It is a small island, but there are those who have loved it. Including several world famous architects. Most well-known, of course, is James Renwick Jr. who designed St Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue and our own Smallpox hospital. Jose Luis Sert’s firm, Sert, Jackson & Associates, did the design for Eastwood and Westview and, before that, Philip Johnson and John Burgee prepared the initial and very ambitious masterplan for the island.
Another architect, famous in his day and but much forgotten now, also left a significant mark on the island. Frederick Clarke Withers, a champion of Gothic Revival, designed The Chapel of the Good Shepherd (in many ways, the centerpiece of our island), the Strecker Laboratory and three brick structures for the almshouse.
Withers was born in Somersetshire, England, educated in King Edward’s school and then studied architecture. He came to the United States in 1852 at the invitation of the renowned American landscape architect, Andrew Jackson Downing. Withers and Downing were not just partners but also became family, when they married sisters: Emily Augusta and Caroline Elizabeth DeWindt, respectively. The sisters were great-grandchildren of President John Adams, and grandnieces of John Quincy Adams.
Withers was primarily considered an ecclesiastical architect and published the influential book “Church Architecture” in 1873. He was a strong advocate of the Gothic style for churches, and the Chapel of the Good Shepherd illustrates his conceptions and ideas of what a church should be.
A rendering of Glenbrook by Withers. Image via The Horticulturist
A word about Gothic Revival
Gothic Revival is an architectural movement that began in the late 1740s in England. Its momentum grew in the early 19th century among opponents of the neo-classic style (think Washington DC) that, to them, signified republicanism and liberalism and the flow away from more traditional religion. The Gothic Revival movement’s roots are intertwined with deeply philosophical movements associated with Catholicism and a re-awakening of high church or Anglo-Catholic belief concerned by the growth of religious nonconformism. By the mid-19th century, it was established as the preeminent architectural style in the Western world (see for example, the British parliament’s Palace of Westminster in London, the Canadian Parliament Buildings in Ottawa and the Hungarian Parliament Building in Budapest).
Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation
Back to Withers
Although he retained his British citizenship, Withers was one of the first members of the newly founded American Institute of Architects. After Downing’s death in the explosion of the steamboat Henry Clay, Withers volunteered for service in the Union Army in 1861. He was invalided out of the service the following year, recovered, and resumed practice in New York City, joining Calvert Vaux, Downing’s former partner, and Frederick Law Olmstead in a partnership that lasted until 1871. Finally, in 1888 Withers formed a partnership with Walter Dickson. Together as supervising architects for the Board of Charities and Correction they designed several buildings on Roosevelt Island. In 1897 Withers retired to his home in Yonkers.
Withers was known for his church architecture, but undertook other projects as well. His most enduring monument in New York City is the Jefferson Market Courthouse and Jail designed in the Italian Gothic style that currently houses the Greenwich Village branch of the New York Public Library. It is an ingenious organization of spaces compacted into an odd, triangular site. A bell tower in the corner commands a view up and down Sixth Avenue in New York City. Withers incorporated the functions of police court, district court, and fire observatory in a structure which many consider his masterpiece. (The building was called “Jefferson Market” because the site chosen, in 1870 was at the time the Jefferson Market, the local produce market.) Other New York commissions included the commercial building at 448 Broome Street in the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District, the high altar in Trinity Church, the lich gate of the “Little Church Around the Corner” (Church of the Transfiguration), and the City Prison which replaced the original “Tombs.”
Rendering of Good Shepherd 1889
The Chapel of Good Shepard
The Chapel was commissioned by George M. Bliss (1816-1896), an important New York banker, who began his career in the dry goods business. It was established by the Protestant Episcopal Mission Society to serve Protestant inmates of the almshouses on Blackwell’s Island.
Originally to have cost $5000 the cost of the chapel eventually exceeded $75,000, due to the ever increasing demands and generosity of its donor. Francis Kowsky, in his book The Architecture of Frederick Clarke Withers, tells us something about the architect’s vision for the Chapel: “The nature of the Welfare Island parish compelled Withers to devise an unusual church for the society.
To maintain the segregation of the male and female inmates, Withers introduced twin entrance porches, one for each sex, on the western elevation. The portals lead into a deep vestibule, which contains two stairways in line with the entrances. These flights of steps ascend to doors in the north (male) and south (female) sides of the wide nave. Between the stairways, a central flight of steps descends to a reading room and other facilities in the basement.
This triple division is developed on the entrance wall of the nave, where a baptismal font sits in a large niche between the two portals. The present interior preserves the warmth and simple dignity of Withers’s original scheme. ‘The brick walls are…faced on the inside with brown enameled brick as high as the stone string-course under the windows,’ records a contemporary description, ‘and above it the whole of the interior walls are of buff-colored pressed-brick laid in red mortar. . .
The roofs (of the nave and apse) are open timbered, constructed in Georgia pine and finished in panels with moulded ribs, etc.’ In the northeast corner of the nave, Withers located the organ chamber, which projects on the exterior to form an L-shaped mass with the tower. By placing the tower at the juncture of the nave and apse, Withers avoided the jumble of forms that could have resulted had the tower been positioned near the western facade. The location of the tower on the north side also insured a satisfactory composition for the elevation that faced the primary approach road.
The Chapel of the Good Shepherd illustrates that Withers still possessed the ability to seek imaginative solutions for out-of-the-ordinary commissions’ He expressed obvious, pride in the work by conspicuously placing his monogram in the apex of the facade gable.” What Kowsky does not discuss is the lovely acoustics of the Chapel beloved by many Roosevelt Island residents who have luxuriated in the soft, splendid sound of music performed there.
Chapel after abandonment in the 1960’s, before 1970’s restoration
Strecker Memorial Laboratory
Strecker Memorial Laboratory, although small in size, is monumental in its overall effect. Essentially Romanesque Revival in style, similar in manner to the late work of Henry Hobson Richardson, suggested by the broad arched openings and the use of rough-faced stone-gray gneiss, quarried on the island and used for many of its institutional buildings. The use of contrasting orange brick for quoins, sting courses, and the arches gives the building a vivid polychromatic effect that is reminiscent of Wither’s earlier compositions in the Victorian Gothic style. As a result of the non-ecclesiastic building type as well as the change in the style from Gothic, which Withers generally favored, to Romanesque it can be surmised that Dickson was largely responsible for the design.
Live in a Withers home?
On a tree-lined street in Balmville, a hamlet adjoining the northern edge of Newburgh, is a house with a direct connection to 19th century Gothic Revival architects. Glenbrook was designed by Withers around 1856 for David and Pauline Clarkson and is more of a grand villa than a modest country cottage. Among his other interests, Wither who settled in Newburgh when he came from England, together with Downing and others, explored new forms for practical living and home design. Glenbrook is located at 60 Balmville Road, but alas, is no longer on the market. Guess we’ll just have to stay here.
Stephen Blank November 27, 2020
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ROBERT SOWERS
STAINED GLASS ARTIST
Robert Sowers (1923 – March 1990) was an American painter, photographer, stained glass artist, and seminal figure in the re-emergence of stained glass as an architectural art in the United States.[His architectural glass commissions cover some 20 years from St George’s Episcopal Church, Durham, New Hampshire (1955) to Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, New York (1975) and the blue cross window for Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception (Burlington, Vermont) (1976 – decommissioned 2019). In November 1953 he participated in the New Talent Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He designed the vast American Airlines terminal glass facade at John F. Kennedy International Airport in 1958–59. It was demolished in 2008 to allow for an reorganization and expansion of their terminal.
