When the original McKim, Mead and White designed Penn Station was demolished in 1963, not all of it was lost. There are many remnants from the 1910 building within the station itself and there is an entire building from the original complex still standing on 31st Street. This structure is what Untapped New York’s Chief Experience Officer Justin Rivers calls Penn Station’s largest remnant, and you can see it from the outside on his Remnants of Penn Station Walking Tour. The granite building at 242 West 31st Street, facing the south side of Madison Square Garden, once served as Penn Station’s coal-fueled power plant. This structure provided a variety of vital services to the station over the years. The photos below, shared to a Penn Station Facebook group, provide a glimpse inside the now-defunct power plant which has been largely abandoned for decades.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Much of Penn Station’s infrastructure was once controlled from inside the service plant. According to the New York Times, machines at the 31st Street building generated electricity to power the station, provide heat, light, elevator hydraulics, and refrigeration for the station, and even incinerate garbage. The electricity used to power the trains was generated by a different power plant on the east bank of the East River at Hunter’s Point according to New York’s Pennsylvania Stations by Hilary Ballon. By 1989, the power plant on 31st Street was almost completely obsolete.
The photos in the gallery at the bottom of this article were taken in 1998 and in 2018. They reveal various corridors and rooms throughout the building filled with filing cabinets, electronics, and a giant control board showing Penn Station’s tracks and connecting subway lines. Many parts of the building are unsafe to visit due to asbestos and other containments that have resulted from years of decay.
The Penn Station power plant was constructed before the station itself. Penn Station opened in 1910 but the service building was complete by 1908. Designed by Charles McKim and William Symmes Richardson, the building features a granite facade quarried from Stony Creek Quarry in Connecticut according to Christopher Gray. A row of Doric pilasters give it a classical style, though much more subdued than the neighboring station. Two smokestacks once rose from the top of the building, but those no longer exist.
The fate of the Service Building is unknown at this time. Though it was spared during Penn Station’s demolition, it is not a New York City Landmark. As of 2003, the New York Times reported the building was still used for “storage and backup systems.” In Governor Cuomo’s proposed Empire Station Complex plan, the power plant, along with other buildings on the block bounded by 7th and 8th Avenues and 31st and 30th Streets would be demolished to make way for a new terminal building and eight additional train tracks. The plan also endangers the historic Capuchin Monastery of the Church of St. John which sits on the block. The opening of Moynihan Train Hall and renovations to Penn Station have brought many changes to the transit hub already. Future plans will determine if the power plant survives or joins the original Penn Station on New York City’s list of lost structures.
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Thanks for reminding us to celebrate the first anniversary of RIHS ! A very lively source of information about many topics that I hadn’t realized were of interest to me.
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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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VACCINATED AND EAGER TO LEAVE HOME! ENJOY RON’S WONDERFUL IMAGES OF AMERICA
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FALL TREE, VERMONYHOLY WATERMIAMI BEACH DECO YELLOW PANTS SUIT BUCKINGHAM FOUNTAIN, CHICAGO
Without leaving home you can journey down Main Street for a local site. Visit the Blackwell House. The house is open to the public Wednesday thru Sunday from11 a.m. to 5 p.m. (closed 2-3 p.m.)
POTATO FAMINE MEMORIAL AMY DIEHL CRATER 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)
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Many of these images are available for sale on the above website
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‘No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field.’ – Oscar Wilde
St Patrick’s Day on 17th March is the perfect time to shine a light on artists from Ireland. The island of Ireland has had a turbulent history, and today encompasses both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Despite the political division that persists today, art famously has no boundaries – so let’s take a look at just some of the incredible Irish artists who have made their mark.
Gipsy Encampment on the Curragh
Joseph Malachy Kavanagh (1856–1918)
National Museums Northern Ireland
Joseph Malachy Kavanagh (1856–1918) studied in Antwerp under Verlat in the 1880s. He was noted for painting landscapes, seascapes and rural scenes in Ireland, France and Belgium. He was keeper of the Royal Hibernian Academy. Despite being a prolific painter, his work is rare – his studio and paintings were destroyed by a fire during the Easter Rebellion/Easter Rising of 1916. This single example on Art UK is a landscape of the Curragh in Co. Kildare.
Cherry Ripe 1889
Walter Frederick Osborne (1859–1903)
National Museums Northern Ireland
A contemporary of Kavanagh, Walter Frederick Osborne (1859–1903) was an Impressionist and Post-Impressionist landscape and portrait painter. He too studied under Verlat in Antwerp, and was later influenced by the Impressionists. He made his living through portraiture and landscapes, but today he is best known for his depictions of the everyday lives of the working class people of Dublin – including women, children and elderly people. He died from pneumonia at just 43, cutting short what was a glittering career, full of potential.
Roderic O’Conor (1860–1940) studied in London and Antwerp, and then moved to Paris in 1883. He was greatly influenced by Gauguin and Van Gogh, which you can see in this work, called Field of Corn, Pont Aven, in which he uses non-naturalistic bold colour and thick brushwork. Virtually unknown in the British and Irish art worlds of his own time, after his death he came to be recognised as a pioneer of Post-Impressionism in the English-speaking world.
The Riverside (Long Ago) 1922
Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957)
National Museums Northern Ireland
Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957) is perhaps the best-known Irish painter of the twentieth century, son of barrister-turned-portrait-painter John Butler Yeats (1839–1922), and brother of the poet William Butler Yeats. He did not regularly paint in oils until about 1905. His subjects included Celtic myth and everyday Irish life, which chimed with the Irish independence movement in the early years of the twentieth century. Influenced initially by French Impressionism, he became more Expressionist as he grew older – his later paintings feature some extremely loose brushwork.
As a boy he had spent long periods with his grandparents in Sligo. When this painting of the Sligo Riverside area was exhibited in Dublin in 1922 the Edwardian costumes and muted colours evoked a sense of nostalgia for the recent past. As with many of Yeats’s paintings, it is based on memories of his Sligo childhood, reinterpreted to illustrate universal themes of human experience.
The Road to Coomasharn, County Kerry
Paul Henry (1876–1958)
Queen’s University Belfast
Born in Belfast, Paul Henry (1876–1958) was noted for depicting the landscape of the west of Ireland in a Post-Impressionist style. In 1898 he went to Paris to study at the Académie Julian and in James Abbot McNeill Whistler’s studio – the American artist was an important influence on him. Henry and his wife Grace moved to the island of Achill in 1910 and then to Dublin in 1919. While still married to Grace, he had an affair with Mabel Young (1889–1974) who later became his second wife. He went blind in 1945 and died in 1958.
