The IND Sixth Avenue Subway opened to the public December 15, 1940 – 80 years ago. It was the fourth and final rail transit tunnel to burrow below Herald Square, making that location the most complicated and challenging piece of subway construction in New York history. Let’s look further at the unique underground history at this location.
The first New York City subway route built here, the BMT Broadway subway, opened in January 1918 as part of a longer route that opened between Rector Street and Times Square, providing through service to and from Brooklyn via the Manhattan Bridge. Due to Broadway’s diagonal slant here, the two subway routes cross an “X” pattern following their respective streets, with the midpoint of the “X” at about 32nd Street. The IND goes beneath the BMT. Eight different routes, four on each line, intersect here, forming the third busiest NYC subway station, with nearly 40 million annual fares collected in the years prior to 2020. The only busier stations are Times Square with about 64 million annual fares, and Grand Central-42nd St. with about 46 million fares.
Those facts are impressive enough, but two additional sets of tunnels opened at this location in 1910, before any of the subways. Let’s find out a little more.
PATH 33rd St. Station Originally was a block north, relocated here to 32nd St. in 1939 to make rom for IND Tunnel. photo www.nycsubway.org
The oldest, and deepest tunnels are four that you can’t see – the Long Island RR-Amtrak tunnels, opened in September 1910, that are deep below 32nd and 33rd Streets and travel east-west into and out of Penn Station, a block to the west. There are four tracks total, two under each street, all part of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s massive early 20th century project that built the station, connecting tunnels on both sides, and the Hell Gate Bridge. Right afterward came the Hudson and Manhattan (H&M) 33rd Street terminal station, opened in November 1910, the last piece of a two-track line that originally opened in 1908 as far north as 19th Street and Sixth Avenue. Popularly known as the Hudson Tubes, and now known as PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson Corporation), it is a subway-type service connecting Manhattan with Hoboken, Jersey City, and Newark. The PATH moniker dates from 1962 when the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey bought the Hudson Tubes from its bankrupt private owners.
The Sixth Avenue line, built most recently (1940), passes underneath the Broadway BMT line, above the LIRR-Amtrak tunnel, and goes around the PATH tunnel. Because the Sixth Avenue tunnel had to be threaded through this already-existing maze, it dips down in the middle of its station, with either end at a higher elevation. Both the PATH and IND tunnels follow Sixth Avenue. As PATH predates the IND subway by about 30 years, its tracks are closest to the surface of Sixth Avenue.
As if this wasn’t complicated enough, the IRT Sixth Avenue elevated was still running above everything when subway construction started and had to be supported as the subway tunnel was being built below. In December 1938, the elevated was closed and its removal was completed in April 1939, easing the work for the new subway.
Because the PATH tunnel was already there, the 1940 IND subway was limited to two tracks between 34th and West 4th Streets. North and south of those locations it was built with four tracks. This constraint would be corrected in 1967 (see below). But there’s even more to this history – the IND Sixth Avenue subway caused major changes to the Hudson Tubes (H&M) as well. The IND station construction required the original H&M 33rd Street terminal to move one block south. The old station was closed in December 1937 and subsequently demolished, with terminal operations temporarily moved to the then-existing 28th Street station. The new relocated station opened in September 1939, still known as 33rd Street and still in use today. At the same time, the 28th Street station was closed, as the new station featured exits to 30th Street. The next PATH station to the south was, and remains, 23rd Street. In fact, the original Sixth Avenue subway plans suggested capturing the PATH tunnel for subway use – but because PATH train cars are smaller than IND cars, the idea was scrapped because the PATH tunnel would require major rebuilding.
Namesake for Herald Square, Long Forgotten New York Newspaper
A final chapter to the 34th Street BMT-IND complex was completed in November 1967, as part of the Chrystie Street Connection project in Lower Manhattan. A deep tunnel opened below Sixth Avenue, under both the PATH and IND local tracks between 34th and West 4th Streets, connecting the previously interrupted middle tracks. This work began in 1961 and allowed full four track service below Sixth Avenue; ever since B and D trains have used this routing.
On the following pages are a track diagram and some photos, both historical and contemporary. The next time you use 34th Street-Herald Square, walk the length of one of the two Sixth Avenue platforms (B, D, F, or M trains), and then walk up the ramps at the north end, or use the escalator, to get an idea of the complexity of this station. And give a thank you to the engineers and construction workers who made it all possible.
The Parachute Jump is a defunct amusement ride and a landmark in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, along the Riegelmann Boardwalk at Coney Island. Situated in Steeplechase Plaza near the B&B Carousell, the structure consists of a 250-foot-tall (76 m), 170-short-ton (150 t) open-frame, steel parachute tower. Twelve cantilever steel arms radiate from the top of the tower; when the ride was in operation, each arm supported a parachute attached to a lift rope and a set of guide cables. Riders were belted into a two-person canvas seat, lifted to the top, and dropped. The parachute and shock absorbers at the bottom would slow their descent.
The ride was built for the 1939 New York World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, also in New York City. Capped by a 12-foot (3.7 m) flagpole, it was the tallest structure at the Fair. In 1941, after the World’s Fair, it was moved to its current location in the Steeplechase amusement park on Coney Island. It ceased operations in the 1960s following the park’s closure, and the frame fell into disrepair.
Despite proposals to either demolish or restore the ride, disputes over its use caused it to remain unused through the 1980s. The Parachute Jump has been renovated several times since the 1990s, both for stability and for aesthetic reasons. In the 2000s, it was restored and fitted with a lighting system. The lights were activated in 2006 and replaced in a subsequent project in 2013. It has been lit up in commemoration of events such as the death of Kobe Bryant. The ride, the only remaining portion of Steeplechase Park, is a New York City designated landmark and has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
*********************** Correct Answers: ED LITCHER, THOM HEYER, JAY JACOBSON, JINNY EWALD, M. FRANK, ARON EISENPRISS, ALEXIS VLLEFANE, CLARA BELLA, ANDY SPARBERG, HARA REISER, NANCY BROWN, VERN HARWOOD, ARLENE BESSENOFF &, LISA FERNANDEZ
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 Deborah Dorff Roosevelt Island Historical Society
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Raymond F. Almirall was a Brooklyn architect best known for civic buildings around the city.
At the dawn of the 20th century, Raymond F. Almirall was an up-and-coming Brooklyn architect with a promising future. After his education at the L’ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he returned home and began an association with New York City government that led to his design of libraries, hospitals, asylums and public baths.
Almirall had been chosen as a member of an advisory commission in charge of building the Carnegie Libraries. He was also the secretary of the group.
Andrew Carnegie had put aside millions of dollars for the building of libraries in the United States, his native Scotland and other nations. Brooklyn got money to build 21 Carnegie branches, and Almirall designed three of them.
Carnegie money was earmarked for branches only, but the Brooklyn Public Library was in need of a new Central Library, which would be financed by the city. What an opportunity this would be for any architect to design such a lasting public project, and Raymond Almirall was in the catbird’s seat. In 1908, Almirall was chosen to design the new Central Branch.
The Beaux-Arts-led City Beautiful movement was shaping public spaces in America’s cities. What could be more beautiful than Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza, already a City Beautiful site, with the Arch, entrance to Prospect Park, the fountains and the new Institute of Arts and Science still growing on Eastern Parkway?
Almirall’s new Central Library would join McKim, Mead & White’s grand museum in Classically inspired glory. It was to be a huge, domed four story structure, complementing the nearby museum.
Almirall plan for new Central Branch, 1907. Photo via Brooklyn Public Library
The new library would have a large central dome and entrance at the apex of the building, with colonnades along both sides, running along both Eastern Parkway and Flatbush Avenue. It would have had the latest accoutrements of library science.
Almirall planned reading rooms, classrooms, music rooms, an auditorium, a children’s library, research and rare book rooms, lunch rooms, miles of stacks, and an underground garage with conveyor belts for transporting books, book elevators, and rooms dedicated to cataloging and restoration and repair.
The new library would also have a first-aid station, a newspaper room, telephone and stenographer’s rooms, and the back sorting rooms would have tracks for carts to run along, for transporting books. The cost was estimated to be $4,500.000.
Ground was broken for the library in 1912. By 1913, the foundation had been dug out, and part of the west wall along Flatbush Avenue had been built. Then the money ran out, and work was halted. It would not begin again for another 30 years, the poster child for incompetence in city building projects.
At a time when Almirall should have been basking in the glow of his magnificent new library rising to join the Institute of Arts and Sciences, he was taking on other projects, designing his final Carnegie Library branch further down Eastern Parkway, at Utica Avenue, and designing churches and Seaview Hospital buildings.
Then, the curse of civic responsibility occurred — jury duty. In 1919, Almirall was impaneled as a grand juror in investigations of city corruption under the administration of Mayor John F. Hylan, who was mayor of NYC between 1918 and 1925.
