The 1915 Marshall Orme Wilson, Jr. House – 11 East 64th Street
from A DAYTONIAN IN MANHATTAN
For many years I walked by this building on East 64th Street. It has been the scene of elopements, marital bliss, romances, intrigue and scandal in its over 115 year history. Enjoy the stories and the vast cast of characters!
Marshall Orme Wilson, Jr. was 17 years old when his parents moved into their sumptuous new mansion at No. 3 East 64th Street. There were few young men in New York who could compete with his social status. His mother was the former Caroline “Carrie” Schermerhorn Astor (daughter of William Backhouse and Caroline Schermerhorn Astor), and his father was banker and railroad mogul Marshall Orme Wilson. His aunt had married Ogden Goelet, his uncle was John Jacob Astor IV, and other aunts had the married names of Roosevelt, Drayton, and Haig.
Marshall Orme Wilson, Jr. original source unknown (photo)
Following his graduation from Harvard, Wilson went into the banking business. Then, in the summer of 1910, one of America’s most eligible bachelors was off the market. On June 10 The Washington Post reported “Society turned out in large numbers to attend the wedding of Miss Alice Borland to Marshall Orme Wilson, jr….The bride is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. J. Nelson Borland, and the granddaughter of George Griswold Haven. The bridegroom is the son of Mr. and Mrs. M. Orme Wilson, and the grandson of Mrs. Astor.”
Three years later Wilson purchased and demolished the former Charles Steele house at No. 11 East 64th Street, steps away from his parents’ home. He hired the architectural firm of Trowbridge & Livingston to design a modern replacement mansion on the site. On June 21, 1913 The Sun announced “The proposed dwelling, plans for which were filed yesterday…will be a five story fireproof structure, 29×80, with an extension, its façade being in limestone and brick. It will cost $75,000.” That amount would translate to about $2 million today.
Construction on the limestone-faced residence would take two years. The architects produced a sedate neo-French Classical style mansion that stressed sophistication over ornamentation. The understated entrance within the rusticated base was decorated with only a scrolled keystone. Three sets of graceful French doors at the second floor, or piano nobile, were fronted by stone balustrades and set within arches. Intermediate cornices separated the two-story mid-section from the first and fourth floors. The fifth floor took the form of a dormered mansard, set back behind a stone balustrade.
Millicent Rogers Salm
The house was, of course, used only during the winter social season. During the warmer months the couple made the rounds of fashionable “watering-holes.” On May 24, 1915, for instance, The New York Press announced, “Mr. and Mrs. Marshall Orme Wilson, Jr., will close their house, No. 11 East Sixty-fourth street, on Wednesday and go out to Bay Shore, L. I., where they have leased a place for the summer. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson will pass part of August in Newport.” The couple had barely arrived back home that year when they left again to spend Thanksgiving with Wilson’s sister and her family. On November 23 The New York Press reported, “Mr. and Mrs. Marshall Orme Wilson, Jr…left last evening for the Greenbrier, at White Sulphur Springs, where they will spend Thanksgiving with Mrs. Ogden Goelet.”
The mansion was shuttered in 1917 after the United States entered World War I. Marshall joined the army and was sent to Washington D.C. It would be a decisive moment in the lives of the Wilsons. With peace achieved in 1919, the couple returned briefly to East 64th Street. On April 6 the New York Herald reported that they “have returned from Washington and opened their house at No. 11 East Sixty-fourth street, which they closed two years ago.”
The Wilsons’ only child, Orme, was born in the mansion in August 1920. In announcing the birth The Evening Telegram noted, “Mr. Wilson has recently been appointed to a secretaryship at the United States Embassy at Brussels and will leave for Europe in two weeks.”
Marshall, Alice and the newborn sailed around September 15 and the following week the New York Herald reported that “Mr. and Mrs. G. N. Ormsby, who are at the Ritz-Carlton, have taken Mr. Wilson’s house at 11 East Sixty-fourth street for the winter.”
What initially was a one-season lease extended through the summer of 1923. George Newell Armsby was the chairman of Curtiss-Wright and sat on the boards of numerous corporations. His wife, the former Leonora Chestnut Wood, was the daughter of Colorado mining magnate Tingley Sylvanus Wood.
Armsby’s decision not to renew the lease on No. 11 no doubt had to do with worsening domestic problems. A few months later Leonora would claim abandonment. Her divorce, granted in San Francisco, earned her a $1 million settlement–more than 18 times that much in today’s money.
The 64th Street mansion was briefly leased to millionaire Moses Taylor, and then, following a remodeling in the spring of 1924, to Standard Oil executive Henry Huddleston Rogers and his wife, the former Mary Benjamin. Moving in with his parents was Henry H. Huddleston, Jr., but not his sister, Mary Millicent Abigail (who went by Millicent). She was currently “away.”
Her elopement to Austrian Count Ludwig von Salm-Hoogstraeten in January that year had enraged her parents (most notably her father). The count had a title, but no money, and was almost twice Millicent’s age. Rogers immediately cut off his daughter’s allowance.
Pregnant and without funds, Millicent was lured back to New York by her father–without the count. It was not the end, but merely the beginning of the long drama. On November 13, 1924 The New York Times reported that the count was considering a trip to America “for a reconciliation with his wife, if such a reconciliation is possible.” The article added, “It was said at the home of the mother of the Countess, Mrs. Henry H. Rogers, 11 East Sixty-fourth Street, that the count was not expected in New York.”
As the count steamed toward New York the following year, Millicent took her baby boy to Palm Beach. Her parents “did not care to comment on the Count’s arrival,” said The New York Times on December 3, 1925, and in Palm Beach Millicent told reporters, “I do not care to talk with the press.”
The count was back in New York the following year, the Daily News reporting on November 26, 1926, “The Austrian nobleman came back to stay. Or so he said.”
Upon arriving he almost immediately telephoned the Rogers house. The newspaper reported, “He wanted to see his golden-haired son, Peter, who is living with his mother. Salm asked that the child’s nurse be allowed to bring little Peter to his father’s presence. But Peter was having his Thanksgiving dinner in the Rogers’s nursery. Or something.”
In April 1927 Millicent filed for divorce in Paris, her father offering Count Salm a $300,000 settlement. Little Peter was left home with his grandfather while Mary accompanied her daughter to France. Already the press was suggesting that Millicent had a second husband in the wings, but she underplayed that, telling a reporter “My future plans are indefinite. I won’t say that I will never marry again, at least, I have no one in mind now.”
In fact, she married Argentinian aristocrat Arturo Peralta-Ramos on November 8 that year. This time her father approved, giving the couple a $500,000 trust fund (with the provision that the groom “lay no future claim” to the Rogers fortune, then estimated at about $40 million).
The wedding was “particularly quiet,” as described by The Knickerbocker Press, due Millicent’s grandfather, Dr. George Hilliard Benjamin, being gravely ill. An eminent electrical scientist, he died two days later, early on the morning of November 10. His funeral was held in the 64th Street mansion. In the meantime Millicent’s brother was living a much more low-profile existence. He attended preparatory schools in the U.S. before entering Oxford University in 1924. Upon his graduation he returned to begin his career as an electrical engineer.
On July 28, 1928 Dr. William R. Lincoln of Cleveland, Ohio, announced the engagement of his daughter, Virginia, to Henry. The New York Times reported “The engagement is one of the most important of the year and is of interest to society not only here and in Cleveland, but in Washington, D. C., and in Europe.”
A month earlier a dramatic fracas had broken out in the 64th Street mansion. On June 7 Henry Huddleston Rogers’s valet, William Mackay, opened a clothes closet to find a burglar hiding inside. Rogers kept a revolver in the bedroom (which was not loaded) and Mackay grabbed it, ordering Haywood Edwards “to precede him to the basement,” as reported by The Daily Star. They never made it that far before an out-and-out brawl broke out among the staff and the intruder.
“When they got downstairs, however, Edwards bolted. Harry Caslow, the chauffeur; Charles Roth, the second man, and a maid servant struggled to hold him. They were being bested in the scuffle but Patrolman Woods arrived in time to place the [burglar] under arrest.” Detectives believed him to be the “window-cleaning” burglar who had been entering the homes of the wealthy in the neighborhood. Justice came quickly and on July 16 Edwards was sentenced to 10 years in Sing Sing prison.
As had been the case with the Armsbys, domestic bliss in the Rogers household began to deteriorate. They left East 64th Street in 1928 before Mary filed for divorce in January 1929.
