In the middle of winter with snow on the ground and masks on our faces, it is time to think of a park of whimsy that will open this summer in the Hudson River at Pier 55.
THE MATERIAL IN THIS EDITION COMES FROM THE SPONSOR LITTLE ISLAND AT PIER 55. WE OFFER NO OPINIONS JUST THE IMAGES OF WHAT WILL SOON BLOOM IN THE HUDSON RIVER. MAY IT BE GREETED WITH AS MUCH ENTHUSIASM AS MOYNIHAN STATION
From Little Island at Pier 55: In 2013, Barry Diller, in partnership with Hudson River Park Trust leadership, embarked on the unique opportunity to envision a solution for the repair and reactivation of Pier 54, recently damaged by Hurricane Sandy. Diller chose to reimagine an entirely new type of public space for New York, one that would create an immersive experience with nature and art.
Diller called on the expertise of industry leaders in the arts—Scott Rudin, Stephen Daldry, George C. Wolfe, and Kate Horton—to explore the vast possibilities of creating a new public park with the arts as an integrated component. This team, together with Hudson River Park, selected the design firms of Heatherwick Studio and MNLA to realize this vision. The two firms combined architectural innovation with a captivating landscape to provide visitors with an oasis from urban life where they could play, relax, imagine, and restore.
Little Island is an initiative of The Diller – von Furstenberg Family Foundation (DVFFF), with support from the City of New York. The DVFFF’s considerable philanthropic history extends to several other New York City parks and arts organizations including The High Line, The Statue of Liberty Museum, Signature Theatre, Carnegie Hall Society, and the Central Park Conservancy.
Born from a collaboration of the UK-based Heatherwick Studio and the New York-based landscape architecture firm MNLA, led by Signe Nielsen, the park’s imaginative design offers all New Yorkers and visitors a new public space that is whimsical, captivating, and restorative.
STRUCTURAL DESIGN
Heatherwick Studio explored the idea of designing a new pier that could draw from the remaining wooden piles from Pier 54.
“My studio and I became interested in the remains of the old piers on the west side of Manhattan, where their top surfaces had long gone, leaving only hundreds of ancient structural wooden piles sticking out of the river.”
“We wondered if the identity of our new park and performance space could emerge from the water, just like these structural piles, but without needing to add any slab on top. This idea evolved to take the new concrete piles that would be needed to connect to the granite at the base of the river, and to then continue them out of the water, extending skyward to raise sections of a generous green landscape with rich horticulture. Fusing at they meet, these 280 individual piles come together to form the undulating topography of the park, angled perfectly for performance and theatre spaces.Once complete and open to the public in 2021 the result should be a unique and thrilling landscape over the water for everyone to enjoy.”
-Thomas Heatherwick Founder, Heatherwick Studio
LANDSCAPE DESIGN
MNLA’s landscape design was conceived as a leaf floating on water – a space that could be both visually surprising and inspiring for New York City.
“The pier’s landscape will be a sensory delight in all seasons and times of day.”
“The lifted corners of the pier create distinct microclimates that reveal themselves through color, texture, light and shadow. Whether meandering along paths or taking alternate routes of stairs or boulders scrambles, the eye is at times directed downward to the rich palette of plants or outwards to spectacular views of the city and harbor. Little Island will be a maritime botanic garden with 35 species of trees, 65 species of shrubs, and 270 varieties of grasses, perennials, vines, and bulbs, many of which have been selected for their fragrance and attractiveness to birds and pollinators. The landscape is one of sweeping swaths of textures and seasonally calibrated color themes punctuated by magnificent trees.”
-Signe Nielsen Principal, MNLA
Explore the Island
The park features seating lawns, gentle slopes, winding pathways leading to dazzling views, and a variety of spaces for performances and play as well as rest and relaxation. The undulating topography of this oasis will surprise and inspire visitors with its range of elevations, lush landscaping, and hidden meadows, encouraging visitors to return time and again to explore all that Little Island has to offer.
ITTLE ISLAND AT PIER 55 SUSAN RODETIS AND LISA FERNANDEZ GOT IT RIGHT!!