This picture was probably painted after 1919, when Henry’s work became increasingly devoid of figures in the landscape. The composition is simple, with the broad shapes of clouds, mountains, peat stacks and the road emphasised.
The Twelve Pins, Connemara
Letitia Marion Hamilton (1878–1964)
National Museums Northern Ireland
Letitia Marion Hamilton (1878–1964) was landscape artist from Co. Meath. Both she and her sister Eva remained unmarried – their artistic careers helped support the household. Hamilton’s early work showed elements of Art Nouveau, and she later worked in a modernist style.
She exhibited more than 200 paintings at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) and travelled widely in Europe. She was one of the founding members of the Society of Dublin Painters, along with Paul Henry, Grace Henry, Mary Swanzy and Jack Butler Yeats. She became a member of the RHA in 1943. In 1948 she won a bronze medal in the last art competition at the modern Olympic Games.
This is The Twelve Pins in Co. Galway, a mountain range also known as The Twelve Bens.
Abstract
Mary Swanzy (1882–1978)
National Museums Northern Ireland
Mary Swanzy (1882–1978) was noted for her eclectic style. Some of her works feature elements of Cubism and Fauvism, and she was one of Ireland’s first abstract painters.
Fluent in French and German, she had an international outlook and was influenced by many of the artistic movements of the early twentieth century in Europe. From the 1920s onwards, she travelled further afield, including to Hawaii and Samoa, where she painted local tropical flowers, trees, and native women. She later moved to London, and continued to paint until her death in 1978.
Painting 1938
Mainie Jellett (1897–1944)
National Museums Northern Ireland
Mainie Jellett (1897–1944) was one of the most important pioneers of modern art in Ireland. She was born in Dublin, where she studied at the Metropolitan School of Art and then at the Westminster School of Art in London, where she was taught by Sickert.
After studying in Paris, by 1923 she was painting in a completely abstract, Cubist-inspired style. Initially poorly received in Dublin, she devoted much of her energy to changing conservative attitudes to art in Ireland. She died young of cancer, but the year before her death she became the first chairman of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, an exhibiting society that became the main venue for avant-garde art in Ireland for years.
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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.
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FROM JAY JACOBSON For the Sloan story. Always enjoy artists who find subjects in urban settings (Hopper is a fave), and glad to learn about Sloan.
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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The Roosevelt Island Historical Society and the New York Public Library are proud to host author Richard Panchyk and his presentation of his book “Abandoned Queens”.
There are many places in New York City’s borough of Queens where traces of the past linger, haunting reminders of the way things used to be, sometimes hidden and sometimes in plain sight. In this presentation, author Richard Panchyk takes us on a journey through his book Abandoned Queens, through a variety of fascinating abandoned places in Queens, including the chilling Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, the meandering remains of the country’s first modern highway, and a defunct airport reclaimed by wilderness. Because Queens is so densely populated, these abandoned places usually coexist adjacent to living, thriving locations, making for an often eerie and beautiful juxtaposition of old and new, used and unused. From an eerie old railroad line in Forest Hills to a destroyed neighborhood in the Rockaways, the poignant images in this book are filled with context and history.
TUESDAY, MARCH 16, 2021
The
312th Edition
From Our Archives
JOHN SLOAN
******** NEW YORK
NEIGHBORHOOD
ARTIST
from Ephemeral New York (c)
Greenwich Village from John Sloan’s rear window
After John Sloan and his wife left Philadelphia and relocated to New York City in 1904, the couple lived first in Chelsea and then in various places in Greenwich Village, where Sloan also took a studio at Sixth Avenue and Cornelia Street to create art that found “beauty in commonplace things and people,” as he once said, per the Whitney Museum.
From one of those Village apartments or out his studio window, Sloan had a view of the shared rear yards of his tenement neighbors on West Fourth Street. “Backyards, Greenwich Village,” from 1914, was born out of that view. “Here, a private scene of two children building a snowman in a backyard, with a pair of cats and another child watching them from a window above, brings dignity and romance to lives that would otherwise go unnoticed,” states the Whitney. It’s hardly the only Sloan painting that featured cats—this Ashcan School founder memorialized a few of the dozen cats living at McSorley’s Bar on East Seventh Street in “McSorley’s Cats,”from 1928.
Hanging laundry in a tenement backyard, 1912 August 17, 2020 John Sloan painted many rooftop scenes, typically depicting the ordinary activities he would see on the Greenwich Village and Chelsea roofs of his neighbors.
In 1912, a woman hanging her laundry to dry apparently caught his eye, and the painting “A Woman’s Work” is the result.
It’s Sloan at his best: her face is turned away while she secures the garments to the rope, and the laundry lines and tenements in the background seem to isolate her from the rest of the city.
The painting belongs to the Cleveland Museum of Art. “With its generally sunny mood, the painting lacks the nightmarish qualities of contemporary photographs of slum conditions in New York by Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine,” the museum states. “Nevertheless, it offers a window view on how poor and working-class residents lived in America’s biggest city — and how laws and regulations shaped their world.”
Faces in the shadow of the Third Avenue El New Yorkers no longer plow through the sky on hulking elevated trains. But the great crowds of commuters and the traffic below the steel rails feels very familiar.
John Sloan’s Six O’Clock, Winter gives us the scene under the Third Avenue El in 1912. (Not the Sixth Avenue El, the subject of some of his other paintings.) “The shop girls, clerks, and working men and women who are massed in the lower part of the canvas seem absorbed in their own actions, rushing to their various destinations, generally unaware of the huge elevated railway looming high above them,” states the website of the Phillips Collection.
“The figures are illuminated by the glow of the train’s electric lights from above and from the shops at street level, with those in the lower left of the composition cast in strong light. Loosely brushed in, the faces have a masklike appearance, while those on the right are almost hidden in shadow, obscuring their features.”
Raising pigeons on tenement roofs doesn’t seem to be a popular thing in contemporary New York. But years ago it was a not-uncommon hobby, and John Sloan makes it the subject of this painting—done from his West 23rd Street studio in 1910. Sloan loved watching what transpired on rooftops. His roof paintings “convey a sense of the freedom and escape the roofs provided from the suffocating confines of New York tenement living,” states Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, which has “Pigeons” in its collection.