At the same time, Marshall Orme Wilson, Jr. was appointed Second Secretary of the American Embassy at Buenos Aires. On October 9, 1928 the New York Evening Post reported, “During his leave of absence they will be in their home at 11 East Sixty-fourth Street.”
In January 11, 1929 the Wilsons sold the mansion to art dealer George Wildenstein and his family. It was conveniently located to the Wildenstein Gallery at 19 east 64th Street, erected in 1931.
On June 3, 1946 the house was the scene of Miriam Wildenstein’s wedding to Gerard R. Pereire, son of Jacques Pereire of Paris. In reporting on the wedding, The New York Times mentioned that the bride’s father “an art critic, is owner of one of the leading galleries in this city, Paris, London and Buenos Aires. He is director of Gazette Des Beaux-Arts, editor and publisher of art magazines and books, and a Commander of the Legion of Honor.”
Daniel Wildenstein and his father George Wildenstein
Daniel Wildenstein inherited the mansion following his father’s death in 1963. His son, Alec N. married Jocelyn Périsset in 1978 and the couple moved into the third floor. Alec’s brother, Guy and his wife, Kristina, lived on the fourth floor and the children of both couples had rooms on the fifth floor.
With drama that surpassed that of Millicent Rogers Salm, Alec and Jocelyn each filed for divorce in June 1997–but both refused to leave the mansion. Things boiled over three months later. On September 4 The New York Times reported “A prominent New York City art dealer was arrested early yesterday on charges of menacing his wife with a handgun.” Jocelyn had charged him with waving a loaded 9-millimeter pistol at her. Although Wilderstein claimed he was defending himself from intruders, she succeeded at having an order of protection issued “that bars him from his home and orders him to stay away from his wife.”
As part of the couple’s divorce agreement in 1999 Jocelyn vacated the 64th Street house and Wildenstein moved back in. He sold the mansion in 2008 for a reported $42.4 million to Oleg Deripaska, the Soviet-born aluminum tycoon and major GOP donor.
On October 8, 2018 the New York Post reported that, following sanctions imposed against Deripaska by the Treasury Department in April, authorities had “frozen his Upper East Side mansion, occupied by the ex-wife of his business partner Roman Abramovich.” The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project added “Deripaska has lost billions after the US sanctioned him on alleged bribery, money laundering, murder and racketeering charges.”
The report said “This might be a problem for Abramovich’s ex-wife Dasha Zhukova, a Russian-American businesswoman, art collector, magazine editor, and philanthropist,” who was occupying No. 11 East 64th Street.
Dasha Zhukova had become close friends with her former across-the-street neighbor, Ivanka Trump. According to the New York Post, “While they were together, Zhukova and Abramovich travelled with Trump and Kusher to Russia, Croatia, Aspen and New York.”
Despite having had more than its fair share of drama, the Wilson mansion continues to exude its architectural serenity after 115 years.
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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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BURJ AL-ARAB HOTEL, DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES CLARA BELLA 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
A DAYTONIAN IN MANHATTAN
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TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2021
The
288th Edition
From Our Archives
SKYSCRAPERS
STEPHEN BLANK
WORLD BUILDING
Skyscrapers
Stephen Blank “Skyscraper” had many meanings in the late 19th century, from top hats to the top-most sails on the great sailing ships. But by the 1880s, skyscraper referred specifically to tall buildings – and a decade later, to buildings 10 or more stories high.
Speaking of tall, until 1890, the highest edifice in NYC was Trinity Church at the top of Wall Street, constructed in 1846. Its spire rose 281 feet, making it not only the tallest building in NYC but also the tallest building in the United States. Folks, we are told, were able to climb to the top for dramatic views of the city, rivers and port. Trinity continued to dominate the New York City skyline until 1890, when the New York World Building topped out at 309 feet.
Speaking of views, I have heard that people were able to climb to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge towers – another early skyscraper, completed 1883 – to watch the great sailing ships pass below. Could this be true?
The first skyscrapers? There are many stories.
First, height or construction? But height, of course, depended on construction. Masonry (load bearing) walls would have to be very thick to support a building more than a few stories high. There would be no interior space on the lower floors. That’s why skyscrapers are identified with internal steel construction. (Note, this is not entirely true – the Monadnock Building in Chicago, one of the great early modern buildings there, had masonry walls.) The changing quality and price of steel in 1880s is behind all of this.
The key to taller buildings was steel frame-curtain wall construction – that is, the walls are hung like curtains from the steel frame. There were earlier steel frame constructed buildings in NYC. The Tower Building at 50 Broadway (by Cass Gilbert, 1889) was possibly the first steel-frame building in the City, though it reached only to 108 feet.
THE TOWER BUILDING
If steel frame-curtain wall construction is the key to skyscrapers, can we look back to NYC’s cast iron front buildings as the early progenitors of the skyscrapers? The curtain wall construction permitted much more window area.
Steel frame construction wasn’t the only requirement for creating tall buildings. Elevators were also key. Through animal and steam driven lifts were used before, the first commercial passenger elevators were introduced by Otis in the Equitable Life Building in 1870 (considered by some to be the first skyscraper). Telephones, ventilation and – my favorite – plumbing were also necessary innovations. Taller buildings required a much greater understanding of stronger, deeper foundation construction and wind bracing. All of this had to come together to make the new skyscrapers possible.
What was the function of these new structures? Vertical space substituted for increasingly expensive horizontal space. Some of the new skyscrapers were prestige buildings – like Singer or Woolworth or the New York Times building – designed to show off the new powers in the economy. Another was purpose built office buildings. But all really served the same need – to provide office space for swarms of new businesses. This need responded to the emerging separation of functions in business. Underline the legal and financial changes that enabled builders to meet large up-front costs and rent to many tenants. The new prestige buildings housed many tenants, often smaller businesses. For companies with a large cash flow, building named, famous buildings and renting office space was good use for their money. Each new building lured tenants from older buildings, a churning which continued at least through the construction of the World Trade Towers.
Speaking of money, most of the new tall buildings provided commercial space on the ground floor. These shops were useful for tenants and also brought more rental income into the building. The one building that did not do this was the grand Telephone (AT&T) Building on Broadway, just south of St Paul’s. In the good old days when one could actually enter and look around, you’d see a magnificent, largely empty Egyptian style lobby with NO shops. The company was delighted to show you it didn’t need the income.
TELEPHONE BUILDING LOBBY
Chicago or New York? That’s hard to answer. Experts say that modern skyscraper construction began in NYC with the completion of the World Building (also known as the Pulitzer Building with the great gold dome, across Park Row from City Hall Park) in 1890. Burnham and Root’s 148 foot Rand McNally Building in Chicago, 1889, is said to have been the first all-steel framed skyscraper The Home Insurance Building in Chicago, completed in 1885, was a 10-story building widely recognized as the first to use steel skeleton frame construction with reinforced concrete.
But regardless of who was first, styles were quite different. In contrast to New York’s typical “wedding cake” style, one floor piled on another, the Chicago Schools’ buildings seemed lighter, with more glass walls and a greater sense of verticality. Of course, building in Chicago was easier because so much of the city had been destroyed in the fire of 1871 and that the downtown area had been completely redesigned, eliminating the narrow, difficult passages of downtown NYC.
CHICAGO STYLE, RELIANCE BUILDING
For sure, once New Yorkers figured out how to do it, the race for height went very rapidly. By 1900, fifteen skyscrapers in New York City exceeded 250 feet in height. Upward, from the World Building at 309 feet in 1890, to the Manhattan Life Insurance Building (348 feet, 1894), the Park Row Building (391 feet, 1899), the Singer Building (612 feet, 1908), the Metropolitan Life Tower (700 feet, 1909) and finally, the Woolworth Building (792 feet, 1913), New York skyscrapers soared higher and higher.
And soon created dark canyons on narrow New York streets. The Equitable Building at 120 Broadway was the last straw. It rose precipitately 38 stories (555 feet) from the sidewalk, and covered most of a block. This contributed to the adoption of the first modern building and zoning restrictions on vertical structures in Manhattan, the 1916 Zoning Resolution, which demanded set-backs at certain heights to ensure better access to light and air and gave NYC its iconic skyscraper image.
The decoration on many of these early New York skyscrapers was either a delight for the eyes or, in the view of the Chicago School, definitely old school. But the standard three-part model, lower level, middle and upper level, gave plenty of space for decoration. To see this clearly, look at Cass Gilbert’s first NYC building, the Broadway-Chambers Building, an 18-story office tower at 277 Broadway, completed in 1900. The tri-part design is clear and the decoration at the top is glorious – if you like that sort of thing.
