I noticed this little building with a large identity. Lucky that my pal Mitch Waxman has investigated and found the interesting history of this business. From the NEWTOWN PENTICLE
It’s funny how you can walk by things just about every day and not take notice of them. Case in point are the stubby streets which intersect with Jackson Avenue when turning west out of Queensboro Bridge Plaza. A couple of them have been mentioned in recent weeks- Dutch Kills and Queens Streets come to mind, but the ones closer to Queens Blvd. haven’t.
What drew me down Orchard Street wasn’t affected by the inquisitive NYPD patrol car which slowly followed this odd looking fellow in a dirty black raincoat who was taking photographs of warehouses, for I was following the amazing pattern of reflected light emanating from the blue glass of the newly constructed Gotham Center. The cops were intensely curious as to my purpose, but not so much that they rolled down a window or got out of the car. Lucky day, thought I, to have a personal bodyguard watching my back while I captured a few shots of the Rosenwasser Bros. facade.
Confession that I had indeed noticed the signage of this facade before must be offered, but for some reason, a conviction that the company had something to do with water tanks had always possessed me. Couldn’t be further from that, it turns out, as the Rosenwassers were magnates in the rag trade.
They started out, like many Jewish garment tycoons, in the shirtwaist business in lower Manhattan. Running what 21st century eyes would process as a sweatshop, they accumulated enough money to set up a large industrial combine in Queens shortly after the opening of the bridge in 1909, and won several military as well as civilian contracts.
By 1913, they were an established and well known Queensican company run by its President- Morris Rosenwasser.
They manufactured baseball cleats sold under Babe Ruth branding in peacetime, and manufactured military footwear and gas masks during war. Also, they supplied the Boy Scouts, and manufactured all sorts of specialty shoes. The large building with the red awning just to the east of the offices isn’t their facility, instead, that was a Steinway Piano plant.
It is presumed that the large parking lot which currently enjoys tenancy on the corner of Jackson between Orchard and Queens Streets was the location of the factory they maintained, which at its height in 1918, employed some 2,500 people.
The Rosenwasser factory, during the first World War, was in possession of several valuable contracts with the Federal Government. The mill turned out an average of 6,000 pairs of shoes a day, 15,000 pairs of leggings, and an undetermined number of canvas gas masks, rucksacks, and other commodities for the war department.
A so called “open shop,” the Rosenwassers were prime movers in a case (Rosenwasser Bros. Inc. v. Pepper et al, NYS Supreme Court October 1918) which defined the rights and limitations of organized labor during wartime for a generation.
It seems that the United Shoe Workers of America, a Boston based trade union, sent an organizer to the Rosenwasser factory to create a new local. Aggressive tactics and a general unwillingness to compromise brought production to a halt, threatening the company with default and failure to deliver on its Federal contracts. After wrangling with the organizer and his masters in New England, Morris Rosenwasser decided to sue.
The resulting case declared that whereas labor has the right to organize and negotiate for better conditions of employment, the essential nature of war production trumped their rights to “go out”, and binding Federal arbitration would be labors only recourse.
It should be mentioned, Lords and Ladies, what the name of that labor organizer from New England was…
Sources list no first name for him, only a surname… which was Gilman. from 1919’s THE MISCELLANEOUS REPORTS OASES DECIDED IN THE COURTS OF RECORD OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK OTHER THAN THE Court of Appeals and the Appellate Division 01 the Supreme Court, courtesy google books
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
NEWTOWN PENTICLE (C) MITCH WAXMAN
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FROM THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM AND EPHEMERAL NEW YORK
Leonard Pytlak, Uptown, ca. 1939, color lithograph, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from D.C. Public Library, 1967.72.217
The curious el train in the nocturnal 1930s city
April 5, 2021 From Ephemeral New York
When this lithograph was made by Leonard Pytlak in 1935, Manhattan’s elevated train lines were still screeching and lurching up and down the city’s major avenues.
Already made obsolete by subways and buses and soon to be dismantled, the el trains were noisy pieces of machinery that operated high above sidewalks yet helped transform late 19th century Gotham from a horse-powered town to a mighty metropolis of steel tracks.
But if the trains were emblems of the modern machine age, why is the lone figure crossing the nighttime street below the tracks so much larger than the train itself? And why is the street no wider than an alley? My guess is that Pytlak might be trying to humanize the el train, giving us a Modernist scene of out of proportion shapes with the soft light of Post-Impressionism. There’s also the influence of Ashcan social realism here: a Belgian block city street lined with a hotel and tenements.