EDITORIAL
When I saw this plan, I thought it was nuts. I do not know if I was crazy of just my jaded skeptical self. Let’s see how the park works out this summer. Yes, we will have to traverse Manhattan Island to get there!
Judy Berdy
WE ARE WORKING ON A LINK TO RESERVE YOUR PLACE AT THE ZOOM EVENT. STAY TUNED.
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 LITTLE ISLAND AT PIER 55 (C)
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
One of the promises of our early Roosevelt Island was that it would be auto-free. That would never be the case, but this suggests that many of us were charmed by the notion of living in a heaven with no auto noises, fumes or congestion. Well, return with me to the thrilling days of yesteryear when the automobile was viewed as the solution to transportation noise, fumes and congestion.
The problem: Horses.
A lot of horses.
In late nineteenth century, New York contained somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 horses. All transport, whether of goods or people, was drawn by horses, from fancy carriages pulled by the finest breeds to cabs and horse trollies as well as countless carts, drays, and wains, all working constantly to deliver the goods needed by the City’s rapidly growing population.
Judy Berdy in an earlier number of the Almanac, pointed out some of the City’s lovely nineteenth century stables. That’s true, but we have to look at the other end of the animal, too. Each horse produced up to 30 pounds of manure per day and a quart of urine. All of this ended up in their stables or along the street. For those of you slow on your math, that adds up to millions of pounds each day and over 100,000 tons per year (not to mention around 10 million gallons of urine).
A lot, indeed. By the end of the 19th century, vacant lots around New York City housed manure piles that reached 40 or 60 feet high. It was estimated that in a few decades, every street would have manure piled up to third story levels.
Streets covered by horse manure attracted huge numbers of flies. One estimate claimed that horse manure was the hatching ground for three billion flies daily throughout the United States, flies that spread disease rapidly through dense human populations. In the winter, manure mixed with the dirt of unpaved streets to form a detestable, smelly, gooey muck and in the summer, the dried and ground-up manure was blown everywhere. Come summer, the smell was overbearing and when it rained, poop-rivers flooded the streets and sidewalks often seeping into people’s basements.
Horses also died. Often in the middle of the street. When they died, their carcasses were abandoned on the streets, creating an additional health issue. In 1880, New York City removed 15,000 dead horses from its streets. But sometimes a big carcass would simply be left to rot until it had disintegrated enough for someone to pick up the pieces.
Moreover, 19th-century New York was already unsettlingly unsanitary, with whole swathes of the city dominated by “a loathsome train of dependent nuisances” like slaughterhouses, facilities for fat melting and gut-cleaning, and “manure heaps in summer” that stretched across entire blocks.
Bear in mind that an increasing number of our New York predecessors shared smaller and smaller spaces with all of this. The human density of New York City rose over the 19th century from just below 40,000 people per square mile to above 90,000, and we had our own waste to deal with.
But as we have seen earlier with clean water and waste, New Yorkers were not keen to spend to improve their situation. Some cities tried to cover the cost of street cleaning by selling the manure for fertilizer. In 1803 the New York superintendent of scavengers spent about $26,000 for street cleaning and realized over $29,000 from selling the manure collected. Nevertheless, it was soon impossible to absorb the huge production distributed around the city. There was so much that farmers began to charge for taking it away.
The structural problem was that the larger and richer cities became, the more horses they needed to function, to move and haul ever growing numbers of people and amounts of goods. Technological innovation didn’t help – indeed made things worse. The horse remained essential in urban civilization, even after the development of the steam engine. As the Nation noted in 1872, though great improvements had been made in the development of such “agents of progress” as the railroad, the steamboat, and the telegraph, modern society’s continued to depend the horse. For it was the horse who fed the railroads and steamboats with passengers and freight, and who provided transportation within the cities.
The more horses, the more manure. Moreover, all these horses had to be stabled, which used up ever-larger areas of increasingly valuable land. And as the number of horses grew, ever-more land had to be devoted to producing hay to feed them (rather than producing food for people), and this had to be brought into cities and distributed—by horse-drawn vehicles. It seemed that urban civilization was doomed.
