Ein deutscher Dichter bin ich einst gewesen” (I once was a German poet) he wrote in 1934.
Shortly before his death he wrote “Litanei der Bitterness,” a poem that reflects on life in exile, expressing the pain of being dependent on the goodwill of others: “Bitter ist es, das Brot der Fremde zu essen” (It is harsh to eat the bread of foreigners).
In 1936 he published a collection of poems in Zurich entitled Um uns die Fremde (Amongst Foreigners – with a preface by Thomas Mann), a poignant work of exile poetry that explores themes of displacement and alienation. By the time of publication, the poet’s personal life was becoming increasingly bizarre.
From that year onward, he and his wife lived in a ménage à trois with Leni’s lover, the Swiss diamond dealer Alphonse de Sondheimer who supported the couple financially.
They shared his apartment at Bryanston Court in George Street, Mayfair. Unable to earn a living himself and deprived of publication outlets, the poet saw the senseless wealth of one of London’s most opulent residential areas.
Consumed by sorrow, he suffered the agony of physical and linguistic isolation. The virus of displacement hits every migrant at some time to a varying degree – it broke Herrmann-Neisse.
The domestic arrangement in Mayfair lasted until the poet died from a heart attack in April 1941. Buried at East Finchley Cemetery, he rests in a lone grave far from his beloved Berlin.
Leni later married Sondheimer who in 1947 became a British citizen and changed his name to Alphonse Sandhurst. She committed suicide in 1961 after Alphonse had passed away.
Wallis Simpson at Bryanston Court
Bryanston Court is a luxurious Art Deco seven-story red brick block of apartments. Built in the early 1930s, it became home to an international set of affluent residents.
It turned out to be a microcosm of the decade’s chaotic political developments, providing a tale of Royals, spies, and secret agents. It was here that a resident named Mrs. Wallis Simpson first entertained the Prince of Wales.
Locialite Bessie Wallis Warfield grew up in Baltimore where shortly after birth she and her widowed mother were cared for by wealthy relatives. In 1916 she married US Navy pilot Earl Winfield (Win) Spencer, a heavy drinker with a violent temper. The relationship lasted for a decade.
While in Shanghai in 1925 she had a fling with Count Galeazzo Ciano, who was later to become Mussolini’s son-in-law and Italy’s Foreign Minister. The affair resulted in a pregnancy. An allegedly botched abortion left her with lasting gynaecological problems.
She divorced Spencer in 1927. By that time, she had become involved with Ernest Aldrich Simpson, an Anglo-American shipping executive.
He was also a former officer in the Coldstream Guards, the oldest continuously serving regular regiment in the British Army, famous for protecting the monarch, wearing iconic red tunics, and sporting tall bearskin hats.
He left his first wife to marry Wallis in July 1928 at the Register Office in Chelsea, London. The couple set up home in a three-bedroom apartment at Bryanston Court where they mingled with a well-connected group of residents.
Their friend Lady Thelma Furness was the mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of King George V. In January 1931 she invited the couple to Burrough Court, her country house at Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, where Wallis first met the heir to the throne. Prince Edward was at once besotted by her.
Fashion & Fascism
Edward became a regular visitor to Bryanston Court. It was there that Wallis and her husband hosted the glamorous parties that he delighted in. The relationship between Edward and Wallis started in 1933.
Born in September 1891 in Vienna, Stephanie von Hohenlohe was the illegitimate daughter of a Jewish woman from Prague. She would later claim to be of pure Aryan descent.
A social climber, she gained the title of “princess” by a brief marriage to an Austrian noble. In 1927, she targeted a meeting with Lord Rothermere, the reactionary owner of the Daily Mail. They became lovers.
In 1932, he employed her to orchestrate communications with the Nazi leadership. She gained access to the Chancellery in Berlin. Hitler referred to her as “Dear Princess” and awarded her with the Golden Insignia of the Nazi Party.
Prompted by Rothermere, Stephanie settled at Bryanston Court into an apartment next door to Wallis Simpson and cultivated a friendship with her.
British intelligence kept the building under surveillance, fearing that Stephanie used her proximity to Wallis Simpson and Prince Edward to gain access to British intelligence.
For that reason, MI6 also tracked Wallis Simpson. Her social encounters were monitored as rumors persisted that she had been intimately involved with Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s ambassador to Britain.
Bryanston Court was a nest of Nazi plotters.
On the death of King George V in January 1936, Edward succeeded his father whilst Wallis Simpson was in legal divorce proceedings. His wish to marry an American woman who had been divorced twice threatened to cause a constitutional crisis.
Refused the union of a morganatic marriage, he abdicated in December that same year and was made Duke of Windsor by his brother and successor George VI.
Wallis married Edward six months later and became formally instated as the Duchess of Windsor (but not Royal Highness).
It was the beginning of a decades-long semi-exile in Europe and Manhattan, marred by friendships and meetings with dubious characters, including a visit to Nazi Germany in 1937 and a private session with Adolf Hitler.
There is little doubt that the couple harbored Nazi sympathies.
The Windsors made Manhattan’s Waldorf Astoria their primary American home for over two decades. The couple occupied a lavish suite (42R) on the hotel’s top floor with superb views over the city.
They arrived every fall in New York City for the social season, hosting private gatherings for elite guests. In 1950, the Duchess met James Paul (Jimmy) Donahue, the inheritor of the Woolworth department store fortune.
Nineteen years her junior, he was a flamboyant playboy. Gossip about their affair was rife on both sides of the Atlantic, leaving the Duke of Windsor publicly humiliated. In Manhattan, she sacrificed what was left of her reputation.
Washington Principles
Curt Valentin (1902-1954) had been an assistant to gallery holder Alfred Flechtheim in Berlin, and he too was of Jewish background. In late 1936, the Nazis barred him from practicing his profession, but they allowed him to move to Manhattan.
With approval of Hitler’s Reich Chamber of Fine Arts that regulated all visual artists and their representatives, he opened the Buchholz Gallery on West 46th Street (later moving to West 57th Street).
The gallery served as the main American channel for the sale of modern artworks that the Nazis had purged from European museums and private collections. The hard dollars of the proceeds supported the war economy.
Curt Valentin acted as a go-between for Alfred H. Barr, director of MoMA, to handle stolen masterpieces. Transactions were kept secret to avoid a public backlash.
Having emigrated from Berlin to the United States in 1939, Charlotte Weidler was a curator and art dealer who acted as consultant for the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh.
While she initially worked behind the scenes to protect German artists from Nazi persecution, she later took part in selling looted art. She collaborated with Valentin in laundering works that had been taken from their rightful owners.