Born in 1910, Pytlak was a lithographer who studied at the Art Students League and worked for the New York City WPA Graphics Program from 1934 to 1941, according to the Illinois State Museum. The museum has this strangely alluring lithograph, titled “Uptown,” in its collection.
Tags: Art Students League, Elevated Trains 1930s, Elevated Trains NYC Paintings, Leonard Pytlak, Leonard Pytlak Uptown, New York City 1930s Paintings
Leonard Pytlak, Side Track, n.d., color lithograph, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from D.C. Public Library, 1967.72.216
Leonard Pytlak, Fall Day, n.d., color lithograph, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from D.C. Public Library, 1967.72.318
Leonard Pytlak, New for Old, ca. 1939-1940, color lithograph, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from D.C. Public Library, 1967.72.21
Leonard Pytlak, Dock Wallopers, ca. 1939-1940, color woodcut on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Audrey McMahon, 1968.98.19
Leonard Pytlak, Back Alley, ca. 1935-1943, lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Jean Nichols, 1974.38.57
SOUTHPOINT PARK EAST SIDE LOOKING TOWARD THE SOON TO BE DEDICATED HOPE MEMORIAL (STATUES ARE IN GREEN BOX)
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)
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM EPHEMERAL NEW YORK
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated PHOTOS BY JUDITH BERDY / RIHS (C)
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Reclining Liberty by Zaq Landsberg, Marcus Garvey Park
Spring is a great time to be out and about in New York City seeing public art. It’s not too cold, it’s not too hot, it’s usually just right. There is an abundance of new public art on display this month, from up in the Bronx, where an eagerly awaited exhibition by Yayoi Kusama will be featured at New York Botanical Garden, to Prospect Heights, Brooklyn where a meditative sound installation bellows among blossoming cherry trees. You could promenade through the city taking in culture and art without ever being inside. Check out the new and ongoing public art on display and plan to make a day of fresh air art experiences.
Reclining Liberty by artist Zaq Landsberg is set to premiere, after much delay, in Morningside Park on April 26. The slightly weary-looking Lady Liberty, posed on her side, head propped up by her hand seems to be waiting, like most of us, for better days that surely are coming.
The sculpture is composed mostly of plaster resin and coated with oxidized copper paint to mimic the copper patina of the real Statue of Liberty. The artist, in explaining his draw to monuments states, “They are literally where the political and the aesthetic meet.” You can visit the public art statue at the base of the stairs at 120th Street and Manhattan Avenue in Harlem.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg statue at City Point in downtown Brooklyn. Photo by Bob Krasner
Artists Gillie and Marc created this bronze statue of late U.S. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to commemorate her in the struggle for gender equality and human rights. The statue, located in downtown Brooklyn is one of ten statues of notable women installed in NYC by the artists to increase the representation of women in public sculpture from 3 to 10% . The double-step base represents the Supreme Court and the climb she made to get there.
Narcissus Garden by Yayoi Kusama Photo Courtesy of New York Botanical Garden
The long-delayed garden exhibition KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature will open at New York Botanical Garden on April 10th. The exhibition will be a comprehensive survey of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama lifelong obsession with the natural world. KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature will include programs, a publication, and exhibits both in the gardens and within the surrounding buildings of the 250-acre landscape.
Giant Pin Cushion art installation incorporated into the Garment District Alliance kiosk district created with colorful botanical materials by Floratorium artists. Photo courtesy of Garment District Alliance
The enormous bronze needle and button public art sculpture you may have seen on 7th Ave next to the garment district info kiosk has a companion for the summer titled Pin Cushion. The giant floral arrangement has transformed the Garment District Alliance kiosk into a delightful place to stop, look and get information about the district.
Pin Cushion was created by Patricia Gonzalez and Carlos Franqui of Floratorium and is made up of 50+ bales of curly willow, nine wisteria bales, and hundreds of faux hydrangeas, poppies, greenery, and butterflies. New Yorkers are encouraged to stop by and visit the exhibit through the summer.
The Flag Project at Rockefeller Center features 83 winning photographs produced as flags. Photo courtesy of courtesy of Tishman Speyer
The Flag Project 2021 is a public art installation celebrating the medium of photography with 83 winning submissions produced as flags flown on the iconic flagpoles of Rockefeller Center. The public art installation also features guest photographers, invited by Aperture, who have helped define New York in photographs, including Kwame Brathwaite, Renee Cox, Elliott Erwitt, Duane Michals, Ryan McGinley, Susan Meiselas, Nan Goldin, and Tyler Mitchell.