In the late 1800s, the city hired drainage engineer George E. Waring Jr., who had worked on Central Park, to start cleaning things up. He pushed for new laws forcing owners to stable horses overnight (instead of leaving them in the streets) and mobilized crews to gather manure and horse corpses to be sold for fertilizer and glue. What they couldn’t sell was dumped. And the City tried harder – sewage infrastructure was improved, and the first streetcar lines appeared (horse-drawn, but able to carry more passengers than a carriage); in addition, public transport was encouraged and street cleaning crews (known as White Wings because of their white uniforms) were established.
Still, the situation remained so grim that in 1898, then New York Mayor George E. Waring Jr. organized the first international congress on urban planning. Manure was the main topic. This event, the first environmental summit in history, was attended by representatives from other cities to develop ideas on how to resolve the manure issue. But despite their collective efforts, participants were unable to solve the problem and the conference planned for 10 days concluded on the third.
By then, things were changing. Electric streetcars were gaining traction. Rising land pricing (for stables and farmland) coupled with higher food costs increasingly made these new options more economical, too. But the rise of private cars was the final nail in the horse-drawn coffin.
Automobiles were cleaner, quieter and healthier than horses! “The horse in the city is bound to be a menace to a condition of perfect health,” warned one leading urban health authority in 1901. Public health officials charged that windblown dust from ground-up manure damaged eyes and irritated respiratory organs, while the “noise and clatter” of city traffic aggravated nervous diseases. Since, noted Scientific American, the motor vehicle left no litter and was “always noiseless or nearly so”, the exit of the horse would “benefit the public health to an almost incalculable degree.” By 1912, cars outnumbered horses on the streets of NYC and by 1917 the last horsecar was put out of commission and the issue of horse droppings slowly disappeared into history.
But progress has a price: Many businesses collapsed and many jobs lost. Not counting those who directly drove or cared for horses, in New York and Brooklyn in 1880, there were 427 blacksmith shops, 249 carriage and wagon enterprises, 262 wheelwright shops, and 290 establishments dealing in saddles and harnesses. Add to this vets and the makers and suppliers of all the goods dealt with by these enterprises.
So our lovely island was never car-free. But it could be worse. We could have had horses.
When it first opened in 1766 as an outreach chapel of Trinity Church to better serve its expanding congregation, St. Paul’s was a “chapel-of-ease” for those who did not want to walk a few blocks south along unpaved streets to Trinity. A decade later, the Great Fire of 1776 destroyed the first Trinity Church, but St. Paul’s survived, thanks to a bucket brigade dousing the building with water.
Until the second Trinity Church was rebuilt in 1790, many, including George Washington, made St. Paul’s their church home. On April 30, 1789, after Washington took the oath of office to become the first President of the United States, he made his way from Federal Hall on Wall Street to St. Paul’s Chapel, where he attended services.
Over the next two centuries, the ministries of St. Paul’s expanded along with the city. Community outreach was a primary focus, with services to accommodate the needs of immigrants, working women, and the homeless.
After September 11, 2001, St. Paul’s became the site of an extraordinary, round-the-clock relief ministry to rescue and recovery workers for nine months. Though the World Trade Center buildings collapsed just across the street, there was no damage to St. Paul’s, earning it the nickname “the little chapel that stood.”
Today, St. Paul’s Chapel and Trinity Church (on Broadway at Wall Street) are the cornerstones of Trinity Church Wall Street, a vibrant Episcopal parish that serves the community with worship, arts, education, and social justice outreach. St. Paul’s Chapel is committed to leadership, social justice, and reconciliation as it carries its legacy into the future.
HARA REISER, ANDY SPARBERG, ARLENE BESSENOFF 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 Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
Photo Credit: NYC Dept. of Records & Information Services
Blackwell’s Almanac:
In this first issue of Blackwell’s Almanac Volume VII:
RIHS brings you Part II of Old New York: Ruin to Riches, delving into City history, post-Revolutionary War.
Following is a recap of Beth Goffe’s presentation Scandals of the Upper West Side — the Society’s first virtual event of the RIHS Public Lecture Series (and certainly not the last!)
Read on to learn about the life of Emma Goldman and why she was derided in her day as “one of the most dangerous women in America.”