In addition to his glass commissions he wrote multiple magazine articles and published four books on stained glass, art, and architecture. He was an exceptional photographer documenting his own as well as other artist’s glass work and spent many hours walking the streets and parks of Manhattan and Brooklyn with camera in hand.
A posthumous volume of his B/W photographs was published in 1990. In 1979 he began a series of black and white paintings that eventually transitioned into color. These were based on his 35mm slides of derelict industrial landscapes, city parks, and botanical gardens of New York City and Tanglewood in the Berkshires. He sold his first painting through OK Harris Gallery, and reviewed the first printing of his fourth book almost simultaneously with his untimely death in March 1990.
His archives are located at the Rakow Research Library, Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York.[8]
AMERICAN AIRLINES TERMINAL AT NIGHT
Queen of the Blues, 1974 Above
EARLY LIFE Robert Sowers was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1923. His family moved to Florida in 1932 because his father Ray Sowers, a respected educator, was offered a position in the state. His high school art teacher, Max Bernd-Cohen, encouraged his creativity, was a profound influence, and became a lifelong friend.
While serving in the Army at the end of World War II, Sowers was able to study art at Biarritz American University, Biarritz, France. On returning to the US he enrolled at the New School for Social Research, studied with the painter Stuart Davis, encountered the theories of Rudolf Arnheim, and graduated with a BA in 1948. In 1949 he received his MA from Columbia University. A Fulbright Award for the study of Medieval Stained Glass in the United Kingdom enabled him to attend the Central School of Arts & Crafts in London from 1950 to 1953. William Johnstone was the Principal and it was here that he completed special studies in stained glass with John Baker. Returning to Manhattan he and his wife, Terry Obermayr, at first lived in a large loft on the Lower East Side and subsequently moved to a corner brownstone on Congress Street, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, NY
Great Cross window, Immaculate Conception Cathedral, Burlington, Vermont, 1976
Career
Sowers began to pursue stained glass commissions though it was an uphill battle to get the attention of Modernist architects of that time. ] Architects whose buildings he did work on included Percival Goodman**, Fritz Nathan, Eero Saarinen, Kahn & Jacobs, Edward Larrabee Barnes, Roger Ranuio, W. Brooke Fleck, Carter & Woodruff, Stanley Prowler, Henry Dreyfuss, Chloetheil Smith, William Garwood, and Philip Ives.
In the execution of projects he utilized traditional painted and leaded glass as well as more experimental processes of lamination with epoxy resins and Dalle de verre. This period of commissioned work as an independent artist consisted of inevitable ups and downs and it was during one of these bleak periods that he decided to reconsider Autonomous Stained Glass panels independent of an architectural setting. In 1971 he was Artist-in-Residence at Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. This marked the beginning of a period of small panel making including the incorporation of various cast glass shapes salvaged from the closing sale of Leo Popper’s glass warehouse in lower Manhattan, and culminating in a series of panels exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts of the American Craft Council in 1975. ] For this panel series the design / cartoon was executed as a “painting” showing the details of the glass in full color. The panel and the cartoon make a pair. A number of these design/paintings are now located in the Rakow Research Library. In addition to the Fulbright Award, he also received the Silver Medal from the Architectural League in 1955 and 1962, a Tiffany Award in 1956, and a Certificate of Merit from the Municipal Art Society in 1961.
The destruction in post-war Germany created opportunities for stained glass installations in the reconstruction of religious and secular buildings and the emergence of such very different glass artists as Georg Meistermann, Maria Katsgrau, Ludwig Schaffrath, Johannes Schreiter, Wilhelm Buschulte, Jochem Poensgen, and Joachim Klos. Sowers developed personal relationships and enduring friendships with a number of them and, most importantly, brought awareness of their work to a younger generation of glass artists and designers around the world. In America these included David Wilson, Kenneth von Roenn, Peter Mollica, Ed Carpenter, and Robert Kehlmann. Sowers also stressed that artists in Germany operated as independent designers associating with the established studios as fabricators. He was antithetical to the prevalent system in the United States where the studios retained their own in-house designers to produce essentially commercial stained glass windows. His dissemination of this departure from the norm and his encouragement of younger individual artists was one of his great contributions. It was a stimulating period for the reemergence of stained glass in the 1960s and 1970s as a truly architectural art while simultaneously opening up experimentation in other forms of glass art.
Percival Goodman was the architect of the Central Laundry on Welfare Island and Terrace City, a plan for the island that was never built.
American Airlines Terminal
American Airlines Terminal completed stained glass mural, 1960. The American Airlines project was Sowers’ most important commission. Completed in 1960, it was an iconic glass mural 317′ long by 23′ high covering the entire facade of the building designed by Kahn & Jacobs for what was then Idlewild Airport in Queens, New York – renamed after the Kennedy assassination to John F. Kennedy International Airport.[14] It was composed partially of a German opaque glass that was quite unusual, consisting of both transparent blues and reds on a solid white base.
The design was also unusual in that it was seen in its entirety from the exterior as a form of mosaic.[Traditionally architectural stained glass was viewed, and therefore designed the other way around, from the inside looking out. Additionally, once inside the terminal it would never be experienced as a whole. Historically early church and cathedral stained glass walls read as dark surfaces, thus the need to utilize dense opaque glass. Additionally, the system was single glazed which meant that the colors were seen to maximum effect as travelers approached the terminal. The idea of developing a reversible image was picked up and pursued by the architect, Percival Goodman, whose projects included many Synagogues. He felt that as a number of services were conducted at nighttime any stained glass should work in some way under reverse conditions. Sowers completed several Synagogue projects for Goodman.
The terminal project was fabricated and installed by the Rambusch Decorating Company in New York, a long established commercial studio where he executed a considerable number of commissions. In the early 1980s, because of frame and moisture issues together with heating and cooling problems inside the building, Rohlf’s Stained & Leaded Glass Studio, Mount Vernon, New York was retained to superimpose aluminum framing and tempered glass on the exterior of the existing frame. This resolved those problems but did not improve the outside appearance due to increased surface reflection coming off the new layer of glass. By 2006 when American Airlines was expanding and rebuilding their terminal it was determined that the mural was too big to save. Notice was given for dismantling, removal, and possible destruction. Initial reuse suggestions included making key chains for airline employees but not carried out. This generated a futile movement to preserve it. A group, Save America’s Window, was formed to try to retain it as a whole, a daunting and hugely expensive proposition. A hasty email exchange between glass artists who were influenced and indebted to Sowers, glass studios and enthusiasts, Judi Jordan his second wife, and Eileen Vaquilar Clifford a flight attendant for American who had great affection for the artwork, explored all possibilities. These included acquisition by various Museums and Institutions but ultimately there were no viable options, with one minor exception whereby the Airline donated 8 sections to the Madison Museum of Fine Art, Madison, Wisconsin. It was dismantled as salvage by Good Olde Things / Good Olde Glass with individual sections to be sold as mementos
Photography Sowers immersed himself in photography when he first spent time in Europe and it became a way to document his work. Photographing stained glass requires considerable expertise to be successful. This is due to the intense variation in saturation and contrast for which the eye compensates but the camera lens does not. At that time a light meter was of prime importance to average out and bracket film exposure. On one of his trips to Europe he spent time in Chartres Cathedral gauging the intensity of the blue glass and he was astonished by the variation of light value compared to the dilation of the human eye. He also spent time in Germany photographing the work of fellow glass artists primarily for illustrating his books but also for dissemination back home. His photographic work expanded when he took his camera on long walking trips in different parts of the city shooting film in both B/W and 35mm Kodachrome slide format. Sunday wandering included downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn between the bridges when these neighborhoods were essentially deserted. One prime set of these slides were unfortunately stolen but an extensive archive still exists. For his B/W work he did all his own enlarging and printing.