“Here Sloan depicts the then popular pastime of raising pigeons, which were let loose daily to fly for exercise. Witnessed by their trainer and a young boy perched on the tenement wall, the birds circling above seem to give visual expression to the men’s dreams of a flight of fancy high above the city,” states the MFA.
Spring flowers arrive on a rainy Village sidewalk
Few artists painted the moods, rhythms, and rituals of the seasons like John Sloan, who moved to New York from Philadelphia in 1904 and spent the early 20th century in Greenwich Village—living and working for almost a decade at 88 Washington Place.
His windows facing Lower Sixth Avenue “gave Sloan a view of street life from an elevated vantage point, which he frequently incorporated into his paintings,” states the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston.
A real-life wagon loaded with vibrant flowers was the inspiration for his 1924 painting “Flowers of Spring,” which belongs to the MFA.
As Sloan (at left in a self-portrait from 1890) himself recalled in his book Gist of Art:
“This picture has, in a very direct, simple way, handed on the thrill that comes to everyone on a wet spring morning from the first sight of the flower huckster’s wagon. The brilliant notes of the plants surrounded on all sides by wet, city grays.”
Sloan’s beloved wife, Dolly, is the woman on the left with the umbrella.
The interior of the Williamsburg Savings Bank Bldg. 1 Hanson Place
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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Jan Matulka, Arrangement with Phonograph, Mask, and Shell, ca. 1930, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1978.158 Painter, printmaker.
Brought to the United States from Bohemia at the age of sixteen, Matulka studied at the National Academy of Design from 1911 to 1916. The next year he was awarded a Joseph Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship, which enabled him to tour the American Southwest.
While in New Mexico and Arizona, he frequented Indian dances and studied the art, ceremonies, and customs of the Pueblo tribes. Like other modernist-inclined painters of the post-Armory Show era, Matulka was drawn by the romantic appeal of the Indian and Hispanic cultures of the Southwest, subjects he translated into stylized geometric drawings and paintings.
As an influential teacher during the twenties and thirties, he transmitted modernist precepts to many American art students who gained prominence in succeeding decades.
Jan Matulka, Still Life Composition, ca. 1933-1934, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the U.S. Department of Labor, 1964.1.29
Jan Matulka, Arrangement–New York, ca. 1925, lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1973.138
Work
Hopi Snake Dance #2 by Jan Matulka 1917–18
In 1919 Matulka illustrated Czechoslovak Fairy Tales with writer Parker Fillmore and published by Hippocrene Books. In 1920 the pair compiled a second book, The Shoemaker’s Apron, published by Harcourt Brace & Company
The next few years Jan and Lida traveled to Czechoslovakia to visit the old family farm, as well as to Germany and France. Matulka found inspiration in the scenery of Tŭri Pôle village, a place that fueled many more paintings over the years. Jan established a studio in Paris and would over-winter there while Lida returned to New York City each October. In Paris he was acquaintances with Gertrude Stein, André Lhote, Jean Lurçat, Josef Šíma, Václav Vytlačil, and Albert Gleizes.
In the 1920s Matulka maintained both his studios, frequently traveling to and fro from Paris to New York City. Around the middle of the decade Matulka began painting stark and jazzy cityscapes. This by no means meant he limited himself to that style, as he was also painting landscapes in Cape Ann, as well as Abstract pieces.
Katherine Sophie Dreier became his patron briefly from 1925 to 1926, which came to a premature end mainly due to petty disagreements and Matulka’s general lack of social grace, ranging from tardiness to tantrums. In November 1926 he started to contribute illustrations to The New Masses.
In 1927, Matulka began an association with the Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery. The clientele of the gallery wanted more conservative and representational works so Matulka complied because he needed the income. Again, this did not prevent him from painting in other styles for other outlets. In 1928 he began drawing from the model when he started meeting with the Society of Independent Artists, while contributing illustrations to the socialist Dělník Kalendar.
“Tŭri Pôle Landscape” by Jan Matulka (1921)
With help from Max Weber and Václav Vytlačil Matulka landed a teaching job at the Art Students League of New York, his first salaried position. Being the only modernist faculty member, his classes were quite popular. His students include Dorothy Dehner, Francis Criss, Burgoyne Diller, I. Rice Pereira, David Smith, Jacob Burck, and Esther Shemitz. The lattermost would later state that Matulka was the greatest influence on his work. Matulka was pushed out of his position at the Art Students League by conservative factions in 1931, but with encouragement from students he continued teaching a private class, which later disbanded in 1932. Matulka continued teaching one-on-one classes for a time after that.
Personal and global financial woes soon prevented Matulka from traveling annually to Paris. In 1928 he sublet his studio there to jazz painter Stuart Davis. Later Josef Šíma sublet it, taking it over completely from Matulka in 1934. Šíma stored all Matulka’s paintings and other works left in the studio, eventually transporting them to his own house in Fontainebleau, where unfortunately these things did not survive World War II.
From 1934 until it ended in 1935 Matulka became one of the few abstract painters to join the Public Works of Art Project, giving him a taste for murals and public art. Immediately afterward he joined the Federal Art Project and also worked on the Williamsburg Houses, eventually completing two murals, both of which were eventually destroyed or painted over.
Isolation and death
In 1936 Matulka helped found the American Abstract Artists, but refused to join the group. His emotional state continued to decline, even more so when his sister Barbara killed herself on 5 July. By the time his association with the Federal Art Project ended in 1939 he had become even more socially and emotionally isolated. He continued painting more and more experimental works.
Over the next few decades Matulka received much acclaim from his exhibitions, but remained relatively withdrawn from society. As age caught up with him, he suffered from many health issues, including deafness. Matulka died 25 June 1972 in New York City.
Jan Matulka, Untitled (Cassis Street Scene), 1930, watercolor and conte crayon on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Ben Goldstein and museum purchase, 1971.383
Waiting on line for Smallpox vaccinations in 1947 after fear of a pandemic was found and the entire population was inoculated in a few months. Andy Sparberg got it
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Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
Sources:
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The Roosevelt Island Historical Society and the New York Public Library are proud to host author Richard Panchyk and his presentation of his book “Abandoned Queens”.