Hylan, whose nickname was Red Mike, had grown up in Bushwick, and was a train conductor with the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Corporation until he was fired for almost running down his supervisor. He became a lawyer, and in 1918, with the sponsorship of Tammany Hall and William Randolph Hearst, became the dark horse candidate for mayor, and won.
Almirall’s persistence in getting to the bottom of the muck in the Hylan administration made an enemy of Red Mike. Some say that the reason the library project was stopped in its tracks was Hylan’s doing. Others blame the economy, World War I, poor city planning, other political in-fighting and an overblown project. In the end, Almirall would never see his library finished.
After World War I ended, Almirall moved his family back to France, where he stayed till around 1929. During that time he was chosen as one of the architects adding their expertise to the restoration of the Palace of Versailles, damaged during the war. His was a principal role in that restoration, and in gratitude, France made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.
While in France, he also designed several other buildings. He came back to the United States and took up residence in Hempstead, Long Island.
By 1929, the year Almirall came back from Paris, the Flatbush wing of the Central Library had crawled to exterior completion, and the project halted again for lack of funds. Then the Great Depression hit.
During the 1930s, the public mindset toward architectural styles had changed. Gone were the Beaux-Art Classical details, the ornate columns and columns. Art Deco, with its flat surfaces, clean lines and ornamental relief was in vogue.
Almirall’s unfinished library stood awkwardly along Flatbush Avenue like a beached ocean liner. The city chose new architects for the project, Alfred Githens and Francis Keally, who kept the Almirall footprint. The foundations had been dug and were sitting there for 30 years.
They kept the walls of the Flatbush wing and tore down everything else, stripping the walls of ornament and detail, and eliminating the fourth floor. They designed a brand new building around what they had retained, and work began on this less expensive Art Deco design in 1938.
WIKIWAND IMAGE
While the library is certainly great in its own right, and a very beautiful and successful building, it must have been a huge slap in the face to Raymond Almirall, who lived to see them tearing down what would have been his finest and most monumental creation.
A year later, after poor health had put him in Lenox Hill Hospital, Chevalier Raymond F. Almirall died at age 69 on May 18, 1939. His funeral mass at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola on Park Avenue was attended by a delegation of the Institute of Architects and the Society of American Engineers, organizations of which Almirall had been a member.
He left behind his wife, two sons and a daughter. He was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, home to many other great architects and visionaries. He did not live to see the new Central Library open with much fanfare and ceremony on February 1, 1941. One wonders if he would have liked it.
In the 1930s, architects Githens and Keally were commissioned to redesign the building in the Art Deco style, eliminating the expensive ornamentation and the fourth floor. Construction recommenced in 1938, and Almirall’s building on Flatbush Avenue was largely demolished except for the frame, but some of the original facade along the library’s parking lot is still visible. Completed by late 1940, the Central Library opened to the public on February 1, 1941. It was publicly and critically acclaimed at the time.
The second floor of the Central Library opened in 1955, nearly doubling the amount of space available to the public. Occupying over 350,000 square feet (33,000 m2) and employing 300 full-time staff members, the building serves as the administrative headquarters for the Brooklyn Public Library system. Prior to 1941 the Library’s administrative offices were located in the Williamsburgh Savings Bank on Flatbush Avenue.[5]
ANDY SPABERG, SUSAN RODESIS, JAY JACOBSON, VERN HARWOOD, HARA REISER, GLORIA HERMAN, LAURA HUSSEY, ALL GOT IT
A NOTE FROM MITCH ELLINSON
Thanks for your article on the Bloomingdale Asylum. There is just one extant asylum building still on Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus. According to Wikipedia, it was built as a residence for wealthy male inmates. It has had many uses over the years. It is currently the home of La Maison Francaise. Here are some pictures of it to the right of Low Library, the administration building. It was moved and stripped of its veranda when the Columbia campus was built. 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 Deborah Dorff Roosevelt Island Historical Society
Sources
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The first, main building as it appeared in 1831. artist Archibald L. Dick, from View in New-York and its Environs (copyright expired)
Students graduating from King’s College in May 1769 had other things to think about than lunatics. Agitators were promoting anti-government sentiments and within months the Golden Hill incident, followed by the Boston Massacre, would spark full-blown military revolution.
Nevertheless Dr. Samuel Bard addressed the need for a “public infirmary” for the insane during his speech that afternoon. Another professor, Dr. Peter Middleton, said Bard’s case was “warmly and pathetically set forth.”
A campaign for public donations, or subscriptions, was initiated and on June 13, 1771 the petitioners were granted a charter for the Society of the Hospital in the city of New York, in America. War slowed the progress of the project; but according to The North American Review in 1837, “The New York Hospital was opened for the reception of patients in 1791. Apartments were then appropriated to lunatics; but the accommodations being inconvenient, a new and separate building was erected in the immediate vicinity of the general hospital, and opened in 1808.”
The governors of the New York Hospital, “with a view of introducing a course of moral treatment for lunatic patients,” applied to the State for aid. In 1816 an act was passed granting $10,000 per year to the Hospital until 1857–a princely sum equal to nearly $175,000 today.
The Review explained “A piece of ground containing eighty acres, near the Hudson river, about seven miles from the city of New York, was purchased; and on a dry, elevated and pleasant spot, fronting the Bloomingdale road, the building now called the Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum was erected.”
Bloomingdale History
The Federal-style stone building was completed in 1821, “and to it were immediately removed all the lunatics in the old hospitals in the city.” The building could accommodate 200 patients.
The complex was enlarged with the addition of two buildings in 1829 “for the more violent.” Patients and visitors could stroll the park-like setting of gardens and winding walkways. Inmates worked the orchards and vegetable gardens.
In 1836 much of the unused 80 acres was sold off, reducing the campus to 40 acres. By then the Bloomingdale Asylum had received 1,915 patients. Of these, 828 were considered cured, 399 were “relieved,” and 146 died.
Following the opening of the Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in 1839–intended for insane paupers–the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum accepted only paying patients.
The New-York State Register, in 1845, described the institution with glowing praise. It “is pleasantly situated near the banks of the Hudson River…laid out in gardens, pleasure grounds, gravel walks and farm lots, well adapted to the unfortunate inmates.
“The building is erected on one of the most elevated and healthy sites on the Island, and sufficiently retired for the comfort and convenience of the patients.” The fact that the asylum was “sufficiently retired” from the city most likely gave more comfort to citizens than to patients.
Miller’s Strangers’ Guide to the City of New York offered a pleasing picture of the Asylum in 1866. “The sudden opening of the view, the extent of the grounds, the various avenues gracefully winding through so large a lawn the cedar hedges, the fir and other ornamental trees, tastefully distributed or grouped, the variety of shrubbery and flowers.”
In 1857 Phelp’s Strangers and Citizens’ Guide to New York City had noted that “it is necessary, before a patient can be admitted into the Bloomingdale Asylum, that a lunacy-warrant from any two justices of the peace, or police magistrates, issued upon the evidence of two reputable physicians as to the alleged fact of insanity be procured” and that “payment of board (which is always in advance) must be arranged.”
The artist of this etching added a family of deer to render a tranquil atmosphere. from the collection of the New York Public Library
The procedure for pronouncing a patient insane was important. In the mid-19th century declaring one’s inconvenient relative a lunatic or “incompetent” was a common means of disposing of the problem. It was used, for instance, by men who had grown tired of their wives, or by those who greedily eyed the fortunes of their relatives.
State laws contributed to the problem. When S. J. Hopkins had his wife, Maria, committed in 1857, he was freed of all financial obligations. As was pointed out in court, “By statute she is to be supported by her mother. The marital right of the husband is gone the very moment she becomes insane…The husband, therefore, is not responsible for her support.”
So when doctors at the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum quickly found Maria quite sane and released her, Hopkins was infuriated. When the carriage carrying Maria and her three brothers arrived at the Recorder’s Office in August to make her discharge official, Hopkins tried to assault her. She was escorted safely into the building by a police officer.
The Recorder’s release of Maria’s to her brothers “was followed by a spontaneous burst of applause from the spectators, and especially from the ladies,” reported The New York Times on August 27, 1857. But the article ended “The husband, after their departure, expressed his determination to his friends to assert and obtain the right to the control of his wife.”
The accusations of illicit commitment continued. Two cases made headlines in 1872–those of Theresa Drew and Rosa McCabe. Both women received court hearings on August 13. The proceedings prompted The New York Herald to dramatically explain that many New Yorkers suspected “barbaric cruelties exceeding the most startling records of fiction,” and that “victims of jealousy or hate or revenge [were] dragged from their homes, and, upon the mere pretence [sic] of insanity, thrust into the gloomiest dungeons of an insane asylum, and there, helpless and remediless, left to linger and suffer and die.”