Painting In 1979 Sowers went back his first love of painting full-time. He had moved to a loft building on Degraw Street in Brooklyn where the space and light were perfect. The first canvases were monochromatic in tones of black and white with an abstract expressionistic sensibility which on closer study reveal an architectural reference. From this beginning he introduced color and began working directly from his series of 35mm slides, a result of his photographic exploration of the city in all its varied landscapes of streets, bridges, buildings, trash, junk, people, parks, and gardens. Nothing escaped his eye through the lens. As a glass artist his prime concern had been with light and this was also a preoccupation in his photographs and paintings. The exploration of light, a common thread in these paintings executed in a photorealistic style, represent a clear departure from his work in glass. The canvases uniformly conform to a 40″ X 50″ format, either vertically or horizontally. They are signed on the back with the date and RWS, one of the few occasions in his professional life that he used his middle initial. In 1988 / 89 he participated in a two-person show at the OK South Gallery in Miami. His death in 1990 coincided with the sale of his first painting, “Stripes”, through Ivan Karp’s OK Harris Gallery in New York and the publication of his fourth book “Rethinking the Forms of Visual Expression”.A number of his paintings have been posthumously placed in private collections.
AMERICAN AIRLINES TERMINAL GLASS RECYCLED INTO GATE. OLDE GOOD THINGS
GLORIA HERMAN GOT IT!!! The original window was a 300-foot piece of stained glass that was designed by artist Robert Sowers in 1960. It stood in JFK International Airport, American Airlines Terminal 8, for nearly 50 years before it was carefully removed by Olde Good Things and repurposed for sale to the public to own a piece of history.
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EDITORIAL
After posting a photo of the American Airlines terminal at JFK yesterday, I decided to learn about the artist who undertook this project. Sowers work was one of the creative construction projects at the airport. Remember the round Pan Am terminal and the three chapels? Many such wonderful buildings were demolished to make way for larger and larger terminals to deal with the new jets. I remember admiring the architecture when you could see the terminals instead of the monorail that blocks the view of most of the buildings.
J. Alden Weir, Portrait of a Lady with a Dog (Anna Baker Weir), ca. 1890, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mahonri Sharp Young, 1977.92
J. Alden Weir taught painting classes in New York City while he cultivated his reputation as a portrait artist. Nineteen-year-old Anna Dwight Baker was one of his students, and after a brief courtship the two married in 1883. Anna Weir’s friends variously described her as “ethereal,” “like some beautiful dream woman,” qualities her husband captured in this portrait of her with his subtle, impressionistic style. She leans forward in a black ladder-back chair, holding her dog, Gyp, in her lap. Just over her shoulder the bedroom door is ajar, providing the viewer with a more intimate glimpse into the private life of the artist. Anna Weir died in 1892 due to complications after the birth of the couple’s fourth child. This touching, personal portrait remained in the family’s collection until it was given to the American Art Museum in 1977. (Dorothy Weir Young, The Life & Letters of J. Alden Weir, 1960)
Nationality American Education National Academy of Design, École des Beaux-Arts, Jean-Léon Gérôme Known for Painting Died December 8, 1919 (aged 67) Born Julian Alden Weir August 30, 1852 West Point, New York J. Alden Weir in the late 19th century
J. Alden Weir, A Gentlewoman, 1906, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans, 1909.7.72
In A Gentlewoman, J. Alden Weir depicted a well-dressed young woman in a moment of personal reflection. She rests lightly on a chair with her eyes cast downward, completely unaware of the viewer. A contemporary critic praised this woman for her “mixture of sturdiness and charm,” qualities valued in turn-of-the-century gentlewomen. In the early twentieth century, modernization brought on by steam power and railroads caused feelings of anxiety among many Americans. To help alleviate such feelings, artists created images like these of quiet interior scenes, a visually soothing antidote to an unquiet age.
J. Alden Weir, Woman and Child, Seated (Mother and Child with Toy), ca. 1887-1893, drypoint on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Brigham Young University, 1972.84.113
J. Alden Weir, At the Water Trough, 1876-1877, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1978.125
At the Water Trough is an early work by J. Alden Weir, which he painted in the fall of 1876 after returning to Paris from a trip to Spain. It is the only known painting from this trip, and was based on sketches and photographs that Weir made in the Spanish city of Granada. This scene, which shows people gathering at a water fountain to exchange news and take a rest from their daily chores, would have been a common sight in Spain at that time, as indoor plumbing was not yet widespread. The painting was exhibited the following year at the National Academy of Design in New York.
J. Alden Weir, On the Porch, 1889, drypoint on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Brigham Young University, 1972.84.50
J. Alden Weir, (Landscape), after 1900, oil on wood, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mahonri Sharp Young, 1978.110
Julian Alden Weir was a nature lover whose Branchville, Connecticut, farm was a retreat from the pressures of New York City. His younger brother had advised him to “hang onto this place, old boy … keep it trim and untrammeled, and you will find a haven of refuge.” Weir began painting landscapes around the property after his beloved wife, Anna, died. This spindly poplar with its elegantly bending trunk might be one of those that he and Anna had planted together and that he closely identified with her. (Cummings, “Home Is the Starting Place: J. Alden Weir and the Spirit of Place,” J. Alden Weir: A Place of His Own, 1991). Perhaps the ghostly figure in the foreground is meant to suggest his wife’s spirit dwelling under the trees.
J. Alden Weir, The Frugal Repast–Isle of Man, 1889, etching on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Brigham Young University, 1972.84.10
The wonderful Bonwit Teller building at 56th Street and Fifth Avenue. Demolished by a developer with no regard of historical value of this building.
Harriet Lieber knew this one!!!
EDITORIAL
A thought: every two to three days more Americans die from Covid-19 than died in the 9/11 attack.
Judith Berdy
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff Roosevelt Island Historical SocietyMATERIALS USED FROM:
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In 1905, Fifth Avenue gained a new mansion. Businessman and baseball team owner Morton F. Plant, the son of a railroad, steamship, and hotel baron, commissioned a marble and limestone showstopper at the southeast corner of 52nd Street.
When Plant moved in to the five-story Italian Renaissance-inspired mansion facing 52nd Street (above and below left) with his first wife, Nellie, he should have felt satisfied with his decision to build it here.
After all, his neighbors were among the wealthiest New Yorkers, including several Vanderbilts, who occupied their own mansions across the street. (Plant bought the land from William K. Vanderbilt; previously it was the site of an orphan asylum, according to a 2019 Bloomberg article by Jack Forster.)
Within a few years, though, Plant apparently realized he’d made a mistake.