TUESDAY, MARCH 16TH, 7 P.M. VIA ZOOM Click below to register:
There are many places in New York City’s borough of Queens where traces of the past linger, haunting reminders of the way things used to be, sometimes hidden and sometimes in plain sight. In this presentation, author Richard Panchyk takes us on a journey through his book Abandoned Queens, through a variety of fascinating abandoned places in Queens, including the chilling Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, the meandering remains of the country’s first modern highway, and a defunct airport reclaimed by wilderness. Because Queens is so densely populated, these abandoned places usually coexist adjacent to living, thriving locations, making for an often eerie and beautiful juxtaposition of old and new, used and unused. From an eerie old railroad line in Forest Hills to a destroyed neighborhood in the Rockaways, the poignant images in this book are filled with context and history.
310th Edition
WEEKEND EDITION
MARCH 13-14, 2021
CROSSING THE ATLANTIC, PART 2
BY STEPHEN BLANK
CROSSING THE ATLANTIC, PART 2
Stephen Blank
The first part of this tale concluded with the beginning of the great era of Atlantic liners. Soon engines would be more powerful, screw propellers would replace sidewheels and sleek steel hulls would enable ships to grow to unimaginable size, speed and grandeur.
American companies, centered in New York, dominated the early Atlantic passenger trade. American packets first created regular scheduled crossings; American clipper ships were the fastest, most elegant and most technologically advanced in the world fleet; Americans had pioneered the use of steam in ship propulsion, and the first steamship to cross the Atlantic (more or less) was the American Savannah. But soon, America would drop out of this competition and the Atlantic passenger trade would be dominated by British, German and other European vessels.
Welcome aboard, friends, and hear how this happened.
Immigrants
Crossing was dangerous, particularly for the growing number of emigrants heading west across the Atlantic. Worst were the “Irish coffin ships” that carried people escaping the Famine. Crowded and disease-ridden, with poor access to food and water, many did not complete the voyage. Owners of coffin ships provided as little food, water and living space as was legally possible. In 1847, during the Famine, 7,000 Irish emigrants died of typhus on the way to America. Another 10,000 died soon after arriving in quarantine areas in the US. Coffin ships were the cheapest way to cross the Atlantic, but mortality rates of 30% were common. It was said that sharks could be seen following the ships, because so many bodies were thrown overboard.
When steam replaced sail, steerage passage wasn’t more comfortable, but it was faster. In 1852 steamships began to bring emigrants to America that could transport 450 at a time from Liverpool to New York. The fare of six guineas a head was double that charged by sailing ships. However, it was much faster and by the 1870s the journey across the Atlantic was only taking two weeks.
Technological change
Technology changed rapidly. Iron hulls were stronger and could support larger engines. Ship size increased dramatically, particularly those created by the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Brunel, known for his innovative bridges and tunnels, built three great steamships, each marking a technological leap forward. A great leap was taken in 1858 with the launching of the Great Eastern, with a length of 692 feet, more than twice that of any other ship. It displaced 32,160 tons, was driven by a propeller and two paddle wheels, as well as auxiliary sails, and its iron hull set a standard for most subsequent liners. The Great Eastern could carry nearly 4,000 passengers. But the Company failed to win a British government mail contract (losing out to Cunard) and the Great Eastern was just too large in the shipping market of the 1860s.
The Great Eastern, iron steamship designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel; lithograph by T.G. Dutton, 1859. Courtesy of the Science Museum, London
Larger ships with more powerful engines could move faster. Speed and increasing comfort appealed greatly to growing market of first-class passengers, who were willing to pay premium fares for a fast voyage. At the same time, larger ships had more room in steerage. Steerage, or third-class, passengers provided the basic income that allowed the lines to thrive. Steerage passengers paid low fares, and they received very little in return in terms of shipboard comfort. Indeed, because steamships were faster, ship owners sold little more than bed space in steerage, leaving emigrants to bring their own food, bedding, and other necessities. The first company to seize the emigration opportunity was the Liverpool-based Inman Line, which began by specializing in the steerage trade, but Cunard, White Star and others soon made the adjustment, increasing their steerage capacity and improving its amenities.
Competition
Efforts by Americans to compete in the Atlantic market were not successful. One exception was the Collins Line, which in 1847 owned the four finest ships afloat. The federal government paid Collins a million dollars a year to carry mail and make better time than the Cunards. The Collins ships were widely advertised as models of comfort and beauty and foreshadowed the elegance which was soon identified with ocean travel. They made better time than their English rivals, averaging crossings in ten to eleven days, while the Cunarders could not do better than twelve. But the enormous expense of speed ruined the line.
U S M Steam Ship Arctic. Collins Line Royal Greenwich Museum
Other reasons help explain the American lost dominance in this industry. During the Civil War, Confederate raiders (constructed in Britain) sank Union ships or drove them to operate under other registries. Also, attention in the US was increasingly focused on opening the West and on railroads rather than steamships. Finally, the bottom line in the industry was bringing immigrants to the US. Immigrants who chose to return (about a third did), found nickel-and-dime fares in now empty foreign steerage. The US went from being the world’s largest merchant marine power to merely an importing shipping nation.
If a company’s bread and butter came from steerage, glamour and prestige came from speed and ship’s image. Each new ship on the North Atlantic run boasted a higher standard of luxury. For the wealthy, these ships offered ever-grander decorative public rooms, finer food and more spacious staterooms with the most modern conveniences-including private bathrooms with hot and cold running water, electric light and steam and heat.
But the Brits didn’t own the industry.
Parts of the next paragraphs are lifted from Robert Ballarad’s Lost Liners: From the Titanic to the Andrea Doria the Ocean Floor Reveals Its Greatest Lost Ships. To say that the Germans invented the twentieth-century luxury liner might be overstating the case, but they surely combined the existing strands of liner evolution to bring it into being. In the late 1890s their ships rapidly overtook the British in terms of size and speed. Two aggressive German companies, Norddeutscher Lloyd and Hamburg-Amerika, themselves fierce rivals, left a greater imprint on shipboard style than on marine engineering. They were the first to turn over the artistic control for designing a passenger liner’s interiors to a single architect/designer.
Hamburg-Amerika’s managing director, Albert Ballin, decreed that comfort and luxury, not speed, would be his watchwords. On a stopover in London, he dined at the Carlton Hotel’s new Ritz-Carlton Grill. Here he encountered not only the lavish haute cuisine of Auguste Escoffier but also the tasteful interiors of a French architect Charles Mewès. Ballin was so smitten by the combination that he determined his next ship would contain a floating version of the Ritz-Carlton Grill, an à la carte alternative-at an additional price-to the first-class dining room. Here was a golden carrot to attract the cream of the Edwardian beau monde. He sought out Mewès and offered him the commission to design the interiors of the Amerika. Then he approached César Ritz and asked him to oversee the restaurant. The two Frenchmen accepted, and a fruitful, enduring partnership was born.