Theresa Drew was described by the Herald as “as large, muscular but pale faced woman of some forty years. She wore a lilac colored striped dress, with white shawl and bonnet trimmed a la mode.” Her interview with the judge and doctors resulted in her being deemed sane.
The case of Rosa McCabe was shocking. Now known as Sister Mary, she wore the habit of the Order of Stanislaus. The Herald explained she “had sought retirement from the pomp and vanities of the world by becoming a nun…Here, as the story goes, a priest sought to make her yield to his vile passions, and upon her refusal she was charged with being insane and removed to the Bloomingdale Asylum.”
Whether Sister Mary was sane or not was not concluded during the hearing. But the writer for The New York Herald felt the idea of an insane nun was more believable than an immoral priest. “This story of the unsaintly procedure of a priest may of course be purely the hallucination of her dethroned reason.”
The Bloomingdale Insane Asylum had faced a far different scandal in 1870. Although patients were charged between $8 to $30 per week–upwards of $565 today–an inspection by the Sanitary Committee of the Board of Health on December 1 that year yielded disturbing findings.
“There are eight water-closets in the house,” reported The Times, “the excrement from six of which pass through a seven-inch iron pipe, which…empties itself into a cistern right under the windows of the female ‘lodge.'” The human waste traveled “about a half a mile until it finds its level in a stagnant pool in Manhattanville…The water is muddy enough and the smell sickening enough, when it leaves the Asylum ground and enters the open street, to have it indicted as a nuisance.”
Worse yet was damning publicity that stemmed from the secret journal kept by a prominent banker, J. P. Van Vleck. According to his lawyer, in 1871 he was arrested “while sitting at his breakfast table, and was taken, without a word of explanation,” to the Asylum. During his 16-month commitment, he kept “a minute diary.”
Once released, the scandal spread beyond New York. On August 15, 1872 the Pennsylvania newspaper, The Elk County Advocate, reported “Although subjected to no special indignity, he says that the treatment of the insane by the keepers is simply revolting.”
The banker’s case appeared to be another of false commitment. “The gentleman who was dismissed yesterday was never treated medically during his entire imprisonment, and his manner and general intelligence prohibit the belief that he is of unsound mind. He does not yet know by whom he was incarcerated or on whose medical certificate.”
Van Vleck’s diary and the subsequent publicity led Governor Hoffman to appoint a commission “to examine the charges against the Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum,” one week later. John D. Townsend, Van Vlecke’s attorney detailed charges to a New York Times reporter:
“The insane, he said, were kicked and choked until blood spurts from the mouth and nostrils–some being driven to suicide by systematic cruelties. He commented on the report of the overseers, making out everything to be ‘lovely’ in the Bloomingdale Asylum, and said that the officials were fully prepared for the visit of the Committee, and had everything arranged for the inspection.”
The officials may have tidied up the Asylum for the Committee’s inspection, but a former employee, George K. Irwin, provided ammunition for Van Vleck’s lawsuit. The Wheeling West Virginia Daily Intelligencer reported he provided affidavits “relating many cruelties resulting in death, by parties connected with the Asylum, that the food is poor, that the inmates receive foul treatment, that vile practices generally obtain there.”
A New-York Tribune reporter faked insanity to get inside, and then spirited out reports of the conditions. The New England Journal of Medicine, in September 1872, was offended, writing “We are glad to observe that the expression of the public press is almost universally condemnatory of the exploits of a Tribune reporter, who thought it sharp to feign insanity and get himself lodged in Bloomingdale, for the purpose of surreptitiously obtaining facts. Such sneak-practice betokens neither great shrewdness nor a proper sense of honor.”
The Journal urged that “popular judgment should be suspended” until the investigations were completed. “It is easy enough to arouse a prejudice against an institution about which so much mystery hangs as is inevitable and necessary with an insane asylum.” The article stressed that “sensible people” would give the Asylum the “benefit of every doubt.”
The Asylum was cleared of gross wrongdoing and the disgrace soon faded.
Somewhat expectedly, of course, stories of sane relatives being committed unfairly, continued. One of these was the 30-year old Susan Dickie who was declared insane in 1871. The South Carolina newspaper The Newberry Herald reported on March 6, 1878 that she was committed “on the certificate of a physician who had only seen her for ten minutes, and who knew no more about her complaints or the nature of her antecedents than he did about the back of his head. He got a good fat fee for his opinion.”
The newspaper floridly complained that the doctor thereby “deprived a fellow-being of her liberty, and consigned her to a living tomb and the fellowship of maniacs for seven long years.”
Susan Dickie’s commitment followed the death of her father and the reading of his will. She was to received one-sixth of the income of his $900,000 estate. Only after she was noticed by “a few persons who knew nothing of her history,” according to the Louisiana newspaper The Bossier Banner, was her insanity questioned. Susan was released after a thorough examination. The Bossier Banner reported on March 21, 1878 “For six years she has been for the most part a solitary little woman, the occupant of a little room among imbeciles, idiots and maniacs. To-day she comes out to enjoy all the pleasures of reunion with old friends and the practical and pleasant consolations obtainable with $7,000 a year.”
The Bloomingdale Insane Asylum played an important part in the defense of Charles J. Guiteau following his assassination of President James A. Garfield on July 2, 1881. In attempting to prove that Guiteau was insane, his attorney presented the 1829 records of the Asylum, which documented that his grandfather, Dr. Francis W. Guiteau “died there insane.”
A witness named Scoville testified that he knew Francis Guiteau when he was about 16 or 18 years old in Utica, New York. He was “disappointed in love,” said Scoville. When he challenged his rival to a duel, the pistols were loaded with blank cartridges. Guiteau, realized that he had been made a fool of. The “shame of it, united with disappointed affection for the lady of his choice, dethrone his reason and he became insane.”
His grandfather’s insanity did not sway the jury and Charles J. Guiteau was executed on June 30, 1882.
On February 23, 1889 the Mississippi newspaper the Woodville Republican reported on the wealth of the Bloomingdale Asylum, which it called “the richest institution of the kind in the world.” The 50 acres of land, it said, was worth more than $6 million. And its patients nearly all came “form the highest classes of society.”
The newspaper mentioned some of the wealthy inmates, including John Travers, son of a recently-deceased Wall Street tycoon. “His share of the…estate was $300,000.” The article said “The richest patient at present is Howard Meyer, son of the New Brunswick millionaire, who has an income of $7,000 a year devoted to his support.”
But living and being treated at the Bloomingdale Asylum was expensive. The writer added “This may seem like a large sum, but when one sees how physicians and others who minister to the rich charge for their services it soon melts away.”
At the time of the article the Asylum was poised to move. The land on which it stood had become far too valuable for the facility to remain there. On May 19, 1888 The New York Times had reported “The site occupied by the asylum is confessedly the finest for residence purposes on Manhattan Island…It embraces some 558 building lots, of an average value of from $5,000 to $8,000 per lot.”
Public opinion played a part in the proposed move as well. As Morningside Heights developed, “protest upon protest was accordingly made by interested parties against the presence of the madhouse within city limit,” explained The Times. The article reported that the Asylum would be moved to White Plains and the old buildings demolished.
In 1897 Columbia University moved onto the former site of the Asylum. Half a century, in 1947, later Horace C. Coon wrote his history of the institution, Columbia: Colossus on the Hudson. He started his book with the tongue-in-cheek comment “It is no accident, perhaps, that the present site of Columbia University was once occupied by the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum.”
Mario Cuomo Bridge, better know as the new Tappan Zee Bridge
Aron Eisenpreiss, Clara Bella, Andy Sparberg, Alexis Villefane, Hara Reiser, Jay Jacobson, Lisa Fernandez, Laura Hussey, Gloria Herman, Arlene Bessenoff, Nina Lublin, got it!!!!
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)
A DAYTONIAN IN MANHATTAN
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EDITORIAL For years we have been told about the living hell at the City run asylum on Blackwell’s Island. We see here that the private asylum not only took your money but you were treated just as poorly.
DIRECTLY ACROSS FROM CORNELL TECH A NEW WATERFRONT WALKWAY/PROMENADE IS TAKING SHAPE. ENJOY WATCHING THE GIANT CRANES AND BARGES WORKING IN THE RIVER.
A rendering of the East Midtown Greenway, as it will appear looking north near East 54th Street. (New York City Economic Development Corporation)
The creation of the East Midtown Greenway (EMG), a 1.5-acre public space stretching from East 53rd to 61st Streets along the waterfront, got underway Friday. The project, to be completed by 2022, is part of the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway initiative to wrap the entire perimeter of Manhattan with accessible public spaces and safe bicycle paths. The midtown space will close one of the largest remaining gaps in the $250 million city initiative, announced by Mayor de Blasio in 2018, to connect 32 miles of Manhattan waterfront esplanade.