The 2021 Flag Project installation will showcase the diversity, energy, endurance and imagination of NYC with photographs of, for or inspired by the city’s faces, objects and textures. The Flag Project is on display through April 30.
Jamal Shabazz with his photograph in the Aperture Lightbox installation in Rockefeller Center. photo courtesy courtesy of Tishman Speyer.
Aperture and Rockefeller Center present an outdoor exhibition of New York City street and subway photographs by Jamel Shabazz, who is known for his authentic and spontaneous depictions of NYC life. Jamel’s career began in 1980 and spans forty years. Fourteen of Shabazz’s portraits will be displayed in the heart of the city, installed on seven-foot-tall lightboxes across Rockefeller Center’s public plazas. From youth culture to a wide range of social conditions, Shabazz’s street photographs are an endearing and truthful depiction of his subjects from the 1980s to the present. You can see them in the Rockefeller public plazas alongside the Flag Project installation.
A sweeping survey of KAW’S career from his roots as a graffiti artist to a dominating force in contemporary art, KAWS: WHAT PARTYhighlights five overarching tenets in the artist’s practice. You will be immersed in the art of KAWS through the various sections of the exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.
Renowned for his pop culture-inspired characters in paintings and sculpture and playful use of abstraction with meticulous execution, the show covers drawings, paintings, bronze sculptures, objects and monumental wooden sculptures of his well known COMPANION character. Museum visitors can digitally interact with the art through AR (augmented reality) app on their smartphones. The exhibition is on view through September 5, 2021.
HALL OF FAME OF GREAT AMERICANS BRONX COMMUNITY COLLEGE, FORMERLY NYU UPTOWN JAY JACOBSON, M. FRANK, ANDY SPARBERG, T. VISEE, WILLA KLEIN ALL GOT IT RGHT!!
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:
UNTAPPED NEW YORK
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He started as an architect and was caught in political corruption scandal, then was introduced to new artistic interpretations
Oscar Bluemner, Evening Tones, 1911-1917, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of James F. Dicke II and museum purchase made possible by the American Art Forum, the Julia D. Strong Endowment and the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2002.24
Former Bronx Borough Courthouse
Between E. 161st St., Brook Ave., and Third Ave.
Oscar Bluemner (with Michael Garvin and Max Hausel)
1905-1914
The courthouse, a compact four-story mass of smooth granite, is divided almost evenly between a deeply rusticated two-story base and an upper portion where piers, pilasters and tall windows rise to a cornice and attic story. A preliminary sketch shows a high dome and cupola, never built, which would have visually absorbed the upthrust and perhaps more satisfyingly resolved the relation of vertical and horizontal. To fit its site, the building is trapezoidal in plan, narrowing toward the side facing down Third Avenue. This façade is penetrated at ground level by a great arched portal scooped out of the heavy stonework. Above it, the façade retreats into a deep bay flanked by two colossal cylindrical columns, between which is poised Jules Eduard Roiné’s larger-than-life-sized marble statue of Justice. Behind her, on the rear wall of the recess, the arch of the lower portal is repeated as a window frame, surmounted by a lion’s-head keystone.
In this Third Avenue front, and its variations on the other sides of the courthouse, very familiar elements of Beaux-Arts classicism have been used with restraint to construct a powerful architectural emblem—the force and threat of the Law represented below, its rationality and self-control above. In compensation for its structural austerity, the Third Avenue façade is enlivened by sharply chiseled geometrical inventions. Intricate frames, stylized swags, and complicated broken pediments surround the windows, some of which puncture the wall with unusually deep, shadowy apertures. Thick bullet-headed finials top the attic. There is even a motif—a set of three classical guttae (or “drops”)—which appears with witty persistence in all sorts of unexpected positions. The total effect is strikingly modern, in the manner of Viennese and Parisian buildings of the period, and very unlike New York’s turn-of-the-century architectural ornament.
How did the Bronx come by this remarkable Beaux-Arts building? By accident.
In 1903, the first President of the borough, Louis Haffen, passed on the contract for a courthouse design, worth $40,000, to his political right-hand-man, Michael Garvin. (“If you have the pull,” Garvin acknowledged later, “you get the work.”) Haffen was only following the Tammany tradition of rewarding loyalty with fat public works assignments. But his friend (despite serving as Building Commissioner) proved to have such limited architectural skills that his plans were rejected by the New York Art Commission, which derided them as “egregious” and “despicable.” The unfortunate Garvin was forced to seek out an underemployed architect, offering to share fees and credit in return for an acceptable building.