Weidler was in possession George Grosz’s portrait of Max Herrmann-Neisse, claiming she had inherited the canvas from Alfred Flechtheim’s estate following his death in 1937.
The real story of how she took possession of the painting remains unresolved to this day. In 1952, she handed the work to Valentin who acted as an intermediary to broker its sale to MoMA (then directed by Barr’s successor, René d’Harnoncourt).
The non-binding 1998 Washington Principles on Nazi- Confiscated Art pressed institutions to find “looted” artworks in their collections and settle disputes with the heirs of former owners in a “just and fair” manner.
To this day, museums are reluctant to investigate the origins of dubious holdings. The legal battle between the heirs of George Grosz and MoMA was dismissed on a procedural technicality: the statute of limitations.
The family had waited too long to file their lawsuit after the museum had formally addressed their claims. The process contravened the ethical spirit that the Washington Principles had called for.
Grosz’s portrait of Max Herrmann-Neisse, the poet of Berlin betrayed by fellow Berliners, stays in Manhattan.
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RI HISTORY CELEBRATED IN RIVERCROSS WINDOWS
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New York Almanack
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Launched in July 1900, the transatlantic liner S.S. Vaderland (Flemish for fatherland) sailed the route between Antwerp and Hoboken on behalf of the Red Star Line. Catering for 340 first-class, 200 second-class, and over 600 third-class (formerly steerage) passengers, the liner was one of “mid tier” elegance rather than opulence and designed to compete with its rivals of the Cunard and White Star lines. She played a key role in the early history of mass emigration from Europe to the United States.
On May 25, 1912, the liner left Antwerp, arriving at Ellis Island for immigrant inspection on June 4th. On board was a talented twenty-year-old Polish woman keen to break free from traditional Jewish domestic constraints and find intellectual and sexual freedom in Manhattan.
Refusal & Removal
Every era creates its own political vocabulary reflecting current socio-cultural and ideological issues. Exclusion and deportation were keywords in American political discourse of the 1920s but attempts to “control” the influx of people go back to colonial days.
In 1639, Massachusetts law makers authorized towns to remove paupers. In 1683, New York handed local officials the legal right to send transient beggars to the “country from whence they came.”
Waves of European immigrants during the late nineteenth century provoked a nativist backlash fueled by the fact that most newcomers originated from Southern and Eastern Europe.
Catholics (especially Irish, German and Italian) and Jews were viewed as inferior to the “old [Protestant] stock” of settlers. Concerns about criminality dominated the public debate. Perceived links between immigration and urban crime would shape federal law from the 1882 Immigration Act onward.
A process of tightening entry conditions culminated in the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act which capped new arrivals by banning most Asian immigrants and imposing nationality-based quotas. It created a Border Patrol to enforce limits on the number of Mexicans and other “illegal aliens” entering the country.
An entire bureaucratic apparatus was set up to track undocumented residents. It became a lucrative business challenge with railway companies competing for contracts to transport deportees and private property owners offering (unsuitable) accommodation to hold and guard them.
The Act curtailed the flow of arrivals, but immigrants were still blamed for driving up crime rates. The number of deportations rose significantly during the decade, escalating from 2,762 in 1920 to 16,631 in 1930.
There was a clear shift in policy from one that tried to restrict mass entry to a more active intervention of monitoring individuals already living in the country.
Post-entry infractions allowed authorities to expel individuals for violating immigration law or breaching conditions of stay. The policy targeted two distinct groups for deportation.
Following the First World War the fear of social agitation led to the Palmer Raids in which officials used post-entry infringements as a justification to deport political leftists. This was the First Red Scare.
The other group was more vulnerable. LPC (Liable to Public Charge) was an immigration term for individuals likely to become dependent for subsistence.
Introduced in the 1882 Immigration Act and signed by Republican President Chester A. Arthur (the son of an Irish immigrant), the concept has been in operation ever since.
The updated Act of 1891 listed “classes of aliens” to be refused admission, including “idiots, insane persons, paupers or persons likely to be come a public charge.” Deportation gradually transformed from a process of last resource into a mechanism of social control.
Moral Turpitude
Legal provisions designed to uphold “healthy” moral standards focused strongly on single women. The law allowed for the arrest of any female who, within a five-year period following arrival, turned out to be a “public charge.”
While the early part of the decade was marked by the “sensational” removal of agitators, the “deportation machine” then became increasingly obsessed with removing women for financial dependency and/or moral infractions such as prostitution.
Federal officials gathered lists of foreign-born individuals in public hospitals, prisons, and alms-houses, creating a hostile environment for women who cared for their children alone. Deportations regularly split families, with mothers expelled and children left behind.
Immigration officials used poorly defined crimes of “moral turpitude” to deport women, specifically those suspected of prostitution, living out of wedlock, or any other diversion from traditional family orientated standards.
So-called “White Slave” legislation was drawn up to target “immoral” behaviors or illicit relationships. An ill-defined charge, officers also sought out independent women who, like Emma Goldman, dared to criticize the political status-quo.
During the 1920s, attitudes toward lesbian women were a contradictory mix of increased visibility and punitive regulation. Within covert subcultures of Chicago or New York City, women adopted masculine fashion to signal lesbian identity.
The monocle, first worn by women in Paris, became a marker of gender affiliation; Le Monocle was a fashionable lesbian bar and club opened in the 1920s on Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, Montparnasse (it closed when the German forces occupied then city).
Such symbols may have been tolerated as “daring” and bohemian in alternative urban settings, but mainstream society ridiculed them as unnatural. Viewed as a psychological deviancy, social observers labeled lesbianism a depravity or mental illness.
Growing visibility triggered a reactionary response. The Great Depression and renewed political conservatism led to increased intolerance.
Lesbian venues became once more subject to surveillance and police raids. In this climate of suspicion and persecution, a lesbian immigrant woman with anarchist sympathies was bound to face a barrage of hostility.
Tearooms
Chaka Złoczower (Kotchever) was born in June 1891 in the Polish town of Mława (part of the Russian Empire) into a large Jewish working-class family. Little is known about her youth, but when she sailed from Antwerp to New York City through Ellis Island, she was a confident multi-lingual person.
On arrival, she anglicized her first name to “Eve” and took “Adams” as her last name, a choice that some of her later adversaries considered provocative. As many Jewish immigrant women did at the time, she started as a factory worker in New York’s garment industry.
Amongst her early contacts was the Russian-born anarchist Emma Goldman. Given Poland’s socio-political turmoil of her younger days, it is probable that she herself held radical ideas on arrival.
Eve became a traveling salesperson of subversive periodicals such as Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth and Max Eastman’s The Liberator. By 1919, the year that Goldman faced deportation, Eve Adams was a suspect under surveillance by the “Radical Division” of J. Edgar Hoover’s Bureau of Investigation (later known as the FBI).