Mewès’s Amerika became a floating grand hotel par excellence. So popular was her Ritz-Carlton Restaurant on the ship’s maiden voyage in the fall of 1905 that Ballin immediately ordered its kitchen doubled in size. But the marvel of a first-class à la carte restaurant, decorated in the classic style of Louis XVI, where one could dine superbly and intimately, was only half the story. On the Amerika, Mewès “was given the opportunity to achieve some kind of total design harmony,” according to liner historian John Maxtone-Graham, “implementing a scheme of uniform decoration in all the public rooms throughout the ship.” Aft of the restaurant, one entered an elegant lounge in the eighteenth-century style of Robert Adam. The airy Palm Court, with its blooming flowers, potted palms, and white rattan furniture, was also inspired by Louis XVI.
Uploaded by: Ballins Dampfer Welt, Sep 10, 2015
Amerika, which immediately became the most fashionable ship on the North Atlantic, set the stage for the heyday of liner grand luxe. Mewès went on to design the interiors of the Amerika’s sister ship, Kaiserin Auguste Viktoria, and then the three Hamburg-Amerika giants of the Imperator class that outsized even White Star’s famous, doomed Titanic. In this competitive climate, both White Star and Cunard realized that to maintain their share of the Atlantic passenger trade, they would have to build new ships of unprecedented size and luxury. The age of the Atlantic superliner had truly begun. Alas, I had intended to do this one in two parts, but I see it will take three. Please don’t run to the lifeboats yet. I hope you will remain on board for the Third Sailing.
M. FRANKS, SUSAN RODETIS, STEVE BESSENOFF, GLORIA HERMAN, LISA FERNANDEZ, HARA REISER, THOM HEYER & ARON EISENPREISS GOT IT
Sources
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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The Roosevelt Island Historical Society and the New York Public Library are proud to host author Richard Panchyk and his presentation of his book “Abandoned Queens”.
TUESDAY, MARCH 16TH, 7 P.M. VIA ZOOM Click below to register:
There are many places in New York City’s borough of Queens where traces of the past linger, haunting reminders of the way things used to be, sometimes hidden and sometimes in plain sight. In this presentation, author Richard Panchyk takes us on a journey through his book Abandoned Queens, through a variety of fascinating abandoned places in Queens, including the chilling Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, the meandering remains of the country’s first modern highway, and a defunct airport reclaimed by wilderness. Because Queens is so densely populated, these abandoned places usually coexist adjacent to living, thriving locations, making for an often eerie and beautiful juxtaposition of old and new, used and unused. From an eerie old railroad line in Forest Hills to a destroyed neighborhood in the Rockaways, the poignant images in this book are filled with context and history.
SWING LOW: HARRIET TUBMAN MEMORIAL
FROM NYC PARKS
This larger-than-life bronze sculpture depicts abolitionist organizer and Underground Railroad leader Harriet Tubman (c. 1822-1913), and stands at the crossroads of St. Nicholas Avenue, West 122nd Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem. Douglass once said of Tubman that except for John Brown, he knew of “no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people.”
Born into slavery in Maryland around 1822, Tubman escaped in 1849 via the Underground Railroad, the network of places and people dedicated to helping slaves find their way to freedom in non-slaveholding communities. Settling first in Philadelphia, then Canada, Tubman spent ten years returning to Maryland at great personal risk, to guide scores of friends and family members to freedom. Determined to end slavery, she later served the Union Army as a scout, spy and nurse in the Civil War. Settling in Auburn, New York after the war, she continued campaigning for equal rights for women and African-Americans. Her humanitarian work, including caring for the sick, homeless and disabled of all races, resulted in the establishment of the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged in that community. She died in 1913 and was buried in Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn with semi-military honors.
The portrayal of Harriet Tubman in Swing Low as the powerful and fearless train of freedom is hardly overstated in the artful sculpture that stands on the traffic island of a Harlem intersection. Facing South in righteous conviction for another trip as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, the Bronze and Chinese granite statue is lined with alternating tiles depicting events of Harriet Tubman’s life and traditional quilting patterns. The surrounding area around the Harriett Tubman memorial is landscaped with plants native to both New York and Maryland, Tubman’s home state, provides a contemplative space to consider Tubman’s legacy.
Frontispiece from Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, ca. 1868. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
ALISON SAAR’S SWING LOW
RENÉE ATER
Public Scholar April 13, 2018
Welcome to my blog! In the coming months, I will post on objects related to my Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past project as well as big ideas I need to sort out. For now, it will not be open for comments but feel free to like!
I selected Alison Saar’s Swing Low: Harriet Tubman Memorial (2008) as my first blog post because it is such a powerful and compelling image, and I am currently obsessed with Harriet Tubman as a woman and as a historical figure. The first public monument to an African American woman in New York City, the statue is located at Harriet Tubman Square, formed at the intersection of St. Nicholas Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard at West 122nd Street in Harlem.
The contrast between the verdigris patina of her coat and skirt and the slate black patina of her skin are visually striking. With a stoic expression and determined gaze (think Roman portrait bust), Tubman moves forward with the steam of a locomotive. The bottom of her skirt becomes the pilot of a train, sometimes called a cattle catcher, which was the device mounted at the front of a locomotive to deflect obstacles on the track that might derail the train. Embedded in her skirt are portraits of anonymous faces, the passengers of the Underground Railroad, as well as objects carried north by fugitive slaves including cowry shells, medicine bottles, time pieces, shoe souls, and the broken manacles of slavery.
Trailing behind Tubman and attached to a boulder and her skirt are tree roots. These gnarled, intertwined roots represent Tubman’s efforts to uproot the system of slavery and the “pulling up of roots by the slaves and all they had to leave behind.” Along the base of the sculpture, Saar included bronze quilt blocks: traditional geometric quilt designs as well as applique blocks of scenes from Tubman’s rescue efforts to the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
I think that Saar ‘s conception of Tubman is based on the 1869 frontispiece from Sarah Bradford’s Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. In June 1863, Tubman became the first woman to lead an armed military raid when she guided Col. James Montgomery and his 2nd South Carolina black regiment up the Combahee River, routing Confederate outposts, liberating more than 700 slaves, and destroying stockpiles of cotton, food, and weapons. Saar incorporated the core visual elements of the nineteenth-century wood engraving including the head wrap, the pleated skirt, and the Union army issued sack coat and haversack. Strikingly, Saar omitted the 1861 Springfield rifled musket. I speculate that Saar and city planners chose deliberately to omit the weapon because of the location of the memorial across from the 28th Precinct of the NYPD, and its long and difficult history of policing the once predominantly black Harlem. What would it have meant to have a statue of an armed black women in such a prominent public space?