The Manhattan Waterfront Greenaway project will close gaps in Inwood, Harlem, and East Harlem, as well as the East Midtown space. The goal is to connect neighborhoods to their waterfronts and add about 15 acres of open space. The planned esplanade will connect the bike paths that line the city’s perimeter so that cyclists can safely circle Manhattan without veering off into city streets.
After a six-month delay during the pandemic, construction has resumed on the long-awaited project adding a new eight-block stretch to the East River Esplanade.
The East Midtown Greenway will stretch between East 53rd and 61st streets, creating new waterfront access and public space and bringing the city closer to its long-held goal of creating a continuous, 32-mile loop around Manhattan.
The existing esplanade runs north above East 60th Street and into East Harlem. Construction started in November on the new $100 million greenway, which will be built directly above the East River, but came to a halt in the spring as the coronavirus took hold.
Now, even as the city faces a severe fiscal shortfall that has thrown a wrench into many capital projects, the greenway will be allowed to restart construction since work had already begun when the pandemic hit.
RENDERINGS FOR THE PROJECT
(FINAL PLANS MAY HAVE CHANGED)
Portion will be over the water. Remember when there was a temporary roadway in this area when the FR Drive was being renovated?
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Tuesday, March 16 “Abandoned Queens” Author Richard Panchyk takes us on a journey through Queens’ past. Revealing haunting reminders of the way things used to be, he describes fascinating, abandoned places, including the chilling Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, the meandering remains of the country’s first modern highway, a defunct airport reclaimed by wilderness, an eerie old railroad line in Forest Hills, and a destroyed neighborhood in the Rockaways.
Tuesday, April 20 “Mansions and Munificence: the Gilded Age on Fifth Avenue” Guide, lecturer, author and teacher of art and architecture, Emma Guest-Consales leads a virtual tour of the great mansions of Fifth Avenue. Starting with the ex-home of Henry Clay Frick that now houses the Frick Collection, all the way up to the former home of Andrew Carnegie, now the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, she takes us through some of the most extravagant urban palaces the city has ever seen.
Tuesday, May 18 “Saving America’s Cities” Author and Harvard History Professor Lizabeth Cohen Provides an eye-opening look at her award-winning book’s subtitle: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age. Tracing Logue’s career from the development of Roosevelt Island in the ‘70s, to the redevelopment of New Haven in the ‘50s, Boston in the’60s and the South Bronx from 1978–85, she focuses on Logue’s vision to revitalize post-war cities, the rise of the Urban Development Corporation.
WEDNESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
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PILOT HOUSE THAT WAS RESTORED AND IS NOW INFORMATION BOOTH AT SOUTH STREET SEAPORT MUSEUM HARA REISER GOT IT!!
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 Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
UPPER EAST SIDE PATCH NYC/EDC 6SQ FT
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Like the fabled elephant graveyards, ships also have graveyards. Would you believe that there’s a ship graveyard on Staten Island? Read on.
Now let’s be clear. We’re not talking about ship breaking. Ship breaking is where large ocean going ships’ last voyage ends running up on a beach. The vessels are broken up for parts, which can be sold for re-use, or for raw materials, chiefly scrap. Most of this takes place today in India, Bangladesh, China and Pakistan, and much of the breaking up is done by hand –although in much of the 19th century, ship breaking took place mainly in the US and Great Britain.
In previous times, other uses were found for no longer useful ships. In South Street Sea Port in colonial times, old ships were used as fill to extend the shoreline. And Vikings and Egyptians, whose great leaders were entombed with boats. And less glam: Ships (and subway cars, too) have been deliberately sunk off shore to create new reefs.
A ‘graveyard’ for ships is an official dumping site for obsolete watercraft. The ‘graveyard’ is the location where the vessels, or their remains, have been deliberately abandoned. The Staten Island boat graveyard is a marine scrapyard located in the Arthur Kill in Rossville, near the Fresh Kills Landfill, on the West Shore of Staten Island.
When a ship reached the end of its operational life, it could be brought here to the highly industrialized Arthur Kill, sunk in shallow water of the Rossville Boatyard and left to rust away. The Rossville Boatyard is a graveyard of decommissioned, scrapped, and abandoned ships of various sizes, ages, and states of decay and has been recognized as an official dumping ground for old wrecked tugboats, barges and decommissioned ferries.
The Boatyard is known by other names including the Witte Marine Scrap Yard, the Arthur Kill Boat Yard, and the Tugboat Graveyard.
NOAA Nautical Chart 12331: Raritan Bay and Southern Part of Arthur Kill
A word about the Arthur Kill
The Arthur Kill (also known as the Staten Island Sound) is a tidal strait (like the East River) between Staten Island and Union and Middlesex counties in New Jersey and a major navigational channel of the Port of New York and New Jersey. The name is an anglicization of the Dutch achter kill meaning back channel, which refers to its location “behind” Staten Island and takes us back to the early 17th century when the region was part of New Netherland.
During the Revolutionary War, the Kill was the border between British occupied (and fiercely loyalist) Staten Island and New Jersey, held by Washington’s revolutionary troops. Skirmishing and larger battles took place across the Kill. A paragraph from Abandoned New York: Staten Island “was a loyalist stronghold, warmly greeting British troops upon their arrival. Hundreds of islanders enlisted in the British army as the conflict escalated. George Washington himself called the Staten Islanders “our most inveterate enemies.” John Adams was less generous, labeling them “an ignorant, cowardly pack of scoundrels, whose numbers are small, and their spirit less.”
BLAZING STAR TAVERN
BLAZING STAR CEMETERY
AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL ZION CHURCH
OYSTER SHUCKERS AT WORK
An early settlement on Arthur Kill was named Blazing Star, after a local tavern. Ferries, and later steamships whose wrecks are still sinking in the Arthur Kill, connected it with New Jersey. The Blazing Star Burial Ground, a cemetery dating from the mid-1750, is found just off Arthur Kill Road. In the early days farming flourished and travelers came to take the ferry and stay at a few local hotels, creating a bit of a resort community. The Old Bermuda Inn, built in 1814, still survives.
During the early 1800s, Blazing Star’s name was changed to Rossville, in honor of landowner Col. William E. Ross. He famously built a replica of England’s Windsor Castle on the coast. It was first known as the Ross Mansion or Castle, then became the Lyon Mansion or Castle, when the home was sold to Gov. Caleb Lyon, a poet, author, and member of the New York State Senate and House of Representatives. The building was demolished 45 years after his death in 1875.
In 1827, slavery in New York was abolished. Soon after, freed black slaves began to arrive in Rossville from Virginia and Maryland. They started an oystering village on the Arthur Kill and named their community Sandy Ground, because of the soil found there, leading to strawberry crops. By 1850, the freed men founded the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, which is known to have been an essential stop on the Underground Railroad. (It became a New York City landmark on Feb. 1, 2011.)
Beside Blazing Star Burial Ground is our boatyard burial ground, filled with deteriorating ships from the past.
An article in Forgotten New York notes, “Vessels from all decades of the 20th Century lie, not exactly in state, but in a state of decomposition and rust at this former boatyard at Arthur Kill Road and Rossville Avenue….The former piers have collapsed and are for the most part impassible, which makes them a magnet for daredevil urban explorers.”
The Boatyard was founded in the 1930s by John J. Witte and managed by him until his death in 1980. It was then taken over by his son-in-law, Joe Coyne, who described it as similar to an automobile salvage yard, with the boats serving as a source of parts to sell. As of 2014, its official name is the Donjon Iron and Metal Scrap Processing Facility.
Over the last century, Witte Marine dismantled hundreds of ships that once crowded the bustling piers of New York’s coastline. Business seems to have boomed after World War II as many old and battered ships were purchased for deconstruction. But even with a steady stream of salvage work, many old tugboats and smaller harbor ships accumulated on the shores of Arthur Kill and rotted in shallow water.
Some of the vessels here were historic, and the boatyard has been called an “accidental marine museum.” These included the American submarine chaser USS PC-1264, the first World War II US Navy ship to have a predominantly African-American crew; and the New York City Fire Department fireboat Abram S. Hewitt, which served as the floating command post at the 1904 sinking of the passenger ferry P S General Slocum, a disaster that killed more than a thousand people.
A 1990 New York Times story reported that 200 ships were sharing space in the Tugboat Graveyard. Today, there are fewer, each a jumble of broken beams and rusted metal. Over time, all the useful parts have been stripped or stolen.