That he turned to Oscar Bluemner, a German émigré who had been a prize student at Berlin’s Royal Academy, was a stroke of fortune for Bronx architecture. But not for Bluemner: when the drawings had been prepared, Garvin submitted them as his own work, and ignored both promised credit and payment. The outraged Bluemner sued and won, his testimony leading to an investigation, which eventually resulted in Haffen’s dismissal. Bluemner, however, was awarded only about one-quarter of the amount he felt he was owed, and forced to allow Garvin main credit for the building; in disappointment, he gave up his profession a short while later, and turned to painting. Official records—even those of the Landmarks Commission—continued to attribute the courthouse to Garvin.
Like its designer, the building itself suffered from the political environment. Construction, begun in 1905, was drawn out until 1914, and cost two million dollars, more than twice the original estimate. (Not coincidentally, Garvin remained as supervising architect through the project.) By 1934 the county had found reasons to build a new courthouse, eventually leaving only a police court at the Third Avenue site. When the building was officially closed by the city in 1977, vandals undertook the stripping of its metalwork until all doorways and windows were sealed with concrete blocks (leveling off Bluemner’s deep embrasures). Although a 1981 designation as a landmark helped protect the courthouse from threatened razing, serious repairs have never been undertaken: the building is currently on the Landmarks Conservancy’s most endangered list. And lively plans for occupancy by community design and museum groups were thwarted when the courthouse was sold to a private developer for a derisory $130,000.
But things may be looking up. The new owner has performed a much-needed exterior cleaning—the Tammany-purchased granite having begun to yellow even before the building was completed—and found a tenant. Meanwhile, after revival of critical interest in his paintings led to a 2005 show at the Whitney Museum, the imaginative Oscar Bluemner is at last being acknowledged as author of this sophisticated public building.
David Bady
Photographs: Lehman College Art Gallery and David Bady
AFTER ARCHITECTURE, A CAREER IN ART
Oscar Bluemner, Self-Portrait, 1933, oil on panel, 19 3/4 x 14 3/4 in. Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
Sunset
Early life
Bluemner was born as Friedrich Julius Oskar Blümner in Prenzlau, Germany, on June 21, 1867. He studied painting and architecture at the Royal Academy of Design in Berlin.
Old Canal Port
Painting
In 1908 Bluemner met Alfred Stieglitz, who introduced him to the artistic innovations of the European and American avant-garde. By 1910, Bluemner had decided to pursue painting full-time rather than architecture.
He exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show. He said that the Americans’ contribution failed to match that of the Europeans because the American selection process reflected rivalries and compromises rather than curatorial judgment, resulting in a “melée of antagonistic examples”. Then in 1915 Stieglitz gave him a solo exhibition at his gallery, 291. Despite participating in several exhibitions, including solo shows, for the next ten years Bluemner failed to sell many paintings and lived with his family in near poverty. He created paintings for the Federal Arts Project in the 1930s.
Morning Light
Fourth, not so much Counterintuitive, but rather not noticed – the lack of freight railways in the City.
Later life
After his wife’s death in 1926, Bluemner moved to South Braintree, Massachusetts. From there in 1932 he contributed a letter to an ongoing debate in the New York Times on the question “What is American Art?”. He wrote:
America sells its shoes, machines, canned beef and so forth in Europe and all over the world not because they have an American style or are wrapped in the American flag, but simply because they are best. Thus also, the French export their paintings and birth-control, and the Germans export sauerkraut and prima donnas, because those things, each, are best. Today, for quality, nationalism, as a race-attribute, means nothing; chemistry, astronomy, or engineering admit, nowhere, of any national flavoring, nor do higher things like religion or philosophy.
Let us, here, make progressive and best painting, each one as he is fit to do, and merely ask: What and when is painting, in a critical sense? … How can the people agree on what is American style, if the painters themselves, and by their work, disagree profoundly as to what real painting itself is! And there is, and always was, nothing more contemptible, ridiculous and, to art, disastrous, than patrioteering, which thinly veils profiteering.