An increasing number of businesses were creeping up to his stretch of Fifth Avenue (like the St. Regis Hotel and Gotham Hotels at 55th Street), ruining the exclusive, residential vibe.
One of those new Fifth Avenue businesses was the American outpost for Cartier, the French jewelers. In 1909, Pierre Cartier launched his first store at 712 Fifth Avenue, near 56th Street, wrote Christopher Gray in The New York Times in 2001.
Business was good for Cartier, which organized workshops in the city to meet the demand for their jewelry, states Forster. (Selling the Hope diamond in 1910 also helped from a PR standpoint, raising the jeweler’s Manhattan profile.)
But back to Plant (at right) and his mansion, which was increasingly out of character on a more commercialized Fifth Avenue. In 1914 he’d remarried a much younger woman, Maisie (above center). The two found themselves left behind as neighbors moved away and businesses replaced them.
“By 1917, life on Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street (at left, in 1900) had long since become untenable for Plant,” wrote Forster. “The ongoing encroachment of businesses, combined with the removal of virtually all the families who’d once colonized the Avenue below Central Park to new addresses north of 59th Street, had left the Plants isolated both physically and socially. Plant had already begun work, the year before, on a new and even bigger residence, on 86th Street and Fifth Avenue (below right).”
Paying for two Fifth Avenue mansions, however, was quite costly, even for a scion of wealth. But then, Maisie caught a look at a Cartier pearl necklace. “It’s really two necklaces: a double strand of enormous, natural South Sea pearls; the smaller is a strand of 55 pearls and the larger, of 73,” wrote Forster. The necklace’s value: $1 million.
“When Maisie Plant fell in love with the natural, oriental pearl necklace, Pierre Cartier sensed an opportunity,” states a 2016 article by Business Insider. “Pierre, the savvy businessman, proposed the deal of a lifetime: He offered to trade the double-strand necklace of the rare pearls —and $100—for the Plants’ New York City home.” (The house was assessed at $925,000.)
In July 1917, an article appeared in the Real Estate Record and Guide announcing the sale of the Plant mansion on 52nd Street to Cartier for “$100 and other valuable considerations,” according to Forster. (At left, in 1975)
It’s an unusual deal, but definitely a win-win. Plant unloaded his first mansion by trading it in to Cartier for a necklace his wife desired, then moved uptown in a more luxurious house on the city’s new Millionaires’ Mile. (Cartier also absorbed the elegant residence next door at 4 East 52nd Street, the Holbrook House.)
Cartier has occupied Plant’s mansion on 52nd Street ever since. The exterior looks very much the same as it did in Plank’s day, though the interior has been altered somewhat.
I tried to get in to take a look around but the line to enter was too long; I’d forgotten it’s jewelry-buying season—when Cartier wraps the building up in a big red bow to celebrate the holidays.
But I did spot this modest plaque marking the mansion’s past as a short-lived residence built on a street destined to become a commercial corridor.
Morton Plant died in 1918, shortly after moving into his 86th Street mansion. When Maisie passed away in 1957, the mansion was bulldozed and her pearls went to auction, where they were sold for $181,000.
Where are they today? No one knows. But a portrait of Maisie wearing them (above portrait) hangs in the Cartier store today, wrote Forster.
These photos came from Gloria Herman, when remembering David Dinkins
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It’s been a good century or so since New Yorkers celebrated Evacuation Day. But in the late 18th and 19th centuries, this holiday—on November 25—was a major deal, marked by festive dinners, parades, and a deep appreciation of the role the city played in the Revolutionary War.
Washington’s triumphal entry on November 25, 1783.
By John Trumbull – New York City Hall Portrait Collection, Public Domain
Following the significant losses at the Battle of Long Island on August 27, 1776, GeneralGeorge Washington and the Continental Army retreated across the East River by benefit of both a retreat and holding action by well-trained Maryland Line troops at Gowanus Creek and Canal and a night fog which obscured the barges and boats evacuating troops to Manhattan Island. On September 15, 1776, the British flag replaced the American atop Fort George, where it was to remain until Evacuation Day.
On September 21, 1776, the city suffered a devastating fire of uncertain origin after the evacuation of Washington’s Continental Army at the beginning of the occupation. With hundreds of houses destroyed, many residents had to live in makeshift housing built from old ships. In addition, over 10,000 Patriot soldiers and sailors died on prison ships in New York waters (Wallabout Bay) during the occupation—more Patriots died on these ships than died in every single battle of the war, combined. These men are memorialized, and many of their remains are interred, at the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn.
British evacuation
In mid-August 1783, Sir Guy Carleton, the last British Army and Royal Navy commander in the former British North America, received orders from his superiors in London for the evacuation of New York. He informed the President of the Confederation Congress that he was proceeding with the subsequent withdrawal of refugees, liberated slaves, and military personnel as fast as possible, but that it was not possible to give an exact date because the number of refugees entering the city recently had increased dramatically (more than 29,000 Loyalist refugees were eventually evacuated from the city).The British also evacuated over 3,000 Black Loyalists, former slaves they had liberated from the Americans, to Nova Scotia, East Florida, the Caribbean, and London, and refused to return them to their American slaveholders and overseers as the provisions of the Treaty of Paris had required them to do. The Black Brigade were among the very last to depart.
Carleton gave a final evacuation date of 12:00 noon on November 25, 1783. An anecdote by New York physician Alexander Anderson told of a scuffle between a British officer and the proprietress of a boarding house, as she defiantly raised her own American flag before noon. Following the departure of the British, the city was secured by American troops under the command of General Henry Knox. Portrait by Gilbert Stuart, 1806 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
Entry to the city under General George Washington was delayed until a still-flying British Union Flag could be removed that had been nailed to a flagpole at Fort George on the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan as a final act of defiance, and the pole was greased. After a number of men attempted to tear down the British colors, wooden cleats were cut and nailed to the pole and, with the help of a ladder, an army veteran, John Van Arsdale, was able to ascend the pole, remove the flag, and replace it with the Stars and Stripes before the British fleet had completely sailed out of sight. The same day, a liberty pole with a flag was erected at New Utrecht Reformed Church; its successor still stands there.] Another liberty pole was raised in Jamaica, Queens, in a celebration that December. Finally, seven years after the retreat from Manhattan on November 16, 1776, General George Washington and Governor of New York George Clinton reclaimed Fort Washington on the northwest corner of Manhattan Island and then led the Continental Army in a triumphal procession march down the road through the center of the island onto Broadway in the Town to the Battery. The evening of Evacuation Day, Clinton hosted a public dinner at Fraunces Tavern, which Washington attended. It concluded with thirteen toasts, according to a contemporary account in Rivington’s Gazette, the company drinking to:
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Lost in the Pandemic: Inside New York City’s Mass Graveyard on Hart Island
By William Hennigan 11/18/2020 – Time Magazine
No one knows who will be carried across the water to Hart Island on the next waves of the dead. No one knows who will be brought back from its anonymous earth by shovel-bearing workers in hazmat suits. This summer, TIME was granted unprecedented access to Hart Island to observe burial and exhumation operations and, on June 26, witnessed the retrieval and formal reburial of casket 40-3 and its occupant, Ellen F. Torron.