Click here to access the February Issue of Blackwell’s Almanac Vol. VII, No. 1
Robert Wilvers, Trinity Church, New York, ca. 1956-1957, watercolor and pencil on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Ford Motor Company, 1966.36.201
Trinity Church is a historic parish church in the Episcopal Diocese of New York, at the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Known for its history, location, architecture and endowment,[5] Trinity is a traditional high church, with an active parish centered around the Episcopal Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion in missionary, outreach, and fellowship. In addition to its main facility, Trinity operates two chapels: St. Paul’s Chapel, and the Chapel of St. Cornelius the Centurion on Governors Island.[6] The Church of the Intercession, the Trinity Chapel Complex and many other of Anglican congregations in Manhattan were part of Trinity at one point.
The current building is the third constructed for Trinity Church, and was designed by Richard Upjohn in the Gothic Revival style. The first Trinity Church building was a single-story rectangular structure facing the Hudson River, which was constructed in 1698 and destroyed in the Great New York City Fire of 1776. The second Trinity Church was built facing Wall Street and was consecrated in 1790. The current church building was erected from 1839 to 1846 and was the tallest building in the United States until 1869, as well as the tallest in New York City until 1890. In 1876–1877 a reredos and altar were erected in memory of William Backhouse Astor, Sr., to the designs of architect Frederick Clarke Withers.
The church building is adjacent to the Trinity Churchyard, one of three used by the church. Besides its building, Trinity manages real estate properties with a combined worth of over $6 billion as of 2019. Trinity’s main building is a National Historic Landmark as well as a New York City designated landmark.
Wall Street by Arnold Ronnebeck, 1925
The market’s up! The market’s down! While the financial markets try to regain their footing, I decided to see how artists have portrayed Wall Street over the years, and came across this interesting lithograph by Arnold Ronnebeck. Executed in 1925, Ronnebeck’s view of “the Street” creates a precisionist’s canyon of shadows and light. The buildings loom tall and have taken on larger-than-life personalities. From the viewer’s vantage point, it appears as if you’ve just landed in a new country or are about to embark on a monumental quest, one step at a time.
Ronnebeck was born in Germany in 1885 and died in Denver, Colorado in 1947. As a young man he fought in the German army during World War I, then studied art in Munich and Berlin before moving to Paris in 1908 to continue his studies with Aristide Maillol and Emile-Antoine Bourdelle. When Ronnebeck immigrated to America he arrived in Washington, D.C., where he lived briefly before moving to New York City and finally settling in Colorado.
Ronnebeck’s fascination with downtown Manhattan is apparent in this lithograph. He often worked from photographs to capture the precise details of his subjects. What Berenice Abbott could do with a camera, Ronnebeck accomplished with ink and paper. Here the buildings loom tall and easily intimidate. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel, as well as the steeple of Trinity Church. Of course, this image was made in 1925 . . . four years before the Street would take its record pounding.
Howard Cook, Trinity Church, 1950, color woodcut on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Barbara Latham, 1980.122.27
Kerr Eby, No. 1 Wall Street, 1930, etching on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Katz, 1971.397
B. J. O. Nordfeldt, Wall Street, ca. 1907-1915,Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. B.J.O. Nordfeldt, 1974.10.24
What familiar name is mentioned in the history of Trinity Church and our island?
TUESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
TOM OTTERNESS SCULPTURES AT 14th STREET & 8th AVENUE STATION.
LAURA HUSSEY, CLARA BELLA, HARA REISER, 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 unless otherwise indicated
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM WIKIPEDIA TRINITY ARCHIVES
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
Born in Russia, brought to Maine in 1905, lived in New York City starting in 1920. Internationally famous artist who created striking assemblages of found wooden forms, and sculptures in steel, aluminum, Plexiglass, and other materials. Her etchings are not as widely known.
