Film buffs know that the movie industry began in New York City, and many know that Fort Lee was the next center of film-making. During the 1910s, D.W. Griffith shot nearly 100 pictures there. This is where Mary Pickford made her film debut and where Theda Bara, “Fatty” Arbuckle, and Douglas Fairbanks all worked in the rows of great greenhouse studios that sprang up in this film boomtown and where tax revenues from studios and laboratories filled municipal bank accounts.
And then there was Astoria.
Hopefully you have visited the Museum of the Moving Image at the Kaufman Astoria Studios. This is where many important films of the 1920s were made, where stars met and deals done. So find a comfy seat, open the popcorn, relax and enjoy the story.
First thing. The industry didn’t come to Astoria from New York or Fort Lee. It migrated back east from Hollywood. The film industry began to move to California before World War I. The Fort Lee phase of the industry ended in the winter of 1918-1919 with terrible cold, coal rationing and the rising specter of the flu pandemic. In sunny California, you could shoot outdoors year-round, where land and labor were cheaper and where film companies were further away from Edison’s toughs chasing down patent infringements.
But not everyone wanted to go west. Richard Koszarski in his The Astoria Studio and Its Fabulous Films, writes “Reaction against Hollywood as a cultural wasteland and factory town began in earnest right after the war… Many who had the clout simply refused exile to California, and others did their best to escape back East.” As Louise Brooks wrote, “There was no theater, no opera, no concerts – just those god-damned movies.”
Moreover, Hollywood was a long way from Broadway, and many film stars couldn’t manage the stretch. Broadway actors starring in films needed to be close enough to the Great White Way so that after a day of filming they could make it to the theaters for their evening performances.
With the end of wartime restrictions on building, studio construction in the New York region boomed. D. W. Griffith moved back east to escape studio control. He settled on Mamaroneck, paying $375,000 for Satan’s Toe, land that jutted into Long Island Sound (the former estate of oil baron Henry Flagler, who lent John D. Rockefeller start-up funds for Standard Oil in exchange for a piece of the profits). Mamaroneck obviously inspired Griffith, who directed such silent classics there as Broken Blossoms, Way Down East (both starring Lillian Gish), and Orphans of the Storm (starring Lillian and Dorothy Gish).
William Randolph Hearst transformed Sulzer’s Harlem River Park and Casino into the Cosmopolitan Studios, and Vitograph, Goldwyn, Metro and Fox all returned to the City. Some commentators said that California was “all filmed out”. At this moment, critics said, New York was the center of the fledgling film industry. And Astoria was the Mecca of the Silent Era.
Astoria was the home of the Famous-Players Studio, the most important eastern studio, which opened in September 1920, at 36th Street between 34th and 35th Avenues.
The construction of Famous Players-Lasky Studios (Paramount Pictures) as seen in 1919. https://www.qgazette.com/articles/lights-camera-astoria-highlights-filmmaking-in-queens/
William Randolph Hearst transformed Sulzer’s Harlem River Park and Casino into the Cosmopolitan Studios, and Vitograph, Goldwyn, Metro and Fox all returned to the City. Some commentators said that California was “all filmed out”. At this moment, critics said, New York was the center of the fledgling film industry. And Astoria was the Mecca of the Silent Era.
Astoria was the home of the Famous-Players Studio, the most important eastern studio, which opened in September 1920, at 36th Street between 34th and 35th Avenues.
The Astoria story began with a Hungarian-born Jewish immigrant named Adolph Zukor. Working as a successful furrier, he invested in a penny arcade theater, or nickelodeon, on 14th Street in Manhattan. By 1908, 550 nickelodeons and movie houses operated in Manhattan. And on Christmas Day, they were all closed down. Progressives felt that this new entertainment undermined efforts to “uplift” the working class and immigrants who were the major consumers. Still, the new industry rolled on – the answer was not to eliminate but rather to regulate and censor films. And, of course, so begins another story.
Back to this one: Zukor teamed up with David Frohman, and became big names in the penny arcade business. They formed the Famous Players Film Company to produce and distribute full-length films. Their first success was The Count of Monte Cristo, released in 1913. Zukor merged with another successful film company, the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Picture Play Company, which had made the first Hollywood movie, Squaw Man, directed by Cecil B. DeMille.
Lasky began his entertainment career in vaudeville after an Alaska adventure which yielded no gold. He became a booking agent – and rich. Lasky wasn’t always a success (he lost $110,000 producing the stage musical Folies Bergère) but he soon found his way to the motion picture industry where he thrived. In 1913 he, his brother-in-law Samuel Goldwyn, and Cecil B. DeMille became partners and founded the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company.
The new company, Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, was launched in 1916. In no time, they had eight film production companies under their wing, including a distribution company called Paramount Pictures, and were now the biggest players in the silent film business.
In 1920, they built their studio complex in the cheaper and roomier confines of Astoria. A few years earlier a Queens location would have been isolated and rural, but thanks to the Queensboro Bridge, which opened in 1909, the new complex was now only a short distance from the city’s theater district.
Astoria Studios produced over 100 films during the twenties. With its main stage and basement stages, it could support up to six feature films in production at the same time. Astoria Studios was where the moving picture industry actually developed; and was home to talented actors such as Academy Award-nominated, Golden Globe-winning American actress Gloria Swanson, sisters Dorothy and Lillian Gish, and Rudolph Valentino. Essentially, it was where many breakout stars had the opportunity to develop and display their talent.
Gloria Swanson said of making movies in Queens in her autobiography, Swanson On Swanson, “Every day we drove across the Queensboro Bridge to the new studio in Astoria in the borough of Queens. It was certainly not another Hollywood. The place was full of free spirits, defectors, refugees, who were all trying to get away from Hollywood and its restrictions. There was a wonderful sense of revolution and innovation in the studio in Queens.” And Louise Brooks noted, “When work was finished, we dressed in evening clothes, dined at the Colony or ‘21’ and went to the theater.”
The first all talking feature film shot at the studio, The Letter, received an Oscar nomination for actress Jeanne Eagels. The talking film debuts of Claudette Colbert, Edward G. Robinson and Tallulah Bankhead were filmed here. The Marx Brothers moved from Broadway to the silver screen in Astoria to produce their first two films, The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930). In fact, they shot “Cocoanuts” while simultaneously starring in the Broadway production of “Animal Crackers.” It is said that major stars like Charlie Chaplin, Eddie Cantor, Groucho Marx and Gloria Swanson rented or owned houses in Queens.
For those interested in the film industry (as well as movies themselves), recall that Famous Players-Lasky, under the direction of Zukor, is important for creating the vertical integration of the film industry and block booking practices – practices that shaped the Hollywood industry in its greatest mid-20th century years.
In 1942, during the start of World War II, the United States Army Signal Corps took over the studio to make Army training and indoctrination films. In 1970 the Studio Army declared it surplus property turned the studio over to the Federal Government. In 1982 the title to the Studio was transferred to the City of New York, and in 1982 real estate developer George S. Kaufman in partnership with Alan King, Johnny Carson and others, obtained the lease from the City. Kaufman renovated and expanded it into a comprehensive studio capable of handling any type, size and style of production.
Kaufman Studios today Wikipedia Kaufman Astoria Studios has had a long track record of success, and has been the location for major motion pictures including: The Wiz, The Warriors, All That Jazz, Arthur, Ragtime, Hair, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Radio Days, Money Pit, Ishtar, Fletch Lives, Glengarry Glen Ross, Scent of a Woman, Age of Innocence, and Carlito’s Way.
Stephen Blank RIHS May 4, 2021
BE PREPARED FOR EARLY VOTING
We’ve just come from a seven-hour seminar on how to fill out the 2021 mayoral-election ballot.”
FORMER STERN’S DEPARTMENT STORE ON WEST 23RD STREET
THOM HEYER, RICHARD MEYER, ALEXIS VILLEFANE, GLORIA HERMAN, VICKI FEINMEL, ARON EISENPREISS ALL GOT IT RIGHT…SEE THE STORY BELOW!!!
The Home Depot Building
Centered above the main entrance of The Home Depot, the giant home improvement store on West 23rd Street, there is a carving of a lion’s head just beneath a cartouche framing the letters “SB,” a monogram that provides a mute but eloquent clue to the building’s original purpose.
SB stands for Stern Brothers, and more than a century ago, when the area just south of Madison Square was New York’s golden shopping district, Stern’s was one of its grandest department stores. On the northern edge of what became known as Ladies’ Mile, it was for a time the largest department store in New York and one of the earliest to take advantage of a new invention called plate glass, installing huge street-level windows that allowed passersby to see inside, to “window shop,” as it were.
Originally on Sixth Avenue near 23rd Street, Stern’s was founded in 1867 by the brothers Louis, Isaac, Bernard and Benjamin. In 1878, in need of additional space, it opened at 32 West 23rd Street in a six-story cast-iron Renaissance Revival structure designed by Henry Fernbach, a German-born architect better known for his work on such houses of worship as the Moorish-influenced Central Synagogue at Lexington Avenue and 55th Street. Five years later, Fernbach died at his desk, so when the Stern brothers desired to expand further, they called upon another German émigré, W. M. Schickel.
By 1892, Schickel had tripled Stern’s footprint, expanding westward to 40 West 23rd Street. Fernbach’s design was duplicated on the western wing and a central section with a new arched entrance united both wings. Together, the sections formed what still might be New York’s largest cast-iron facade. Painted white and stretching across eight city lots, the building dazzled onlookers on sunny days and was sometimes called “the big wedding cake on 23rd Street.”