The sun has barely risen above the glassy surface of Long Island Sound. A breeze sweeps over an island half a mile from the Bronx where 15 workers watch a backhoe remove the layer of soil that separates a mass grave from the outside world. There are 1,165 identical pine caskets stacked three high, two wide in this football-field-size pit. The men are here to find and dig up casket No. 40-3. The backhoe churns up a layer of gray sand, a sign that the caskets are close. Already sweating in their hazmat suits, the workers climb 10 ft. down into the hole, shovels in their gloved hands. The grave is more than two months old. The smell seeps through their protective masks. As they dig, three coffins come into view, identifying numbers bored into the pine at one end. “Four-zero-dash-three,” one of the men shouts over the noise of the diesel engine. They set about retrieving the box, and its occupant, from the anonymous earth. Hart Island is a graveyard of last resort. Since 1869, New York City has owned and operated this potter’s field—the largest in the country. City workers put unidentified or unclaimed corpses in simple wooden coffins, load them onto a ferry and entomb them in trenches across the island. The homeless, indigent and stillborn all lie within eyesight of the hyper-kinetic, high-rolling inhabitants of the Manhattan skyscrapers across the water. “Hart Island is like a shadow of New York City,” says Justin von Bujdoss, 45, the cemetery’s chaplain. “It reflects the lives of people who live on the margins—the homeless, the sickly, the neglected, the forgotten and overworked.” Over a century and a half, more than a million people have been buried in unmarked graves on the island, including from past epidemics like tuberculosis, the 1918 flu and AIDS.
“No one lives their lives believing it will end here,” von Bujdoss says.
But nine months into the pandemic that has killed more than 250,000 Americans, one lesson is clear: no one escapes the virus. It infects paupers and Presidents alike. Even those who don’t get it have been affected as the disease crushes economies, strains our health care system and pulls comfortable families back into hardship. Hart Island is once again reflecting this latest dark truth: many who thought they were immune to America’s inequalities are vulnerable in this pandemic.
At the height of the outbreak last spring, New York’s hospital morgues and mortuaries became overwhelmed, and the mass graves on Hart Island emerged as an expedient option for the city’s fast-rising number of dead. More coffins were stacked aboard the ferry dispatched to the dock here. More trenches were dug. Through the end of October, 2,009 New Yorkers have been buried on Hart Island in 2020, more than double last year’s total of 846.
No one knows how many of the people arriving here died of COVID-19. At points, the city was so overwhelmed that bodies were sent to the island before authorities had a chance to determine their cause of death or track down next of kin. Some families chose to have their loved ones buried here. Some families had no other option. And some families weren’t aware their relative had died in the first place. “We figured that most of them would be disinterred because we were moving so quickly,” says Alex Mahoney, 55, executive director of facilities at the city’s department of correction (DOC), which oversees operations at the cemetery.
Not all of them were forgotten. Social workers, government employees and families have worked to identify people lost in the chaos of the COVID-19 crisis, and now, where once the ferry ride to Hart Island was usually a one-way crossing, dozens of those interred here this year are expected to make the trip back. So far, 32 bodies buried in 2020 have been claimed and removed from the graveyard.
As infections spike this fall, New York City is bracing for another wave of death. The coroner’s office has once again readied the temporary morgues and box trucks that hold the dead before they head for the potter’s field. In October alone, 360 corpses were buried on Hart Island, more than four times as many as in the same month last year. As they prepare for the next crisis, city officials anticipate more family members will come forward to exhume their loved ones.
No one knows who will be carried across the water to Hart Island on the next waves of the dead. No one knows who will be brought back from its anonymous earth by shovel-bearing workers in hazmat suits. This summer, TIME was granted unprecedented access to Hart Island to observe burial and exhumation operations and, on June 26, witnessed the retrieval and formal reburial of casket 40-3 and its occupant, Ellen F. Torron. This is her story.
The first sign of trouble came when tenants of the red brick Queens apartment building complained about a lingering smell on the fifth floor. Their calls went to Enis Radoncic, 43, a hardworking Bosnian immigrant, who is the building’s porter. He thought it might be a plumbing problem and that it would dissipate. But it didn’t.
Radoncic ultimately traced the stench to the unit next to the elevator, 5G, which belonged to Ellen Torron, a slight 74-year-old woman with short gray hair and piercing dark brown eyes who had lived alone in the building for more than 20 years. She tended to shy away from small talk and appeared to be something of a germaphobe, covering her hands with surgeon’s gloves and her face with a mask—even before the pandemic.
It didn’t surprise Radoncic when she didn’t answer his knocks at the door nor the letter he slid underneath it. But after calls to her cell phone went unanswered, he called the police. “We thought she barricaded herself inside because she was scared of the virus,” Radoncic says.
At around 2 p.m. on March 16, Radoncic watched as a locksmith picked the nickel-plated dead bolt to allow New York police officers inside her apartment. The odor swept over them, forcing their hands to their noses. When the dull gray door swung open, it revealed a floor-to-ceiling mess inside the 800-sq.-ft. studio apartment.
Torron was a hoarder. Discarded Stouffer’s micro-wave dinner boxes, empty SkinnyPop chip bags, mismatched suitcases, bags of trash, clothes, books, magazines and paperwork were tangled together, waist-high. The police pushed inside, following a narrow path carved among the thousands of things packed tightly from the front door to her twin bed and from there to her adjoining bathroom. In the bathtub, they found Torron’s body under the murky water. She had been dead for days, possibly weeks.
An undated photo of Ellen Torron discovered by investigators at her Queens apartment unit.
Courtesy Queens County Administrator’s Office
Cable news droned away on her flat-screen television. The letter from building management remained unopened at the foot of the door. There were no signs of struggle or injury, and police ruled out foul play. After Radoncic identified Torron’s bloated body, a transport team from the office of the chief medical examiner zipped her into a body bag and drove her in a black truck to the morgue at Queens Hospital Center. No friends or family came forward to claim the remains. Radoncic and neighbors did not know of any spouse or children. The job of settling her estate fell to the Queens County public administrator, an obscure agency that identifies unclaimed persons’ financial assets and next of kin. On a cursory look around the apartment, investigators found Torron’s birth certificate. But the pandemic’s crush of cases and enforced lockdowns prevented investigators from returning to her apartment to rummage for evidence of a burial plot, any life savings or a will. So Torron’s last wishes remained unknown as her body lay inside a refrigerated drawer at the morgue for the next 24 days. An autopsy determined her cause of death was arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease. The medical examiner couldn’t tell whether or not she had contracted COVID-19, but she died just as the disease was beginning to ravage New York City. In March and April, the death count mounted to more than 27,000, or six times the normal level, and the city’s death care system was overwhelmed. The influx of corpses forced municipal morgues to free up space. With room running out, Torron’s body was placed inside a pine box and prepared for passage to Hart Island. Just after dawn on April 9, a white box truck carrying Torron’s body and 23 other dead New Yorkers rolled onto the 58-year-old steel ferry, the Michael Cosgrove, for the half-mile voyage from a fenced-off pier on City Island. It’s a 10-minute trip. Once the boat makes its way across the water, it slows to a putter near the dock. Two crew members jump out and begin pulling steel chains that lower a short mechanical dock into place, inch by inch.