SINGER BUILDING
Bear in mind, dear reader, that while this was going on downtown, the City was building enormously, everywhere: Penn Station, 1910; NY Public Library on 5th Ave, 1911; Grand Central Station, 1913. Bridges: Williamsburg, 1903; Manhattan and Queensboro, both 1909. And the subways were being built, too. (And steam shovels really worked with steam! No automatic tools.) Don’t forget that this was the great era for shipping in the New York Port – with all of the traffic and tumult that caused. And it is worthwhile saying, none of this was throw-away. Builders felt they were constructing for the ages and were delighted to put their names on their works. Thanks for coming along with me.
Brick House is a 16-foot (4.9 m) tall bronze bust of a black woman by Simone Leigh, installed along New York City’s High Line in 2019 LAURA HUSSEY, VICKI FEINMEL, SUSAN RODESIS,GLORIA HERMAN, ALEXIS VELLEFANE, & V. HARWOOD 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
Judith Berdy STEPHEN BLANK WIKIPEDIA
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
Richmond Barthé (January 28, 1901 – March 5, 1989) was an African-American sculptor associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Barthé is best known for his portrayal of black subjects. The focus of his artistic work was portraying the diversity and spirituality of man. Barthé once said: “All my life I have been interested in trying to capture the spiritual quality I see and feel in people, and I feel that the human figure as God made it, is the best means of expressing this spirit in man.”
FROM WIKIPEDIA
RICHMOND BARTHE HARLEM RENAISSANCE-ERA FRIEZE AT KINGSBOROUGH HOUSES TO BE RESTORED
“Exodus and Dance” by Richmond Barthé depicts African-American figures engaged in collective dance. Photo by Michele H. Bogart
from Brooklyn Paper by Jessica Parks
A crumbling Harlem Renaissance-era sculpture at Crown Heights’ Kingsborough Houses is getting a much-needed facelift following decades of neglect. “The artwork is falling apart,” said Larry Weeks, Fulton Art Fair treasurer and neighbor of the Kingsborough Houses. “I would walk through there and I would see it and say this piece needs some tender loving care.”
Richmond Barthé — a gay, Black sculpturist prominent in the city’s art revival era — built the frieze, titled “Exodus and Dance,” on commission for an amphitheater that was never built at the Harlem River Houses, a mostly-Black housing complex at the time. Instead, the artwork traveled across the East River to the Kingsborough Houses, which had a mostly-white population, in 1941.
The sculpted-stone mural can now be seen at the New York City Housing Authority complex, although it exists in a state of disrepair — suffering from cracks due to rainwater and a bad patchwork job, according to one of the project’s advocates. “The work of cast stone was literally cracked and crumbling and you could put a finger through sections of it,” said Michelle Bogart, an author and art history professor.
“The immediate approaches to it are crumbling too… there was patching that had been done but very badly.” The restoration is a result of the combined effort of a number of people and organizations — which is said to have begun in 2018, when Bogart drew attention to the artwork’s dilapidated state on Twitter, and when the Weeksville Heritage Center and Fulton Art Fair began reaching out to their councilmember.
“So I was just simply trying to draw awareness to the work, so I started tagging [First Lady] Chirlane McCray and [Councilmember] Alicka Ampry-Samuels,” Bogart said. “And it was on that basis that some people saw it.” Their pleas eventually reached the right people, and moves were made to preserve Barthé’s largest work of art — in a project costing a whopping $1.8 million. “NYCHA continues to move forward with the in-house work on the Barthé frieze,” said a NYCHA spokeswoman. “In 2018, the Public Design Commission, NYCHA, and Speaker Corey Johnson’s staff met to discuss the conservation of this work, and The Speaker allocated $1.8 million for the work to be done.
BARTHE’S LIFE AND OTHER WORKS
Early life
James Richmond Barthé was born in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. His father’s name is Richmond Barthé and mother’s name is Marie Clementine Robateau. Barthé’s father died at age 22, when he was only a few months old, leaving his mother to raise him alone. She worked as a dressmaker and before Barthé began elementary school she remarried to William Franklin, with whom she eventually had five additional children.
Barthé showed a passion and skill for drawing from an early age. His mother was, in many ways, instrumental in his decision to pursue art as a vocation. Barthé once said: “When I was crawling on the floor, my mother gave me paper and pencil to play with. It kept me quiet while she did her errands. At six years old I started painting. A lady my mother sewed for gave me a set of watercolors. By that time, I could draw very well.”
Barthé continued making drawings throughout his childhood and adolescence, under the encouragement of his teachers. His fourth grade teacher, Inez Labat, from the Bay St. Louis Public School, influenced his aesthetic development by encouraging his artistic growth. When he was only twelve years old, Barthé exhibited his work at the Bay St. Louis Country Fair.
However, young Barthé was beset with health problems, and after an attack of typhoid fever at age 14, he withdrew from school.[6] Following this, he worked as a houseboy and handyman, but still spent his free time drawing. A wealthy family, the Ponds, who spent summers at Bay St. Louis, invited Barthé to work for them as a houseboy in New Orleans, Louisiana. Through his employment with the Ponds, Barthé broadened his cultural horizons and knowledge of art, and was introduced to Lyle Saxon, a local writer for the Times Picayune. Saxon was fighting against the racist system of school segregation, and tried unsuccessfully to get Barthé registered in an art school in New Orleans.
In 1924, Barthé donated his first oil painting to a local Catholic church to be auctioned at a fundraiser. Impressed by his talent, Reverend Harry F. Kane encouraged Barthé to pursue his artistic career and raised money for him to undertake studies in fine art. At age 23, with less than a high school education and no formal training in art, Barthé applied to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago, and was accepted by the latter.
Josephine Baker 1951
Chicago
During the next four years Barthé followed a curriculum structured for majors in painting. During this time he boarded with his aunt Rose and made a living working different jobs.[9] His work caught the attention of Dr. Charles Maceo Thompson, a patron of the arts and supporter of many talented young black artists. Barthé was a flattering portrait painter, and Dr. Thompson helped him to secure many lucrative commissions from the city’s affluent black citizens.
At the Art Institute of Chicago, Barthé’s formal artistic instruction in sculpture took place in anatomy class with professor of anatomy and German artist Charles Schroeder. Students practiced modeling in clay to gain a better understanding of the three-dimensional form. This experience proved to be, according to Barthé, a turning point in his career, shifting his attention away from painting and toward sculpture.[
Barthé had his debut as a professional sculptor at The Negro in Art Week exhibition in 1927 while still a student of painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. He also exhibited in the April 1928 annual exhibition of the Chicago Art League. The critical acclaim allowed Barthé to enjoy numerous important commissions such as the busts of Henry O. Tanner (1928) and Toussaint L’Ouverture (1928). Although he was still in his late 20s, within a short time he won recognition, primarily through his sculptures, for making significant contributions to modern African American art. By 1929, the essentials of his artistic education complete, Barthé decided to leave Chicago and head for New York City.
New York City
While many young artists found it very difficult to earn a living from their art during the Great Depression, the 1930s were Richmond Barthé’s most prolific years. The shift from the Art Institute of Chicago to New York City, where he moved following graduation, exposed Barthé to new experiences as he arrived in the city during the peak of the Harlem Renaissance. He established his studio in Harlem in 1930 after winning the Julius Rosenwald Fund fellowship at his first solo exhibition at the Women’s City Club in Chicago. However, in 1931, he moved his studio in Harlem to Greenwich Village. Barthé once said: “I live downtown because it is much more convenient for my contacts from whom it is possible for me to make a living.” He understood the importance of public relations and keeping abreast of collectors’ interests.
Barthé mingled with the bohemian circles of downtown Manhattan. Initially unable to afford live models, he sought and found inspiration from on-stage performers. Living downtown provided him the opportunity to socialize not only among collectors but also among artists, dance performers, and actors. His remarkable visual memory permitted him to work without models, producing numerous representations of the human body in movement. During this time, he completed works such as Black Narcissus (1929), The Blackberry Woman (1930), Drum Major (1928), The Breakaway (1929), busts of Alain Locke (1928), bust of A’leila Walker (1928), The Deviled Crab-Man (1929), Rose McClendon (1932), Féral Benga (1935), and Sir John Gielgud as Hamlet (1935).