In 1921, Eve settled in Chicago with her lover, the Minnesota born painter Ruth Olsen Norlander (1889-1973). For about eight months, the couple ran a tea room named The Grey Cottage in East Chestnut Street, Towertown, frequented by a gay and lesbian clientele.
After the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition, artists, writers, and poets had settled in the district, attracting the opening of radical bookshops and bohemian clubs (including the legendary Dill Pickle Club).
At the time, the term “tearoom” had two distinct meanings: a social venue for unchaperoned women to meet and socialize; as well as a slang term used in gay subculture (referring to a public lavatory used for male sexual encounters).
Like it was for TheGrey Cottage, some women-owned establishments provided a front – “tearoom” was a lesbian code for safe space at a time that same-sex activity was criminalized.
By 1924 Eve had returned to Manhattan, living in a block (now demolished) at 38 Washington Square West. She ran a small tearoom named Eve’s Hangout in the basement of a row house at 129 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village which became a destination for local activists, gay men, and lesbians.
Inevitably, the Hangout was watched by police; local crusaders who campaigned to “clean up” the area turned into informants. A Village alliance of social radicalism and moral “aberration” was intolerable to them.
There was more to come. In February 1925, Eve Adams (pen name Evelyn Addams) published a privately printed collection of nine short stories entitled Lesbian Love in a limited edition of 150 copies for circulation among friends.
It was America’s first ethnography of lesbians. The stories, reflecting personal encounters and relationships from the author’s past, predated the publication (and obscenity trial) of Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness by three years.
That is the historical significance of the book. The choice of title was audacious. The term “lesbian” at the time was associated with medical literature and used to pathologize women in same-sex liaisons.
It was this negative label of “perversion” that Adams embraced to give identity to a type of relationship that needed recognition.
Vice squad officer Margaret Leonard was instructed by the NYPD to visit Eve’s Hangout and gather undercover evidence against its owner. She claimed that Eve had made sexual advances.
The latter was arrested on June 17, 1926, at her tearoom being accused of indecency in print and disorderly conduct towards a female officer. According to police transcripts, she had ten copies of her book left, all of which were confiscated and destroyed.
The only known surviving copy was traced back by Jonathan Ned Katz when preparing his biography of Eve Adams, an iconic study that saved her “daring life” from oblivion.
Katz added the complete text of Lesbian Love as an appendix to his book The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams (Chicago Review Press, 2021). The copy Lesbian Love was sold by the owner in 2024 at Bonham’s “Remarkable Women” auction.
Convicted to a sentence of one year for her “crime,” Eve was locked up in the women’s penitentiary on Welfare (now Roosevelt) Island. There she crossed paths with the notorious Mae West (1893-1980) who had been sentenced to ten days imprisonment for the alleged obscenity of her acclaimed Broadway play, Sex.
While West was treated as a celebrity and quickly released, Eve had to face deportation proceedings. The trumped-up charges were an excuse to punish Adams for her friendship with Emma Goldman. She was deported to Poland on December 7, 1927, and not allowed to return to America.
Convoy 63
In 1930, Eve moved to Paris, where she worked under the name Eva Kotchever as a street bookseller along the Left Bank, offering “forbidden” writings by Henry Miller (including Tropic of Cancer), Anais Nin, and others, to American tourists.
Three years later she met Hella Olstein Soldner, a Jewish singer who originated from Łódź, Poland. Eve was hired to take care of Hella’s house, but it was an open secret that the two were a couple.
In 1940, the Nazis marched into Paris and many of city’s Jewish residents fled to the “zone libre” of southern France. This territory was not occupied by German forces until November 1942.
Administered by the collaborationist Vichy regime under Marshal Philippe Pétain, the latter would participate in rounding up Jews (in razzias), often prioritizing the removal of foreign Jews.
Having settled in Nice on the Mediterranean coast, Eva and Hella were arrested at their home in December 1943. They were held briefly at Drancy, the main French transit camp near Paris, before being sent to Auschwitz on Convoy 63.
The train left on December 17, 1943, transporting 848 men, women, and children. Most of them were sent to the gas chambers upon arrival. There were few survivors.
Adams and Olstein were not amongst them. It is not even known if the couple were together or separated during that fateful journey.
In 2021, the city of Paris named a street for her in the 18th arrondissement, Rue Eva Kotchever.
PHOTO OF THE DAY
TIME TO UPDATE THIS SIGN MORE USELESS SIGNAGE THAT IS IGNORED WE CAN DO BETTER
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New York Almanack
Jaap Harskamp Illustrations, from above: Postcard showing S.S. Vaderland on the River Scheldt leaving Antwerp for New York; Thomas Nast’s “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner” from Harpers Weekly, 1869 (colorized); I.W.W. New York City headquarters after a Palmer Raid, 1919; H. W. Lytle & John Dillon’s From Dance Hall to White Slavery: The World’s Greatest Tragedy (Chicago: Charles C. Thompson, 1912) from the collection of John Warren; Adams’ Polish passport, 1928 (Daniel Olstein Collection via OutHistory); Cover of what’s believed to be the only remaining copy of Lesbian Love; Eve Adams (right) and Hella Olstein (Daniel Olstein Collection); and the plaque for Eva Kotchever Street in Paris, 2021.
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
In late July of 2007, the RIHS Visitor Center finally opened to visitors and islanders. After a 4 year period of starts and stop the kiosk was finally ready to open.
The long story was over as the original trams passed over with our future visitors.
On opening day Jessica Lappin, our City Council member cut the ribbon.
Image via Library of Congress
Four remnants of the many structures that once made up the Billings estate can still be seen in Fort Tryon Park today. The largest and most notable remnant is the driveway Billings had constructed at an estimated cost of $250,000. This private road would allow BIllings to have an easy and direct route to Riverside Drive, now the Henry Hudson Parkway. Billings hired architects Buchman and Fox to figure out a way to build a gently sloping road that would allow horses and carriages to easily traverse the 200-foot drop from the estate to Riverside Drive. The solution was to build a sort of bridge that extended over the edge of the hill, creating a wide curve “S” curve supported by “a high, graceful arch” at each end, with five smaller arches in between. It took 100 laborers more than a year to build the roadway out of stone quarried from the site.
The team from NYC Department of Cultural Affrairs and Department of Design and Construction were there to admire the project.
We were ready with books, mugs, tee shirts and totes for our customers.
My mom Ruth Berdy was one of our first guests.
RIOC CEO Steve Shane was a great supporter of the project.
Two of our first staff were Deborah Dorff and Zakia Wazani
IN 2010 the kiosk was restored to it’s original colors and authentic historic look.