Apparently, less can be seen today. But photographer Shaun O’Boyle, known for his work on Antarctica, produced a wonderful set of photos of the Ship Graveyard. See his “Modern Ruins: Portraits of place in the Mid-Atlantic Region” (2010), and online at https://www.oboylephoto.com/portfolio/G0000nvLhs57vUko
(1913-1983), Self Portrait, Lithograph, Edition 20, 1951 The Noble Maritime Collection, Gift of the Noble Family
John Alexander Noble (1913–1983) was an artist known for creating drawings, paintings, and lithographs of ships and harbors around New York City.
Noble was born in Paris, France, in 1913. The son of painter John Noble, he moved to the United States with his family in 1919. About 1929, he started drawing and painting. While in school he was a “permanent fixture” on the McCarren line tugs, which towed schooners in New York Harbor. In the summer, he would go to sea. In 1931, he graduated from Friends Seminary and returned to France, where he studied for a year at the University of Grenoble and met his wife, Susan Ames. When he returned to New York, he studied for a year at the National Academy of Design.
Career From 1928 to 1945, Noble worked as a seaman on schooners and in marine salvage in New York Harbor. When he saw the Port Johnston Coal Docks on the Kill van Kull, which had become a “great boneyard” of wooden sailing vessels, the sight of it “affected him for life”. In 1941, he began to build a floating, “houseboat” studio there, made out of salvaged ship parts. From 1946, he worked as an artist full-time, voyaging through New York Harbor in a rowboat and creating—in oil paintings, charcoal drawings, sketches and lithographs—a “unique and exacting record” of the “characters, industries, and vessels” of the harbor.
Houseboat Studio Permanent exhibition in the John A. Noble Maritime Collection at Sailors Snug Harbor
The centerpiece of the museum is Noble’s Houseboat Studio. The studio had been restored to its appearance in 1954, the year Noble and the studio were featured in the December issue of National Geographic. Noble created paintings, drawings, and lithographs there for over 40 years.
Of his “little leaking Monticello,” Noble wrote in 1977, “Strange cabin! and odd its beginnings—and lonely its long and precarious career. Through it all, our tenuous careers, its and mine, have been intimately and inexorably linked, for within its teak walls most of my pictures have been clumsily breech birthed for nigh unto forty years with great effort and small grace….
“After the Civil War, Newark Bay was bridged by the New Jersey Central Railroad. One of the results of this engineering was that anthracite coal came to the banks of the Kill van Kull; and … the world’s greatest hard coal complex—Port Johnston….Well, after a fire sometime in the early twenties…its docks became…a great boneyard.
“I first laid eyes on these acres of new, old, and dead vessels as a boy in 1928 from the deck of a stone schooner….I must say the sight affected me for life—and shortly thereafter I was drawing them….Well, it was but a few years more, and I was making my living there, keeping the vessels which had not yet sunk pumped out and watching their lines….
“Now this great length of pier was punctuated by odd cabins that had been thrown aside in wrecking operations. One of these was the teak saloon of a European yacht. One summer day when things were slack I had a sudden impulse. I cut a hole in its roof and fashioned a makeshift skylight. Through the years I rebuilt and collected teak fittings—adding, changing. Unknown to me was how much I was becoming wedded to my cabin studio. The shock to me was deep when the dock, already badly collapsing, was abandoned, and in panic I built the wooden barge which enabled me to escape from the boneyard. For years now I have been plagued with ‘Oh! the artist with the floating studio, etc. etc.’ There is no cuteness nor color in all this for me—the only small romance is that I did escape.
“The sources of the myriad parts that such a structure must have may seem peculiar now, for they came from that dim region where nothing is ever bought or stolen. The spikes in my bottom were pulled from the deck of the steam schooner Robert Dollar….Most of the planks in the bottom came from the wings of an old Bethlehem Steel Brooklyn dry-dock….The Romanesque windows are black walnut and came from the old Carteret Ferry….The main skylight windows (on the opposite side) are from the classroom built aboard the four-masted schooner Guillford Pendleton….The intriguing little fiddle block and the small davit are from the Kaiser’s sailing yacht Meteor….here also are parts from the steam lighter McKeever Bros.—that carried New York’s dead horses to the rendering plant—the Hart’s Island, that bore the poor and unknown dead to Potter’s Field—and the William C. Moore, the immigrant barge from Ellis Island….
“Time naturally flowed on as did the tides around me. To my port arose the largest oil still in the world, making Getty the richest man in the world, yet in time it rusted and was torn down. To my starboard…a great rack for car tows slowly went into obsolescence…. Dockbuilders, a dredging company, a shipyard came and went,…the nickering vandalism of Sailors’ Snug Harbor trustees never ceased as architectural gems and noble trees came down…until even the seamen were gone. It strikes me as weird that this stone was no sooner finished than the last of the great hulks of the boneyard burned to the water’s edge.
“Thus it came about that now my own little leaking Monticello pitches and survives in the wake of the passing tugs.” John A. Noble Essays, 1977
HUDSON YARD “&” TRAIN ENTRANCE LAURA HUSSEY, GLORIA HERMAN & VERN HARWOOD & ANDY SPARBERG GOT IT!
From our transit expert Andy Sparberg, some clarifications of Monday’s issue:
In 1945 the Transit Authority NYC Board of Transportation shut down the City Hall Station, demolishing the ornamental kiosks and sealing the entrances under concrete slabs. The tiled arches and brass chandeliers were thrust into tomb-like darkness and the station was essentially forgotten. However, Lexington Ave. Local (#6 today) trains continued to use the station’s loop tracks to change direction at Brooklyn Bridge, and do so to this day, as noted in the last sentence.
Any hope that the City Hall stop would be resurrected was smashed when modern train cars became too long , the R17s, introduced on the IRT in 1954, had door positions that could not safely open on the sharp curve of the platform. The wide gaps created between the platform and cars would be unsafe and logistically unreasonable to attempt to correct.
Explanations: The Transit Authority was not created until 1953. The older model cars had doors at the extreme car ends, whereas the R17 cars were the same length, 51 feet, but had a different door arrangement that created dangerous gaps on curved platforms.
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
SAILORS SNUG HARBOR JOHN NOBLE MARITIME COLLECTION (C)
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated PHOTOS BY JUDITH BERDY / RIHS (C) FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
PLEASE SEE OUR SPECIAL EDITION ON RIHS.US. FROM DEBORAH DORFF WHO JUST SPENT HER WEEK IN HER COLD, DARK AND SNOWED IN HOME IN AUSTIN, TEXAS.
293rd Edition
Monday,
February 22, 2021
The Abandoned 1904
City Hall Subway Station
FROM A DAYTONIAN IN MANHATTAN
Rafael Guastavino’s tiled arch construction was not a new idea in 1900; actually it had been used in Europe since ancient times. He simply rediscovered and improved it, yet earning himself a powerful reputation in doing so.
Guastavino, born in Valencia, Spain and trained as an architect in Barcelona, immigrated to the U.S. after he earned a medal of merit at the Philadephila Centennial Exposition in 1876. He founded the Guastavino Fireproof Construction Company and marketed his tiled arch construction as the “Guastavino Tile Arch System.”
His construction designs fit well with the popular Arts and Crafts movement of the period. Interlocking terra cotta tiles were installed in layers of mortar which enabled him to create strong arches with no visible means of support. Although the clay tiles were, individually, fragile; together they were incredibly strong — often compared to the inherent strength of an eggshell.
While Guastavino was perfecting his tile construction, New York City was planning a subway system. Not only could the 19th Century elevated trains no longer efficiently move the multitudes of New Yorkers, they spewed ashes and soot and were noisy. Through the Rapid Transit Act of 1894 the State had authorized the city to build and run a subway. Six years later things got underway with the formation of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company.
At what would become the City Hall Station, Mayor Robert Van Wyck put foot to silver shovel and formally initiated construction on the subway system. Architects George Lewis Heins and Christopher Grant LaFarge were commissioned to design the stations which were functional, white-tiled, nearly-claustrophibic spaces with individual mosaic themes or, in some cases, ornate tiles proclaiming the stations.
Except for City Hall Station.
The new mayor, George B. McCllellon, was explicit. He wanted it to be a showplace. “My station under City Hall,” he insisted, “will be more beautiful than the rest.” Calling on Rafael Guastavino, Heins and LaFarge incorporated his graceful soaring tiled arches, creating a vast, elegant station. Twelve brass chandeliers illuminated the earthy ochre, green and black Arts and Crafts tiles. Nine stunningly ornate leaded glass skylights pierced the ceiling of every fourth bay. On the opposite wall from the platform large bronze plaques honored the architects, the engineers and the politicians responsible.
As the system was being readied for opening, the Interborough Rapid Transit described the station. “It might readily have been supposed that the limited space and comparative uniformity of the underground stations would afford but little opportunity for architectural and decorative effects. The result has shown the fallacy of such a supposition.