In October 1933, a major body of Barthé’s work inaugurated the Caz Delbo Galleries at the Rockefeller Center in New York City. The same year, his works were exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933. In summer 1934, Barthé went on a tour to Paris with Reverend Edward F. Murphy, a friend of Reverend Kane from New Orleans, who exchanged his first class ticket for two third-class tickets to share with Barthé. This trip exposed Barthé to classical art, but also to performers such as Féral Benga and African American entertainer Josephine Baker, of whom he made portraits in 1935 and 1951, respectively.[
During the next two decades, he built his reputation as a sculptor. He was awarded several awards and has experienced success after success and was considered by writers and critics as one of the leading “moderns” of his time. Among his African-American friends were Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Jimmie Daniels, Countee Cullen, and Harold Jackman. Ralph Ellison was his first student.
Supporters who were white included Carl Van Vechten, Noel Sullivan, Charles Cullen, Lincoln Kirstein, Paul Cadmus, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., and Jared French.
In 1945, Barthé became a member of the National Sculpture Society.
Blackberry Woman, modeled by 1930, cast 1932, bronze, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2001.6
Later Life
Booker T. Washington, 1946, National Portrait Gallery
Eventually, the tense environment and violence of the city began to take its toll, and he decided to abandon his life of fame and move to Jamaica in the West Indies in 1947. His career flourished in Jamaica, and he remained there until the mid-1960s when ever-growing violence forced him to move again. For the next five years, he lived in Switzerland, Spain, and Italy, then settled in Pasadena, California in a rental apartment. In this apartment, Barthé worked on his memoirs, and most importantly, editioned many of his works with the financial assistance of actor James Garner until his death in 1989. Garner copyrighted Barthé’s artwork, hired a biographer to organize and document his work, and established the Richmond Barthe Trust.
Haitian works
Barthe’s Haitian works came in a time after his 1950 move to Ocho Rios, Jamaica, and were among his larger and more famous works. The huge 40-foot equestrian bronze of Jean Jacques Dessalines, (1952), was one of four heroic sculptures commissioned in 1948 by Haitian political leaders to mark independence celebrations. The Dessalines monument was part of a larger 1954 restoration of the Champs-du-Mars park in Port-au-Prince, Barthe’s 40-foot-high Toussaint L’Ouverture statue (1950), and stone monument was positioned nearer the National Palace, and was unveiled in 1950 with two other commissioned heroic sculptures (in the capital and in the north of the county) by Cuban sculptor Blanco Ramos. At the time, one African-American newspaper called the collection “the Greatest Negro Monuments on earth.” [ L’Overture was a subject Barthe returned to several times, having created a bust (1926) and painted portrait (1929) of the figure early in his career.[
Exhibitions
Barthé’s debut as a professional sculptor was at The Negro in Art Week exhibition in Chicago in 1927. His first solo exhibition was held at the Women’s City Club in Chicago in 1930, exhibiting a selection of 38 works of sculpture, painting, and works on paper.[23] In 1932, the Whitney Museum of American Art decided to purchase a bronze copy of the Blackberry Woman (1930) after exhibiting it at the opening exhibition of Contemporary American Artists in 1932. Barthé’s work was paired with drawings by Delacroix, Matisse, Laurencin, Daumier, and Forain at the Caz-Delbo Gallery in 1933 in New York City.[ In 1942, he had an exhibition of 20 works of art at the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago.] The retrospective which included works from private collections shown for the first time, Richmond Barthé: The Seeker was the inaugural exhibition of the African American Galleries at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi, curated by Margaret Rose Vendryes, PhD.
Barthé’s most recent retrospective, titled Richmond Barthé: His Life in Art, consisted of over 30 sculptures and photographs.[ The exhibition was organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions of Los Angeles, CA, in 2009. The exhibition venues included the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, the California African American Museum, the Dixon Gallery and Gardens,] and the NCCU Art Museum.
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.
Roman Aqueduct – Caesarea Maritima, Haifa, Israel ARLENE BESSENOFF AND 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)
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286th Edition
FEBRUARY 13-14, 2021
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FROM THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM
Arthur F. Mathews, Spring Dance, ca. 1917, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David J. Carlson, 1982.126
Arthur Mathews led a group of progressive Californians who believed that fine art and design served the public good. After the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, he and his wife, Lucia, also a designer, led the effort to rebuild the city’s fine public spaces. The pastoral scene in Spring Dance resembles civic-minded murals created for museums, libraries, and concert halls at the turn of the twentieth century. But Mathews had more on his mind than ancient Greece or Rome. His Arcadia is the luminous landscape of California, and the planes of color and the graceful postures of the dancers show the artist is looking across the Pacific to Japan. The ornate frame is a reproduction of the original. It repeats the colors in the painting, reflecting Mathews’s commitment to designing furniture, art, and architecture to create an aesthetic whole.
Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006
Robert Reid, The White Parasol, ca. 1907, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans, 1909.7.57
This painting shows Robert Reid’s young wife, Elizabeth Reeves, in the year of their wedding. Reid painted Elizabeth in a white gown surrounded by many different colored flowers to emphasize her flawless porcelain skin. Their marriage lasted only a few years, and here the delicate colors and idealized setting suggest the optimism of young love. Reid’s many paintings of girls immersed in nature emphasize the fragility and beauty of women, as if he equated them with the flowers, trees, and clouds.
Robert Reid, The Mirror, ca. 1910, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans, 1911.2.4 American Impressionism emerged in the late 1880s when a generation of American artists studied abroad to absorb the new palette and compositions that were modernizing painting in France. Landscapes and domestic scenes by these American Impressionists are as wonderfully fresh and sparkling as those by their more familiar French counterparts. These artists, attracted to the light and color of painting outdoors, celebrate a modern view of life as America entered the twentieth century. Smithsonian American Art Museum: Commemorative Guide. Nashville, TN: Beckon Books, 2015.
John White Alexander, June, ca. 1911, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William Alexander, 1916.10.1
Robert Reid was born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, into a family of New England clergymen. Schooled at the Philips Academy from 1880 to 1884, he was a student and teaching assistant at the Boston Museum School, an institution then known for its conservatism. He studied briefly at the Art Students League in New York then journeyed to Paris for three years of study at the Académie Julian. While in France, he worked with the colony of French and foreign artists at Etaples on the Normandy coast, painting peasant genre scenes of religious tone. Returning to New York he taught at the Art Students League and Cooper Union. After 1890 he seems to have been inundated with important mural commissions: the “White City” in Chicago, the Boston State House, the Library of Congress, and many private institutions. It was also at this time that his conversion to impressionist technique began to manifest itself. The Beaux Arts classical female nudes of his murals were now joined by easel paintings of loosely gowned maidens carefully posed in landscapes or sunlit gardens and rendered in vivid colors with slashing brushwork.
In 1897 he was inaugurated into the Ten American Painters, the youngest of that number, but affecting a dazzling palette that outshone the more somber tones of his colleagues. The decorative quality of his canvases prompted a major critic to dub him a “decorative Impressionist”; yet another called his work “sentimental” and “pretty,” all of which must have improved his sales in some markets. As Richard Boyle astringently remarks, “sentiment pervaded all the art world at that time. It was popular and it sold.”
A self-indulgent and vain man, social by nature and much given to gambling, in due course his expenses exceeded his income and he was impelled to retreat to Colorado Springs where he established an art academy and painted innumerable portraits to recoup his losses. In 1927 he suffered a stroke, but undaunted he learned to paint with his left hand. He died in a New York sanatorium at the age of sixty-seven.
Robert Reid studied at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. After further training in Paris, Reid moved to New York and established himself as a figure painter. He painted several murals and, in the early 1890s, won a commission to decorate the domes of the main building at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. His wedding to Elizabeth Reeves in 1907 was attended by many prominent artists, but their marriage lasted only nine years before she left him. Reid worked steadily until 1927, when he was partially disabled by a stroke and had to learn to paint with his left hand.
Laura Wheeler Waring, Portrait of Alma Thomas, ca. 1945, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Vincent Melzac 1977.121.
Alma Thomas
During the 1960s Alma Thomas emerged as an exuberant colorist, abstracting shapes and patterns from the trees and flowers around her. Her new palette and technique—considerably lighter and looser than in her earlier representational works and dark abstractions—reflected her long study of color theory and the watercolor medium.
As a black woman artist, Thomas encountered many barriers; she did not, however, turn to racial or feminist issues in her art, believing rather that the creative spirit is independent of race or gender. In Washington, D.C., where she lived and worked after 1921, Thomas became identified with Morris Louis, Gene Davis, and other Color Field painters active in the area since the 1950s. Like them, she explored the power of color and form in luminous, contemplative paintings.