The truck lurches forward onto the island and turns east down a gravel road below a lane of willows, scattering a family of deer. It rumbles past crumbling, abandoned brick buildings once used to house a mental hospital, a tuberculosis sanitarium, a drug addicts’ workhouse, a boys’ reformatory and a host of other Dickensian operations since the Civil War. The cemetery run on the island has always been part of this place.
Potter’s field is a biblical term from the New Testament that refers to land purchased by Jewish high priests with the 30 pieces of silver returned by a repentant Judas. The clay-heavy land was unsuitable for farming, so it would instead be used to bury “strangers.” In New York City, these strangers have always been a cross section of America’s down-trodden and overlooked: poor workers of all races and backgrounds, criminals, the mentally ill and any unidentified person with no one to claim them.
A cemetery, especially one with more than 1 million bodies, is a place where you would expect people to gather to celebrate many lives lived. Not here. Hart Island may be a rather easy place to reach if you’re deceased but not if you’re among the living. Family-member graveside visits are allowed only twice a month, require weeks of careful planning and must be authorized by the DOC, which for much of the past 151 years has been responsible for providing the labor and oversight for the burials at Hart Island. The bodies are buried over 131 acres of rolling meadows. The only signs of the dead are 3-ft. white posts stuck in the ground every 25 yd. or so. Each marker signifies 150 bodies below, and they are every-where on the island. Quiet reigns on Hart Island, except for the occasional jangle of a nearby bell buoy afloat in the water. Sailboats glide along in the distance. Seagulls wheel overhead and nibble atop rocks half submerged in the receding tide. Bones are sometimes found jutting from the coastline where erosion has washed away the soil. Hart Island is a uniquely New York phenomenon. In other cities, the indigent are cremated or buried at a traditional cemetery. Here, they’re buried together on an island inaccessible to most city residents. Although most New Yorkers are oblivious to its existence, Hart Island is a necessary by-product of a sprawling metropolis—not everyone can afford a formal funeral. And to people who oversee the graveyard, burial is a more sensible option than cremation. “What if someone is sent by mistake?” says Captain Martin Thompson, 59, of the city’s DOC, who has overseen operations on Hart Island for 15 years. “You can’t reverse a cremation.” When Torron arrived, COVID-19 was triggering the biggest shift in operations on the island in a century and a half. The week beginning April 6, 138 people were buried there as a result of COVID-19 because morgues were overfilled; at one point, the rate of burials went from roughly 25 a week to around 25 a day. “This trench was supposed to last us the whole year,” Thompson says, looking over the mass grave. “Instead it was full within two months.” That same week, the city for the first time also stopped using incarcerated workers for Hart Island burials. An outbreak of the coronavirus among prisoners was ultimately passed to every correction officer on the island, including Thompson, who was ill for nearly two months. At first, the city tried to replace the inmate labor with city employees who normally fill potholes. That didn’t work out. They were uncomfortable with the grim task. Then the city turned to contract laborers. On the first day, there were 40 workers who showed up for work, not knowing what the job entailed. When they found out the task at hand, 28 people left. “The remaining guys have stuck around ever since,” says Keron Pierre, 35, a laborer from Brooklyn. “We just have to try and think of it as any other job.” When the truck carrying the caskets pulls to a stop at the foot of the trench, the laborers hold back from assembling for prayer with the staff chaplain. That’s when the reality of the day’s task becomes most clear. With each delivery since the onset of the pandemic, von Bujdoss, the head chaplain from the DOC, climbs atop the truck’s rear liftgate, stands over the coffins and reads out the names of those set to be buried, along with a Buddhist blessing and a few prayers. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me,” he says, his voice resounding inside the cargo hold.
Once von Bujdoss concludes, the laborers emerge from a white and blue bus wearing hazmat suits, work gloves and protective masks. Some stay to off-load the truck while others plod into the trench. The first task is to write the names of the dead and their corresponding burial numbers in black chalk on the coffins’ lids and sides. Then the burial numbers are bored into the wood with a router to ensure they can be identified as the chalk fades over time.
Two coffins are removed from the truck and placed on the front bucket of the skid-steer loader, then driven into the trench, where workers pull them off and force them into position, side by side in stacks of three. They fill the spaces between rows with shovelfuls of dirt. Correction officers dressed in crisp navy blue uniforms stand on the trench’s rim, 10 ft. above the hole.
On June 26, more than two months after Torron has been placed in Plot 401, the same team of workers stands near the grave, watching a black Grand Caravan approach from the end of the deserted gravel road. Behind it, the dust whips away like smoke. When the van arrives, funeral director James Donofrio steps out, smiling. “Good morning, Captain,” he says in a Brooklyn accent, offering Thompson paperwork that shows he’s authorized to take custody of Torron’s exhumed coffin.
City investigators hadn’t been able to thoroughly search Torron’s apartment back in April, but they did happen to discover a birth certificate that showed she was born at the Jewish Maternity Hospital in Manhattan. The Queens County public administrator’s office knew that was enough proof for Hebrew Free Burial Association (HFBA), a 132-year-old nonprofit that offers low-cost and free burial for indigent Jews.
Donofrio, 61, was sent by the association to retrieve Torron’s body. He came prepared. To guard against the stench, he brought a second casket, large enough to accommodate Torron’s casket, which the workers lower into place. Then Donofrio spreads two 8.8-oz. packets of espresso coffee between the two. “If there’s a better way to soak up the smell, I haven’t seen it,” he says. After the crew helps squeeze the oversize coffin into the van, Donofrio sets off on a 37-mile trip to the opposite side of the city to bury Torron for a second time
As the Grand Caravan pulls under the arches of HFBA’s Mount Richmond Cemetery on Staten Island, Donofrio is greeted by Rabbi Shmuel Plafker, 70, an Orthodox chaplain, who directs him to a squat one-story building nearby. Inside, Donofrio, Plafker and a group of men don head-to-toe protective gear, and Donofrio uses a power drill to remove the 12 screws holding the lids onto each of the two coffins. When the second lid is removed, Donofrio leaves the men to the ritual.
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None of the men left behind in the sterile, windowless room had met Torron in life, none knew her religious convictions, and none have mortuary training. They voluntarily undertake the ceremony pursuant to Jewish law. Torron’s corpse is stripped of clothes and dressed in eight separate pieces of white linen clothing, including a bonnet, shirt, pants, gown and belt. She’s then placed back inside both coffins and secured with the screws and carried out the building feet-first.
The men lift the coffin into the back of a flatbed truck and make the short walk to Torron’s new burial plot, in Section 91 of the cemetery. The small group passes mounds of dirt piled atop freshly dug graves. They pass hundreds of tombstones, including 22 victims of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, Holocaust survivors and Soviet Union refugees who sought asylum in the U.S.
When they arrive at the empty grave, the workers from HFBA slowly lower Torron inside. Plafker, dressed in a cream-colored panama hat and gray suit jacket, opens a prayer book and begins reciting prayers in Yiddish:
Go in peace, rest in peace and arise to your lot at the end of days
May the omnipresent console you among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem
May they blossom forth from the city like grass of the earth
Remember that we are but dust
He throws a shovelful of soil into the grave. It lands on Torron’s coffin with a thump.
About a month after Torron was finally put to rest, Rhoda Fairman, 83, was at her West Village apartment when she spotted something on her kitchen table that took her breath away. A brochure from HFBA was open and facing up. Within the leaflet were the names of the 333 people the association had buried through the first six months of the year. “It’s the way it fell on my table—second page up—that I was able to see Ellen’s name,” she says.