Ideally, art, pure, is of a sphere and of no country; the first real artists, always and everywhere, have either been importers or immigrants bringing the light with them. El Greco, an immigrant … defied the Spanish professors … ; we, now, call his work more truly Spanish than that of his local contemporaries. And in the same sense, the future will not fail to stamp that of our own work as peculiarly American in which the living painter, here, has injected no conscious thought of his hailing from Hoboken or Kankakee, and every consideration of pure and modern painting and of the supreme quality he maybe capable of.
He had a successful one-man show in 1935 at the Marie Harriman Gallery in New York City. In the New York Times, Edward Alden Jewell called it Bluemner’s “apotheosis”. He wrote:
He is very much alive and has been working of late … with robustious [sic] results. These twenty-eight canvases bear the generic title , “New Landscape Paintings.” That is because Mr. Blkuemner feels that some degree of “representation” is essential if abstract ideas are to be put over with entire success. However, the artist more fully and more exactly classifies them as “compositions for color themes.” He might, if he chose, even call them “color music” without risking the opprobrium that usually attends excursions into so hazardous a field. … These startling pictures build harmonies and rhythms that depend as a rule on simple statement. Here we find none of the overtones and undertones that some other artists have employed in projecting visual music. Bluemner relies for his effect upon plain, resonant chords. Though modulations of tone occur, these seem of secondary importance in his scheme. There is decidedly something in this new, bold, exclamatory style.
Bluemner committed suicide on January 12, 1938
Oscar Bluemner’s “Abruzzi Mountains,” is a 1922 watercolor. (Stetson University)
Legacy
Stetson University holds more than 1,000 pieces of Oscar Bluemner’s work bequeathed in 1997 by his daughter, Vera Bluemner Kouba. In 2009 the Homer and Dolly Hand Art Center at Stetson opened with a primary mission of housing a providing exhibition space for the Kouba Collection.[11] Often overlooked in his lifetime, Bluemner now is widely acknowledged as a key player in the creation of American artistic Modernism, with better-known colleagues such as Georgia O’Keeffe and John Marin.[
LEFT: STETSON UNIVERSITY RIGHT: Oscar Bluemner, Last Evening of the Year, c. 1929. Oil on board mounted on wood, 13 3/4 × 9 3/4 in. (34.9 × 24.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art; gift of Juliana Force 31.115
Painting of factories at Paterson by overlooked Armory Show artist Oscar Bluemner.
FROM ANDY SPARBERG, OUR RAIL PROFESSIONAL:
I would like to take the liberty of adding some information about the Penn Station project. Besides establishing a New York City station, the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) also wanted to create through train operation between Boston and Washington, today’s Amtrak Northeast Corridor service. The Hell Gate Bridge, which connected the PRR to the New Haven Railroad, was part of the overall Penn Station grand scheme and made this route possible, unchanged today.
Another piece of overall project was Sunnyside Yard, which allowed long distance PRR trains terminating in New York to simply continue east, enter the yard for servicing and cleaning, and then return to Penn Station for southward or western trip. That practice continues today. The overall track layout reduced the number of stub-end tracks in Penn to four (today’s tracks 1-4). Tracks 5 through 21 are all through-running tracks. That’s why Penn is not called a “terminal”, but a “station.”
Prior to the Hell Gate Bridge, Washington-Boston through train cars were floated around Manhattan, on barges between Jersey City and The Bronx, which was expensive and time-consuming
CHAPEL OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD WITH THE GOOD SAMARITAN GERMAN LUTHERAN CHURCH IN 1969
GLORIA HERMAN, MITCH HAMMER, NINA LUBLIN, JAY JACOBSON AND ED LITCHER MADE GREAT EFFORTS TO GET IT RIGHT. JOYOUS EASTER GREETINGS!
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 SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM WIKIPEDIA STETSON UNIVERSITY
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Railroads in New York City: Counterintuitive truths We New Yorkers deal a lot with steel rails. After all, many of us ride subways or trains every day (or we did “B.C.”). And we were blessed with two of the greatest rail stations in the world, stations which were star performers in many New York novels and films (think of “Twentieth Century Limited”). But our relationships with rails – at least, trains – has been different than one might expect. So sit back, get comfortable and come with me on a tour of counterintuitive New York railroad stories.
Original Grand Central Terminal, NY Times
First counterintuitive truth. Most railroad passengers didn’t arrive in NYC by rail.
All of the trains arriving from the west – even the mighty Pennsylvania – ended at the Hudson River in New Jersey. There, passengers transferred from one of six terminals – Exchange Place (Pennsylvania), Weehawken, Hoboken, Pavonia, and Communipaw – to ferries for the final lap to Manhattan. Trains didn’t come to Manhattan.