Stern’s flourished, as did other retailers on the block, including Teller & Co. (the future Bonwit Teller) and Best & Co. The four Stern brothers were always on hand, at least one of them greeting customers and all of them decked out in cutaway tailcoats. Pianists perched on every floor provided music to shop by, a harbinger of sounds to come. By 1913, however, the city — and its top retailers — was heading uptown. Stern’s did too, moving to 42nd Street, opposite Bryant Park. It continued growing, opened two dozen branches in three states and eventually became part of Federated Department Stores. In 2001, its remaining locations were converted into units of Bloomingdales or Macy’s and Stern Brothers disappeared.
The building, however, did not, even though it was neglected for a while and its once-resplendent facade suffered the temporary indignity of a coating of pink. For most of the 1900s, with 23rd Street abandoned by prestigious stores, the structure housed manufacturing and shipping facilities for a variety of tenants. In 1968, its fortunes began to change. The property was acquired by Jerome M. Cohen, chairman of Williams Real Estate Co., and his partners, who launched a full restoration of the cast-iron facade. Soon, showrooms and offices filled the building.
In 1986, Hasbro, Inc., the multinational toy and board game company, moved in, conducted toy fairs and even inspired a scene filmed there for the Tom Hanks movie “Big.” Hasbro remained almost 20 years, giving way to Home Depot in 2004.
Home Depot is the building’s major tenant, but not its only one. A separate entrance at 40 West 23rd Street leads to the expansive offices and showrooms of the clothing designer Marc Ecko, a space now on the market.
Meanwhile, Home Depot has taken the building back to its original purpose: operating as a retailer with special appeal to New Yorkers. Because this is the company’s first store in Manhattan, its focus is on apartment and brownstone dwellers. Home Depot’s 108,000 square feet fill the entire street level, including space in 28 West 23rd Street, plus a mezzanine and a basement. It stocks 20,000 different products, a figure that climbs to 100,000 if special orders are included. And unlike its other units, this Home Depot has a doorman to welcome customers — a reminder of the era of the Stern brothers even though this greeter doesn’t wear a cutaway tailcoat.
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
Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture 1915-1928 (1990) Richard Koszarski, The Astoria Studio and Its Fabulous Films (1983)
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
It has graced 23rd Street and Broadway for over a Century
One of Manhattan’s most famous landmarks — the wedge-shaped Flatiron Building — is getting an overhaul to attract an entirely new crop of office tenants.
The nearly 120-year-old tower near the foot of Madison Square Park is empty, with all of its space available for the first time in more than 60 years, while it undergoes a total renovation of its interior. The effort to fill it will be a test of demand for New York offices as the city emerges from the pandemic.
With Manhattan’s office supply at its highest level in at least three decades, the 21-story Flatiron Building will need to rely on its singular image to stand out. Asking rents are more than $100 a square foot. That’s pricier than the $77.46-a-square-foot average in the broader Midtown South area, according to data from CBRE Group Inc.
A commercial floor under renovation.Photographer: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg
“We don’t think that the current market conditions actually relate to this leasing program because three years from now, there won’t be any space in the Flatiron,” said Mary Ann Tighe, chief executive officer of the New York tri-state region at CBRE, the brokerage marketing the offices. Space like this “doesn’t come up all the time.”
A newly renovated commercial floor.
Photographer: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg
The tower at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street, designed by architect Daniel Burnham, is among New York’s most enduring symbols and was one of the city’s tallest buildings upon its completion in 1902. It’s been empty since 2019, when Macmillan Publishers, its sole tenant for five years, moved downtown to the Financial District.
The property was gutted over the past year. As part of the work, nearly 650 window air-conditioning units were removed to make way for a central system. The penthouse, still stripped to the bones, will have new, large windows and a private wraparound terrace. The building’s lobby will also be renovated, and the six tiny elevators will be modernized.
The marketing process for the Flatiron Building’s more than 200,000 square feet (19,000 square meters) of offices has just begun, and the brokers already have received three proposals — mainly from international firms looking for an outpost in the iconic property, Tighe said.
THE MANHATTAN BRIDGE AT THE FOOT OF CANAL STREET LISA FERNANDEZ, VICKI FEINMEL, NINA LUBLIN, ARLENE BESSENOFF, LAURA HUSSEY, ALEXIS VILLEFANE, GLORIA HERMAN, JAY JACOBSON & ED LITCHER WERE THE EARLY BIRDS TODAY.
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
BLOOMBERG
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
The private homes of Manhattan’s wealthy citizens had moved northward before 1853 when the luxurious marble-fronted St. Nicholas Hotel opened on Broadway between Spring and Broome Streets. The exclusive hotel, which cost about $1 million to construct, would attract handsome retail stores around it.
In 1859 Homer Bostwick hired architect John Kellum to design an upscale emporium building across the street from the St. Nicholas, at Nos. 502-504 Broadway. Kellum had just dissolved his partnership with Gamaliel King, and was now partnered with his son as Kellum & Son.
The private homes of Manhattan’s wealthy citizens had moved northward before 1853 when the luxurious marble-fronted St. Nicholas Hotel opened on Broadway between Spring and Broome Streets. The exclusive hotel, which cost about $1 million to construct, would attract handsome retail stores around it.
In 1859 Homer Bostwick hired architect John Kellum to design an upscale emporium building across the street from the St. Nicholas, at Nos. 502-504 Broadway. Kellum had just dissolved his partnership with Gamaliel King, and was now partnered with his son as Kellum & Son.
The cast iron storefront of clustered columns and regimented arches was manufactured by the Architectural Iron Works. Its catalogue listed these capitals as “Gothic.” Above, the four stories of white marble were distinguished by two-story arches, separated by slim engaged columns which would later earn the style “sperm candle” because of the similarity to candles made from the waxy substance found in the head cavities of the sperm whale.
Kellum & Son stacked nubby, faceted blocks up the side piers, which provided a somewhat incongruous frame when compared with the otherwise gentle lines of the facade. Below the stone cornice a corbel table carried on the arched motif. High above Broadway two stone urns were the finishing touches.
While the building was completed in 1860, the Civil War prevented tenants from moving in until 1866. That year C. G. Gunther & Sons moved into the top floor. Described as “The oldest and largest fur house in the United States,” it was founded in 1820 by Christian G. Gunther at No. 46 Maiden Lane and remained at that location until now. The firm, now headed by C. Godfrey Gunther, not only imported raw furs and skins, but manufactured fur clothing and accessories.
In May 1866 china and “fancy goods” dealers John Vogt & Co. moved into the first four floors. Founded in 1852 it had been operating from William Street. In its new store, according to the History of New York in 1868, “may now be seen the most magnificent and choice stocks of merchandise” and “an endless variety of curious, chase, quaint, and elaborate designs, and combining superb beauty of shapes, colors, and embellishments with rare excellence of materials and most exquisite workmanship in respect to moulding, carving, etc.”
The first floor was the “Porcelain Ware” showroom. Here well-do-to female shoppers browsed among dinnerware, tea services, and “toilet ware.” The second floor contained “Bohemian and Belgian Glass Ware, Lava Wave, German China, and Parian Marble.” Reproductions of classical statuary suitable for Victorian parlors were available here. Among the copies available in 1868 were “Cupid captive by Venus; Sybilla, with guitar; Paul and Virginia (from that memorable and pathetic story); [and] Mounted Amazon attacked by a leopard.” The third and fourth floors were used for warehousing stock.
Only four months after John Vogt & Co. opened, disaster struck. On October 8, 1866 The New York Times reported “A destructive fire occurred in the marble building No. 502 Broadway, on Saturday night. The building was occupied by C. G. Gunther & Sons, furriers, and John Vogt & Co., dealers in china and glass.” The devastating fire roared through the floors and sparks set St. Patrick’s Cathedral several blocks away on Mott Street ablaze.
Damage to the church and “its interior adornments” were estimated at $150,000; while the Broadway emporium was gutted. The Times reported “the edifice was reduced to ashes.” The losses suffered by John Vogt & Co. and C. G. Gunther & Sons was around $350,000–approximately $5.4 million in 2017.
The History of New York noted “the whole edifice underwent a thorough and costly refitting and adornment.” Undaunted, both companies moved back into the restored building.
By 1872 John Vogt & Co. had left and C. G. Gunther’s Sons had expanded throughout the lower floors. Formerly a wholesale house, it now opened both a men’s and a women’s store. On December 28, 1872 an advertisement in Harper’s Bazaar offered “Ladies’ Furs,” an “elegant assortment of seal-skin fur, in all the leading styles of sacques and turbans.”
Choosing its audience carefully, C. G. Gunther’s Sons placed its ad for menswear that same month in the Army, Navy, Air Force Journal & Register. The advertisement gave a hint of the wide variety of items manufactured and sold here. Well-to-do patrons were offered “caps, collars, gloves, gauntlets, etc., including the latest styles in seal skin fur.” There was also a “large and elegant stock of fur robes and skins for carriage and sleigh use” and “seal coats and vests.”
Earlier that year, in October, the New-York Tribune dedicated an article to C. G. Gunther’s Sons. It described the luxurious pelts used to create items worn by Manhattan’s wealthiest citizens. “The most costly furs are those made from the Russian and ‘Crown’ Sable, which always have been and always will be fashionable.” The article explained that the term “Crown” sable indicated these were the skins used by the Czar.
The prices quoted were an indication of the C. G. Gunther’s Sons’ carriage trade customers. “The price of a set, consisting of muff and boa, or collar, varies from $115 to $1,000. The darker the fur the more expensive, other things being equal.” The cheapest price mentioned would be equal to about $2,300 today; the most expensive about $20,000.