BROOKLYN TERMINAL FOR LONG ISLAND RAILROAD 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 Roosevelt Island Historical Society
Sources
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The Roosevelt Island Historical Society and the New York Public Library are proud to host author Richard Panchyk and his presentation of his book “Abandoned Queens”.
TUESDAY, MARCH 16TH, 7 P.M.
VIA ZOOM Click below to register: https://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2021/03/16/abandoned-queens
There are many places in New York City’s borough of Queens where traces of the past linger, haunting reminders of the way things used to be, sometimes hidden and sometimes in plain sight. In this presentation, author Richard Panchyk takes us on a journey through his book Abandoned Queens, through a variety of fascinating abandoned places in Queens, including the chilling Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, the meandering remains of the country’s first modern highway, and a defunct airport reclaimed by wilderness. Because Queens is so densely populated, these abandoned places usually coexist adjacent to living, thriving locations, making for an often eerie and beautiful juxtaposition of old and new, used and unused. From an eerie old railroad line in Forest Hills to a destroyed neighborhood in the Rockaways, the poignant images in this book are filled with context and history.
Irving T. Bush
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigationJump to search Irving Ter Bush
Irving Ter Bush (July 12, 1869 – October 21, 1948) was an American businessman. He was the son of the wealthy industrialist, oil refinery owner, and yachtsman Rufus T. Bush.
As founder of the Bush Terminal Company, Bush was responsible for the construction of the massive Bush Terminal transportation, warehousing, and manufacturing facility in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, New York City which employed more than 25,000 people within its boundaries. Bush also commissioned Manhattan’s landmark Bush Tower skyscraper on 42nd Street near New York City’s Times Square and funded the construction of Bush House in London. A prolific author, his life and works attracted attention from the national press, influential figures, and major publishers and journalists.
Early Years….Not from an Average Family
Born in Ridgeway, Lenawee County, Michigan, a small town southwest of Detroit, Bush moved with his family at a young age to Brooklyn, New York, at the time an independent city. When he was in his teens, his father sold his Brooklyn waterfront oil refinery to Standard Oil and retired.Bush was educated at The Hill School, a boarding school outside Philadelphia, and joined his father’s firm at age 19.
The two-masted schooner yacht Coronet, a 136-foot (41 m) vessel that Rufus had built during the mid-1880s, influenced Irving’s life, for the ocean race between the Coronet and the yacht Dauntless in March 1887 made Rufus T. Bush and the victorious Coronet famous—the New York Times devoted its entire first page for March28, 1887 to the story.[ Rufus and Irving then circumnavigated the globe on the Coronet in 1888. Though they traveled overland and did not join the yacht until it arrived in San Diego in 1889, the Coronet was the first registered yacht to cross Cape Horn from East to West.] After crossing the Pacific Ocean, the Coronet stopped in China, Calcutta, Malta (and elsewhere), giving him a view of the world that few had at the time] The Coronet was sold before Rufus’s death in 1890,[4] when Rufus accidentally drank a fatal dose of aconite. Rufus T. Bush left an estate estimated at $2,000,000 to his wife and two sons.[8] The family heirs quickly incorporated under the name The Bush Co.[2] Bush, as a 21-year-old clerk for Standard Oil, could have lived off his inherited wealth and retired from the business life.
Motion Pictures
Bush was chair of the Continental Commerce Co., which had exclusive rights to market Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope overseas. The kinetoscope was the earliest motion picture viewer. Unlike later movie projectors, kinetoscopes could show a moving image to only one person at a time. The Continental Commerce Co. opened the first licensed European kinetoscope parlor in London in 1894.
Bush Terminal
Bush’s connection with Edison’s motion pictures was brief. Soon after, during the mid-1890s, Bush started the planning and construction of Bush Terminal on the Brooklyn waterfront site where his father’s former oil refinery had been located.
To induce railroads to use his car floats, (i.e. using the barges that transported railroad cars across New York Harbor), Bush had to resort to ordering dozens of carloads of hay from Michigan himself. To show shippers that using the wharves and warehouses at the new terminal could be profitable, Bush entered the banana business. Within two decades, the complex originally derided as “Bush’s Folly” became a great success. Though the complex was seized for government use during the First World War by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bush complied with government demands. He even helped to design the Brooklyn Army Terminal for General Goethals in 1918.
Bush was named Chief Executive of the War Board of the Port of New York in 1917, during World War I. This would later become the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
During this period before and during World War I, Bush planned and had built Bush Tower, a landmark 30-story Neo-Gothic skyscraper on 42nd Street in Manhattan, just east of Times Square.[15][16] The tower was conceived as display space for the manufacturers and shippers of Bush Terminal and New York. An even more ambitious venture was Bush’s attempt to meld commercial displays and social space in London at Bush House, an elaborate and large office building built in three phases during the 1920s, but the concept was not fully carried through at that project.[17] Bush House was known around the globe today as the headquarters of the BBC World Service, which broadcast in 32 languages to all parts of the world.
Image Courtesy Museum of the City of New York
Contributions to art and architecture
Within recent decades, scholarly architects have described and critiqued the buildings Bush had commissioned. Perhaps mindful of the Dutch ancestry of his family (and of New York’s), Bush’s 1905 townhouse at 28 East 64th Street, in Manhattan, built by the firm of Kirby, Petit & Green was “flamboyantly Jacobean, with a high, almost Flemish gable”.
Bush commissioned southern California architect Wallace Neff to design his winter home at Mountain Lake Estates in Florida, near the residence (and later tower) of his father’s former business partner, Edward W. Bok. Neff, who had recently been named “architect to the stars” by the Los Angeles Times, designed few houses outside California.
He also commissioned the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. to design the grounds of the Florida estate. Olmsted was known not only as the son of Central Park’s designer, but among numerous other accomplishments, was notable for re-designing the White House grounds in 1930.