Except one. Passengers on the New York Central didn’t have to make the ferry connection. This was Vanderbilt’s great advantage. The Commodore patched together a slew of railroads beginning with what became the Hudson River Railroad (in part surveyed by the renowned civil engineer John Jervis. Yes, the very Jervis we read about who was central in building the Croton Aqueduct and Erie Canal). Vanderbilt also built a connection from Spuyten Duyvil to Mott Haven to connect with another railroad he owned, the New York & Harlem, to get to 42nd Street in Manhattan. In 1869, Vanderbilt changed the name to the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad as he expanded his railroad empire to Chicago. No ferry.
The NY Central enjoyed one of the most beautiful rail passages in the world, along the east shore of the Hudson River (Remember the Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint seduction scene in the dining car in “North by Northwest”?).
OK. That explains Grand Central. What about Penn Station? The existing situation was horrible. As Diehl writes in The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station, The Pennsylvania trains “came from Philadelphia, Washington, and as far west as Chicago. Together with other roads, they brought passengers from as far south as Florida. Vacationers, tanned and rested wintering in Palm Beach, would leave their well-appointed Pullman cars and stand alongside office clerks commuting to the city as they all waited for ferries to dock.” The other side was worse. No pedestrian bridges crossed West Street and everyone, of every rank, jostled for cabs. And, at times, the Hudson was so enraged that a 15 minute crossing took an hour!
Pennsy’s head, Alexander Cassatt (brother of the impressionist painter, Mary Cassatt) wanted his line to get to Manhattan without ferries. And he wanted a station in New York City that would be truly breath-taking. Long story – which involves relations with Andrew Carnegie, rail rebates, lots of money and so on – relatively short. Cassatt wanted a tunnel but was stymied because steam driven trains in a long tunnel would suffocate everyone, so he opted for a bridge that would be twice as long as the Brooklyn Bridge, across a much more difficult river. He finally found the answer in electrifying the railroad and building a tunnel. And, of course, Penn Station modeled on the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. Even more, Cassatt’s plan was to link the LIEE and Pennsy at the new station, to provide non-stop service from the west to Long Island.
(There’s another railroad story here, too, about the change in 4th Avenue from the worst, dirty, smelly and dangerous avenue in the City to beautiful Park Avenue – which involves the electrification of the railway line up the Avenue. But for another time.)
Jersey City’s Central Railroad of New Jersey Terminal Wikipedia
All right, second Counterintuitive truth. Most immigrants who arrived in New York harbor didn’t come to New York City.
About 70 percent of the 12 million immigrants processed at Ellis Island between 1892 and 1924 were headed to destinations outside New York.
Immigrants were taken by ferry to all of the New Jersey shoreline stations to board trains heading west. Many passed through Jersey City’s Central Railroad of New Jersey Terminal, one of the largest, busiest stations in the region, serving nearly 300 trains a day, whether for passengers or freight. New York-bound commuters from Hudson, Union, Middlesex, Somerset, Warren, Monmouth and Hunterdon counties would pass through the terminal to transfer between the train that brought them from home and the ferry that connected to lower Manhattan.
In a separate waiting room sat a contingent of new arrivals, making a much less routine transfer. The Terminal was the first place they landed after they were approved on Ellis Island to enter the country. Many had purchased their train tickets before leaving home, in a package deal with their ship’s passage, but a ticket office at the Immigration Station was also available for those who still had to plot their course to their new homes. Ferries shuttled them from Ellis Island to the station, where the Baltimore and Ohio offered direct passage to points as far west as St. Louis and Chicago. The Reading Railroad also supplemented the Central Jersey with service to western Pennsylvania and Philadelphia. During the heaviest migration years, entire cars of trains would often be designated solely for immigrants.
Third Counterintuitive truth, the Port of NYC & NJ, the third biggest container port in the country, is basically truck served rather than rail.
The images we have of great container ports are huge ships, enormous cranes, and vast spaces. What’s distinctive about the Port of NY-NJ is the tighter quarters and the dominant role of trucks. Trucks account for moving 85 percent of the containers on and off NY-NJ port terminals. At the first and second largest container ports in the US, Los Angeles and Long Beach (NY-NJ is third), 35 percent of containers are taken by rail directly on the loading dock.