The Tribune’s article included mention of the extraordinary number of furs–a list that would shock readers today. Included were fox, chinchilla, mink, ermine, seal, beaver, monkey, marten, bear, buffalo, wolverine, lynx and wildcat. The writer decided “the purchasers who cannot find their wants immediately supplied must be difficult to please.”
A would-be burglar was attracted to the expensive goods within the store early on a September morning in 1874. Michael Moreno, described by The Times as “an Italian living at No. 59 Crosby street,” was noticed loitering outside by the night watchman. The guard used a forceful incentive to prompt the Moreno to move on; but was trumped. “The watchman caught hold of the Italian and drew his club, as if to strike him, when the latter drew a revolver.”
Hearing the commotion, Police Officer Corey rushed in. He grabbed Moreno by the collar, only to find the revolver now pointed at him. For his bold move Moreno received a “stunning blow on the forehead” by the policeman’s baton.
The blow was severe enough that the next morning he was moved from his jail cell to Bellevue Hospital. But he had not learned his lesson about 19th century law enforcement yet. The newspaper reported that he was “so threatening” that an officer was called in to help the nurses undress him. Finally he was placed in a strait-jacket.
If the authorities had searched Moreno for weapons, they missed his knife. He managed to escape from the strait-jacket then attacked the police officer with the knife. The policeman “was obliged to use his club to protect himself.” It all ended badly for the combative would-be burglar. “At a late hour last night Moreno was lying in a dangerous condition in the hospital,” reported The Times on September 19, 1874.
Although C. G. Gunther’s Sons had returned to the building after the ruinous fire a decade earlier, it would no do so in 1876. The conflagration of February 8 quickly became known nation-wide as the “Great Broadway Fire.” The Tribune described it in florid Victorian prose saying “The air rushed into the vortex of the ascending flame from every direction, and lifted the fire in gigantic billows that rolled aloft in roaming surges to a great height.”
Structures along Broadway collapsed during the massive fire. Harper’s Weekly, February 1876 (copyright expired)
Choosing its audience carefully, C. G. Gunther’s Sons placed its ad for menswear that same month in the Army, Navy, Air Force Journal & Register. The advertisement gave a hint of the wide variety of items manufactured and sold here. Well-to-do patrons were offered “caps, collars, gloves, gauntlets, etc., including the latest styles in seal skin fur.” There was also a “large and elegant stock of fur robes and skins for carriage and sleigh use” and “seal coats and vests.”
Earlier that year, in October, the New-York Tribune dedicated an article to C. G. Gunther’s Sons. It described the luxurious pelts used to create items worn by Manhattan’s wealthiest citizens. “The most costly furs are those made from the Russian and ‘Crown’ Sable, which always have been and always will be fashionable.” The article explained that the term “Crown” sable indicated these were the skins used by the Czar.
The prices quoted were an indication of the C. G. Gunther’s Sons’ carriage trade customers. “The price of a set, consisting of muff and boa, or collar, varies from $115 to $1,000. The darker the fur the more expensive, other things being equal.” The cheapest price mentioned would be equal to about $2,300 today; the most expensive about $20,000.
The Tribune’s article included mention of the extraordinary number of furs–a list that would shock readers today. Included were fox, chinchilla, mink, ermine, seal, beaver, monkey, marten, bear, buffalo, wolverine, lynx and wildcat. The writer decided “the purchasers who cannot find their wants immediately supplied must be difficult to please.”
A would-be burglar was attracted to the expensive goods within the store early on a September morning in 1874. Michael Moreno, described by The Times as “an Italian living at No. 59 Crosby street,” was noticed loitering outside by the night watchman. The guard used a forceful incentive to prompt the Moreno to move on; but was trumped. “The watchman caught hold of the Italian and drew his club, as if to strike him, when the latter drew a revolver.”
Hearing the commotion, Police Officer Corey rushed in. He grabbed Moreno by the collar, only to find the revolver now pointed at him. For his bold move Moreno received a “stunning blow on the forehead” by the policeman’s baton.
The blow was severe enough that the next morning he was moved from his jail cell to Bellevue Hospital. But he had not learned his lesson about 19th century law enforcement yet. The newspaper reported that he was “so threatening” that an officer was called in to help the nurses undress him. Finally he was placed in a strait-jacket.
If the authorities had searched Moreno for weapons, they missed his knife. He managed to escape from the strait-jacket then attacked the police officer with the knife. The policeman “was obliged to use his club to protect himself.” It all ended badly for the combative would-be burglar. “At a late hour last night Moreno was lying in a dangerous condition in the hospital,” reported The Times on September 19, 1874.
Although C. G. Gunther’s Sons had returned to the building after the ruinous fire a decade earlier, it would no do so in 1876. The conflagration of February 8 quickly became known nation-wide as the “Great Broadway Fire.” The Tribune described it in florid Victorian prose saying “The air rushed into the vortex of the ascending flame from every direction, and lifted the fire in gigantic billows that rolled aloft in roaming surges to a great height.”
Buildings collapsed, others were gutted. Nos. 502-504 Broadway was heavily damaged. The tailor’s trimmings firm of Lesher, Whitman & Co. took advantage of catastrophe by quickly purchasing the building. Three days later, even while The Times remarked “The public interest in the ruins of the buildings destroyed by fire Last Tuesday night was unabated yesterday,” it reported “Messrs. Lesher, Whitman & Co. yesterday purchased the premises No. 502 and 504 Broadway, at present occupied by Messrs. C. G. Gunther & Co. as a fur store.”
The article explained that Lesher, Whitman & Co. would take over the building “as soon as Messrs. Gunther & Co. shall have removed.” One month later C. G. Gunther’s Sons moved into “the new and capacious building No. 184 Fifth avenue” at 23rd Street.
According to a 1943 New York Times article, 104 patients were evacuated in accordance with an order by Mayor LaGuardia to close childcare institutions in order to conserve oil during World War II. LaGuardia noted that if Neponsit Hospital closed, 300,000 gallons of oil would be saved, which would lead to a 10% reduction of New York City’s fuel oil. Two years later in 1945, the hospital reopened, but mainly to veterans. The US Public Health Service leased the hospital to treat veterans with tuberculosis for five years. In 1952, the Queens Hospital Center was created through the merging of Queens General Hospital and Triboro Hospitals, and Neponsit Beach Hospital was absorbed into this new medical center. Yet despite talks of expanding Neponsit into a general hospital, Neponsit closed in 1955, as tuberculosis cases declined significantly in the 1950s.
For the next few years, many New York agencies struggled to discover the best use for the building. New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses proposed expanding Jacob Riis Park onto the hospital land, replacing hospital buildings with sports fields and a swimming pool. The New York City Planning Commission actually approved this expansion unanimously, but the Board of Estimate overturned the plan. In the meantime, others proposed converting the hospital into housing, while others proposed turning the building into a nursing home. By 1959, construction began on the main building and the nurses’ residence, and in 1961 the Neponsit Home for the Aged was opened.
Lesher, Whitman & Co. conducted business from the restored building with little fanfare for more than a decade. The only upheaval seems to have been the ongoing battle with the New York District Rail Company in 1886 and 1887. The company proposed to build a “railroad underneath Broadway.” Stephen R. Lesher, head of the firm, vehemently fought against it.
It was not until 1889 that trouble came; not through business troubles, but through love. Stephen Lesher’s son, Charles S. Lesher, was 20 years old at the time and still lived in the family’s handsome house at No. 330 Madison Avenue. He was employed by the insurance firm Weed & Kennedy on Pine Street.
The young man became enamored with 28-year old Leonore Mitchell, described by The Times as “a handsome woman.” Shockingly, Lenore asserted that the two were “on intimate terms,” and Charles admitted, according to the newspaper, “that he had spent a good deal of his time in her company.”
But, according to Leonore, he became fiercely jealous. It came to a climax when he called on her at her home at No. 21 West 31st Street on March 4. During the preliminary hearing she declared he “induced her to drink a glass of wine in which he poured a quantity of digitalis.” Soon afterwards she became ill and “was compelled to call in a doctor, who saved her life.”
Lesher was arrested for attempted murder. His accuser appeared in the courtroom on May 14 “fashionably attired and was accompanied by a colored maid, Laura Paul.” She told the court that when he called on her a few days after the incident, he admitted to poisoning her; “but said that he had been drinking, or he would not have done it.”
Lesher insisted it was all a lie and that Leonore was simply attempting to blackmail him. He claimed to have a letter from her in which she confessed to attempted suicide. His father provided the $1,000 bail pending his court case.
More heartbreak came to the Lesher family six years later when Charles’s older brother Stephen visited the family’s ranch at Rockwood Station, Texas. While riding there his horse stepped into a prairie dog burrow and fell, rolling on top of Lesher. He suffered internal injuries and decided to return to New York “to get competent advice.” Doctors gave him morphine to ease the pain on the trip.
There was no railroad connecting Texas and New York; so Lesher boarded the steamer Neuces. According to other passengers, when the 35-year old went to his berth at 11:00 on the night of June 18, he was “cheerful.” But when Stephen Lesher, Sr. met the Neuces in New York Harbor four days later he would not be greeting his son, but retrieving his body. The 35-year old had been found dead in his berth, the apparent victim of an overdose.
At the time Wertheimer & Co., makers of gloves, was also in the Broadway building. On Christmas Eve 1891 Bloomindale’s ran an advertisement noting “Special–We have secured the entire sample stock of Lined Gloves from Wertheimer & Co…Ladies’ and Men’s, with and without fur tops.” The department store announced that although they were normally priced at up to $2.98 per pair, “We shall put these out as a great Holiday Special at 79c. per pair.” The store warned “Only 1,200 pairs; lingerers may be losers.”