Charles Sullivan, ed American Beauties: Women in Art and Literature (New York: Henry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with National Museum of American Art, 1993)
Nevelson came to the United States as a child with her family, settling first in Rockland, Maine. At age twenty she went to New York to study voice and drama as well as painting and drawing. She attended the Art Students League in 1929 and 1930, then traveled to Munich to study with Hans Hofmann. Two years later she was working as an assistant to Diego Rivera, who introduced her to pre-Columbian art; her first solo show in 1941 featured terra cotta and wood sculptures based on Mayan and other primitive imagery. Not until the mid 1950s did Nevelson’s far-ranging interests coalesce into dramatically conceived constructions for which she became world-renowned. Nevelson’s sculptures are about myth and mystery, and although she took motifs from the world around her, she stated that she identified with ideas “more than with nature.” Although she was fascinated with the living quality of wood, in the 1960s she added plastics and formica to her repertoire of media and in the 1970s began to create monumentally scaled pieces in aluminum and steel.
Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987)
Louise Nevelson remembered painting, drawing, and carving soap sculptures when she was only five years old. Born in Russia, she moved with her family to Rockland, Maine, in 1905. She felt like an outsider while growing up and apart from her art classes, she did not enjoy being in school. She married Charles Nevelson in 1920 and moved with him to New York. The marriage did not last, however, and Louise left her husband and son to go to Germany, where she worked with abstract expressionist painter Hans Hofmann. She returned to New York after only a few months, feeling a strong connection to the country of her youth and seeing far greater possibilities for the development of her work: “I could be a leaf on the tree in Paris, but I could be the whole tree in America.” Nevelson struggled to gain recognition for many years but eventually achieved success during the 1950s, creating dreamlike constructions that evoked dramatic cityscapes. She built boxes and walls from dismantled furniture, ornaments, and scraps of wood that she found on the street, and often painted them in single colors to emphasize the effects of light and shadow.
Louise Nevelson, Three Nudes, n.d., pen and sepia ink on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Emil J. Arnold, 1967.56.4
Louise Nevelson, Dawnscape, 1975, cast paper relief, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1978.25
Louise Nevelson, (Untitled #1), 1973, color aquatint and collage on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1973.181
Louise Nevelson, Night Leaf, 1969, plexiglas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Woodward Foundation, 1976.108.90
In the late 1960s, Louise Nevelson experimented with new techniques and materials, developing work in Plexiglas and Cor-Ten steel. Night Leaf displays an arrangement of opaque black boxes that contain variations of a simple leaf shape. Nevelson emphasized the contrast between nature and technology by using industrial techniques to illustrate an organic form. The rigid plastic transforms the leaf into a geometric and uniform shape, highlighted by the use of black.
“Sometimes it’s the material that takes over; sometimes it’s me that takes over. I permit them to play, like a seesaw. I use action and counteraction, like in music, all the time …” Louise Nevelson, “American Artists on Art,” 1982
Louise Nevelson, Untitled, 1967, lithograph, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Inc., 1973.97
Louise Nevelson, Untitled (Tamarind no. 830 (830b)), 1963, color lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1971.84.213
Louise Nevelson, Gate V, from the Garden Gate Series, 1959-1960, cast bronze, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson, Martha Jackson Memorial Collection, 1980.137.84
The illusion of timeworn wood conveyed by the cast bronze of Gate V suggests a once beautiful garden that is now overgrown and wild. It also creates an awareness of the past that is at the heart of Nevelson’s “resurrection” of discarded materials. Nevelson viewed gates and doorways as metaphors that suggest transition in nature and in life. As she explained it, “After a tree is cut down, it is assumed that the tree is dead. It may be the finish of that life as such. But even [then], there’s activity.…Patterns of life change, but life doesn’t change
Louise Nevelson, Figure, 1958, softground, etching, aquatint, and drypoint on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1971.308
LOUISE NEVELSON NIGHT PRESENCE IV
FROM ART NERD NEW YORK
CHAPEL OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD AT ST. PETER’S CHURCH
The Chapel prior to the current restoration. Opened in 1977, the need for updates were necessary and have been going on for the last 3 years.
Located in the Citicorp Building, a place of respite and Meditation.
TO SEE VIDEO ON THE CHAPEL AND NEVELSON GO TO NYC ARTS WEBSITE:
HARA REISER, JAY JACOBSON, ALEXIS VILLEFANE, ANDY SPARBERG, & NANCY BROWN 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 Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
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