At the same time the tram cabins were being replaced so the Tram Plaza had two new additions in the winter of 2010.
PHOTO OF THE DAY
Dance performance by Chris Bisram Celebrating City of Water Day at the FDR Park
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Untapped Cities
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Fort Tryon Park sits high above the Hudson River on land once home to several Gilded Age estates. The most luxurious of the estates belonged to wealthy Chicago businessman and horse breeder Cornelius K.G. Billings. In 1901, Billings bought twenty-five acres of land in what was then the countryside of northern Manhattan. Billings constructed a sprawling summer vacation home with sweeping views of the Hudson River and the Palisades on this land. Though Billings’ magnificent mansion no longer stands, you can still find remnants of it in the park today!
Fort Tyron Hall from a 400-page book about the estate published in 1911
C.K.G Billings, the retired president of the People’s Gas Company of Chicago, started construction on his Manhattan estate in 1901. The incredible natural vistas of Fort Washington and his love for horse racing drew him to northern Manhattan, where he could be close to the Harlem River Speedway that once operated on Harlem River Drive.
The New York Times reported that Billings’ estate, which was to feature a large mansion, stables for sixty horses, and an observatory from which to observe the panoramic views of the waterfront location, would “rival anything of its kind in the city.”
Architect Guy Lowell, who also designed the Supreme Courthouse in New York City, was commissioned to design a lodge on the property. The lodge was perched 250-feet above the Hudson River, overlooking Fort Washington Avenue and Riverside Drive at the highest point on the land. Billings was so taken by the stunning location that he instructed Lowell to enlarge the lodge and make it suitable as a year-round dwelling. Styled after a Louis XIV château, the 25,000-square-foot home featured glamorous amenities such as a heated swimming pool, squash courts, a “fumed oak” bowling alley, and a yacht landing at Dyckman Street. It was called Fort Tryon Hall. Along with the mansion, Billings had a “palatial stable” built “at the cost of $250,000.” Dubbed Tryon Towers, the stables were “finished throughout with Georgia pine, fitted with brass” and “the latest and most sanitary improvements,” according to The New York Times.
Tryon Towers, the Billings estate stables
By 1917, after enjoying his Fort Washington estate for nearly fifteen years, Billings was ready to move on. He sold the property to John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller planned to combine the Billings property with the neighboring Hays and Shaefer Estates and turn the land into a public park. Rockefeller originally wanted to tear down Fort Tryon Hall, but its architects’ protest made him change course. There was brief talk of making the estate an official residence of the mayor or turning it into a museum, but while the park’s plans lagged, Rockefeller rented the mansion to drug manufacturer Nicolas C. Partos. Before park plans materialized, the mansion, along with priceless works of art and other finery inside, burnt down in 1926.
Image via Library of Congress
Four remnants of the many structures that once made up the Billings estate can still be seen in Fort Tryon Park today. The largest and most notable remnant is the driveway Billings had constructed at an estimated cost of $250,000. This private road would allow BIllings to have an easy and direct route to Riverside Drive, now the Henry Hudson Parkway. Billings hired architects Buchman and Fox to figure out a way to build a gently sloping road that would allow horses and carriages to easily traverse the 200-foot drop from the estate to Riverside Drive. The solution was to build a sort of bridge that extended over the edge of the hill, creating a wide curve “S” curve supported by “a high, graceful arch” at each end, with five smaller arches in between. It took 100 laborers more than a year to build the roadway out of stone quarried from the site.
When Fort Tryon Park was created in the 1930s, the road beneath the bridge was turned into a pedestrian path and the driveway above was made into a lookout point. The Billings Terrace and Arcade are easily spotted from the Henry Hudson Parkway and can also be seen from above on Cabrini Blvd. You can walk down from the Billings Lawn and Terrace to access the Arcade. Underneath the arches, you can still see the beveled bricks the drive was paved with. These special red bricks made it easier for horses to navigate and helped prevent their hooves from slipping. Stone pillars at the end of the driveway mark the former location of a gate that led to Riverside Drive.
From the arcade, you can see another remnant of the Billings Estate, the former gatehouse, known today as the Fort Tryon Hall cottage. The three-story building appears deceptively small from its front entrance but expands at the top of the hill. When the estate property was turned into a park, the gatehouse served as a residence for the park’s superintendent and family. The stone and stucco building is now home to NYC Parks’ and Fort Tryon Park Trust offices. You can find the cottage next to the Heather Garden, just west of Corbin Circle.
The last remnant of Fort Tryon Hall is a memorial plaque Billings funded in 1909. The large bronze and granite plaque commemorates Fort Tryon, the Revolutionary War stronghold that once occupied the site, and the brave soldier Margaret Corbin. When Margaret Corbin’s husband John, a cannoneer, was killed in battle, she took up his charge, cleaning and loading the canon until she too was wounded. For her efforts, Corbin became the first woman to receive a military pension and be buried at West Point. As the memorial reads, it was “erected under the auspices of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society through the generosity of C.K.G. Billings.” The main entrance and plaza of Fort Tryon Park were renamed for Corbin in 1977. You can find the memorial in the retaining wall north of Linden Terrace.
PHOTO OF THE DAY
Dance performance by Chris Bisram Celebrating City of Water Day at the FDR Park
CREDITS
Untapped Cities
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Now in its 19th year, City of Water Day is a region-wide day, organized by Waterfront Alliance and New York–New Jersey Harbor & Estuary Program (HEP), to champion a climate-resilient New York and New Jersey harbor by inviting communities to experience their local waterways through free, family friendly activities that support joy, belonging, education, access, and stewardship.
ShakunDaviDance will be performing Introspection 2026, a continuation and reworking of last year’s performance.
Introspection is about Luyster Creek, a body of water hidden in Queens/Astoria, and it is a part of a series of works called Dancing Underground Waterways, which is about dancing hidden bodies of water in Queens and beyond. Luyster Creek is an area with water that can be accessed by residents but isn’t. Through the dance performance of Introspection, ShakunDaviDance is bringing the site’s history and possible future to residents of Roosevelt Island.
Fogo Azul NYC is New York City’s homegrown all women/trans/non-binary Brazilian-American Drumline!
Founded in 2016 and based in Queens, we can be seen appearing at over 150 events per year ranging from birthday parties and weddings to fundraisers, galas, parades and marches. Fogo Azul NYC is a community group open to folks who believe music and rhythm is in every human—if you give them the means, very loudly! Fogo Azul NYC is an age and ethnically diverse community of people who span the drummer spectrum from novice to professional. Always taking new members. We love bringing the beat to NYC!
PHOTO OF THE DAY
The staff at Coler have a wonderful collection of pets!