” At 1:00 on October 27, 1904 ceremonies marked the opening of the New York City Subway at the City Hall Station. After customary speeches, Mayor McClellan personally turned the silver key and acted as motorman, transporting the dignitaries far uptown to the 137th Street Station. At 7:00 that evening, paying passengers (admission was by five-cent ticket) were admitted.
According to The New York Times that day, “The rush for tickets to the opening continued unabated yesterday, and scores of demands had to be refused, with the result that the applicants went away declaring they had been slighted.” More than 7,100 paying passengers entered the City Hall Station that evening; a fraction of the system-wide horde of New Yorkers eager to ride the new system.
The City Hall Station was unusual in that, because it was situated at the beginning of the loop where trains would swing around to head back north, its platform was tightly curved. Eventually lack of use and this design element would doom the station.
During World War II the beautiful skylights were blacked out for security purposes, eventually becoming covered over. Then, because the nearby Brooklyn Bridge Stop was more convenient, fewer and fewer passengers were using the elegant station. In 1945 the NYC Board of Transportation shut down the City Hall Station, demolishing the ornamental kiosks and sealing the entrances under concrete slabs. The tiled arches and brass chandeliers were thrust into tomb-like darkness and the station was essentially forgotten. However, Lexington Ave. Local (#6 today) trains continued to use the station’s loop tracks to change direction at Brooklyn Bridge, and do so to this day, as noted in the last sentence.
Any hope that the City Hall stop would be resurrected was smashed when modern train cars, the R17s, introduced on the IRT in 1954, had door positions that could not safely open on the sharp curve of the platform. The wide gaps created between the platform and cars would be unsafe and logistically unreasonable to attempt to correct.
Explanations: The Transit Authority was not created until 1953. The older model cars had doors at the extreme car ends, whereas the R17 cars were the same length, 51 feet, but had a different door arrangement that created dangerous gaps on curved platforms.
In 1995 plans were made to rehabilitate the stop as an annex to the Transit Museum. Over $1 million was granted by the federal government and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to restore the space and, for awhile, was opened for tours. However, in 1998 after terrorist bombings around the globe, Mayor Rudolph Guiliani shut down the space again in concern over the accessibility to the area under City Hall.
Today tours are again conducted, although sporadically. While some of the skylights have suffered severe damage, some are surprisingly intact. There is some water damage and the once elegant chandeliers are covered in decades of gray dust. Yet the grandeur of Mayor McClellan’s showpiece is still evident over a century after its opening.
You can ride thru the station on the #6 train as it turns to start its uptown run. Though the station is not open you can get a glance of it from the train.
Save the Date A Tale of Two Waterworks
Talk by Jeffrey Kroessler presented as part of NYC H20’s Ridgewood Reservoir for the 21st Century
Tuesday, Mar 2, 2021 6:00pm–7:15pm
In conjunction with the current Community Partnership Exhibition Ridgewood Reservoir for the 21st Century situated around the historic Watershed Model at the Queens Museum,
We are pleased to host A Tale of Two Waterworks, talk by Jeffrey Kroessler presented by NYC H20. The presentation will be followed by Q&A with attendees.
This event will take place on Zoom. To join please see queensmuseum.org
The history of the water systems of New York City and the once independent City of Brooklyn is not only a story of engineering triumph, but a story about the public spirit. Clean water was essential for economic prosperity, health, sanitation, and municipal growth. When New York reached into Westchester and the Catskills for water sources, and when the City of Brooklyn tapped the Long Island aquifer, what were the environmental, economic and political factors in play? A Tale of Two Waterworks will explore the history of the two water systems, how and why they were built, how they determined the city’s future, and the story behind their unification.
Jeffrey A. Kroessler is the Interim Chief Librarian of the Lloyd Sealy Library, John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is the author of New York, Year by Year, The Greater New York Sports Chronology, and the forthcoming Sunnyside Gardens: Planning and Preservation in a Historic Garden Suburb.
Image Credits: (black and white image) Drawing with aerial view of the two rectangular-shaped reservoir basins built in NYC in 1842, prior to the construction of Central Park, showing the larger oval-shaped reservoir which would replace them in1858. (color image) Lithograph,1859, showing the original two Ridgewood Reservoir basins in the City of Brooklyn, completed by 1858.
BODLEIAN LIBRARY, OXFORD ARLENE BESSENOFF, HARA REISER & ANDY SPARBERG GOT IT RIGHT
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 Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
Sources: A DAYTONIAN IN MANHATTAN NY DAILY NEWS PHOTO JUDITH BERDY
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First, y’all are getting a special edition from Texas since I (Deborah Dorff) make the daily posts to this site and I’ve been unavailable due to this very unusual storm in Texas. Here’s a mostly day by day account of what we experienced.
View out our front window. 2/14/21
Temperatures had been steadily dropping for several days. The forecast was for more cold and maybe some snow. Sunday night, we had a bit more than a dusting of snow, which was pleasant, mostly because this is a rare occurrence in Central Texas. This was actually our second snow of the season.
Monday morning, we woke to a chilly house, more snow, and no power. No worries, we have battery back-ups and had already been dripping our faucets to prevent freezing pipes. We collected our drippings and filled a stock pot, in case we lost water. Road conditions were reported as snow-packed and icy, so we chose to stay put. We were hopeful the power would return soon.
View our front 2/15/21
Back patio view 2/15/21
We quickly realized that we were not only without power, but we were also almost completely without cell service. We had a very limited ability to text. We started checking in with friends and neighbors and the news was not good. Broken pipes, no power, no water, and treacherous roads.
Photos of the Neighborhood
Fallen trees and other vegetation throughout the state contributed to power outages.
Native plants were impacted by snow and ice.
Rosemary popsicles
Birds finding food in our holly tree
How many birds can you find?Bird watching was a good way to pass time
A Heritage Oak weighed down with ice.
Tuesday we had a heat source to melt snow and to cook .
The Daily Podcast by the New York Times featured the power failure in Texas.
Tuesday night by candle light and Wednesday morning trying to stay warm.
Deborah Tuesday night and Kevin Wednesday morning
Wednesday things began to thaw…
Thursday we lost water
Melting snow for toilets only
Friday we ventured out for more water from a friend who still had running water and heat.
Friday afternoon, four and a half days later, we had power again and began the process of heating our home. By Saturday afternoon, we felt it was safe to turn on our water. The city of Austin is still requiring that we boil our water before consuming it. Throughout the week very few stores were open and there were long lines and limited items for purchase.
Most counties in Texas have hit the threshold for disaster relief and FEMA is on the ground trying to process claims. Throughout the week there were warming locations, but people were asked to bring their own food and blankets. By Saturday, multiple locations had been set up for water distribution using supplies sent in from neighboring states.
This ordeal will quickly be a memory for most even though full restoration, for many, will take months.
Deborah Dorff
Text by Judith Berdy & Deborah Dorff Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by 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
Yesterday, I stumbled on a CSPAN-3 history program on Alexander von Humboldt. I was immediately fascinated by the story of this explorer, artist, scientist, adventurer and diplomat.
I suggest you watch the two videos about the exhibit at the SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM. The videos are presented by Senior Curator Eleanor Jones Harvey https://www.c-span.org/video/?507040-1/alexander-von-humboldt-united-states-exhibit-part-1 https://www.c-span.org/video/?507040-2/alexander-von-humboldt-united-states-exhibit-part-2
There is also a great 4 minute video for kids explaining who Humboldt was. (Suitable for adults too)
As soon as the Smithsonian re-opens, let’s go!
Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture
Friedrich Georg Weitsch, Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), 1806, oil on canvas, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany / Klaus Goeken / Art Resource, NY.
292nd Edition
FEBRUARY 20-21, 2021
FROM THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM
Renowned Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt was one of the most influential figures of the nineteenth century. He lived for 90 years, published more than 36 books, traveled across four continents, and wrote well over 25,000 letters to an international network of colleagues and admirers. In 1804, after traveling four years in South America and Mexico, Humboldt spent exactly six weeks in the United States. In these six weeks, Humboldt—through a series of lively exchanges of ideas about the arts, science, politics, and exploration with influential figures such as President Thomas Jefferson and artist Charles Willson Peale—shaped American perceptions of nature and the way American cultural identity became grounded in our relationship with the environment.
Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture places American art squarely in the center of a conversation about Humboldt’s lasting influence on the way we think about our relationship to the natural world. Humboldt’s quest to understand the universe—his concern for climate change, his taxonomic curiosity centered on New World species of flora and fauna, and his belief that the arts were as important as the sciences for conveying the resultant sense of wonder in the interlocking aspects of our planet—make this a project evocative of how art illuminates some of the issues central to our relationship with nature and our stewardship of this planet.