Alma Thomas began to paint seriously in 1960, when she retired from her thirty-eight year career as an art teacher in the public schools of Washington, D.C. In the years that followed she would come to be regarded as a major painter of the Washington Color Field School.
Born on September 22, 1891, in Columbus, Georgia, Thomas was the eldest of four daughters. Her father worked in a church and her mother was a seamstress and homemaker. Thomas’s family was well respected in Columbus, and she and her sisters grew up in comfortable surroundings. The family lived in a large Victorian house high on a hill overlooking the town where Thomas spent her childhood observing the beauty and color of nature. In 1907, when Thomas was fifteen years old, her father moved the family to Washington, D.C. She enrolled in Howard University, and in 1924 became the first graduate of its newly formed art department. Thomas’s teacher and mentor, James V. Herring, granted her use of his private art library, from which she gained a thorough background in art history. A decade later, she earned a Master of Arts degree in education from Columbia University.
During the 1950s Thomas attended art classes at American University in Washington. She studied painting under Joe Summerford, Robert Gates, and Jacob Kainen, and developed an interest in color and abstract art. Throughout her teaching career she painted and exhibited academic still lifes and realistic paintings in group shows of African-American artists. Although her paintings were competent, they were never singled out for individual recognition.
Suffering from the pain of arthritis at the time of her retirement, she considered giving up painting. When Howard University offered to mount a retrospective of her work in 1966, however, she wanted to produce something new. From the window of her house she enjoyed watching the ever-changing patterns that light created on her trees and flower garden. So inspired, her new paintings passed through an expressionist period, followed by an abstract one, to finally a nonobjective phase. Many of Thomas’s late-career paintings were watercolors in which bold splashes of color and large areas of white paper combine to create remarkably fresh effects, often accented with brush strokes of India ink.
Although Thomas progressed to painting in acrylics on large canvases, she continued to produce many watercolors that were studies for her paintings. Thomas’s personalized mature style consisted of broad, mosaic-like patches of vibrant color applied in concentric circles or vertical stripes. Color was the basis of her painting, undeniably reflecting her life-long study of color theory as well as the influence of luminous, elegant abstract works by Washington-based Color Field painters such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Gene Davis.
Thomas was in her eighth decade of life when she produced her most important works. Earliest to win acclaim was her series of Earth paintings—pure color abstractions of concentric circles that often suggest target paintings and stripes. Done in the late 1960s, these works bear references to rows and borders of flowers inspired by Washington’s famed azaleas and cherry blossoms. The titles of her paintings often reflect this influence. In these canvases, brilliant shades of green, pale and deep blue, violet, deep red, light red, orange, and yellow are offset by white areas of untouched raw canvas, suggesting jewel-like Byzantine mosaics.
In her last paintings, Thomas employed her characteristic short bars of color and impasto technique. The tones, however, became more subdued, and the formerly vertical and horizontal accents of Thomas’s brush strokes became more diverse in movement, and included diagonals, diamond shapes, and asymmetrical surface patterns. During the artist’s final years, the crippling effects of arthritis prevented her from painting as often as she wanted.
Alma Thomas never married, and lived in the same house her father bought in downtown Washington in 1907. The final years of her life brought awards and recognition. In 1972 she was honored with one-woman exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art; that same year one of her paintings was selected for the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Before her death in 1978, Thomas had achieved national recognition as a major woman artist devoted to abstract painting.
Henry Wolf, John White Alexander, A Flower, 1905, wood engraving on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1973.130.214
Loïs Mailou Jones, Initiation, Liberia, 1983, acrylic on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of the artist, 2006.24.7 Jones was especially sensitive to the rights and roles of women. For many years she felt forced to ship rather than deliver her work in person to exhibitions so museums would not reject them because they had been done by a black female artist. In Initiation, Liberia, she interpreted the Sande society initiation ritual. The swath of white paint across the young woman’s eyes indicates her role as an initiate. The mask partly obscures her distinctive personality but combined with the receding profiles at the left of her head, suggests continuity over generations that is implied by the ritual ceremony.
Henry Wolf, John White Alexander, The Quiet Hour, 1903, wood engraving on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1973.130.199
Roger Medearis, Godly Susan, 1941, egg tempera on board Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Roger and Elizabeth Medearis, 1992.84 Roger Medearis completed this painting of his grandmother Susan Carns Medearis at the end of a three years’ study with Thomas Hart Benton at the Kansas City Art Institute. Medearis used the sunporch of his father’s church as a makeshift studio to create detailed sketches of his grandmother, who had suffered a stroke several years earlier. His grandmother holds a lemon, whose sour taste she enjoyed, in her strong, still-vibrant left hand, contrasting the paralyzed right side of her body.
This portrait memorialized his beloved family matriarch. The title reflects Susan’s role as the daughter and granddaughter of Baptist ministers and the mother of three more. Born in the early days of the Civil War, her life spanned one of the most formative times in American history; she died only months after this portrait was finished. Roger Medearis completed this painting of his grandmother Susan Carns Medearis at the end of three years’ study with Thomas Hart Benton at the Kansas City Art Institute. Medearis used the sunporch of his father’s church as a makeshift studio to create detailed sketches of his grandmother, who had suffered a stroke several years earlier.
He would wheel her up the ramp to the sunporch, where she often fell asleep while he worked. Medearis had her hold a lemon, whose sour taste she enjoyed, in her strong, still-vibrant left hand to contrast the paralyzed right side of her body. This portrait memorialized his beloved family matriarch. He titled the work Godly Susan because Susan Medearis was the daughter and granddaughter of two Baptist ministers and the mother of three more. Born in the early days of the Civil War, her life spanned one of the most formative times in American history; she died only months after this portrait was finished.
“I was 21 and my life was just beginning. She was 81—her life would soon be ending. That year, America entered [World War II] and nothing would ever be the same again!” The artist, quoted in American Art Museum curatorial file.
The top of the GE Building on Lexington Avenue Robin Lynn and John Bacon got it right!
The General Electric Building (also known as 570 Lexington Avenue) is a skyscraper at the southwestern corner of Lexington Avenue and 51st Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The building, designed by Cross & Cross and completed in 1931, was known as the RCA Victor Building during its construction. The General Electric Building is sometimes known by its address to avoid confusion with 30 Rockefeller Plaza, which was once known as the GE Building.
570 Lexington Avenue contains a 50-floor, 640-foot-tall (200 m) stylized Gothic octagonal brick tower, with elaborate Art Deco decorations of lightning bolts showing the power of electricity. The tower is set back from the round-cornered base with elaborate masonry and architectural figural sculpture. The building was designed to blend with the low Byzantine dome of the adjacent St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church on Park Avenue, with the same brick coloring and architectural terracotta decoration. The crown of the building, an example of Gothic tracery, is intended to represent electricity and radio waves. On the corner above the building’s main entrance is a clock with the cursive GE logo and a pair of disembodied silver arms holding bolts of electricity.
Plans for the building were announced in 1929, and it was completed two years later. The project was originally commissioned for RCA, then a subsidiary of General Electric (GE). RCA moved to 30 Rockefeller Plaza midway through construction, and 570 Lexington Avenue was conveyed to GE as part of an agreement in which RCA and GE split their properties. GE had its headquarters at 570 Lexington Avenue between 1933 and 1974, and retained ownership until 1993, when the building was donated to Columbia University. The building was extensively renovated by Ernest de Castro of the WCA Design Group in the 1990s. It was designated a New York City landmark in 1985 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004.
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)
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An Ode to Construction Workers on a 57th Street Art Deco Tower
February 8, 2021
There’s a lot to love about the Fuller Building, the Art Deco-Art Nouveau beauty built in 1929 that rises 40 stories over Madison Avenue and 57th Street.
A few favorites: the black granite facade on the lower floors, geometric designs at the top of the tower, and the medallions on the lobby floor showing various buildings constructed by the Fuller Company, an early developer of steel-skeleton skyscrapers. (These included the Flatiron Building, which was called the Fuller Building when it opened in 1902—but “flatiron” stuck because of the shape of the lot it was built on.)
The sculptures, by Elie Nadelman, seem to be an ode to the men who literally constructed the Fuller Building and other mighty towers that raised New York’s skyline higher toward the heavens in the early 20th century. Perhaps the most eye-catching feature of this iconic tower sits above the entrance: two idealized and shirtless construction workers flanking a clock while standing in front of a cityscape of skyscrapers.
It makes sense. The Fuller Company was a construction company that depended on the strength and skill of men in the building trades. Without these workers and advancements in engineering, Manhattan would have remained a low-rise metropolis topping out at six or so stories.