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
This 1823 Federal row house on Greenwich Street houses Joanne Hendricks Cookbooks.
Heading north on Greenwich Street, you pause, your attention caught by a lace curtain, time-worn brick, a weathered wooden door. A plaque on the door reads, simply, “Cookbooks.” Welcome to Joanne Hendricks Cookbooks, an inviting store of antiquarian, out of print, and unusual cookbooks that has occupied an anachronistic space in a landmarked, two-story building at 488 Greenwich Street (just past Canal Street) since 1995. Joanne Hendricks founded the quixotic emporium after working in several bookstores and developing a passion for books about food—an avocation piqued when she began cooking nightly suppers for her young family. The shop (which has room to hold just four or five people, and which she originally used as a storage space) is stocked with whatever intrigues Ms. Hendricks, a mandate that embraces a broad range of topics. “It’s always thrilling when I have something people are interested in,” Ms. Hendricks said. The proprietress has no staff. Ms. Hendricks thoughtfully curates and shapes the store herself, from the selection of the books to the decor. The store brims with character. “I control how it looks,” she said, “I don’t work for somebody who controls it.” An attestation to this insight is the irregular hours that are the privilege of the eccentrically self-employed: A notice on the store’s website advises, “Text At This Number To Be Sure I’m Open.”
A further indication of Ms. Hendricks’s independent streak: “The furniture is my own furniture and I’ve put the store together myself. I work with color and patterns and only see the full vision after I’ve put stuff together.” As a case in point, she cited, “the wallpaper, which I found in a Vermont attic. It’s decorative and Victorian-looking, which has influenced the rest of the store.” Recent arrivals include “Romany Remedies and Recipes” (1935), “The Paris (Texas) Cook Book,” “The Diary of a Country Housewife” (1951), and “A Vindication of a Natural Diet,” in which Percy Bysshe Shelley admonishes, “never take any substance into the stomach that once had life.” When asked about the difficulties of running a small business in Lower Manhattan, Ms. Hendricks cited one particular dilemma: The historic building seems untouched by time, which makes it a sought-after venue for movie and television location scouts. “Filming on the block interrupts the flow of traffic, which can be a challenge sometimes,” she sighed. Describing her customer base, Ms. Hendricks said, “there’s a wide range of people. We have repeat customers, but some people just stumble in because this little old house catches their attention.” For more information on the shop, click here.
Separately, a culinary bookstore with a tenure that will be measured in weeks, rather than decades, recently opened at 111 Broadway. Kitchen Arts & Letters is part of the RE:Store program sponsored by the Downtown Alliance, which is creating temporary pop-up shops in vacant Lower Manhattan retail spaces, now through Labor Day. Managing partner Matt Sartwell, left, said, “this is a place where stories and legends and cultural myths and traditions are all valued and found. We really love to talk to people about these books and the food in them.”
Tonight (Thursday, July 23) at 6:30pm, the 111 Broadway shop will host a panel discussion, “The Space Between Tables: Third Culture Cooking and Belonging.” Inspired by the book of the same title, this confab will be moderated by food writer Bettina Makalintal, who will chat with cookbook authors Eric Kim (“Korean American”), Zaynab Issa (“Third Culture Cooking”) Hawa Hassan (“In Bibi’s Kitchen,” “Setting a Place for Us”), and Stacey Mei Yan Fong (“50 Pies, 50 States”). For tickets (priced at $15), click here. Any customers who find the culinary culture at Kitchen Arts & Letters habit-forming are encouraged to visit the pop-up’s mothership (at 1435 Lexington Avenue, on the Upper East Side), which not only will continue operation after Labor Day, but is actually America’s oldest food and drink bookstore.
Grace Glukhov
PHOTO OF THE DAY
The staff at Coler have a wonderful collection of pets!
CREDITS
The Broadsheet
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
In summer thoughts turn to fun at the beach, pool and in parks. The vertical files of the New York City Municipal Library include a trove of publications describing City government’s role in providing recreational opportunities between 1919 and 1979.
A good portion of the contents are news clippings that track, decade by decade, City residents’ recreational choices. “Eel Season Ending For City Anglers” the New York Times reported in 1967; “People Pushing Horses Out Of Park” the Daily News decried as the Claremont Riding Academy was poised to close in 1970; and the perennial “New York on Next to Nothing” from the New York Post are just a few of the titles.
Other items include reports and communications from City offices which is the focus of this essay.
The first item of note dates from the administration of Mayor John Purroy Mitchel (1914-1917) titled “the work of the Mitchel Administration for Recreation.”
Of the four “notable things in the field of recreation” touted, the most impactful was increasing the number of playgrounds. There were 283 playgrounds in 1913 “the best of any administration” until the 446 playgrounds opened under the Mitchel Administration.
The report also cites the increased proportion of funds for playgrounds and athletic fields. In closing, the report notes that the administration “laid the foundation for sound future development” as well as increasing the spaces for play.
The 1933 ‘Report on Play Streets’
Fast forward to 1933 and the “Report on Play Streets,” prepared by the Community Councils of the City of New York. With President Franklin D. Roosevelt listed as the “Honorary Chairman” of the Child Welfare Committee, the Councils consisted of private citizens organized in groups in the five boroughs, very similar to today’s Community Boards.
The Council’s 1933 report described how they operated 40 “play streets” as part of a City-wide summer recreation program that temporarily suspended traffic on 483 streets on weekday afternoons during July and August.
The Council-sponsored streets were sited in Manhattan (28) The Bronx (5) and Queens (3) in neighborhoods with the greatest need for play space. Support for the program was largely provided through the Manhattan Borough President’s Office that supplied a crew to paint and prepare the streets.
Each street was painted, following a diagram that laid out shuffle board courts, paddle tennis courts and a circular area for free play. The crew repainted the lines every two weeks.
The Sanitation Department provided showers, placed in the middle of the streets which were a big draw, attracting “hundreds of children into the play block who may never have come for game purposes.”
Equipment was stored in church basements community centers and the local candy stores. “An appeal strictly from an increased business angle usually sold these merchants,” notes the report.
Each play street was managed by a supervisor who then identified “block captains” from among the participants. And, the staff was supplemented by “emergency relief workers” from the Greenwich House, the New York University Community Center and the Henry Street Settlement.
According to the report the success of the play streets rose and fell on the type of the supervisor, who had to “first sell himself to the children in his particular block so as to receive their cooperation, making it possible to develop their interest and enthusiasm.”
This was, of course, in the midst of the Great Depression and the play street program provided both recreation to young New Yorkers as well as jobs for the unemployed.