This exhibition will be the first to examine Humboldt’s impact on five spheres of American cultural development: the visual arts, sciences, literature, politics, and exploration, between 1804 and 1903. It centers on the fine arts as a lens through which to understand how deeply intertwined Humboldt’s ideas were with America’s emerging identity. The exhibition includes more than 100 paintings, sculptures, maps, and artifacts as well as a video introduction to Humboldt and his connections to the Smithsonian through an array of current projects and initiatives.
In 1805 Humboldt and Bonpland published this plant geography map, which Humboldt called his Naturgemälde or “picture of nature.” It combines illusionistic watercolor with a cutaway diagram labeled with the plants he and Bonpland observed in South America, shown at the altitudes where they found them. This map affirmed his belief that the distribution of plants around the globe could be correlated based on altitude and the rock underneath. By amassing and comparing this kind of data, Humboldt refined his theory that everything on the planet was interrelated. His idea of the unity of nature —that plants, animals, and climate are related in ecosystems—is widely accepted today, but was a radical concept when Humboldt first began writing about it.
Artworks by Albert Bierstadt, Karl Bodmer, George Catlin, Frederic Church, Eastman Johnson, Samuel F.B. Morse, Charles Willson Peale, John Rogers, William James Stillman, and John Quincy Adams Ward, among others, will be on display. The installation features a digital exploration of Frederic Church’s famous landscape, Heart of the Andes (1859), enabling visitors to engage with the painting’s details in new ways. The wealth of detail is a painterly extrapolation of Humboldt’s plant geography map. The mountain at the center of the work, Chimborazo, was referred to as “Humboldt’s Mountain.” The narrated, 2.5D animated projection enables visitors to appreciate the connections between Church’s painting and Humboldt’s ideas.
The exhibition also includes the original “Peale Mastodon” skeleton, on loan from the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, with ties to Humboldt, Peale and an emerging American national identity in the early nineteenth century. Its inclusion in the exhibition represents a homecoming for this important fossil that has been in Europe since 1847, and emphasizes that natural history and natural monuments bond Humboldt with the United States.
Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture is organized by Eleanor Jones Harvey, senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. A major catalogue, written by Eleanor Jones Harvey, accompanies the exhibition. The book shows how Humboldt inspired a network of like-minded individuals who would go on to embrace the spirit of exploration, decry slavery, advocate for the welfare of Native Americans and extol America’s wilderness as a signature component of the nation’s sense of self. Harvey traces how Humboldt’s ideas influenced the transcendentalists and the landscape painters of the Hudson River School, and laid the foundations for the Smithsonian, the Sierra Club, and the National Park Service
.The catalogue is co-published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Princeton University Press; it is available for purchase ($75) online.
In this late self-portrait, the elder Peale gestures to the femur of a mastodon. The discovery of the mastodon had been Peale’s inspiration to expand his museum and the complete skeleton was his prize attraction. The femur held special meaning: it was the index bone that allowed one to estimate the overall size of the animal. Like Humboldt’s barometer, it represented what Peale cherished most: the ability to use parts of nature to take the measure of the whole. Here it suggests the summation of Peale’s life as an artist, scientist, and museum founder. Peale had hoped that his museum might become a national institute; however, it would be James Smithson’s bequest that enabled the country to establish the kind of museum complex Peale envisioned.
After Eduard Hildebrandt, Humboldt in His Library, 1856, chromolithograph on paper, 18 5/8 x 26 5/8 in., Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Robert F. Norfleet Jr., Photo: Travis Fullerton, Courtesy Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
ABOUT THIS ARTWORK
In 1855, Smithsonian Regent and art collector William Wilson Corcoran traveled to Europe with former president Millard Fillmore. Carrying a letter on Smithsonian letterhead, they met Humboldt in Berlin, where the aging naturalist welcomed them, showing them around the city and arranging for a dinner with the Prussian king. Corcoran commissioned a marble bust of Humboldt; Fillmore returned with this color print showing Humboldt in his library, surrounded by his books, travel diaries, maps, specimens, and artworks. His rooms had come to resemble Peale’s museum. The globe is positioned to show the regions he visited in South and North America.
THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HOW THE SMITHSONIAN CAME TO BE!!!
James Smithson: Founder of the Smithsonian Institution
Engraving of James Smithson, by Heliotype Printing Co., c. 1881
James Smithson (c. 1765-1829), founding donor of the Smithsonian Institution, was born in 1765 in France with the name James Lewis Macie. The illegitimate son of Elizabeth Hungerford Keate Macie and Hugh Smithson, 1st Duke of Northumberland, he changed his name as well as his citizenship, becoming a naturalized British citizen around the age of ten. After his parents’ death, he became known as James Smithson rather than James Macie. On May 7, 1782, he enrolled in Pembroke College, Oxford, and graduated four years later. The natural sciences sparked his interest, and he established a solid reputation as a chemist and mineralogist, during the exciting period when chemistry was being developed as a new science in the late 1700s. Committed to discovering the basic elements, he worked diligently to collect mineral and ore samples from European countries. Excerpts from his notes show that his field excursions often forced him to brave the elements and do without the upper class comforts known to his parents. Smithson, although a wealthy man, was determined to make a name for himself among scientists. He kept accurate records of his experiments and collections, and his publications earned the respect of his peers. The Royal Society of London recognized his scientific abilities and accepted his membership on April 26, 1787, only a year after he graduated from college, an unusual honor for someone so young. The society became an outlet for publishing many of his papers, which covered a wide range of scientific topics, and also was a meeting place for Smithson and other scientists. James Smithson wrote a draft of his Last Will and Testament in 1826 in London, only three years before he died. He died on June 27, 1829, in Genoa, Italy, where he was buried in a British cemetery. The will left his estate to his nephew, Henry James Hungerford, and stated that if his nephew died without an heir, the money would go “to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge ….” After his nephew died without an heir, Smithson’s estate did come to the United States and a debate began about what this new institution would be.
First, Richard Rush, an attorney from Philadelphia, filed a lawsuit in London to get the Smithson estate for the United States. Rush brought Smithson’s personal effects to the United States in 1838, along with the money from his estate. Then Congressional debates continued until 1846 when legislation was passed creating the Smithsonian Institution. Unfortunately, a fire in the Smithsonian Institution Building or Castle in 1865 destroyed many of the Smithson letters, diaries, and other papers originally acquired by the Institution. As a result of the fire, the Smithsonian Institution Archives does not have very many of James Smithson’s original letters or other papers. Among those that the Smithsonian Institution Archives does have are a handwritten draft of Smithson’s Last Will and Testament, dated October 23, 1826, and his “Receipt Book” containing formulas for food, beverages, and everyday products.
COOPER UNION WHEN THE THIRD AVENUE ELEVATED TRAIN WAS NEXT TO THE SCHOOL.
M.FRANK, HARRIET LIEBER, HARA REISER & ANDY SPARBERG GOT THIS
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 Deborah Dorff Roosevelt Island Historical Society
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM C-SPAN3
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By 1860 New York City was floundering in a disconnected tangle of public agencies. Then on March 1 of that year The New York Times reported on the formation of the Department of Public Charities and Correction—a title with a seemingly incongruous authority.
The new Department would consolidate and oversee the workings of numerous institutions: The Colored Home, the Colored Orphan Asylum, the Lunatic Asylum, the Nursery Hospital, the Smallpox Hospital, the Work House, and the Penitentiary among them. Despite the dizzying collection of responsibilities, the bill specifically excluded from its supervision “the House of Refuge, Juvenile Delinquent Asylum, the House of Detention for Witnesses, and the County and Sheriff’s Jail.”
Shortly after moving in to the new headquarters the Commissioners met. The minutes reflect the unwieldy scope of responsibilities. Among the issues addressed were “That all Emigrants with Relapsing Fever be retained on Hart’s Island;” the problem of “boys not being at work at tailors shop” on Randall’s Island; the night watchman of Hart’s Island, L. Van Buskirk, was absent without leave and had not returned his pistol (his dismissal was ordered); an additional nurse was needed at the Lunatic Asylum; the Lunatic Asylum needed five new boilers; and a hospital was established “on the corner of Chambers and Centre streets, for the reception and medical treatment of persons Sun struck, or taken ill from excessive heat in the lower portion of the city.” The report from the Apothecary of Bellevue Hospital necessarily included the “consumption of liquors for April.” That month 81 gallons of whiskey, 66 gallons of port wine and 471 gallons of ale were consumed in the hospital. The report, sadly, did not disclose who drank the liquor, other than “5-1/4 galls. Whisky and 55 pints ale given to mechanics, etc., by order of the Commissioners.” The Department was in charge of the education of boys for the trades. To prepare young sailors, the School Ship Mercury, was operated under the Department’s charge. The boys did not necessarily choose a sea-faring vocation, however. The Department issued a report to Mayor A. Oakey Hall regarding the Mercury on September 12, 1871 explaining the selection of the crew. Some, it said, had been committed to the care of the Commissioners by the courts “for slight misdemeanors and vagrancy. Others, and in large numbers, had been committed by their parents as incorrigible, or because of evil associates, who were leading them to ruin.” The lawless boys, the Commissioners felt, “could not without a long probationship be recommended as apprentices, because of their wayward and reckless character, nor could they be discharged without the probability that they would again become vagrants, or fall into their former wicked associations.” So they were loaded onto the Mercury to learn to be a sailor.