Lesher, Whitman & Co. would remain in the Broadway building until 1900. In the meantime, other firms leased space. Benjamin & Caspary, cloak makers, were here by 1897. The firm sent a letter to the Citizens’ Union headquarters in October that year, endorsing Seth Low for reelection to mayor. It said in part “We wish to inform you that we are enthusiastically in favor of the election of Seth Low.”
The endorsement may not have been totally unbiased. Seth Low owned the Broadway building at the time and was, therefore, Benjamin & Caspary’s landlord. The property values along Broadway were an undergoing astonishing boom. In 1898 502-504 Broadway was valued at $250,000 and a year later at $300,000.
As Lesher, Whitman & Co. moved out, D. Jones & Sons moved in. The wholesale shirt makers were best known for their “Princely” and “Emperor” brands. In January 1901 The American Hatter insisted “No shirt buyer can afford to miss this line. Everything that is desirable in plain, fancy and negligee, or any variety of shirt, is here.”
Meinhard-Cozzens offered a variety of elegant women’s collars. Fabrics, Fancy Goods and Notions, December 1905 (copyright expired)
Headed by Dramin Jones, the firm included sons Joseph, Morris and Henry. Calling itself “the largest producers of popular priced shirts in the world” in 1902, it maintained a massive factory in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
The company was joined in the building on January 1, 1904 by Meinhard-Cozzens Company, makers and sellers of ladies’ neckwear and belts. “Neckwear” for women in 1904 referred to the high, stiff collars indispensable to a fashionable Edwardian wardrobe.
By 1909 another women’s neckwear company had moved in. Klauber Bros. & Co. advertised “Embroideries, Laces, Neckwear, and Novelties.” In November 1911 when Seth Low sold the building to Charles Lane, the three tenants were still here. D. Jones & Son was now known as Phillips-Jones Co.; but was still selling its highly-successful Emperor Shirts. Lane paid Low $251,000 for the property, a price the astonished Real Estate Record & Builders’ Guide pointed out was “$194,000 less than the assessed value.”
Lane quickly resold the building a month later. On December 23 the Record & Guide hinted “The buyer is said to be the Coca-Cola Co.” The rumor was colorful but false. The purchaser was William H. Browning of Browning, King & Co. clothiers. He told reporters he had not decided what he would do with the property and “that the purchase was merely for investment.”
Throughout the next nine years the building continued to house apparel manufacturers. Philips-Jones employed 150 men, and 23 women in their shirt making shop. In 1917 another shirt manufacturer, Goodman, Cohen & Co. took 12,500 square feet of space; while Everett, Heaney & Co. dealt in fabrics.
For the first time in decades Nos. 502-504 Broadway was home to just one company when S. Blechman & Sons leased the entire building in July 1920. Listed in directories as “dry goods distributors,” the firm produced hosiery, underwear and other knit goods. And it found itself at odds with the labor unions several times over the next few years.
In 1934 management won a court order prohibiting strikers from carrying picket signs in front of the building. When the union refused to comply, S. Blechman & Sons went back to court, asking for a contempt of court ruling. In a case of deja vu the firm was back in court in 1937 when the union “flouted the injunction which restrained it from carrying signs…asserting that S. Blechman Sons, Inc…was unfair to labor.” The union was fined $250 for that offense.
The following year Simon Blechman commissioned architect Harry Hurwit to design the company’s new $65,000 building. Then in what was apparently a sudden change of mind, it purchased the old Rouss Building at Nos. 549-555 Broadway.
The building was home to Canal Jeans on a much-changed Broadway. photo by Edmund Vincent Gillon from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York
The stretch of Broadway had not been the shopping district of the carriage trade for decades. Until the last quarter of the century its once-elegant buildings would be overlooked and abused. With the renaissance of the Soho neighborhood, Canal Jeans leased ground floor of 502-504 Broadway in 1992.
Through it all, little changed to Kellum & Son’s striking 1860 facade. In 2003 Bloomingdale’s leased the former Canal Jeans store in the building where 112 years earlier it had purchased an entire line of gloves.
WHY 502?
Who would be interested in this building? I am. My father’s business was located in 502 for some years in the 1960’s and 1970’s. In those days, a rowboat was in front of the building filled with jeans that were sale in Canal Jeans.
My father was always in the textile business. Lower Broadway was full of manufacturers, converters, wholesales, jobbers and related industries. These cast iron buildings have immerse floor strength and could support die presses and heavy industrial equipment.
502 was a vast building going thru to Crosby Street and was far from a glamorous address in those years.
My father’s textile businesses ranged from manufacturing brassieres in the early years and then inside linings for men’s neckties. Like all our self taught manufactures of the past he could take on a new product easily and continue the small manufacturer business that are vanishing in New York.
The Photos are FEMALE INSANE PAVILLION, LIGHTHOUSE SMALLPOX HOSPITAL, AMUSEMENT HALL ALMSHOUSE CHAPEL, STEAMER LANDING WARDEN’S RESIDENCE BLACKWELL MANSION, VISITOR PROMENADE
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 Sources
DAYTONIAN IN MANHATTAN
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue, UDC and the Creation of Roosevelt Island
by Robin Lynn
In the early 1980s, I invited Ed Logue to my home on Roosevelt Island. I knew of his role as the former president and chief executive of the NY State Urban Development Corporation (UDC), the agency that Governor Rockefeller formed in 1968 to build subsidized low- and moderate- income housing throughout New York State. I wanted to meet the mastermind behind the audacious plan that created our “new-town-in-town,” allowing me to live in the middle of the East River, raising my three children among appealing open spaces, with an unlikely form of mass transit—the tram—connecting us to 59th Street.
To my surprise, Logue accepted my luncheon call. “Residents never invite you back,“ he said to my husband Larry, and I had. Now, Lizabeth Cohen has published Saving America’s Cities , Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019). This fascinating book tracks Logue’s work, not just in developing Roosevelt Island in the 1970s (as head of UDC), but redeveloping New Haven in the 1950s, Boston in the 1960s, and the South Bronx from 1978–85. Cohen, the current Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies in the History Department at Harvard University, brings Logue’s backers and foes to life, while focusing on his vision to revitalize post-war cities. She spends considerable time documenting the rise and demise of the UDC, which had transformed Welfare Island into Roosevelt Island.
Cohen’s meticulously researched and accessible volume, which won the Bancroft Prize for history in 2020, delves into the complex world of city planning through the lens, as she states in her introduction, of “who’s in charge, who should have a say, who benefits, and who pays the bill.” Logue, Cohen writes, was enormously proud of his work on Roosevelt Island. He aimed to create what he called a “socially engineered community,” which embodied his goals for successful post-war urban living: a mixed-income, mixed-race, handicapped accessible community, with buildings designed by progressive architects working to build housing for all and using innovative building technology.
Logue couldn’t come over to the island often enough while it was being built. Cohen quotes a New York Times reporter’s description of him as, at least once a week, “plunging in his bear-like way around the site—old corduroys, green Shetland sweater, shirttail hanging out and no hard- hat covering his stack of grey hair; slow-speaking, fast-thinking, an interesting mixture of charm and combativeness.” Cohen helped put Logue’s comments to me—those that I remember, lo, these many years later—into context. But I wanted more. And although I could not invite Lizabeth Cohen over to schmooze about her book, I could contact her for the Roosevelt Island Historical Society.
Robin: Thank you for letting me email questions to you. For those who don’t know Edward J. Logue, could you please introduce our island’s planner and tell us why he is important.
Professor Cohen: Ed Logue may not be a familiar name to most people today. But in his own time, he was well known as a leader in the effort to revitalize American cities which were under severe threat from the explosion of suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s. And it was not just residents who were fleeing. So too were business headquarters, manufacturing plants, and retail stores, which meant that many jobs and urban attractions were relocating to more decentralized metropolitan areas.
In New Haven, Boston, and New York, Logue took advantage of federal funding for what was then called “urban renewal.” Many of the efforts undertaken to save cities ultimately proved terribly damaging to their survival: for example, when working-class neighborhoods were torn down to make way for new highways or housing that would retain and attract middle-class residents. I have no interest in whitewashing the worst abuses of urban renewal. But I argue in the book that we are mistaken if we assume that urban renewal meant the same thing everywhere from its establishment in 1949 until the mid-1970s, when the federal government under President Nixon withdrew funding for housing and cities. Instead, I suggest, someone like Logue made mistakes, but he also learned on the job. And over time, he experimented with new, less damaging strategies for saving cities, which he deeply valued and felt were in grave trouble. The UDC’s three New Towns, of which Roosevelt Island was one, were a way of doing things better.
Not all urban renewers were like Logue, of course. I show how, for example, his goals were much more progressive than Robert Moses’s. Roosevelt Island was so precious to Logue because it embodied his hope that city neighborhoods could be made more diverse in income, race, age, and accessibility, with affordable housing and good schools available to all who were living side-by-side. To his mind, financial support from the federal government was key to achieving this rather utopian goal of a more socially and economically integrated America.
Robin: Every morning as he shaved, Logue would look out his window onto Welfare Island, and that was how, he said to me, he became curious about the place. (From Cohen’s research I learned that his apartment was at 1 East End Avenue). With all the affordable housing projects he had under construction across the state (eventually, 115), and the pressure he was under to quickly complete them, why was he so intent on building an entire new town? What lessons did Logue learn from his work redeveloping New Haven in the 1950s, and Boston in the 1960s that determined his approach to developing Roosevelt Island?
Cohen: The New Town strategy arose out of Logue’s growing recognition that demolition-style urban renewal was not the answer. His earliest efforts in New Haven had suffered from this clearance approach. He sought alternatives in Boston. But the real breakthrough came in New York State. As he told colleagues in 1970, “We cannot…put all the emphasis on rebuilding, tearing down and rehabilitating in the inner city.”