240 EAST 72nd STREET
Art Deco poetry on a 1929 East Side high-rise January 25, 2021 You don’t see a lot of green glazed terra cotta on New York City high-rise facades. But then 240 East 79th Street isn’t just another residential building on the Upper East Side.
This “rather plain brick building” completed in 1929 features a showstopping Art Deco entrance, “completely faced in colored glazed terra-cotta squares, with glazed terra cotta surrounds for the windows and the main entrance,” noted Anthony Robins in his book New York Art Deco: A Guide to Gotham’s Jazz Age Architecture.
The building’s awning carries the address in a recognizable Art Deco typeface, as does the “No. 240 East 79 St” inscribed above the entrance
Isn’t that eight-sided emblem amid all the green terra cotta unusual? Robins has this to say about it: “Above the inscription sits an octagonal piece of stone, set within a terra cotta frame and capped by a flowering form that curves out from the facade to hover protectively over it.”
“Frederick Godwin, the architect, was a great-grandson of American poet William Cullen Bryant—and his ornamental treatment here is quite poetic.”
F9EBD7The Gateway Arch is a 630-foot (192 m) monument in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. Clad in stainless steel and built in the form of a weighted catenary arch,[it is the world’s tallest arch the tallest man-made monument in the Western Hemisphere, and Missouri’s tallest accessible building. Built as a monument to the westward expansion of the United States, and officially dedicated to “the American people,” the Arch, commonly referred to as “The Gateway to the West” is the centerpiece of Gateway Arch National Park and has become an internationally recognized symbol of St. Louis, as well as a popular tourist destination.
The Arch was designed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen in 1947; construction began on February 12, 1963.
CLARA BELLA, ANDY SPARBERG, M. FRANK, HARA REISER, AND GLORIA HERMAN GOT IT
EDITORIAL
Walking in Manhattan, Queens or any neighborhood reveals low-key wonderful design, especially around entryways, doors and vestibules. Look up and you will spot gargoyles and decorative terra cotta trim! Judith Berdy
STOP INTO THE RISH VISITOR KIOSK FOR A GREAT PAIR OF REALLY WARM LINED GLOVES. $5- FOR KIDS, $10 FOR ADULTS
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)
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In the past months, many of us have wondered about the future of our country. Let me take you to a time when many leaders felt our country’s future was very grim. This essay is a Cliffs Notes version of a (now Zoom) course I am preparing for the Osher Program at Carnegie Mellon University. I thought I might share it with you, and hope you find it interesting.
We assume that the United States’ march across the continent was inevitable. That’s how it worked out. But at the time, in the 1790s and early 1800s, it did not seem so. The more likely bet would have been that North America would be shaped like a flag, with north-south stripes of the US and British, French and Spanish territories, rather than a sandwich, with a thick, coast to coast US between the Canadian “bread” to the north and Mexico to the south.
The Founding Fathers feared, with very good reason that the mainland of North America would continue to be a cockpit of diplomatic intrigues and military struggles among the European powers, that these struggles would reflect issues centered outside of the continent, and that the new nation would be embroiled in all of this. The way things worked out was, as the Duke of Wellington said after the battle of Waterloo, a damn close thing.
So, what’s the story?
The result of the French and Indian War in 1763 (part of a global struggle between Britain and France) was that the French were out of North America – though they retained several islands in the Caribbean. London’s relations with their American colonies worsened, leading to the Revolution and the independence of 13 of their former colonies. (Why Quebec and Nova Scotia didn’t join the revolution is interesting but too much for this brief piece.)
Peace left the new nation with twice as much territory – from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. But geography was a problem: the Allegheny Mountains, not large by Rocky Mountain standards, but a formable barrier to westward movement. The Alleghenies divided the old seaboard colonies from the new territories.
Growing numbers of settlers in the trans-Allegheny west were cut off from the older Atlantic front states. They could get goods to market only by boat down Mississippi, through New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico and then around Florida and up the Atlantic Coast to eastern US ports and rivers. From earliest days, the new republic faced the danger that the trans-Allegheny region would be separated from new nation.
Britain was another problem. Even after peace, London didn’t’t give in. The British maintained forts south of the new border with British North America and, Americans believed, continued to embolden Native American anger and fear. Many Brits, King George III included, assumed that, after a few years of anarchy, the States would beg to be taken back into the Empire.
The trans-Allegheny west became the focus of a complex ballet with Spanish, French and British adventurers (some sponsored by their governments, some working on their own) seeking to detach pieces of these territories while Washington struggled to respond to demands of those crossing the mountains for land, security and access to the Mississippi to trade their goods and, as well, to control the Native Americans in the region who responded with increasing violence to these incursions (and, it was believed, were being supported by the British).
And indeed, the efforts of the new US government to slow the flood of Americans across the mountains in search of cheap land were no more successful than the British has been earlier. Kentucky’s population soared from perhaps 12,000 in 1783 to 221,000 in 1800.
Spain was a big problem. After 1763, Spain gained all of French territory west of the Mississippi (“Louisiana”) and, under Emperor Carlos III, tried to revive its North American holdings. Spanish explorers advanced up the California coast, establishing new colonies as far as San Francisco. Spain threatened to bottle up Mississippi passage and sought to entice trans-Allegheny settlers to switch to Spanish allegiance. This was not too difficult: the most famous was Aaron Burr. In Kentucky, the first state west of the Alleghenies, many argued that they should join Spain rather than the US.
France, too, threatened again. Big time. Napoleon had been determined to put down slave rebellion in in Saint-Domingue (later Haiti), the source of 40% of the world’s sugar and France’s most profitable colony. Meanwhile, France had secretly reacquired Louisiana (and control of the Mississippi) by a deal with Spain, which had switched sides in the Napoleonic War. Many French troops were sent to Saint-Dominique. During the Peace of Amiens (between two parts of the Napoleonic wars), these troops were viewed as a potential invasion force that could restore France’s colonial empire in North America. The result? This would import the Napoleonic wars into the North American mainland, creating much greater European military involvement and risking drawing the US into the fray and marginalizing it at the same time. American leaders were deeply divided about allying with Britain, but even Jefferson, who had been a forceful French supporter, said that “the day France takes possession of new Orleans…we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.”
How did it all work out? Disease in Saint-Dominique massively slew French troops, and the resumption of war in Europe forced Napoleon to abandon any North American aspirations. Instead, he offered to sell Louisiana.
Jefferson’s envoy, James Monroe, was forced to make a quick decision: What would Jefferson do? Lacking any Constitutional mandate by which the federal government could acquire new territory – but certain that Jefferson would approve, the Americans purchased a territory of some nine hundred thousand square miles, roughly equal in size to the existing nation. What would happen to all of this land was totally uncertain. Whether it might become a permanent colony of the United States, whether it might lead to the creation of several new, larger states or even to emergence of several sovereign nations in North America were all possibilities.
Meanwhile, the Spanish role in North America collapsed. After the US Revolution, Spain’s position in North America was never stronger. In fact Spain was on the defensive, losing its position in the Pacific Northwest and Florida. But the catastrophe took place at home. In 1807, the French invaded Spain, and replaced the Spanish king with Joseph Napoleon. This plunged Spain into years of chaos and civil war. Lacking central authority in Madrid, Spain’s North American colonial empire disintegrated.
With the purchase of Louisiana, the size of the new US was doubled and the issue of control of the Mississippi was resolved. Efforts to detach parts of the country continued – see Aaron Burr – but that danger had passed. The addition of these new territories, soon followed by Texas, California and a large section of Mexico would bring the US to its coast to coast reality. But this would also intensify the existing and near fatal problem – the extension of slavery.
Still, the story was not entirely over. Taking advantage of US Civil War, France, Spain and Britain invaded Mexico in 1861 to pressure Mexico to settle its debts. Spain and Britain withdrew in 1862 after negotiating an agreement. But France’s Emperor Napoleon III invited Austrian archduke Maximilian in 1864 to establish a new pro-French monarchy in Mexico, overthrowing the administration of President Benito Juárez. (A holiday many celebrate here, Cinco de Mayo, marks the beginning of struggle against the French.) Maximillian was executed in June 1867.
And finally let us not forget the so-called Zimmerman telegram. In January 1917, British cryptographers deciphered a telegram from German Foreign Minister Zimmermann to the German Minister to Mexico offering United States territory to Mexico in return for joining the German cause.
The historian’s dilemma is that one knows how the story ends. The task is to write from the perspective of those who don’t know what the outcome will be. Certainly the young nation’s leaders in the post-Revolutionary War years were deeply uncertain, often pessimistic, about the country’s future.