Boys put on the Mercury could not expect to see New York again for, sometimes, a year. “The only effectual mode of instruction is the continuous handling of a ship at sea,” said the report, “and that the manifold duties of a thorough seaman can only be learned by actual service.” The report outlined the cruise that had begun on December 20, 1870. The boys took the ship to the Madeira Islands, then to the Canaries, then on to Sierra Leone. From there they sailed to Barbados before returning to New York.
In 1880 the Commissioners Report reflected the struggle the Department had in keeping up with the burgeoning population and the resultant medical and charity cases. The Pavilion for Insane was overcrowded and “we are obliged to place more than one patient in a room. This is to be regretted, from the fact that this class of patients when admitted, become very much excited and often violent; such cases it is necessary to place under mild restraint, which, under the circumstances, cannot be avoided.”
The report noted that a separate pavilion for alcoholics was needed. That year “the number of cases admitted suffering from alcoholism was 1,565, of which 45 died.”
Shortly after 1895 the Department left its 3rd Avenue headquarters. A separate Department of Corrections had been established, relieving the Department of an enormous work load. Around this time orphaned and abandoned children were put under the care of the Out-Door Poor. The Charity Organization Society of the City of New York approved of the move, but felt it did not fully address the problem.
“This was an improvement of course, on the former practice, since the children, while waiting, associated only with tramps, paupers and sick people, instead of with prostitutes and criminals but it was bad enough,” said the Society’s report in 1901.
To address the situation, the Bureau of Dependent Children was established by Commissioner Keller in January 1899. The Bureau took over the building at 3rd Avenue and 11th Street. The organization realized early on that one of its most crucial tasks would be weeding out parents who tried to use the Bureau as a convenient dumping ground for unwanted babies.
Such was the case in April 1900 when jeweler Wilbur F. Hammond walked in with a two-month old baby. The man told Superintendent Blair that he had gotten off the 23rd Street Ferry from Jersey City, walked about four feet and noticed the child lying against the wall. After he waited approximately 45 minutes and no one came to claim the child, he took it to the New York Foundling Hospital. The Hospital refused to accept the infant and sent Hammond to the Bureau. Now, sitting before a suspicious Superintendent Blair, he was asked if he wouldn’t like to adopt the child. No, he answered, “but he was willing to pay for his care,” reported The New York Times. Hammond’s story began unraveling when cabbie Thomas McDonald came forth saying that a man and a woman (she “veiled and well dressed), disembarked from the 23rd Street Ferry and asked to be taken to the Foundling Asylum. The man got out of the cab with a baby and the woman was driven to the elevated railway at 67th Street and 3rd Avenue. There was only one baby brought into the Foundling Hospital that day; a fact that pointed to Hammond as the man. Employees of the ferry terminal said Hammond’s story was “preposterous.” Instead of the lonely station he described, the terminal teemed with “several hundred people. Police became involved and Hammond faced a seven-year prison term for abandoning a child under six years of age. The careful scrutiny of every case resulted in similar discoveries. In 1908 10,519 children were brought to the Bureau. Of them only 3,269 were accepted. The city sold the building—now a half-century old—in 1917. Automobiles crowded New York City streets and parking, as now, was a problem. The old Department headquarters was unceremoniously converted to a garage and its mansard roof, controversial in 1868, was demolished. Throughout the 20th century the humiliation continued with glass brick replacing the window openings—no doubt with security in mind. Yet amazingly the building survived until 1989 when Loew’s Theater Management leased the corner property. Before long one of James Renwick’s surviving structures, already forgotten, was replaced by a cinema complex.
EDITORIAL I sit in my warm apartment looking out at the snow thinking of the dire situation in Texas. A state of stubborn individualists and government that did not heed the warnings. Texas wants to be a loner. Now they are alone, even ted Cruz left for Cancun. (He got a police escort to the airport). No matter how we criticize ConEd, they are prepared for winter and summer…………..with mutual aid from our good neighboring states.
Judith Berdy
COLD HANDS?
STOP INTO THE RISH VISITOR KIOSK FOR A GREAT PAIR OF REALLY WARM LINED GLOVES. $5- FOR KIDS, $10 FOR ADULTS KIOSK OPEN SATURDAY AND SUNDAY 12-5 P.M.
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 Deborah Dorff Roosevelt Island Historical Society
Sources
A DAYTONIAN IN NEW YORK
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Simone Leigh (born 1967) is an American artist from Chicago who works in New York City in the United States.She works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism. Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society.Leigh has often said that her work is focused on “Black female subjectivity,” with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history.[4]
The Art Newspaper.com
African AH.com
Early life and education
Leigh was born to Jamaican parents and received a BA in Art and minored in Philosophy from Earlham College in 1990.
Career
“I came to my artistic practice via the study of philosophy, cultural studies, and a strong interest in African and African American art, which has imbued my object and performance-based work with a concern for the ethnographic, especially the way it records and describes objects.”[7] The artist combines her training in American ceramics with an interest in African pottery, using African motifs which tend to have modernist characteristics. Though Leigh considers herself to be primarily a sculptor, she recently has been involved in social sculpture, or social practice work that engages the public directly.Her objects often employ materials and forms traditionally associated with African art, and her performance-influenced installations create spaces where historical precedent and self-determination co-mingle. She describes this combination representing “a collapsing of time.” Her work has been described as part of a generation’s reimagining of ceramics in a cross-disciplinary context.[9] She has given artist lectures in many institutions nationally and internationally, and has taught in the ceramics department of the Rhode Island School of Design .
In October 2020, Leigh was selected to represent the United States at the prestigious 2022 Venice Biennale.[14] She is the first black woman to do so.
Hammer Museum Los Angeles, California
Working across ceramics, sculpture, video, installation, and social practice, Simone Leigh examines the construction of black female subjectivity and economies of self-preservation and exchange. Her practice is largely research based and intersectional, and considers a range of sources, including ethnography, feminist discourse, folklore, and histories of political resistance.
Through ceramics, Leigh references vernacular visual traditions from the Caribbean, the American South, and the African continent, as well as the black diasporic experience dating from the Middle Passage to the present. Vessels, cowrie shells, and busts are reoccurring forms, each making symbolic reference to the black body. Each object is heavily decorated, either with pin drops of glaze or clusters of flowers covering the head or face. The repetition of shapes allows Leigh to have a sustained, temporal engagement with the formal—and gendered—history of ceramics and the cultural histories each object represents. Architecture becomes another extension of the body for Leigh; often cages constructed of steel that become either the armature for another layer of cover, or are left bare. These womb-like structures allude to sub-Saharan grass huts and rural meeting places, often built by women.
Concealment and visibility are also central to Leigh’s work, pointing to historical instances where people, especially women of color, operated in secret in order to build communities and organize against oppression. Her recent projects, such as The Free People’s Medical Clinic (2014) and The Waiting Room (2016) locate social practice within institutions that are geared towards underserved communities. Inspired by the outreach work of the Black Panther Party focused on literacy, poverty, and hunger, and radical self-care initiatives rooted in non-traditional health practices, such as herbalism, meditation, acupuncture, and yoga, these free workshops empower visitors to take back the care of their bodies from agents of capitalism.
For her first solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles, Leigh presents a selection of recent ceramics and a site-specific installation, as well as a public program related to her ongoing research and work in public engagement.
LEIGH ON SITE AT STRATTON SCULPTURE STUDIOS, THE PHILADELPHIA FOUNDRY WHERE SHE IS PRODUCING NEW WORKS.
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)
WIKIPEDIA GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM HAMMER MUSEUM
REPORT FROM TEXAS
Deborah Dorff, our webmaster and the person who keeps our website updated lives in Austin, Texas. For four days she and her husband have had no electricity in their home. This afternoon she reports that their water service is out. Texas homes are not build for cold and their power grid has collapsed. The only shelter they can go to, you have to bring your own food and blankets. It sounds dire in Texas,
Read the interesting stories about the Texas “GO IT ALONE” power grid. It is an interesting story about the attitude “that we do not need other states”. In NY and all the other states we mutually cooperate when one state needs help there is a network, not in Texas.
Hoping Deborah and Kevin are soon warm and cozy soon.