So, instead, he sought available land where new housing could be constructed. “I don’t have to condemn it. I don’t have to relocate families. I don’t have to demolish any buildings,” he explained. He also broke with the modernist orthodoxy of separating functions, and sought to combine living, working, schooling, shopping, and recreating in one planned community.
Robin: I remember that Logue said he hired many different architects to develop Roosevelt Island so that no one firm could dominate his project. Logue, you make clear, liked to be in control. What were Logue’s criteria for selecting architects? Why was he a champion of modern architecture? Why did he equate “social engineering” with the modern movement in architecture?
Cohen: Logue wanted as much as possible to ensure that his projects avoided the cookie-cutter look—an alienating experience-of public housing. That goal included seeking alternatives to high-rise “tower-in-the-park” buildings. The UDC’s Marcus Garvey Park Village project in Brooklyn, for example, innovated what was called “low-rise, high density housing,” achieving the same number of units by designing the structures differently.
Interestingly, just when the UDC was collapsing in 1975, it was in the midst of sponsoring an architectural competition for a new, more promising prototype for high-rise-style subsidized housing on Roosevelt Island. In selecting architects, Logue wanted to attract a mixture of up-and-coming and established architects. He hoped to encourage them to make housing design more of a priority. But he was also wary of letting architects do too much of their own thing and, in that way, was a demanding client. He said, “If you leave architects alone, they will make a statement.” So he established mechanisms like the UDC’s famous “live-ins,” where architects and staff alike had to stay over in projects nearing completion to learn what worked and what didn’t.
Robin: When I moved to the island in 1980, I was only vaguely familiar with UDC and Logue’s social goals. I was more taken with the physical presence of Roosevelt Island’s river walks, open spaces, plazas, green areas, playgrounds and communal rooms, which provided a space for joint activities to take place and a community to form.
What is the role of open space in “social engineering?” Is there anything you can add about Logue’s attitude regarding how open space advances social engineering?
Cohen: That’s an interesting question. Logue liked sports and relished playing tennis and football, for example. So creating recreational facilities mattered to him in planning a community like Roosevelt Island. But even more importantly, he saw the river walks, open spaces, playgrounds, community centers, and the like as a way to advance the social mixing he advocated. Given that the buildings themselves were specified as market-rate or subsidized, there would be little social mixing there. And the most expensive units benefited from the spectacular skyline of Manhattan, while the others looked at industrial Queens. Those walkways and the mini-schools, he hoped, would be scattered throughout the many buildings (that ambition got scaled back) would be the public spaces he expected would bring people together. They would allow everyone to share the best views and a common social experience.
Robin: One of the goals of UDC was to build quickly, to fast-track construction. One of Logue’s goals for UDC was to find ways to use innovative building technology to make that happen. Can you point out innovative technological means used in constructing the island’s buildings?
Cohen: From the start, the UDC was committed to promoting innovation in building methods to make housing construction more efficient and affordable. Pre-assembly of building materials off-site cut down on the unit cost of objects, which also translated into savings in on-site labor expense. An example was the pre-assembled and presumed technologically-advanced electrical wiring panels developed by NASA.
Sometimes these efforts went awry, such as when UDC was convinced by Con Edison to install electrical heating with bulk metering on Roosevelt Island at a big savings per unit, only to find itself footing a huge bill when the energy crisis hit in 1973–74. But Logue was proud of other technological innovations on the island, such as the free electric minibuses that transported residents, the vacuum sanitation system that whisked trash under the streets to a central refuse disposal site for compacting, and, of course, the tramway. It became a necessity once it was clear that the subway would not be finished on time. And it soon became the icon of Roosevelt Island.
Robin: To build quickly, UDC was also allowed to use such tools as eminent domain to acquire land and to overrule local zoning and building codes. I’m not a big fan. I realize that my duplex apartment in Rivercross has no egress from its bottom floor where we sleep. I’m not sure I would have moved into that apartment if I had been savvy enough to realize this at the time. Why was he given permission to override local laws and was this his undoing when he tried to build affordable housing in Westchester?
Cohen: Logue understood that zoning and antiquated building codes were often used, particularly in suburbs, to keep out affordable housing. (And they still are today.) He had battled the problem in New Haven and Boston, but there he had no jurisdiction over areas outside of the city limits. Moreover, he felt strongly that the economic and social needs of underserved urban populations were not only the responsibility of cities. An entire metropolitan area, where many workers who profited from cities lived, needed to be involved.
When Logue was offered the statewide position heading the UDC, he thought he would finally have the authority to promote metropolitan-level solutions to housing, schooling, transportation access, and the like. So he pushed for the power to override local zoning and building codes if necessary. But when Logue proposed what he called a “Fair Share Housing Plan” to build 100 units of affordable housing in nine Westchester towns, he was met with violent opposition—ultimately leading to the demise of his UDC. It was a dramatic story that I tell in great detail in the book.
Robin: The island was never built out as Logue had planned. In 1975, a little less than half of the 5,000 proposed units were complete when UDC went bankrupt and construction stopped. What happened?
Cohen: The UDC had plans to keep building up Roosevelt Island. As I mentioned above, it had even sponsored an architectural competition to develop a new prototype for subsidized housing in 1974–75. But everything stopped when the UDC disastrously defaulted on notes and loans and Logue and many of his team were forced to resign. There were multiple reasons for the UDC’s default on $104.5 million in maturing short-term notes and $30 million in bank loans in February 1975. This collapse took place, of course, at a time when New York State and New York City were close to bankruptcy, so the UDC’s troubles must be put in that context as well. In fact, it was a very complicated convergence of factors, all of which are explained in Chapter 8 of my book.
Robin: Nevertheless, the truth is that none of us would be living here if Logue hadn’t conceived a plan that this “island that nobody knows”— as Welfare Island was called in 1969—could be a desirable housing haven for all. Yet there’s no place here that bears Ed Logue’s name. He should be remembered; your book fills a void, but what about recognizing him on Roosevelt Island?
Let’s ask the Roosevelt Island Historical Society readers how we can commemorate Edward J. Logue. Please send suggestions to Judy Berdy, President, Roosevelt Island Historical Society, at rooseveltislandhistory@gmail.com.
Editor’s note: Dr. Cohen’s book, Saving America’s Cities , Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019), is available on Amazon and barnesandnoble.com. You can hear Cohen speak on the topic on Tuesday, May 18 at 7:00 pm on Zoom. Watch for the registration link in your email as the date approaches.
In the early 1900s, not every child who visited Coney Island was having a blast on the rides and in the ocean.
That’s because Coney was home to the Sea Breeze Hospital, an institution for poor children (and some of their moms) who had contracted tuberculosis in the tenement neighborhoods of the city.
Sea Breeze Hospital, Coney Island (Library of Congress) Tuberculosis is rare in New York now, and usually curable. But 100 years ago it was more common and deadly—and thought to be cured or at least eased by fresh, salty sea air.
Which is why Coney Island made the perfect place to build the hospital, equipped with its own school and partly funded by John D. Rockefeller. A New York Times article from 1905 reports:
“Yesterday afternoon at Sea Breeze the boys were playing at building terrible forts of sand, while their sisters sat in the sunshine to rock their ragged dolls to sleep. They were so healthy looking that no one would have dreamed they even had tuberculosis.”
THE ABANDONED TUBERCULOSIS HOSPITAL IN ROCKAWAY, QUEENS
FROM UNTAPPED NEW YORK
Looming over the beach in Rockaway, Queens adjacent to Jacob Riis Park is the abandoned Neponsit Beach Hospital also known as the Neponsit Children’s Hospital. The hospital once served as a tuberculosis sanatorium and operated from 1915 to 1955, and the main building was designed by the notable architectural firm McKim, Mead and White. Neponsit Beach Hospital mostly operated on children, but by World War II, the hospital began to treat military veterans until the hospital’s closure. The hospital was later converted into a Home for the Aged, a city-run nursing home that closed in 1998.
Around the start of the 1900s, the journalist Jacob Riis advocated for the creation of a children’s tuberculosis hospital in the Rockaways to take pressure off of the more prominent tuberculosis treatment centers in the city. Riis, a leader of the muckraking movement, chronicled the horrifying condition of New York’s tenements in his book How the Other Half Lives. After publishing his findings, Riis worked with the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor and New York City Mayor George B. McClellan, Jr. to create a hospital on the beach away from the hustle and bustle of the city.
“Riis soon became an influential spokesperson to lobby for the establishment of many of the city’s parks and playgrounds, providing a haven from the stagnant air and cramped lifestyle so commonly found within the city limits,” writes Opacity. The park and hospital began development starting in 1907, but efforts were suspended until 1909 due to the disastrous Panic of 1907, when the New York Stock Exchange fell nearly 50% from the previous year’s peak. Before being transferred to the city, the hospital was built by the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor with support by the Neponsit Realty Company and private sources.
In order to raise the $250,000 needed for the hospital’s construction, the Association distributed pictures of “Smiling Joe,” a boy suffering from spinal tuberculosis at the nearby Sea Breeze Hospital in Coney Island. The boy appeared in Association letters, newspapers, and magazines, and Theodore Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller paid visits to “Smiling Joe.” After seeing the boy, Rockefeller contributed $125,000 to the project.
“Joe, although he suffered with spinal trouble and had to lie strapped to an iron frame, had a most cheerful smile. The doctor took his picture and sent it broadcast throughout the country, with an account of the work. Money came in with every mail, from East and West, North and South,” wrote the New York Times.