Thanks for reading,
Stephen Blank RIHS February 8, 2021
If you would like to see a longer iteration of this essay, with full footnotes and references, you can find it on my website: www.stephenblank.info under “Articles”, “Slow Blogs”, “The Map of North America”.
The Valley Forge War Memorial, one of many designed by the architect Paul Philippe Cret.
Architects have long created memorials to commemorate dead from wars and other mass casualty events. In America, these structures, from the Washington Memorial to lesser known monuments located across the country commemorating the Union victories of the Civil War, play an important role in shaping and projecting a certain vision of American history.
The French-American architect Paul Philippe Cret, active during the first five decades of the 20th century, is perhaps the most prolific American memorial designer.
We featured the architecture of Paul Phillipe Cret in a previous edition.
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)
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New York City Transit Authority Objects, from the collection of and photographed by Brian Kelley, published by Standards Manual. Introduction by Eric Greene
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian Kelley (b. 1988) moved to New York City in 2006 and received his BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts. Kelley’s work resists the hurried march of consumerist modernity, seeking to halt the cyclical emptiness of our material lives to capture a sense of culture at “the end of history.” A mixed-media approach has allowed him to pursue artwork with disruptive capacities—exhaustive research, slow & meditative composition, and the repurposing of photographic mediums—all employed to reveal the artifacts left behind by the precession of simulacra. Kelley was born in Horseheads, NY and currently lives in Lumberland, NY.
Since 2011 Brian Kelley has been collecting and photographing Metrocards and other ephemera from the New York City Transit Authority. He now has a collection of thousands of items from the TA. Some were trash, found items and donations from employees and others.
We will learn how Brian’s collection have overtaken his studio and how he shares his collection with a contemporary audience.
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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.
VICKI FEINMEL, ANDY SPARBERG AND ARLENE BESSENOFF 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
NEW YORK CITY TRANSIT AUTHORITY OBJECTS (C) BRIAN KELLEY, STANDARDS MANUAL
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John Hultberg, Monhegan Dock, 1961, oil on canvas mounted on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson, Martha Jackson Memorial Collection, 1980.137.42
John Hultberg studied at the Art Students League with artists Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. In 1952 his work was included in an exhibition of emerging artists, and two years later he won first prize at the Corcoran Gallery of Art Biennial. In 1955, Time magazine declared him the “latest darling of modern art.” (Jacks, John Hultberg: Painter of the In-Between, 1985) Hultberg exhibited his work all over the world, published many poems, and taught in art schools across the country. His paintings often show surreal landscapes of indistinct objects that evoke stormy wastelands or long-forgotten ruins.
John Hultberg, Road through the Labyrinth, 1979, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson, Martha Jackson Memorial Collection, 1980.137.35
John Hultberg, Desecration of the House, 1977, acrylic on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson, Martha Jackson Memorial Collection, 1980.137.37
John Hultberg, Sculptor’s Garden, 1968, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson, Martha Jackson Memorial Collection, 1980.137.46
John Hultberg’s paintings of imaginary environments often show strange groups of art objects and old artifacts. In Sculptor’s Garden, he included paintings, easels, and other tools to suggest artists working out-of-doors. But there are no people in the image and the works on the easels appear unfinished, as if whoever was working here had to leave suddenly; the threatening clouds and desolate landscape in the distance emphasize this sense of abandonment. Hultberg wanted to infuse his landscapes with uncertainty and ambiguity, and once wrote that “I rejoice that I find in painting a way to create my own earth.” (Jacks, John Hultberg: Painter of the In-Between, 1985)
John Hultberg, Blue Black Destruction, 1958, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson, Martha Jackson Memorial Collection, 1980.137.55
John Hultberg, Machine Shop Showing Gantry Cranes Newport News Shipyard, 1957, gouache, charcoal, pencil and crayon on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson, Martha Jackson Memorial Collection, 1980.137.59
John Hultberg, New City, 1957, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson, Martha Jackson Memorial Collection, 1980.137.58
John Hultberg, After De Chirico, 1953, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson, Martha Jackson Memorial Collection, 1980.137.57
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A WALK AFTER THE SNOW
BLACKWELL HOUSE IS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC WEDNESDAYS TO SUNDAYS 11 A.M. TO 5 P.M. CLOSED 2-3 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 Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
Judith Berdy
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM
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
An unidentified Brooklyn street in March 1888. Photo by Breading G. Way via Brooklyn Museum
Snow? You missed the Big One
The storm, from my windows at least, was disappointing. Not two feet of snow, no sprawling drifts.
But the real big one, the snowstorm that did the most damage and had the greatest impact on our City was in 1888. So return with me to the thrilling days of yesteryear, to March 11, 1888.
This is what the New York Herald had to say, a few days later when the City began to move again:
With men and women dying in her ghostly streets, New York saw day breaking through the wild clouds yesterday morning. Nature had overwhelmed the metropolis, and citizens were found dead in the mighty snowdrifts. White, frozen hands sticking up out of the billowed and furrowed wastes testified to the unspeakable power that had desolated the city.
Had Jules Verne written such a story a week ago New Yorkers would have laughed and pronounced it a clever but impossible romance.
Yet here was the stupendous reality. Within forty-eight hours the city was converted into an Arctic wilderness, cut off from all railway and telegraph communication. The white hurricane had strewn her busiest and gayest thoroughfares with wreck and ruin. Courts of justice were closed and the vast machinery of commerce was paralyzed. Groans of mutilated humanity filled the air. (Oh, to have been a journalist then!)
Yes, March. The temperature had hit a warmish 50 degrees on March 10. And this wasn’t the most snow. Storms in 1947, 2006 and 2016 laid down more. But March 1888 was one of the worst blizzards in American history, killing more than 400 people in the Northeast (where 25% of Americans lived) and dumping as much as 55 inches of snow in some areas – the greatest snowfall since the formation of the United States.
On March 11, Arctic air from Canada collided with Gulf air from the south and temperatures plunged. Rain turned to snow and winds reached hurricane-strength levels – the 1888 storm became known as “The Great White Hurricane”. By midnight, gusts were recorded at 85 miles per hour in New York City. Along with heavy snow, there was a complete whiteout in the city when the residents awoke the next morning, and the storm worsened that night and into the 12th. Simply walking the streets was perilous.
A researcher who dug through newspaper files in 1988 found many stories about 1888:
“I saw a man for one and a half hours trying to cross 96th Street. We watched him start, get quarter way across, and then be flung back against the building on the comer. The last time he tried it, he was caught up in a whirl of snow and disappeared from our view. The next morning seven horses, policemen, and his brother charged the drift, and his body was kicked out of the drift.”
Although “only” 21 inches of snow fell, the City ground to a near halt in the face of massive drifts rising up to 30 feet and powerful winds. Thousands of people were stranded on elevated trains; in many areas, enterprising people with ladders offered to rescue the passengers for a small fee. Telegraph lines, water mains and gas lines were all above ground and froze and were inaccessible to repair crews. Wall Street was forced to close for three straight days. New Yorkers camped out in hotel lobbies waiting for the worst of the blizzard to pass. Mark Twain was in New York, stranded at his hotel for several days and P.T. Barnum entertained some of the stranded at Madison Square Garden.
The New York Times, March 13, 1888, reported:
Before the day had well advanced, every horse-car and elevated railroad train in the city had stopped running; the streets were almost impassable to men or horses by reason of the huge masses of drifting snow; the electric wires – telegraph and telephone — connecting spots in the city or opening communication with places outside were nearly all broken; hardly a train was out from the city or came into it during the entire day; the mails were stopped, and every variety of business dependent on motion or locomotion was stopped.
In New York City, damage done by the storm was estimated at $20 million (by comparison, this was close to 10% of the U.S. Federal Government’s entire expenditures in 1888), and, it is said, 200 New Yorkers died because of the storm.
The 1888 storm had a lasting impact on the City. Like most American cities that had entered the era of electric illumination and the telephone in the late 19th century, vast forests of poles carrying a helter-skelter network of wires lined and crisscrossed New York streets. Unsightly and dangerous: Wires snapped, spraying sparks and occasionally injuring (or killing) an unlucky passerby.
The wires belonged to Western Union Telegraph Co., Gold and Stock Ticker Co., and the United States, Metropolitan, Brush and East River electric lighting companies, as well as those of burglar alarm companies and the police and fire departments. They were draped from poles that ranged from 55 to 150 feet tall, with dozens of cross arms. Adding to this confusion, each company erected its own poles.