Most of the activities and games are still played, but some have not stood the test of time. “Puss in the Corner,” “Off the Spot,” and “Kaiser Ball,” for example, are three games which have faded into obscurity whereas “Tag” and “Tug of War” still are enjoyed today. Stickball tournaments at Spring and Sixth Avenues were special features that attracted between 500 and 800 spectators!
Somethings never change: street safety. “Play Street Detour signs mean little or nothing to the average New York City driver” laments the report. Equipment was destroyed by careless drivers and games were disrupted by cars driving through.
There is no mention of any injuries or accidents which must have been just a stroke of fortune. After two weeks of this mayhem, the supervisors were authorized to report license numbers of cars driving onto the play streets and the drivers were sent warnings and summonses.
That still had little effect so the organizers turned to better signage, which had an impact. In future years, the report urged a police officer should be available on the street for the day.
Revenue Producing Facilities
From the same period we have a report from the NYC Parks Department on “Revenue Producing Facilities” between 1934 and 1937, the heyday of Robert Moses.
Although parks, beaches, golf courses, and facilities within the parks such as swimming pools and tennis courts are generally thought of in terms of their value as venues for healthful recreation, this very detailed report shows they also produce revenue that helps defray operational expenses.
Soon after his appointment in 1934, Moses leveraged federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) dollars to fund dozens of park improvement projects — and the success of his program is evident in the numbers.
Swimming pools, his signature achievement (he famously opened 11 municipal pools in 1936), get top billing in the report and the numbers are impressive: revenue increased from $9,248.78 in 1934 to $255,000 in 1937, and attendance grew from 128,765 in 1934 to more than 2.3 million in 1937.
Another of Moses’ noted accomplishments were the beaches. “On July 25, 1936, Orchard Beach was opened with a bathhouse accommodating 6,800 people, a parking space for 4,000 cars and a newly made white sand beach.”
Adding the numbers of Orchard Beach visitors with beachgoers at with the reconstructed Jacob Riis Park Moses reported attendance ballooning from 500,000 during the summer of 1934 to more than 4.2 million in 1937.
The report carefully notes that revenue from the beaches, “show a profit of $61,900 over operating and maintenance costs notwithstanding the fact that they were not opened until June 25th of this [1937] year, a loss of four weeks operation.”
The report also includes similarly precise figures for increased revenue accruing from the improvements at the tennis courts, Randall’s Island Stadium, and golf courses — he built three and renovated seven more between 1934 and 1937.
Flushing Meadows Park & Commodore Barry Parks
In 1942, the files hold a lovely brochure for the New York City Building in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens which opened to the public in the preceding year.
Built for the 1939 World’s Fair, from 1946 to 1950 the building was the home of the United Nations General Assembly. It is now home to the Queens Museum. NYC Municipal Library.
The air conditioned building contained both an ice skating rink and a roller skating floor with “ideal skating temperatures.”
A cafeteria with light refreshments at popular prices as well as more formal dining facilities allowed for special programs and skating parties for as many as 250 people.
Two decades later, Robert Moses, in his capacity as Chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority wrote Brooklyn Borough President Abe Stark to officially announce the building of a “year-round glass conservatory swimming pool for youngsters in the corner of Commodore Barry Park adjacent to the Brooklyn Expressway.”
Promising that the pool would be ready for use in 1968, Moses noted the pool would serve a very congested area. However this grand structure was not to be. Instead, The Parks Department built a summer seasonal pool and kiddie pool in the 1970s, without the benefit of Triborough funding or a year-round structure.
Citizens Summer Committees
As with the summer play streets during the Depression, Mayor John V. Lindsay relied on a Citizens Summer Committee to provide recreational opportunities during his term. A beautifully illustrated report from 1967 lists donations from several businesses that collectively donated $500,000 to support summer programs.
“That New York had a relatively stable summer is due in large part to your efforts, for which I and hundreds of thousands of your fellow citizens are indebted,” Lindsay wrote in thanks.
And yes, there was “Operation Play Street” which by this time was operated by the Police Athletic League and staffed in part by Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA—the domestic Peace Corps).
Other programs include a Soap Box Derby in Central Park, Puerto Rico Sings offering performances by high school and college students in 25 different neighborhoods, the Junior Olympics, a Teenage Film Van that produced a movie and Operation Beat the Heat that provided 2,000 bus trips to beaches, airports, state parks, museums and other “cool” places.
PHOTO OF THE DAY
The Effler family swimming in the East River, off the Island around 1917. Definitely not suggested these days.
CREDITS
NYC Alamanack
A version of this essay by Pauline Toole was first published on the New York City Municipal Archives Blog. The Municipal Archives preserves and makes available New York City government’s historical records. Records include office documents, manuscripts, still and moving images, vital records, maps, blueprints, and sound recordings. Learn more about historical records the Municipal Archives at their website.
Illustrations, from above from the NYC Municipal Archives: boys playing stickball on a New York City Play Street in ca. 1916; Mayor John Francis Hylan turning on the water at West 47th Street near 8th Avenue, July 6, 1921; a sprinkler at 85th Street and Lexington Avenue, August 17, 1920; kids play paddle tennis games under adult supervision on a NYC Play Street, ca. 1935; a Play Street and street shower alongside the Queensboro Bridge shown in a detail from a June 22, 1934 photo; at Denis P. Gorman Memorial Playground in Jackson Heights, Queens children grab for greased melon, August 11, 1934; and Orchard Beach, July 25, 1936.
RIHS Archives Effler Family
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
THIS ARTICLE IS A FEW YEARS OLD BUT A GOOD PRIMER ON EARLY ROOSEVELT ISLAND DEVELOPMENT.
Roosevelt Island is a 2.5-mile long sliver of land in the middle of the East River between Midtown Manhattan and Queens totaling 147 acres. The island was first known as Blackwell’s Island, named after the Blackwell family who farmed the land before selling it to the city in 1825 when it was then used for various public facilities over the next century; a penitentiary, smallpox hospital, cemetery, and insane asylum.
The city would drastically transform Roosevelt Island in the mid-20th century, following the construction of the Queensboro Bridge, which opened in 1909 and passed over the island without providing access to it. In 1921 the island was renamed Welfare Island after the public hospital located on the southern end. Automobile and trolley transportation was first introduced with the opening of a vehicular elevator from the Queensboro Bridge in 1930. Over the next three decades, two large hospitals opened and in 1955 the Welfare Island Bridge was constructed, connecting the island with Queens and opening it up to more vehicular traffic.