The two women had worked together for more two decades as legal secretaries at the high-powered Milberg law firm in Manhattan in the 1990s and 2000s but had fallen out of touch. Most of the other 20 or so secretaries from the firm had kept tabs on one another over the years through Facebook. Torron, however, never created an account. Fairman always wondered what had happened to her.
Not many people managed to get close to Torron, but Fairman did. They’d share lunch breaks, go out shopping or schedule occasional museum outings. They were together on 9/11 when they witnessed the second plane hit the south tower from the 49th-floor office of One Penn Plaza.
Torron was born in Manhattan on Jan. 19, 1946, the only child of Polish and Lithuanian immigrants. She had lived on her own since she was 18 years old, and in her 40s, she put herself through school, attending Hunter College and graduating in 1988 with a double major in English and classical studies. Fairman says Torron was the sort of woman who should’ve been born in another era because she’d likely have been a lawyer herself. “She was a victim of the times, honey,” she says.
As far as Fairman or anyone knew, Torron never married. She claimed to have a daughter who lived in Brazil, but no one in the office ever met her or even saw a picture. “Ellen was a bit of a mystery,” says Sanford Dumain, a lawyer for whom Torron worked for more than two decades, until her retirement in 2015. “I thought she might’ve been a Russian spy.”
He was only half joking. Torron was seen as something of a loner around the office but also known to be intelligent and well traveled—though she also traveled alone. TIME joined Queens County public administrator investigators when they visited her unit in July. Amid the disorder, her bookcases were tidy and lined with shelf after shelf of language and travel books.
These items were of little interest to the two men hunting for clues on settling Torron’s estate. To them, finding a will was more valuable than finding a suitcase of cash. Yet no will turned up. They resorted to requesting that the post office forward her mail, but nothing significant came in eight months. Torron received 401(k) returns, bank statements, a lot of junk mail, but not a single letter from family or friends. Nor was there a sign she had a daughter, despite what she had told co-workers.
Investigators did discover that Torron had a total of $56,148.85 in two Chase banking accounts and an estimated $2,560 worth of jewelry, including a pearl necklace, silver brooches and ruby-diamond earrings. By law, the Queens County public administrator’s office must attempt to track down next of kin to distribute the estate. The only family that the public administrator has identified thus far are several first cousins once removed, the furthest relatives eligible to lay claim to an estate.
One of those cousins is Meryle Mishkin-Tank, a 56-year-old paralegal who lives in the San Francisco area. Not only has Mishkin-Tank never met Torron—she didn’t even know she existed. Now most days after work and on weekends, she’s trying to uncover details about Torron’s life and death. She’s learned of—and contacted—five new cousins and an aunt through genealogy research. “It doesn’t sound like any of the cousins knew anything about Ellen,” she says. “It’s just sad.”
Though she grew up in Manhattan, Mishkin-Tank didn’t know much about Hart Island or Mount Richmond Cemetery, where Torron was buried in June. Through her research, however, she found that Torron’s paternal grandfather, Zelman, and grandmother and likely namesake, Elka, are also buried at Mount Richmond. In fact, their graves are located a short walk away from their granddaughter’s plot.
—With reporting by Currie Engel/New York
Finally at rest at Mount Richmond Cemetery
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On Thursday, renewable energy company Verdant Power installed an array of three tidal power turbines off Roosevelt Island in New York City’s East River.
Verdant’s Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy (RITE) site is the first U.S.-licensed tidal power project, and it is a pre-commercial testbed for the company’s fifth generation of turbine arrays. Its first version began operation in 2013, and the latest features heavy-duty marinized components. The three-turbine, steel-frame design is intended for scalability to larger sizes for deployment in deeper, faster-moving waters. It is also intended for economical installation: with one hoistable frame holding three five-meter turbines, the amount of on-the-water work per turbine is reduced, according to Verdant Power CEO John T. Banigan.
RITE is grid-connected, and its operation will give the New York-based company more experience and data on system performance. After six months, the frame will be lifted out of the water and one of the three turbines will be removed for inspection. The full test is scheduled to last for one year, and if all is satisfactory, Verdant hopes to scale up to a 10-meter diameter turbine for commercial sale.
“We are proud to be the first licensed tidal power project in the U.S,” said Banigan. “Today we are demonstrating clean power from the tidal currents and that tidal power is a viable energy resource advancing our industry in the U.S. and globally.”
RITE will operate under a pilot project license from the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) – according to Verdant, the first commercial license for a tidal power project in America. The project will provide electricity to Roosevelt Island through a connection to Con Edison’s local grid. It is underwritten by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and the U.S. Department of Energy, along with New York-based private equity investor
Tidal Energy and Roosevelt Island
The Roosevelt Islander recently carried an interesting article on Verdant Power’s Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy (RITE) Project.
This note provides additional background on the project.
To begin, we’re talking about the white things you see sticking out of the East Channel of the East River just off the Parking Garage, north of the RI Bridge. These are the tops of turbines fixed to the bottom of the river. The East River, as many know, is not a river. It is a salt water tidal estuary connecting Long Island Sound with the Atlantic Ocean in New York Harbor. And as you probably have observed, this is a very active stretch of water. From the junction just north of Roosevelt Island where the Sound turns south (and becomes the East River) and where the Harlem River (also not a river!) joins in, it is narrow, deep (that’s why we go down so far when we take the F train) and often turbulent. The junction where all three combine has long been known as “Hell Gate” – not because of the violence of the water but from the Dutch Hellegat meaning either “bright strait” or “clear opening”. This was a particularly treacherous stretch of water. Tides from the Long Island Sound, New York Harbor and the Harlem River meet there, making it difficult to navigate, especially because of the number of rocky islets which once dotted it, roughly 12 islets and reefs in all, all of which led to a number of shipwrecks, including HMS Hussar, a British frigate that sank in 1780 while supposedly carrying gold and silver intended to pay British troops. In the 1870s, Hell Gate was cleared of rocks and widened. (The story of how many of these islands were blown up to make the waterway easier is another good story, carried in an article in The Wire, August 7, 2007) Even more, and still today, because the tide tables of the Sound and the Harbor differ, the East River changes direction several times a day, and the incoming tide rushes north or south in a great flurry of currents. (From Lighthouse Park, you can see the power of this movement as the water swirls in a huge whirlpool.) Because the East River is so narrow and so deep, an enormous amount of water moves at high intensity. That’s the energy the RITE project seek to capture: The project generates clean Hydrokinetic energy from the natural East River’s tidal flow – that is energy generated by the movement of a body of water. Tidal stream generators (think underwater flat windmills) make use of the kinetic energy of moving water to power turbines, in a similar way to wind turbines that use the kinetic energy of wind to power turbines. These, however, are entirely submersed, thus avoiding concerns over the impact on the natural landscape. Tidal energy is one of the oldest forms of energy used by humans. Indeed, tide mills, in use on the Spanish, French and British coasts, date back to the 8th century. Tide mills consisted of a storage pond, filled by the incoming (flood) tide through a sluice and emptied during the outgoing (ebb) tide through a water wheel. The tides turned waterwheels, producing mechanical power to mill grain. We even have one remaining in New York – which worked well into the 20th century. Tidal power is non-polluting, reliable and predictable. Tidal barrages, undersea tidal turbines and machines harnessing undersea currents are under development. Unlike wind and waves, tidal currents are entirely predictable. In February 2012 the federal government announced an agreement with Verdant to install 30 tidal turbines in the channel of the East River. The turbines were projected to begin operations in 2015 and are supposed to produce 1.05 megawatts of power. The RITE Project would be the first commercially-licensed tidal power plant in the United States. Phase One, installed now, is an array of three Gen5 Free Flow System turbines on a TriFrame™ mount, generating 105 kW of power for delivery to the New York City grid. That is, three turbines, each with its blades, are set on a single frame on the bottom of the River. Free Flow means that turbines generate electricity no matter which way the river is flowing. The idea is that the installation will demonstrate the advanced Gen5 system and allow for analysis of the TriFrame™ as a cost-effective solution for the installation, operations, and maintenance of tidal energy systems. Funding support is being provided by the US Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office and the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority (NYSERDA). This isn’t the first time Verdant has tried to extract power from the East River. Some 15 years ago, it announced plans to install hundreds of turbines in the East River to harness tidal energy and generate zero-emission electrical power. In December 2006, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg formally dedicated the opening of the project as six turbines were placed in the river (capable of supplying 1,000 daily kilowatt hours of power and serving the then Gristedes market). Just several weeks later, the project was halted because of the massive amount of energy they were dealing with – that is, the strength of the river flow. Currents proved so strong that the turbine propellers were sheared off, and stronger replacements were hampered by insufficiently strong bolt connections to the turbine hubs. The first round of turbines were temporarily removed.