The city had passed a law in 1884 ordering the various utility companies to place their wires below the ground, which they simply ignored, saying the costs were too high.
Library of Congress
After the storm, The New York Tribune printed an editorial reminding New Yorkers that not only had a law had been passed to bury the wires, but that the companies, which owned them, had more than enough money to make it happen. The New York Times chimed in: “If the telegraph wires had been placed underground as contemplated by the law, they would have been made to serve a specially important duty at a time when they were most sorely needed.”
In the fall of 1887, Mayor Abram Hewitt had tried without success to get a proposal through the state legislature to put wires underground. Then, in January 1889, a new City administration under Mayor Hugh Grant coupled with two very public deaths from the downed wires finally resulted in an end to the injunctions for the companies that owned the wires. Within the next few years, all of the poles and wires were dismantled and the wires were buried underground where they would be more secure. This ensured that neither wind nor snow would cut off electricity to New York City again. “When we fix a time, we mean it,” said Grant. “When the time is ended, the poles will come down.” When financier Jay Gould, who owned Western Union, contended in court that the city’s action was “unconstitutional,” the court supported the city.
Thanks for reading,
Stephen Blank RIHS
EDITORIAL
To this day, just ride over the R.I. Bridge into a neighborhood of overhead wires and a hodge-podge of phone, cable, electric lines jerry rigged on poles. Some also hold sneakers and abandoned grocery bags. These unsightly masses of dangerous lines are there for all to see and for the squirrel Olympians and for the critters to feast on!
FROM A READER Thanks for great history of knitting in WW I and II. I remember some classmates in first and second grade knitting during recess for brothers and family members. Jay Jacobson
Arc de Triomphe, Paris Where the American Soldiers dreamed of marching by at the end of the Great War. Susan Rodetis, Ed Litcher, Andy Sparberg and Gloria Herman 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) ROOSEVELT ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY LIBRARY OF CONGRSS BROOLYN PUBLIC LIBRARY Sources: JUDITH BERDY THE ROOSEVELT ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY (C) FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
SOCKS OVER THERE: HAND KNITTING FOR THE WORLD WARS
Getty Images
Socks “Over There:” Handknitting for the World Wars
Rachel Maines
2 February 2021
In the summer of 1944, American forces pushed south and east from their beachhead in Normandy, forcing the Germans to retreat from an ever-larger territory in Southern France. Although it had been planned to the smallest detail many months in advance, the Normandy invasion fell behind almost at once, as German resistance prevented the capture of major ports. Without essential ports along the French coast, necessary supplies, troops, and weaponry could not be landed.
After the breakout, supply continued to be a problem. By D+100, the front lines were about 200 miles from the supply depots. Daily deliveries by truck, the famous Red Ball Express, brought necessary supplies to troops fighting at Metz, Verdun, Antwerp and Liège. These transport units carried ammunition, rations, gasoline, and one further supply item needed at the American front: dry socks.
The horseshoe-nail role of dry socks had become apparent the previous year, when forty per cent of the casualties in the Attu Islands campaign, 1,200 of 2,900 total, were due to trench foot. In November 1943, trench foot, caused by exposure to cold and wet, accounted for twenty per cent of the casualties of the winter campaign in Italy.
The U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps made frantic efforts to acquire adequate footgear for the Normandy invasion, but they could not get delivery of critical items in time to prevent 70,000 cold-injury casualties in the European theater during the winter of 1944-45. Most of the men affected by these injuries were trained, battle-hardened riflemen. Each spent an average of sixty days in field hospitals before returning to the front. Some were so seriously disabled that they were removed from active duty and sent home. The price exacted by wet socks from American military efforts in Europe was so impressive that it was the subject of an investigation in 1945. Army historian Roland Ruppenthal reports that by January 1945, “loss of personnel from trench foot and frostbite already approximated the strength of three divisions in the 12th Army Group.”
People were recruited to send comfort packs with needles, thread, stationery, buttons, chocolate bar and other necessities to the soldiers on the front.
Trenchfoot, a common trauma of battle, is an injury to the lower extremities caused by damp cold, tight and/or infrequently-changed footgear, standing for long periods, and, of course, wet socks. Military physicians Tom Whayne and Michael DeBakey (later of heart surgery fame), analyzing the nearly half a million cold injuries to American soldiers in World War II, observed that “the upper limit of temperature at which cold injury can occur has not been established.”
In both World Wars, combatant nations, including the United States, Britain, and Germany, learned that inadequate or poorly-maintained footwear produced costly and preventable casualties from trench foot and frostbite. While provision of shoes and boots to troops were major issues in earlier conflicts, no nation before World War I had fully appreciated the significance of warm, dry, well-fitting socks to the effectiveness of soldiers in the field. The large numbers of trench foot casualties in World War I, especially among the French and British, convinced policymakers that this vital commodity must receive a higher priority in military production planning, but few nations in wartime could shift production to knitting mills rapidly enough to make a difference. Thus, in Britain and the U.S, the best policy option proved to be recruiting women and children civilians to knit socks by hand for the military in the first war, and for refugees, prisoners and civilians in the second.
Knitting instructions for the heel of a sock
When World War I began in Europe in 1914, the United States was the world’s premier manufacturer of knitting and spinning machinery. Exports of this equipment, however, did nothing to increase the manufacturing capacity of American knitting mills, which proved to be a significant bottleneck for military textile production. Despite the conversion of silk and cotton knitting equipment to wool, industrial knitters were unable to supply the Army with the more than 150 million pairs of heavy wool socks it required in 1917-1918. Two strategies were employed: the hasty construction of 1200 knitting machines, which were by the end of the war capable of producing 8 million socks a month, and home production by hand knitters.
The hand knitters may not have been as fast as the machines, but they could be mobilized much more quickly. In the First World War, women, the elderly and children worked with such voluntary associations as the American Red Cross to make up the shortage of knitted wool socks for the Army, and to produce hospital bedding and surgical textiles from fabric and cotton lint (unspun fiber), with some work done by hand sewing and the rest by on sewing machines. Clothing was made at home and in Red Cross workshops for both American servicemembers and allied refugees. School children mobilized to produce socks, sweaters, wristlets, washcloths, Balaclava helmets and similar goods for the “Sammies” in France.
You could make hot water bottle covers, eye bandages and bath mitts. The Red Cross set out instructions for all kinds of items to make the soldiers time easier.
By the last month of 1917, the reorganized Red Cross had shipped 13,336 cases containing some 13 million dressings and hospital items to Europe, 424,000 articles of hospital clothing, and a quarter of a million hand-knitted items. Not even this monumental labor met the demand; the Red Cross had to purchase half a million commercially knitted sweaters in 1917 to clothe soldiers still not fully outfitted by the War Department. By October 1918, the Red Cross had distributed nearly three million garments made by a membership of more than 8 million. At the end of the war, 371.5 million relief articles had been produced, about 11 million garments had been knitted for members of the U.S. armed forces, and close to two million French refugees had been fed and clothed.
World War I was in fact the last occasion on which knitting for the military had official U.S. War Department sanction: by World War II such work was limited to production for hospitals, prisoners of war and refugees. The former conflict accounted for the largest Red Cross membership in U.S. history; the Second World War brought half a million fewer volunteers into the organization, mainly because more women workers were employed in war industry.
War Work for Willing Hands was publicized in Star Needlework Journal
The problem of wet socks at war in World War II was ultimately resolved for the U.S. Army in late 1944 by the approval for distribution of a new type of footwear that later revolutionized civilian cold weather gear: the M-1944 shoepac, “a moccasin-type rubber boot” with a leather upper and removable wool felt lining, the type of footwear now sold to civilians as the “L.L. Bean Boot.” After a few false starts in the refinement of this footgear, the chief surgeon for the European theater determined in December 1944 that “the shoepac had been found to be the only mechanical aid which contributed substantially to the prevention of trench foot.” The U.S. military establishment had finally figured out how to keep its socks dry without enlisting home knitters.
LOTS OF CORRECT ANSWERS TODAY: HARA REISER, ARLENE BESSENOFF, BILL SCHIMOLER, LISA FERNANDEZ, ANDY SPARBERG AND SUSAN RODETIS
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 RACHEL MAINES
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Editorial Just about 10 months ago, people were pulling out their sewing machines and making face masks for protection from Covid-19. Soon the mask business became big time business and home sewing was limited. In World War I, many women followed the instructions put out in journals and by the Red Cross and provided thousands of necessities to the fighting forces abroad.
Soldiers were provided with sewing kits to keep their uniforms in good shape.