In the 1960s planners and politicians started eyeing Welfare Island for a mixed-use masterplan. Urban renewal projects were transforming neighborhoods across the city and Welfare Island’s close proximity to Midtown and public designation made it a prime candidate for development. In 1961 shopping mall pioneer Victor Gruen proposed constructing a platform 22-feet above the island for a residential community of 70,000 people with schools, stores, public facilities, and housing, all connected by air-conditioned malls. The plan, which would have renamed Welfare Island, East Island was never realized, partly because of competing proposals to turn the island into a park and because the city was wary of giving such a large tract of land to one developer. East Island was just the first of many proposals that were considered during this period, none of which gained significant political favorability. One far-fetched proposal included digging up bodies in Queens and Brooklyn cemeteries and reburying them on the Island to free up space in the two Boroughs. Other ideas included linking the island to Midtown via landfill and multiple causeways, funneling the East River and shipping traffic through a narrow canal. The most significant development was the decision to connect the island to the subway system, with a station just north of the Queensboro Bridge in 1963.
VICTOR GRUEN’S EAST ISLANDUNDERGROUND TRANSPORTATION
In 1966 Mayor Lindsay officially announced the city’s intention to develop the island with the first step of demolishing forty five condemned hospital structures. In 1969 the newly established New York State Urban Development Corporation (UDC) issued a 141-page report analyzing the different options for the island. They proceeded to sign a 99-year lease for the land and brought in architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee to design an ambitious masterplan with housing for 20,000 new residents. Johnson and Burgee called for a mixed-income, automobile-free community planned around landscaped plazas and promenades utilizing the picturesque river and skyline views. While the development would have commercial and civic buildings – a public school, daycare facility, parking garage, office space and a hotel – the large majority of space would be used for apartment buildings of varying shapes and sizes. The area was split into two “towns,” Northtown and Southtown, of which there were nine zones, five parks, and four building lots. This was done to preserve the vistas from the island and to avoid long slab-like developments running the length of the island, as seen in the Gruen Plan. The only street, Main Street, would run north-south reserved only for emergency vehicles, minibuses, bicycles and necessary deliveries and would be the location of commercial and public facilities. Instead of cross streets, pedestrian walkways would bisect the island between buildings. Certain existing island buildings such as Blackwell House and the Lunatic Asylum would be landmarked and preserved. The masterplan was approved in October 1969 and the UDC immediately lept into action, hiring architects for the housing, garage, commercial facilities, infrastructure, and parks.
Johnson & Burgee’s Roosevelt Island masterplan. Credit: The island nobody knows, 1968. View the full report here.
In 1973 as construction was underway Mayor Lindsay renamed Welfare Island Franklin D. Roosevelt Island, unveiling plans for a monument and park at the southern end of the island named “Four Freedoms Foundation Monument to President Roosevelt.” Designed by Louis Kahn, the monument was a 780-foot-long triangular site created by landfill from the new subway tunnel, strategically positioned directly across the river from the United Nations headquarters in Midtown. Four Freedoms would face delays and not open until 2012. The 63rd street subway tunnel connecting Roosevelt Island to the system would not open until 1989.
The first phase of construction commenced in the summer of 1971 with 2,138 units of housing for 5,000 residents in four apartment buildings, along with streets, sewers and commercial space. Kallmann & McKinnel were hired to design Motorgate, a parking garage with a firehouse, post office, full-sized supermarket and retail. The housing developments Rivercross Apartments and Island House, designed by John Johansen with Ashok M. Bhavnani were completed in 1975. Johansen & Bhavnani’s Rivercross and Island House buildings were reinforced concrete structures clad in cement-asbestos panels, stepped up from the Manhattan side of the East River, housing 850 middle- and upper-income families. Across Main Street was Sert, Jackson & Associates’ Eastwood and Westview Apartments, a Mitchell-Lama development, which housed lower- and middle-income families on a six-acre site that was completed a year after Rivercross and Island House.
Sert was one of Europe’s leading modernists and a highly influential figure in post-war modernism, both in architecture and planning. Before coming to the U.S., Sert worked under Corbusier and co-founded the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). As Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design during the 1950s and 60s, Sert helped to spread the styles and ideas of Corbusier, Team X, and European Late-Modernism across the Northeastern U.S. Critics claim that his work was too reliant upon Corbusier or that he represented disproven orthodoxies of modernist ideology, but his work on Roosevelt Island, like his projects in Cambridge, deliver a type of late modernist Architecture, that like Corbusier, bridges the worlds of orthodox CIAM theoretical modernism with an avant-garde artistic sensibility. This varies from the formalist approach that we know in the U.S. thanks to Rudolph, Johnson, SOM, Stone, and Saarinen.
EASTWOOD AND RIVERCROSS CONSTRUCTION
EASTWOOD ROOSEVELT LANDINGS
Date: 1976 Architect: Sert, Jackson & Associates Address: 510 – 580 Main Street, Roosevelt Island Use: Residential
Sert’s apartment buildings Eastwood and Westview are two of the most interesting and innovative housing developments of the period. At 1,003 units, Eastwood is the largest residential complex on the island made up of ten connected buildings, stepped back from the water, forming three courtyards, each containing their own community facility; a school, senior center, and outdoor amphitheater. The courtyards are enclosed on all four sides, walled off from the waterfront except for a few open-air passageways that access a promenade along the river. Sert positioned the lowest slabs along the water, opening up the panoramic views from the rising towers, similar to 1199 Plaza across the East River in Manhattan. This was a compromise from Johnson’s original master plan that called for the courtyards to open up to the waterfront, unobstructed. Johnson’s masterplan pressed the need for a human scale, with buildings not exceeding ten stories, however, the UDC analysis determined the heights would need to increase to up to 22 stories to meet the required density. Sert and Johansen’s buildings were able to retain Johnson’s human scale by gradually stepping the 22 story east-west sections back from the river, preserving the water views and capping the longer north-south portions that followed Main Street to seven stories, creating a concrete canyon along the narrow street. Sections of the building along the river promenade were raised to create an arcade, along with openings into the courtyards.
Along Main Street, the buildings form a pedestrian arcade, raised above the sidewalk by smooth poured concrete columns. The facade is comprised of precast board-formed striated concrete panels, resembling Paul Rudolph’s iconic corduroy texture. Sert left the mortar lines on the facade visible, giving the panels a tiled pattern. The elevator shafts provided visual anchors for the buildings – a smooth, lighter concrete with small windows illustrating the skip-stop elevators that stopped only every third floor.