After moving from his townhouse at East 64th Street, Bush lived in the 17-floor tower at 280 Park Avenue, Manhattan, New York, designed by Warren and Wetmore, architects of Grand Central Terminal in New York City, Michigan Central Station in Detroit and the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu.
Bush became one of the founding trustees of New York City’s Grand Central Art Galleries, an artists’ cooperative established that year by John Singer Sargent, Edmund Greacen, Walter Leighton Clark, and others.[33] Also on the board were the Galleries’ architect, William Adams Delano; Robert W. DeForest, president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Frank Logan, vice-president of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Personal life
Bush was in the news from a young age, when he was mentioned in stories of the Coronet’s circumnavigation. He married Belle Barlow, with whom he had two daughters, Eleanor and Beatrice. Divorcing her, he married Maud Beard and had one son, Rufus, named after Irving’s father.[citation needed]
His 1930 divorce in Reno, Nevada, and remarriage one hour later to dentist, artist, socialite, and philanthropist Marian Spore Bush made the front page of the New York Times as well as the “Milestones” section of Time magazine.[36] Irving had met Marian, a fellow Michigan expatriate, while working together on a breadline in New York’s impoverished Bowery during the late 1920s. After their marriage, they lived at 280 Park Avenue along with Mrs. Marian Spore Bush’s niece Helen Tunison, who after Irving’s death, dedicated the statue of him at Bush Terminal in front of 3,000 people.[37]
Bush owned two yachts that subsequently served as patrol boats in the United States Navy. In 1917, during the First World War, the navy bought his 164-foot-long (50 m) steam yacht Christabel and commissioned the vessel as the USS Christabel (SP-162), which took part in at least two actions against German U-Boats and was credited with sinking one. (See Navy History website) A sailor even won a Medal of Honor during one of these engagements. His larger 185-foot-long (56 m) diesel yacht, Coronet, built for him in Germany in 1928 and placed under his wife’s name during the Great Depression, was bought by the Navy during World War II and patrolled the Caribbean as the USS Opal (Pyc-8) before being transferred to Ecuador in 1943, where it was scrapped in 1960.
Legacy
Bush left behind Bush Terminal, which not only provided a model for intermodal transportation, it provided employment for thousands and their families. His Bush Tower in Manhattan and Bush House are both landmarks.
TODAY
The area around the terminal has been reclaimed into a charming waterfront park. Thanks to Lisa Fernandez for telling me about the park and Irving Bush!
You can take a local historic landmark with a visit into Blackwell House. The house is open to the public Wednesday thru Sunday from11 a.m. to 5 p.m. (closed 2-3 p.m.)
THE PORT OF MIAMI THE LARGEST CRUISE TERMINAL IN THE COUNTRY, DODGE ISLAND TOM WEISE 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)
WIKIPEDIA
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
The Roosevelt Island Historical Society and the New York Public Library are proud to host author Richard Panchyk and his presentation of his book “Abandoned Queens”.
There are many places in New York City’s borough of Queens where traces of the past linger, haunting reminders of the way things used to be, sometimes hidden and sometimes in plain sight. In this presentation, author Richard Panchyk takes us on a journey through his book Abandoned Queens, through a variety of fascinating abandoned places in Queens, including the chilling Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, the meandering remains of the country’s first modern highway, and a defunct airport reclaimed by wilderness. Because Queens is so densely populated, these abandoned places usually coexist adjacent to living, thriving locations, making for an often eerie and beautiful juxtaposition of old and new, used and unused. From an eerie old railroad line in Forest Hills to a destroyed neighborhood in the Rockaways, the poignant images in this book are filled with context and history.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 10, 2021
THE 307th EDITION
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
CROSSING THE ATLANTIC
STEPHEN BLANK
Black Ball ship Montezuma By Antonio Jacobsen – Christie’s, LotFinder: entry 5648386 (sale 2670, lot 2030, New York, 25 January 2013), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23751297
Crossing the Atlantic, Part I
In March 1959, I left Dartmouth (long story), purchased the cheapest fare possible and boarded the Queen Mary (the original) from the famous Pier 54 and set off for Southampton. A total innocent, I had no idea of the ship’s grand salons and ballrooms I would never see. But I vividly remember climbing to the highest point I could reach and watching the stormy waves rise up to what seemed eye level before crashing down, more like broken glass than water. Over the next few years, I did two more Atlantic crossings and a mid-winter round trip sailing between Marseilles and Haifa. Only years later was I willing even to get on a river cruise.
But crossing the Atlantic by liner is a good story and very much involves New York. On board all.
Folks did sail across the Atlantic in colonial times. But few made the journey for pleasure. Businessmen, diplomats, men on the run – but most of the human cargo was migrants (coming and, about a third, returning).
Mail ships were the earliest regularly scheduled Atlantic crossings. The British Government started operating monthly mail brigs from Falmouth, Cornwall, to New York in 1756. These ships carried few non-governmental passengers and no cargo. Ben Franklin an amazing traveler, made eight crossings, possibly on these vessels.
In the early 19th century, sailing ships took about six weeks to cross the Atlantic. (Columbus made it in 36 days, but not all the way to New York.) With adverse winds or bad weather the journey could take as long as fourteen weeks. When this happened passengers would often run short of provisions which they had to bring on board themselves.
Early on, captains waited until they had a full enough ship and then departed. The novel idea was packet ships that departed from port on a regular schedule. The typical packet sailed between American and British ports, and the ships were designed for the North Atlantic, where storms and rough seas were common.
The first of the packet lines was the Black Ball Line, which began sailing between New York City and Liverpool in 1818. Packets were contracted by governments to carry mail and also carried passengers and timely items such as newspapers. The line originally had four ships, and it advertised that one of its ships would leave New York on the first of each month irrespective of cargo or passengers. Within a few years several other companies followed the example of the Black Ball Line, and the North Atlantic was being crossed by ships that regularly battled the elements while trying to remain on schedule.
Average time for packets to cross between New York and Liverpool was 23 days eastward and 40 days westward. But many times, crossing were much longer, and westward passages of 65 to 90 days were not uncommon. The best time from New York to Liverpool was the 15 days 16 hours achieved at the end of 1823 by the ship New York. American packets, based in New York, dominated this market.