Because a much larger share of goods from the port stay in the New York region than in other major ports, we see more trucks on NYC streets than in most major American cities. About 90 percent of freight is delivered by truck in the City. By contrast, the city’s rail lines transport just 2 percent of New York’s cargo. (Another story – the growing role of trucks in New York freight was one reason for the building of the High Line railroad on the West Side.)
Plans are (were? Before-Covid) underway to reduce the port’s historical heavy reliance on trucks to transport cargo that arrives via ship. This is the ExpressRail system, and culminates a $600 million Port Authority capital investment program dating back to the 1990s that established direct rail access to on-dock and near-dock intermodal rail services at all of its major marine terminals.
One reason is simple. Most goods arriving by rail from the west have to be transferred to truck in New Jersey. That’s part of the reason why we have so many more trucks in the City. Some railroad cars do cross the Hudson, but not by bridge or tunnel. Rather, by barge – or “car float”. Car floats operated between the major railroad terminals on the west bank of Hudson and numerous terminals located in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx, and Manhattan. Before the rise of safe, large and inexpensive trucks, this was how New York got its stuff. Today, the New York New Jersey Rail, LLC is a switching and terminal railroad operates the only car float operation across Upper New York Bay between Jersey City and Brooklyn. This operation has been owned by the Port Authority since November 2008, as a step in what was hoped might lead to the creation of a Cross-Harbor Rail Tunnel. Fat chance.
Freight rail does exist in City, but is largely unseen. For example, the New York & Atlantic Railway, a freight train that chugs through Queens and Brooklyn neighborhoods, hauling cars loaded with food, scrap metal, construction materials and even beer. The short-line railroad picks up loads from major freight lines that run down through the Bronx and over the Hell Gate Bridge into Queens, to New York & Atlantic’s cramped rail yard in Glendale. New York & Atlantic then takes the cars and distributes them to businesses along its lines where they are often taken onto tracks leading to a customer’s property. Some trains end up at rail-to-truck hubs, where goods are transferred to trucks for local deliveries. About 15 percent of New York & Atlantic’s rail cars are floated over from New Jersey, but that would grow if the car float system expanded. I hope this essay didn’t run you off the rails. Thanks for reading. Stephen Blank RIHS March 24, 2021
THURSDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY MAGNOLIA TREES IN COLER GARDEN
THOM HEYER, CLARA BELLA, ALEXIS VILLEFANE, RITA MEED, ED LITCHER, JAY JACOBSON, GLORIA HERMAN, & NINA LUBLI GOT IT.
EDITORIAL
TAKE A WALK TO THE GARDEN JUST NORTH OF THE COLER MAIN ENTRANCE AND ENJOY THE MAGNOLIAS IN FULL BLOOM!
JOYOUS EAST GREETINGS
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
STEPHEN BLANK RIHS ARCHIVES
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
IN 2007, ARTIST THOM SOLOLOSI BROUGHT A UNIQUE ART AND HISTORY PROJECT COMPOSED OF 100 TENTS CONTAINING STORIES OF THOSE LOST IN THE WORLD OF MENTAL ILLNESS, PRISONS AND ASYLUMS.
THE SITE WAS SOUTHPOINT PARK, WHICH WAS ONLY A HILL OF GRASSY AND DUSTY LAND. THE FDR AND SOUTHPOINT PARKS WERE NOT BUILT AND THIS VAST OPEN SPACE LED TO A GRAND VISUAL SITE.
THE PROJECT TOOK MONTHS TO PLAN. THE EXECUTION TOOK PLACE IN A FEW DAYS AND THE ENCAMPMENT WAS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC FOR JUST A LONG WEEKEND.
2007 WAS A DIFFERENT TIME AND THE ISLAND FLOURISHED WITH MANY ART PROJECTS AND LESS CONSTRAINTS OF THESE LATTER YEARS.
Artwork, Assembled at the Last Minute, Explores the Long Ago
The New York Times (c)
Thom Sokoloski’s installation artwork, “The Encampment,” has been assembled on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island.Credit…Robert Bennett for The New York Times
At about 7 last night, “The Encampment,” an installation of 100 19th-century-style tents by the Canadian artist Thom Sokoloski, was to open in an empty field at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island.
A year in the making, the tents represent the patients who once lived in the island’s smallpox hospital, the remains of which loom nearby. Inside each, volunteers would arrange artifacts to memorialize patients and other island residents. As a final touch, the tents were to be illuminated from within, so “The Encampment” would be visible from both sides of the East River, a glowing link to the area’s history.
But first, it had to be finished.