The newly opened hospital replaced Sea Breeze Hospital, as almost fifty children were transferred to Neponsit Hospital followed by children from other city hospitals, tenements, and orphanages. The main building was designed by McKim, Mead & White in a “U” shape with a capacity of 122 patients. Facing the beach were porches and open-aired balconies facing the beach so that patients could momentarily escape their painful reality.
“They become sun worshipers these little ones, who have come a long way from dreary, harassed homes that could not provide them with the proper nutrition and care; from the deadening institutionalized atmosphere of orphan asylums, from charity wards and from crowded fire escape ‘sun parlors’ perched over harrow, foul streets. In their two-wheel carts and chairs, or on crutches, or just dragging one foot after the other, slowly but without fuss, they come to the big open piazzas fronting on the beach or down to the sand for sun baths,” describes a 1930 article from the Brooklyn Eagle.
For the next two decades, the hospital treated hundreds of young tuberculosis patients, giving them opportunities to bathe in the ocean and travel outside with supervision. In 1929, city hospitals commissioner Dr. William Schroeder, Jr. announced an expansion for the hospital that would double the hospital’s capacity. The hospital soon became a project of the New Deal agency WPA, or Works Progress Administration, which employed millions of job-seekers to carry out public works projects. The Board of Estimate appropriated $300,000 for the building’s expansion, and a power plant and a nurses’ residences were soon after completed in 1939 and 1941 respectively. Two sets of murals for the hospital were commissioned by the WPA in 1938, included a set of 11 circus-inspired murals by Louis Schanker and 23 panels depicting children playing games by Helen West Heller. The WPA also created gardens around the hospital and added a sea wall.
Louis Schanker at the presentation of his W.P.A. mural at the Neponsit Beach Children’s Hospital in Queens in 1939. Andrew Herman
For the next three decades, the nursing home cared for elderly patients, mostly with Alzheimer’s. Efforts to move HIV/AIDS patients to wings of the Neponsit Home for the Aged in the 1980s failed due to high risk of disease transmission.
Yet in 1998, the renamed Neponsit Health Care Center abruptly emptied the center of 282 elderly patients in the middle of the night. As a result of a Labor Day storm, the building suffered major damage to the point that city officials thought the building would collapse. As a result of this sudden move, two patients died. A report by the federal government concluded that the evacuation was unnecessary and that health officials not only endangered patients’ lives but also lied to them about a speedy return to Neponsit.
THE ROOSEVELT ISLAND CONNECTION
Under the direction of Mayor Giuliani ,busloads of Neponsit residents were delivered to many City Hospitals, unannounced with all their possessions in black garbage bags. Thirty souls appeared at Goldwater Hospital and it was later made their home. This disgusting act by Giuliani administration was fought and the dislocated Neposit residents won a lawsuit against the City of New York.
From Facebook:
October 28, 1999 – With the sudden closing, there were rumors that Giuliani wanted to sell the land to a political ally and friend, to turn the facility into an oceanfront hotel. The plan was tripped up because the deed to the land requires it to be used as a health care facility or a park. With the residents removed and the hotel plans thwarted, the City made plans to clear the property and turn it into park land. A Legal Aid attorney, however, got a court-ordered injunction in October 1999 which prevented the city from tearing down the buildings. (Source: http://www.rockawave.com/news/2014-03-07/Front_Page/Neponsit_Money_Pit.html) Justice David Goldstein ruled in favor of the New York City Council’s motion for summary judgement and declared that: (1) HHC’s surrender of the use and occupancy of the facility required the approval of the Council; (2) the Council has the right to determine the use of the facility (hospital, park or other public purpose); and (3) the Council has the right to contest the demolition of the facility by an unsafe building hearing. (Sources: http://rockawave.our-hometown.com/news/2000-09-16/Front_Page/Neponsit_Home0916.html?print=1; Text of judgement online: https://www.nycourts.gov/library/queens/decisions/council.htm)
Due to deed restrictions that allow only a hospital or public park, little redevelopment of the site has occurred. The Neponsit Adult Day Health Care relocated to nearby Rockaway Park in 2004, but the facility still remains abandoned despite numerous efforts to develop luxury homes on the property to the dismay of local residents. A security guard booth remains in operation, even in coronavirus times along the entrance on Rockaway Beach Boulevard.
FINAL OPPORTUNITY TO REGISTER FOR TUESDAY’S PROGRAM
CENTRAL SYNAGOGUE NINA LUBLIN, JAY JACOBSON, LAURA HUSSEY, ARLENE BESSENOFF, VERN HARWOOD & ED LITCHER GOT IT RIGHT!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
UNTAPPED NEW YORK
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
Mickey Marcus: Two-Time War Hero and Roosevelt Island
Stephen Blank
David “Mickey” Marcus never lived here, but he had an exciting and important link to our Island. Read on. Marcus was a 1924 West Point grad, up from a tough youth on the Lower East Side. At West Point, he lettered in boxing and football, and graduated in 1924 as an infantry second lieutenant. During his first assignment, on Governor’s Island, Marcus studied law at night school and married. Rather than take up his next duty assignment, in Puerto Rico, Marcus resigned his Regular Army commission and went to work as a law clerk in New York. A year later, he received a degree from Brooklyn Law School.
First War.
Marcus had maintained a Reserve commission and in 1940, Lt. Col. Marcus’ Guard unit was federalized. After the onset of war, Marcus sought a field command, but instead became chief of planning for the War Department’s Civil Affairs. Here, he served as a legal and military government adviser at some of the war’s most important conferences – Cairo in 1943; Dumbarton Oaks, where the UN was born; and Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam. According to the citation for his Distinguished Service Medal (an unusually high service decoration for a colonel), Marcus played a key role in the ‘negotiation and drafting of the Italian Surrender Instrument, the Instrument of Unconditional Surrender of Germany, and the international machinery to be used for the control of Germany after her total defeat.’
He did make one trip to the front. In early May 1944, he got himself to London ‘to provide liaison and act as observer in the implementation of military government policies for France.’ Then he disappeared. Without telling anyone, he had wangled his way onto a plane and parachuted into Normandy with the 101st Airborne Division – although he had never jumped from an airplane before. Once on the ground in Normandy, Marcus led several patrols, engaging in firefights with German units and freeing a group of captured US paratroopers. Back in Washington, his boss finally had to issue the order: ‘Find Marcus. Arrest him if you have to–but send him back!’ Shortly after that, Marcus was on a plane to the United States, still in his dirty field uniform.
Their faces displaying a variety of emotions, these paratroopers from the 101st Airborne prepare to take off in a C-47 “Skytrain” on D-Day.
Immediately after the end of the fighting in Europe, Marcus worked with the occupation and became head the Pentagon’s War Crimes Division, responsible for selecting the judges, prosecutors and lawyers for the major war crimes trials in Germany and Japan. Marcus turned down a promotion to brigadier general and an assignment military attach at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow to return to civilian life.
Second War But soon, Marcus began a new task, to help organize and train the army of the soon-to-be-born Israeli state. Reporting directly to future Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, Marcus’s recommendations would help transform a largely underground organization into an effective strike force. Once again, he moved from staff into the front line. Marcus was instrumental in building a new road under fire from Tel Aviv to beleaguered Jerusalem. His actions won him a promotion into the top most ranks of the Israeli army
Road to Jerusalem Burma_Road_(Israel)
The night before the cease-fire that would end the war took effect, Marcus and his staff held a celebration in the ancient village of Abu Ghosh, some eight miles east of Jerusalem. In the early morning hours, Marcus went for a walk and was shot dead by a sentry who failed to recognize him. Marcus became the first soldier buried at West Point who had died fighting under another nation’s flag.
OK. An interesting, brave guy. But what about Roosevelt Island? Here’s the connection
Between 1930 and 1934, Marcus was an assistant US attorney in the Southern District of New York. When La Guardia became New York mayor on a reform ticket in 1934, he appointed Marcus deputy commissioner of corrections. One of Marcus’ first actions was a special police raid on the corruption-ridden and prisoner-controlled penitentiary on Welfare Island.
(SB: Much of the next paragraphs come from TIME’s coverage of the raid – TIME at its absolute best, delightful, bare knuckle reporting.)
“Early one morning last week several carloads of men, led by New York City’s thin, purse-lipped new Commissioner of Correction Austin Harbutt MacCormick and his stocky aid David Marcus, descended the elevator from the Queensboro Bridge, made Welfare Island a surprise visit. By sundown Commissioner MacCormick had lifted the lid off Welfare Island and given city, state and nation a terrifying glimpse into the nether depths of prison life. ‘The worst prison in the world,’ pronounced Commissioner MacCormick, whom new Fusion Mayor LaGuardia had enlisted from the Federal Bureau of Prisons to clean up penal scandals left by years of Tammany rule. ‘The most corrupt prison in the country, physically and from every other standpoint. . . . A vicious circle of depravity that is almost beyond the ability of the imagination to grasp!’”
First stop on MacCormick’s raiding party was a cell-block tenanted by narcotic addicts who whimpered in their blankets, begged their visitors for “just a little shot.” In their littered cells were found electric stoves, pots, pans, hatchets, butcher knives, lengths of lead pipe, needle-pointed stilettos… To the police it looked more like a hop house than a prison.
“The dregs of the prison’s life were still howling disconsolately among the debris of their possessions when the raiders turned their attention to the prison’s hierarchy. Sixty-eight prisoners…virtually ran Welfare Island. They cowed their guards through outside political influence. They sold to some 500 inmates the best of vegetables and meats… Since the food was looted from the prison commissary, the other 1,200 prisoners virtually starved on greasy cold stews.