Travel times might be better, but the trip was not very pleasant. Wealthier, more distinguished passengers fared a bit better. But it was rough sailing. One historian observes, “In 1842 the British government attempted to bring an end to the exploitation of passengers by passing legislation that made it the responsibility of the shipping company to provide adequate food and water on the journey. However, the specified seven pounds a week of provisions was not very generous. Food provided by the shipping companies included bread, biscuits and potatoes. This was usually of poor quality. One government official who inspected provisions in Liverpool in 1850 commented that ‘the bread is mostly condemned bread ground over with a little fresh flour, sugar and saleratus and rebaked’.” (SB: “fresh flour, sugar and baking powder and then baked again”)
Steam changed everything. Only a dozen years after Fulton’s Clermont steamed from New York City to Albany—150 miles—in 32 hours, the Savannah in 1819, an American sailing ship with auxiliary steam engines and two paddle wheels that could be folded away on deck, made the first steam-assisted crossing of the Atlantic. In reality, she (always “she”) used her engines only a fraction of the time and mostly when she was in sight of critical eyes ashore. No one could be found who was willing to risk the trip, so Savannah carried no passengers. In the end, the steam experiment failed, and Savannah was converted back to full sails. (The name Savannah appeared again in another unsuccessful experiment – the USS Savannah was the first and last nuclear powered merchant ship, in 1955.)
In 1838, the British and American Steam Navigation Co.’s Sirius left Ireland with 40 paying passengers for a historic voyage to New York. It took 18 days and the Sirius ran out of coal—the crew had to burn cabin furniture and even a mast—but it was the first passenger ship to cross the Atlantic entirely on steam power. There’s a story here, involving competition between lines and the beginning of a new era of Atlantic liner history.
The Great Western Steamship Company was an outgrowth of the yet incomplete Great Western Railway. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was chief engineer. The Great Western Company was ready to send its new ship, Great Western from Bristol to New York. The British and American Steam Navigation Company was also planning a transatlantic steamship service, but because its first ship was unfinished, British and American chartered the Irish Sea steamer, the Sirius from the St. George Steam Packet Company for two voyages. Sirius left Cork four days before Great Western departed, but Great Western still came within a day of overtaking Sirius to New York.
Because British and American did not begin its regular service until the following year, the Great Western Steam Ship Company is considered the first regular transatlantic steamship service. Great Western was launched in July 1837 and ready for her maiden Bristol-New York voyage the following April and the Company operated the first regular transatlantic steamer service from 1838 until 1846.
In fact, the Great Western Company didn’t achieve a dominant position in Atlantic passenger trade when it failed to win a mail contract – although it was a pioneer in ship building. Cunard was the winner.
With the birth of the Cunard Line in 1840 a steamship company promised to deliver its passengers to their destinations on a regular timetable. Cunard’s first four small steamers, all commissioned in 1840-41, had actually launched something completely new in ocean travel: constant, reliable service on a fixed schedule.
But wind was still important. These early steamers weren’t pure steamships, but wooden-hulled sailing ships with steam engines and great side paddle wheels. They used their sails whenever possible, to enhance speed and to promote fuel economy. Coal was bulky and expensive, and making steam was a noisy and dirty process. Nautical technology would need years of development before steam completely displaced sail.
The nineteenth century saw great waves of emigration from the Old World to the New, but in the early days of steam, few emigrants arrived under steam power. The four original Cunard ships, each with space for only 115 passengers, made no provision for steerage passengers at all, concentrating on their main task, which was the speedy and safe delivery of the Royal Mail.
The new world of the grand trans-Atlantic passenger steamship (whose revenues were largely based on immigrants in steerage class) was about to begin. It would include both the worst – Irish “coffin ships” – and the best – an entire new class of elegance in Atlantic travel. New York was the destination for most of these passages, but foreign companies dominated the industry.
Britannia of 1840, the first Cunard liner built for the transatlantic By Wikid77 -http://cunardline.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/rmsbritannia.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4242795
MARK YOUR CALENDARS FOR OUR EVENTS
UPCOMING PROGRAMS ON ZOOM
Registration will be available before each event All events are at 7 p.m.
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.
EXCLUSIVE NYC MAP DESIGN MASKS AND ZIPPER POUCHES MASKS $18-, ZIPPER POUCHES $12- AT RIHS VISITOR KIOSK
Thom Heyer was the only person to recognize Miss Hunter.
** Yesterday’s image was the library at the Morgan Library.
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)
STEPHEN BLANK
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
DIANE PRYOR HOLLAND, WILLIAM DANIELS AND ROCHELLE HOLLAND IN FRONT OF: “IN THAT NUMBER” A QUILT BY WILLIAM DANIELS
PURPLE PEACOCK SWIRL DIANE PRIOR HOLLAND
ROCHELLE HOLLAND
HEAD ROOSTER
DIANE PRYOR-HOLLAND
I PRESENT MISS BILLIE
TOTEM SERIES DANIEL WILLIAMS
DIANE PRYOR-HOLLAND
LEFT: FREEDOM FIGHTER: MISS FANNIE LOU HAMER RIGHT:FLOATING DIAMONDS
DIANE PRYOR – HOLLAND
is well known and active in many quilting groups including: Quilt N Queens, Brooklyn Quilters Guild, Empire Quilting Guild, Quilters of Color of NYC, Quits for Cops ABOVE IS QUILT MADE IN HONOR OR POLICE OFFICER.
JUNGLE FRIENDS
DIANE PRIOR-HOLLAND
STAINED GLASS WITH AFRICAN ART KAREN BROWN
DR. ROCHELLE A. HOLLAND
DR. ROCHELLE A. HOLLAND
QUILT BIO
My educational background is in sociology and mental health; however as a teen, during the weekends , I took classes at a local arts center. During 2012, I started learning mixed media art by watching YouTube and completing classes at Craftsy. Currently I enjoy creating mixed media fine art by using fabric, canvas and/or paper as substrata. I equally enjoy designing and sewing quilts. I have always admired the works of other artists and I have grown to enjoy my autistic process and work,
JINNY EWALD, THOM HEYER, TOM VISEE, HARA REISER, GLORIA HERMAN, ARLENE BESSENOFF ALL GOT IT !!!
FROM A READER I remember seeing the submarine Turtle, which was displayed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard when that was still a military facility. As for Revolutionary history, my cousin, Art Cohn, founder and emeritus executive director of the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum, is writing a book about Benedict Arnold and his role in the history of the time. Stay tuned. Matt Katz
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)
DIANE PRYOR HOLLAND, WILLIAM DANIELS, ROCHELLE HOLLAND
ROOSEVELT ISLAND VISUAL ARTS ASSOCIATION
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