In the 80-degree weather of yesterday morning, a dozen volunteers showed up to help; most encountered a locked gate. Though Mr. Sokoloski spent months assembling the proper permits, security had been a constant issue: the site, part of what will become Southpoint Park, is usually closed to the public. Homeland Security officials were on high alert because of the United Nations General Assembly meeting just across the East River, and the police threatened to shut things down because of a miscommunication.
By noon only a dozen tents had been set up, and few were filled. Mr. Sokoloski’s partners, Jenny-Anne McCowan, a choreographer and outreach coordinator, and John McDowell, a composer, busied themselves marshaling the volunteers.
Even the construction supervisors — four Canadian military re-enactors, with extensive experience in putting up tents — were sweating. The exhibition, part of the annual Openhousenewyork weekend, was several hours behind schedule.
But Mr. Sokoloski, a Toronto-based artist who seems younger than his 57 years, remained calm. A former theater director (he worked at La MaMa in the 1980s) and location scout for movies, he is adept at making big projects work, like an opera he staged in Toronto’s main train station in 1992.
“It’s one thing after another, but you get used to it,” Mr. Sokoloski said. “You just keep going till the last moment, because who knows what will happen tomorrow?”
“The Encampment” is the second in a series of tent-based installations Mr. Sokoloski has planned. A smaller-scale version was erected in Toronto last year for Nuit Blanche, an arts festival, and he hopes to create a larger version elsewhere in Canada next year. Each project is devoted to exposing an urban past that’s usually kept hidden: the history of mental health and addiction treatment in Toronto, the confinement and isolation of the many sanitariums that once dotted Roosevelt Island.
The idea, Mr. Sokoloski said, was to create “an archaeological dig into the collective memory of a space.” To enhance that collective spirit, he enlisted about 70 “creative collaborators” — artists, students and patients from the island’s Coler-Goldwater Memorial Hospital — to research and compile art for the tents.
The tents ready to be filled with memories.
Below: Sketches of asylum inmates from “Ten Days in a Madhouse” Doll and piano represent musical memories Small images on the fabric of the tent with piles of money on the ground Oysters, commonly found in the East River
Some people took on more than one tent. The interior objects — drawings, dioramas, mannequin heads, flowers — had to be small enough to be boxed up, though Mr. Sokoloski was not to know what they were.
The volunteers had only two hours to install their work. Ronit Muszkatblit, 32, a theater director from the East Village, was inspired by the story of Ernest Otto, an asylum patient who died in 1894 after choking on rice and bread. Her installation included a human silhouette buried in rice. “I love site-specific work,” Ms. Muszkatblit said before dragging a cart laden with props to her tent.
“The energy, the adrenaline, the rush of the last moment, the not sleeping and carrying everything back and forth.” Mr. Sokoloski knows all about it. On Wednesday the tents — seven-foot-long canvas A-frames — were still at the manufacturer, the Fall Creek Suttlery, of Lebanon, Ind., which usually supplies tents for military re-enactments, because Mr. Sokoloski didn’t have the money to pay for shipping
By the time the funds materialized, he needed the tents shipped overnight— at a cost of about $4,000. “I said, ‘I can’t pay that much,’” Mr. Sokoloski recalled. (“The Encampment” cost about $150,000, financed mostly by him, Ms. McCowan and donations.) He asked Andy Fulks, the company’s owner, for a cheaper alternative.
Mr. Fulks came up with one: a guy named Wayne. So Wayne, a local resident, packed the 100 tents into his pickup and drove straight through from Indiana to New York, delivering the tents at 2:30 on Thursday afternoon. Then he turned and drove home.
The construction cavalry — Canadian re-enactors who specialize in the War of 1812 — arrived early Friday morning, hauling a trailer filled with 100 pounds of 10-inch nails and 300 beams to erect the tents. But the beams were the wrong size. So hours before opening, volunteers had to cut them to fit, using the trailer’s fender as a sawhorse.
Mr. Sokoloski savored the momentum. “I find there’s a kind of excitement when you do it this way,” he said of his last-minute art. “It’s not a Cartesian way to achieve results. But there’s this other level of energy, of spontaneity.”
In the end they were able to erect only 90 of the tents on Friday. (Ten more will follow today.) But the lights went on just after 7.
Temple Emanu-El One East 65th Street Gloria Herman, Aron Eisenpreiss, Jay Jacobson, Vicki Feinmel and 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)
RIHS ARCHIVES JUDITH BERDY NEW YORK TIMES (C)
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