What is Verdant? It’s a young and highly focused company. Its website tells us that the company was founded in 2000, and that its “mission is to help build sustainable communities through a holistic approach focused on clean energy generation as well as advancing partnerships and hybrid platforms to make significant impacts at the water-energy nexus.” It is privately held with around 20 employees. Verdant Power “develops technologies and projects that generate village- and utility-scale energy from the free-flowing currents of tides, rivers, and canals, referred to as ‘marine’ or ‘marine & hydrokinetic (MHK)’ energy. Marine energy systems are next-generation clean energy technologies that can provide electricity in a predictable manner for populations near water currents.” The website mentions other projects, but its RITE project is certainly the most important. At one point, KeySpan was said to be partnering with Verdant Power in its East River project but there is no evidence that Verdant has any current business partners. The company seems to be a true trailblazer. In 2005, when it first sought permission from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to test turbines off Roosevelt Island, there were no U.S. regulatory processes for this type of marine energy technology. Eventually, Verdant received FERC approval for the world’s first demonstration of tidal turbines and the company began to gather data to apply for a larger system and commercial permit at the same site. In 2012, Verdant received the country’s first commercial license for a tidal power project, to install up to one megawatt of power off Roosevelt Island. And this summer, this next phase of the RITE project was set in motion. Verdant’s position in the evolving maritime energy industry is important. Most others in the field focus on ocean energy and as such are extremely large, with much greater generating capacity. But to do this, they must operate in deep waters, far offshore, requiring long transmission lines and highly specialized installation equipment and supporting infrastructure. Verdant’s primary differentiating factor is that it’s specifically designed for shallow waters and its unique design is scalable for locations around the world. In addition to the current, the project faced several other issues. One has been the impact on fish in the river. Here, the company is clear that its studies have shown that fish are careful to avoid the rotors – which do not spin at speed like airplane engine propellers. Another issue, is competition. Tony DePalma, writing in the NYTimes, said that Verdant was facing the prospect of competition — not so much from giants like KeySpan but from other alternative energy start-ups. One company, Oceana Energy, had been granted a federal permit to install turbines in the East River just north of Roosevelt Island. There seem to have been some exchange between the companies, but nothing more has appeared. The most serious recent problem has been, of course, coronavirus which has slowed down current plans. In all, good for us. Roosevelt Island remains in the center of the search for clean energy. Stephen Blank RIHS November 1, 2020
Ferry House at Brooklyn Bridge Park Lisa Fernandez, Gloria Herman, Susan Rodetis and Alexis Villefane all got it right
Funding Provided by: Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation Public Purpose Funds, Council Member Ben Kallos City Council Discretionary Funds thru DYCD Edited by Deborah Dorff ALL PHOTOS COPYRIGHT RIHS. 2020 (C)
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The Maritime Executive
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PHOTOS IN THIS ISSUE (C) RIHS
EDITORIAL
Wonderful new art has arrived at Coler.
Details in Monday’s edition
Judith Berdy
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
Roger Broders (born Paris, France, 1883, died, Paris, 1953) was a French illustrator and artist best known for his travel posters promoting tourism destinations in France, typically fashionable beaches of the Côte d’Azur and skiing resorts in the French Alps in the early 20th century. Broders’ illustrations were distinctive for their simple lines and bold, flat areas of color, combined with noticeable graphical perspective showing the featured mountains and seascapes in the background. Broders’ illustrations depicting people show active elongated figures wearing elegant, contemporary clothes. His posters were simply and boldly lettered identifying the destination, and were supplemented with a brief slogan. The Paris Lyon Mediteranée Company (PLM), a railway, commissioned Broders’ poster art, sponsoring his travel so he could visit the subjects of his work. From 1922 to 1932, Broders fully dedicated himself to poster art, though overall he produced fewer than 100 posters. Lithographs of Broders’ travel posters are still available commercially. See for instance Christie’s London Ski Sale on 21 January 2010. Others are shown in the book about Railway Posters, published in Munich in 2011 and listed below.
Paris Lyon Mediteranée Company (PLM),
New York Skyline at William J. Jenack Estate Appraisers & Auctioneers in 2016
This was more grand than the Blackwell House. The warden of the Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary had this grand home with an in-ground swimming pool. The house was located just south of the Queensboro Bridge. The penitentiary administration was notoriously corrupt and I am sure there was some intrigue here.
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
EDITORIAL
The thought of a pandemic and staying home for almost a year reminds me of the good life I had as a travel agent and the few trips I took to the French Riviera. Maybe the illusion of the joyful life will cheer our long winter ahead.
Judith Berdy
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff Roosevelt Island Historical Society
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FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
After years of delays the official ribbon cutting was held today at Blackwell House. The newly repaired and restored house will be the site of community events hosted by the Roosevelt Island Historical Society and other island organizations.
Shelton Haynes, Rebecca Seawright, Jose Serrano, Lynne Shinozaki, Ben Kallos and Jessica Lappin before cutting the ribbon. Ms. Lappin obtained funding for the house restoration in 2007!
A bitter cold day to make a speech behind a mask.
Lynne Shinozaki, in Colonia attire, joins RIHS President Judith Berdy in the warmth of the hearth.
The Living Room where small groups can gather for social and meeting events
Images featuring the island history are located in all areas of the main floor.
The corridor has a time-line of contemporary island images
The kitchen wall features a great aerial image of the island in the 1920’s
A photo is worth a thousand words. All I can say is thank goodness Blackwell House is back and soon it will be welcoming islanders and guests. My special thanks to Janet Fasano who was the designer of the interior and made this historic building a warm and friendly gathering place. Thanks to Shelton Haynes and all the RIOC staff who brought this great day to happen so successfully.
Judith Berdy
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