In addition, the ring sold narcotics, provided monied prisoners with clothing filched from newcomers, even had a strong voice in the granting of paroles. Divided between an Irish and an Italian gang, the hierarchy lived soft in two hospital wards, while men who should have been hospitalized—100 drug addicts, more than 100 venereal cases, 13 insane patients and one man suffering with sleeping sickness—roamed at large through the prison spreading demoralization and infection.”
Irish leader was Edward Cleary, a “graduate” of Sing Sing…. “Italian leader was a big swarthy gunman named Joie Rao, kept sleek and well-pressed by his underlings. Rao, onetime boxer, was shaving when Marcus ordered him to get along with the rest of his henchmen to solitary cells. Prisoner Rao insolently remarked that he would when he finished his toilet. Deputy Marcus, a boxer in his time at West Point, made short shrift of that kind of talk.
But Commissioner MacCormick had not sounded the most deplorable depths of Welfare Island until he went to the mess hall at noon. In fluttered a huge chorus of perverts, their lips and cheeks blushing with rouge, their eyes darkened with mascara, their hair flowing long. In their cells were found heaps of feminine underclothes, nightgowns, perfume, lipsticks, suntan powder. They were confined to the laundry during work hours, but at other times were not segregated. Unless close watch was kept on these tainted characters, other prisoners would fight as desperately for their favor as they would for a woman’s.”
How can you top this stuff? The New York Times gave top front page billing to the raid, headlining “Welfare Island Raid Bares Gangsters Rule Over Prison; Weapons, Narcotics Found”. Extensive, meaty, but not quite the bombastic heights of TIME.
The warden’s house included an in-ground swimming pool
Ah, but the story doesn’t quite end here.
On July 17, the Times reported that “a large patch of marijuana weed, a plant from which a narcotic smoked in the form of cigarettes is derived, was found, growing wild yesterday in the ground of the Welfare Island penitentiary…. It was believed that the weeds were being grown by prisoners assigned to duty outside the cell blocks. After yesterday’s discovery Deputy Commissioner David Marcus ordered Warden Lazarus Levy to assign workmen to destroy the weeds. The workmen, prisoners at the penitentiary, carefully pulled up every weed and burned it.” That must have been a very enjoyable task. So that’s the story of a tough, smart kid from the LES, a hero in two wars and a key figure in our Island’s history.
PS – Ted Berkman’s book Cast a Giant Shadow: The Story of Mickey Marcus Who Died to Save Jerusalem was made into a film by the same name starring Kirk Douglas. Neither got great reviews.
Stephen Blank RIHS May 12, 2021
WEEKEND PHOTO OF THE DAY SEND YOUR SUBMISSION TO: ROOSEVELTISLANDHISTORY@GMAIL.COM
FRIDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
AIR VENT OPPOSITE SUBWAY STATION
JAY JACOBSON, & ED LITCCHER GOT IT RIGHT.
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
NURSES IN TRADITIONAL WHITE PREPARED TO RENEW THEIR FLORENE NIGHTINGALE PLEDGE
THE TENT WAS DECORATED FOR A FUN BREAK FROM DAILY DUTIES
ROBERT HUGHES, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR CHEERS COLER’S NURSING STAFF
NATASHA ELIE-ASSOCIATE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR PRESENTS A BOUQUET TO YVES ROSE PASCAL-DIRECTOR OF NURSING
NURSES BROUGHT BACK THE TRADITIONAL CAP FOR THE OCCASION.
THE TRADITION OF PINNING THE CORSAGE ON A NURSE CONTINUED. JOVEMAY SANTOS, DIRECTOR OF THERAPEUTIC RECREATION PHOTOGRAPHS THE EVENT!!!
WATCHING THE CEREMONIES AS THE FOOD TRUCKS AWAITED WITH LUNCH.
THE WAIT FOR LUNCH WAS WORTH IT!
THURSDAY SCAVENGER HUNT
WINNING TEAM CELEBRATES WITH GOODIES THAT THEY DISCOVERED.
ANOTHER TEAM IN THE LOBBY
ON A BEAUTIFUL DAY, A BREAK IN THE SUNSHINE WAS APPRECIATED
EDITORIAL
This week has been special for the nurses and staffs of our nursing homes. After a year of struggle, the sun came out and the joy of celebrating with your co-workers was welcome.
Wednesday, the nursing profession was celebrated with a ceremony and lunch from two food trucks.
Thursday, a scavenger hunt was held with goodies hidden around the front of the campus. After that it was time for ice cream for all 600 staff!
The Coler residents also had special lunches this week along with their own out-door activities at Coler.
Thanks to all who have supported Coler, its residents and staff this past year and we are looking forward to a great summer!!
QUEENSBORO BRIDGE UNDER CONSTRUCTION VIEW FROM QUEENS JAY JACOBSON, ED LITCHER & NINA LUBLIN GOT IT!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
JUDITH BERDY JOVEMAY SANTOS
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
Aaron Bohrod, Junk Yard, 1939, oil on fiberboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from General Services Administration, 1971.447.8
b. Chicago, 1907 – d. Madison, WI, 1992
Aaron Bohrod was born on Chicago’s West Side in 1907, the third child of Jewish immigrant parents. He gravitated toward art as a child, recalling that, at the age of nine or ten “it was fun to scribble.” After a brief attempt at training through a correspondence course, Bohrod pursued formal study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC): initially in a Saturday morning children’s class and later, from 1926–28, as a full-time student. Both the classroom instruction and his exposure to the museum’s collection and library had significant effects on his development. During this time, Bohrod also earned a living as a commercial artist in the advertising art departments of local stores, including the discount retailer the Fair Store.
Drawn toward “the mecca for all young artists,” Bohrod relocated to New York City, where he studied at the Art Student’s League from 1929–32 with notable American artists and instructors John Sloan, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Boardman Robinson. Bohrod credited Sloan’s insistence on humble, everyday subjects, and on “vitality in painting” as key underpinnings for his own art.
After his return to Chicago in 1932, Bohrod put Sloan’s teachings into practice by seeking out a wide range of urban locales for his paintings: “backyards and alleys and garage eaves and rooftops, and the parks, and the setting for the life of everyday people.” Working from his studio on North Avenue, Bohrod quickly established himself as a vital member of the city’s artistic community. He gathered with fellow residents and artists Francis Chapin and Davenport Griffen for sketching classes and lively discussions, embraced the “Chicago School’s” living connection to its audience, belonged to the Chicago Society of Artists, and maintained an active local exhibition schedule. He continued to take occasional courses at SAIC until 1937, and taught there briefly in the early 1940s.
Street in Oklahoma (1932) and Burlesque at the Rialto (1935) are typical of the artist’s work from this period, and reveal his engagement both thematically and stylistically with American scene painting. In the former, Bohrod depicted a rural townscape. Although the prominent sign in the foreground marks its location along Route 66—the “Main Street of America”—the deserted road and the sinister expanse of sky convey desolation and despair. A Texaco station and a few boldly colored structures line the forlorn thoroughfare, devoid of human presence with the exception of the lone figure reclining against the building to the right. The eerie quality of the scene is emphasized by the blackened windows and doors of the buildings, the skewed perspective of the telephone poles and wires, and the white headlamps of the parked car, which stare vacantly at the viewer. Above, the roiling, darkened clouds suggest an impending storm, perhaps one of the “black blizzards” of swirling dust that ravaged the Great Plains during the 1930s. The spontaneity of the brushstrokes and loose handling of the paint further enhance the simplicity and rural character of the setting.
By contrast, Burlesque at the Rialto revels in a vibrant, densely populated scene of urban spectacle in a more ordered, tighter style characteristic of Bohrod’s work beginning in 1934. In the foreground, heads and shoulders of the overwhelmingly male viewers are packed into neat rows, framed by the rigid geometry of vertical stripes and arches on the left wall and the forceful beams overhead. A muted palette of grays, browns, and flesh tones suggests a murky, smoke-filled haze. Bohrod set the stage in dynamic opposition to the audience’s space: the luminous, writhing female performers create a sinuous pattern of flesh-colored arabesques against a striking blue curtain, punctuated with bursts of brilliant yellow, green, purple, and orange. The movement and bold sensuality of their nude bodies is at odds with the staid, drably garbed seated men. Bohrod’s technique is more controlled in this painting, with a greater attention to detail in the figures and architecture that is softened with a glimmering surface effect. The burlesque show enjoyed great popularity during the 1930s and served as an alluring subject for several important American artists, most notably Reginald Marsh. Bohrod’s Burlesque at the Rialto bears a striking affinity to Marsh’s numerous canvases featuring performances such as Star Burlesque (1933, Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis).
Throughout the Depression, Bohrod managed to support himself as a full-time artist. He sold a number of watercolors for up to $35 apiece through the Chicago gallery of Mrs. Increase Robinson. Robinson, who served as State Director of the Federal Art Project in Illinois between 1935 and 1938, facilitated commissions from Bohrod for three WPA murals for post offices in Clinton, Galesburg, and Vandalia, Illinois. The artist’s professional achievements in the 1930s also included two consecutive Guggenheim Fellowships (1936–37 and 1937–38), which funded trips to the West, and the South and Northeast, respectively. In 1939 Bohrod was accepted into the Associated American Artists group, whose membership included such luminaries as Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, and Thomas Hart Benton. This New York-based gallery marketed art to the middle classes and employed artists to produce affordable lithographs during the Depression. In 1941 Bohrod was appointed a visiting artist at Southern Illinois University, a post that he vacated in 1942 to serve in the Army War Art Unit during World War II. In 1948, he was appointed artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where Bohrod remained until his retirement in 1973.
Despite his success as an American scene painter, Bohrod’s work shifted dramatically in 1953, when he abandoned the themes of his earlier work and devoted his attention to precisely detailed trompe l’oeil paintings. The artist earned recognition and praise for this new genre, and his work appeared widely in magazines, galleries, and museums over the ensuing decades.