MOTORGATE
Date: 1974 Architect: Kallmann & McKinnel Address: 688 Main St, Roosevelt Island Use: Parking Garage
Roosevelt Island’s utopian vision was centered around the Motorgate parking garage. Designed by Boston City Hall architects Kallman & McKinnel, the garage was intended to absorb the load of automobile traffic to the island, creating New York City’s only car-free neighborhood. With capacity for 1,000 cars, (then increased to 2,600) Motorgate was established to hold vehicles for all island residents, their visitors and employees of Roosevelt Island institutions and businesses. Johnson and Burgee’s masterplan proposed restricting all traffic on the island with the exception of deliveries, construction trucks, ambulances and personal emergencies. Motorgate was constructed at the base of the Roosevelt Island Bridge, the sole vehicular connection to the island, funneling all traffic into the garage ensuring the 38-foot-wide Main Street would be restricted to pedestrians. In 1975 a pneumatic trash collection system was installed to deliver all waste to a central collection point, making garbage trucks obsolete. The concrete-framed six-story structure was an adaptation of the architect’s work on Boston’s City Hall (1968) with influences from Paul Rudolph’s Temple Street Parking Garage in New Haven.
The UDC had hoped to create a livable neighborhood in the city that could compete with the growing suburbia, allowing residents open space and a parking spot, while still having a walkable community with close proximity to Midtown Manhattan.
On the lower level, the garage incorporated a post office and grocery store, helping to open it up to the surrounding urban fabric and making it more inviting to pedestrians. These commercial additions also solidified the site as the civic center of the new planned community
PHOTO OF THE DAY
Recently the RIHS and RIOC Youth Center Celebrated the Island History with Landmark History Quest Thanks to Ana Medina & Youth Center staff or a great day and their creative artwork.
CREDITS
NYC URBANISM
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Chrysler Building in 1932. Photo by Samuel H. Gottscho, in public domain
At the close of Prohibition, Seagram’s from Canada was well-positioned to export its spirits to the United States. In fact, during Prohibition, the Bronfman family which owned Seagram’s was stockpiling alcohol to be ready when America went wet again. By 1933, when the 18th Amendment was repealed, Seagram’s owned the “largest private stock of aged whisky” in the world. Even during Prohibition, Seagram’s was selling liquor to the United States, first directly to bootleggers and then when export was banned in Canada, the company shipped stock to the French island territory of Saint Pierre and Miquelon near Newfoundland and smuggled it to the States.
With his smart marketing schemes, Samuel Bronfman nearly singlehandedly rebranded whiskey from the domain of bootleggers to that of the refined class. A 1934 Seagram’s advertising campaign had the tagline, “We who make whiskey say: drink moderately.” Lisa Jacobsen writes, in an article for the journal Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, “If alcohol producers were to make repeal success, they would not only have to teach consumers what commercial-grade alcohol should taste like, smell like, look like, and feel like going down, but they would also have to teach Americans the etiquette (and imperative) of responsible drinking. Alcohol producers in essence had to cultivate new kinds of consumer knowledge to advance the cultural and political legitimacy of their still morally suspect industry and products.” In essence, the marketing efforts associated alcohol “moderation with masculine virtue, middle-class respectability,” says Jacobsen, values which persist today.
Chrysler Building in 1932. Photo by Samuel H. Gottscho, in public domain
As such, Seagram’s rented a floor high up in the Chrysler Building in Manhattan, the icon of modernity and respectability as skyscrapers went at the time, as part of their efforts to take over the American alcohol market. The company hired architect Morris Lapidus to create an office with a private executive bar. In his early career, Lapidus had worked for Warren and Wetmore, the architectural firm that designed Grand Central Terminal, and later became a retail design expert while working for Ross-Frankel. Lapidus may be most famous for his later career work defining the hotels in Miami, designing The Fountainbleu Hotel (which had a starring role in the most recent season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), and the Eden Roc Hotel.
But 1933 was the year Lapidus was hired by the Seagram Company. The office was designed in an “exuberant, bright and shiny deco-moderne style” that defined Seagram’s embrace of modern architecture as a form of civic duty,” writes Benjamin Flowers in Skyscraper>The Politics and Power of Building New York City in the Twentieth Century.
The Executive Bar at the Seagram’s office in the Chrysler Building in 1939. Photo by Otto Schlesinger from Library of Congress.
The design of the Executive Bar clearly takes cues from Lapidus’ retail design aesthetic, with curved lines throughout in the ceiling, along the bar, and following the leather banquettes. In the book Cafes and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display the bar is described as a “showroom of and for [Seagram’s] own products: bottles of alcohol” displayed in round display holes and notes that instead of being public facing, the bar was “hidden away in the heart of a skyscraper.” According to a 1956 report in Forbes, reporters would be “summoned” there for news and would sample the latest in the extensive range of Seagram’s products.
A very detailed description of the space in Cafes and Bars offers additional detail that accompanies the photographs by Otto Schlesinger (available at the Library of Congress). The walls, the report describes, “are covered in panels of bleached rift-sawn oak and East Indian rosewood and North American plywood, combined with brown rubber tiles for the floor and leather for settees along the wall…the murals above the banquettes by Stuyvesant van Veen depict the production and tasting of spirits…” Fluorescent lighting, curved of course, illuminated the bar. A mirror behind the bar expands the space and duplicates the alcohol display on the back wall as well as the bottles at the bar.
The Seagram company would eventually build its own skyscraper in New York City 1958, the Seagram Building on Park Avenue designed by Mies van der Rohe with interiors by Philip Johnson. The glass curtain-wall building would host the iconic Four Seasons Restaurant, the premiere destination for power lunches in New York City and the building would become a landmark in its own right.
The Executive Bar in the Chrysler Building is long gone, much like the other Art Deco and Art Moderne spots in the building like the auto showroom on the ground floor and the Cloud Club at the top. But to get a sense of the powerhouse that Seagram’s has been, it controlled the distribution (and in some cases also the production) of brands like Dewar’s, Captain Morgan, Chivas Regal, Crown Royal, Seagram’s V.O., Tropicana, Absolut Vodka, and more.
By the 1950s, the company was diversifying and going into oil and coal, and in the 1980s as a result of acquisitions, Seagram’s became the largest shareholder of DuPont, the chemical company. In the 1990s, Seagram’s got into the entertainment business, investing in Time Warner and MCA (which includes Universal Studios). In 2000, Seagram’s merged with Vivendi, although the new French company soon sold off the liquor business to Pernod Ricard and Diageo. Over time the Bronfman family sold their shares of Vivendi ending the family’s long history with Seagram’s from Prohibition to the 21st century.
PHOTO OF THE DAY
CONGRATULATIONS TO FRANCINE BENJAMIN FOR BEING AWARDED THE AGNES ABRAHAM AWARD FOR HER WORK AS THE CO-CHAIR OF THE RESIDENT COUNCIL AT COLER
CREDITS
UNTAPPED NEW YORK
Michelle is the founder of Untapped New York and the author of The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland, Secret Brooklyn, Secret New York, and Broadway. michelleyoungwriter.com
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