Patricia Smith Scanlan
Street in Oklahoma
Burlesque at the Rialto
Aaron Bohrod, Street in Joliet, n.d., gouache on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of International Business Machines Corporation, 1969.133
Aaron Bohrod, Associated American Artists, Church in Luxembourg, ca. 1946, lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Frank McClure, 1979.98.38
Aaron Bohrod, Ogden Avenue Viaduct, 1939, gouache on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the General Services Administration, 1985.65.12
Aaron Bohrod, Revery, 1929, etching, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1972.12
Turner Valley
OOPS……I have not been able to list the correct answers to the weekend and Monday and Tuesday photos, due to taking a few days off the island. I will have to discipline my staff!!!
HESCO BARRIERS TO PREVENT FUTURE FLOODING OUTSIDE COLER
GLORIA HERMAN, NINA LUBLIN, LAURA HUSSEY, ALEXIS VELLEFANE, ALL GOT IT
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
SEND US YOUR FAVORITE NEIGHBORHOOD AND PLACES OF YOUR CHILDHOOD.
WHAT WAS YOURS?
I spent 12 year in Forest Hills, thru Jr. high and high school. Can’t believe it was 50+ years ago.
Stratton was a popular neighborhood place to dine.
“The Gardens” exclusive, where the residents hated the US Open when it was played there. They also put stickers on your windshield if you parked there.
Get small theatre named after the Trylon and Perisphere from the 1939 World’s Fair!!
Alumni:SIMON AND GARFUNKEL, RON CHERNOW, BOB KESHAM AKA CAPTAIN KANGAROO, JERRY SPRINGER, THE DIONNES……Most are way before or after my time there.
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
WIKIPEDIA
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
George L. K. Morris, Posthumous Portrait, 1944, oil on fiberboard and plaster relief, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia and Phillip Frost, 1986.92.67
Posthumous Portrait is Morris’s eulogy for the Paris he knew before the Germans occupied the city in World War II. The collage style recalls the heady days when Picasso and Braque experimented with Cubism and broke the old rules of art. By 1944 the freedom that they, Morris, and a generation of artists and writers had known was gone.
Morris’s abstract shapes suggest a great, helmeted head in a space filled with smaller soldiers and two stick figures of falling bodies. The sharp-edged rectangle on the right side of the face, and a much smaller one above, suggest bayonets. Bits of words cut off by these elements appear to spell “Boulangerie d’Alençon,” perhaps a favorite bakery from Morris’s Paris days.
Morris made several abstract paintings about the war in Europe. Like other artists who had been politically active in the 1930s, he felt he could do little but watch the devastation unfold. This work is a protest against Germany’s brutality, but it is also a retreat-—a poignant memory of better days when he and other Park Avenue Cubists enjoyed the pleasures that only Paris could provide.
Home Art + Artists Artists George L. K. Morris Copyright unknown
Name George L. K. Morris Also Known as George Lovett Kingsland Morris
Born New York, New York Died Stockbridge, Massachusetts born New York City 1905-died Stockbridge, MA 1975
Active in Paris, France Nationalities American Linked Open Data Linked Open Data URI
A writer and editor as well as a painter and sculptor, George L. K. Morris used various publications as platforms for advocating abstract art during the 1930s and 1940s. He believed that abstraction offered limitless possibilities for the twentieth century and set about to interpret new forms and ideas in historical terms so they would have special meaning for an American audience. “There is nothing new,” he maintained in a 1937 article, “about the quality that we have come to call abstract.… In great works of the past there has always been a dual achievement—the plastic, or structural, on the one hand, and the literary (or subject) on the other.” When “the veil of subject-matter had been pierced and discarded,” he continued, “the works of all periods began to speak through a universal abstract tongue.”
Morris came to his understanding of modern movements firsthand. His frequent trips to Europe and close association with leading Parisian painters and sculptors gave him special authority when arguing the historical basis of their art.
Often described as a ” Park Avenue Cubist,” Morris came from a privileged background. He attended Groton and graduated from Yale in 1928, where he studied art and literature and edited the Yale Literary Magazine. He spent the fall semesters of 1928 and 1929 at the Art Students League; in the spring of 1929 he went to Paris with Albert Gallatin and stayed after Gallatin’s departure to take Léger’s and Ozenfant’s classes at the Académie Moderne. In Paris he became a confirmed abstractionist; in his work illusionistic space in figurative paintings yielded to uptilted planes and increasingly to a Cubist fracturing of the picture plane.
On his return to New York, Morris founded a short-lived cultural and literary magazine called The Miscellany, for which he wrote intelligent and informed art criticism. He continued to travel frequently, often accompanying Gallatin to Paris to buy work for the Gallery of Living Art. He became friendly with Jean Hélion, who provided introductions to Braque, Picasso, and Brancusi, and he wrote catalogue notes to accompany Hélion’s essayfor the catalogue of the Gallery of Living Art. In 1937 he joined forces with Gallatin, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Cesar Domela, to publish an art magazine called Plastique. There, and in the pages of Partisan Review—where he served as an editor between 1937 and 1943—Morris spoke of the cyclical nature of art history and placed contemporary art squarely within a framework of historical evolution. He wrote that during the nineteenth century, when art appealed to a growing middle class insufficiently sophisticated to understand its plastic qualities, it became stuck “in the mire of realism.” With Cézanne and Seurat, who analyzed objects as shapes in space, the modern era began. The time is ripe, Morris continued, “for a complete beginning. The bare expressiveness of shape and position of shape must be pondered anew; the weight of color (and) the direction of line and angle can be restudied until the roots of primary tactile reaction shall be perceived again.” Contemporary artists, he maintained, “must strip art inward to those very bones from which all cultures take their life.”
During World War II, Morris worked as a draftsman for a naval architect’s firm. After 1947, he devoted his time almost exclusively to painting and sculpture, although he continued to write occasionally. A founding member of the American Abstract Artists, in the late 1940s he also served as the group’s president, arranging exhibitions in Europe and Japan as well as in the United States. He continued to be active with the group during the 1950s and 1960s. In Morris’s own art, Léger served as an early model. Although his work never physically resembled that of his teacher, like Léger, Morris sought a synthesis of Cubist structure and primitive form. In Morris’s work this was reflected in the incorporation of American Indian imagery.
During the mid 1930s, he argued for the concrete, and in his paintings juxtaposed hard-edged circular and angular forms in completely nonobjective compositions related to Hélion’s work of the same time. In the early 1940s, he began to reincorporate figurative imagery in his art. In his Posthumous Portrait of 1944, Morris experimented with such non-art materials as tile and linoleum embedded in painted plaster compositions.
Although Morris exhibited with some frequency during the 1930s and 1940s, his paintings and sculpture received greatest recognition after the war. He remained steadfast in his devotion to his variant form of Cubism, even though many of his friends and colleagues turned to more expressionist styles in the postwar years.
George L. K. Morris, Industrial Landscape, 1936-1950, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of an anonymous donor, 1968.49
George L. K. Morris, Untitled, from the portfolio American Abstract Artists, 1937, offset lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia and Phillip Frost, 1986.92.114.22
SUZY FRELINGHUYSEN
Suzy Frelinghuysen Suzy Frelinghuysen was born in 1911 in New Jersey and descended from a long line of clergymen and politicians. Her grandfather Frederick T. Frelinghuysen was Secretary of State under President Chester A. Arthur, Theodore Frelinghuysen was a Senator from New Jersey who opposed Jackson’s removal of the Cherokees from their land and ran as a VP candidate with Henry Clay.
Suzy was named Estelle, after her mother, but given the nickname of Suzy by her four brothers who thought their baby sister resembled a monkey they had just visited at the zoo. Suzy was educated at Miss Fine’s in Princeton and privately tutored in art and music and made childhood trips to Europe. In 1935 she married Morris who encouraged her painting and in 1938 became the first woman artist to have a painting placed in the permanent collection of the Museum of Living Art. Her principle interest remained music and after WWII she auditioned for the New York City Opera and became an instant success, singing the lead roles as a dramatic soprano in “Tosca” and “Ariadne auf Naxos” under the name Suzy Morris. She toured opera houses and recital halls in Europe and the United States. Her career was cut short with her retirement in 1951 after a bout of bronchitis. She began painting full time again, achieving some of her finest works. When asked how she reconciled the two art forms, singing and painting, she told an interviewer, “In painting, you’re concerned with the arrangement of forms. On the stage, which is your frame, you’re concerned with arranging yourself. It’s like a picture, only, of course, you’re moving.”
She died in 1988 in Lenox, Massachusetts and left instructions in her will that the house and art collection be used to further the understanding of abstract art in America.
Her work is intently sought after by private collectors and can be viewed in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Carnegie Art Institute.
THE WORKS OF THIS ARTISTIC COUPLE CAN BE SEEN AT:
Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio 92 Hawthorne St. Lenox, MA 01240
RETIRING SOON ONE OF MY FAVORITE RIOC RED BUS DRIVERS ANGEL TINOCO IS RETIRING SOON AFTER 28 YEARS WORKING ON THE ISLAND. ANGEL, ALWAYS QUIET, POLITE AND EAGER TO PLEASE WILL BE GREATLY MISSED. i AM SURE HE AND CARL CAN NOW DISCUSS THE METS BASEBALL GAMES!! BEST WISHES PAPACITO, JUDY BERDY
THE POWER PLANT ACROSS THE RIVER TESTING ITS FIRE SUPPRESSION SYSTEM
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
Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
PHOTOS BY JUDITH BERDY / RIHS (C)
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
