In yesterday’s issue we told you of the story of the now Parq Central Hotel in Albuquerque. The past is remembered by the architecture, artwork and memorabilia throughout the building.
An original blueprint framed for all to see
Ranyee Lee, my travel companion points our tour rail route from Chicago.
Sadly there are no more timetables printed or route maps on Amtrak. Luckily you can follow the route by Google Maps or look out the window of the train!!!
A remnant of the past is this bench on one of the many patios around the buildings.
The former staff housing is now hotel rooms with the original woodwork preserved.
Cabinets of found objects decorate the hallways.
Room decor includes an enlarged postcard from 1921. (The house that the card is addressed to still exists in Portland, Maine)
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
JUDITH BERDY
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The reason for the trip on Amtrak across 2/3rd of the continental United States was the wedding of Melanie Colter and Jose Medrano. Melanie was our historic preservation intern and we have kept up and she has written for Blackwell’s Almanac while having a great career in historic preservation.
A funny thing happened when we arrived at our hotel in Albuquerque last week. The build is a former hospital for workers of the Santa Fe Railway and then a hospital for children. What a coincidences! The halls are decorated with all kinds of good stuff that I love to see. We had a great time learning about the building how it was converted into a 75 room hotel. It is a wonderful case of historic restoration.
No other railroad connected the Southwest to the rest of America like the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. Over a century after the railroad entered New Mexico many of its legendary hotels have been torn down, but now in an historic twist of fate, the Santa Fe Railroad’s 1926 hospital in downtown Albuquerque is on its way to becoming a famous hotel.
I grew up loving trains. My granddad worked as a railroad detective or “bull” for the Great Northern line, and I have his spring steel sap and his Colt .38 Police Positive pistol. Throughout the 19th and well into the 20th century, railroads represented the cutting edge of American business innovation. Though railroads were dangerous places to work, employees remained loyal often for their entire careers.
On the ATSF, one of the workers’ benefits was medical care that employees contributed to monthly. At the height of American railroading, the ATSF built a modern hospital between 1924 and 1926 on Central Avenue complete with a boiler plant, four-story building and separate lodging for physicians.
The railroad had 5,000 employees and a dozen hospitals between the Duke City and Topeka, but Albuquerque acted as the ATSF hub for the entire western part of the United States, with a variety of railroad shops and repair and maintenance facilities. Patients came in with injuries suffered up and down the railroad line. Doctors at the hospital practiced emergency medicine on difficult cases and trained on the latest equipment.
Built in the shape of a wing, dramatic-colored tile, glazed in Silver City, N.M., can be found on the building’s exterior, and the inside features additional tile and wide hallways commensurate with moving hospital beds around centrally located nursing stations. Constructed on a full city block in what is now called “EDO” or eastern downtown Albuquerque, the hospital for decades served the medical needs of the Santa Fe’s male railroad employees and, after 1961, their families, too. Later, it became a residential mental-health facility.
Food in the hospital cafeteria was legendary with some of the best enchiladas served in Albuquerque. On a tour with Gabriel “Gabe” Alvarado, I learned that “doctors came back at night just for the cafeteria food.” But what do you do with an old building in need of extensive repairs?
Transformation and preservation
The principal precept of historic preservation is “preservation in place” or keeping an historic building and its setting intact. That’s hard to do with structures designed for specific functions, but creative architects and interior designers can work wonders. The term is “adaptive re-use.”
David Oberstein and partners bought the hospital as an investment.
“We recognized it was a landmark, and we looked at a variety of alternatives including medical offices and condos, but we decided on a boutique hotel,” Oberstein said. They named it the Parq Central.
“We had to re-zone it for hotel use and get approval for serving alcohol,” he said. “The city couldn’t have been more supportive. We also worked with the New Mexico State Historic Preservation Office and the National Park Service.”
Students from the University of New Mexico’s School of Architecture lent a hand, and in the surgeon’s quarters I learned on a guided tour the floors are all the same and they still creak.
That structure has 90 percent of its original wood trim and wainscoting. It’s the most pristine on the property, with a beveled glass door and even a small classroom, which is now an intimate lounge. No one was allowed in this auxiliary building except physicians.
Nurses lived in the boiler-room building on the second floor with no heat – only what came from the boilers themselves. In that building, the original 5-foot furnace door built by the Brownell Co. of Dayton, Ohio, remains in place. Maintenance workers opened that massive door to shovel coal to heat the sprawling medical complex. Now, the boiler building has cozy hotel units. In the main structure, designers added inset display cases with historical artifacts or medically-themed exhibits.
I’ve learned that former hospital staff have nothing but the fondest memories of the building and that retired employees have broken down and cried because of their memories here. For many, this was the highlight of their careers.
An astounding conversion
“The conversion from an old hospital to a modern hotel is spectacular,” said historian Spence Wilson of Historic Albuquerque Inc. “The layout and upgrades are very well done.”
All window glass had to be replaced and damaged tiles matched with the correct colors. “One of the most difficult areas of the rehabilitation was the windows, which had to be shipped to Chicago, acid-dipped and re-glazed,” said Managing Director Yancy Sturgeon. “We also had to replace the old mechanical systems and elevator with new systems.”
Now, visitors can see a few model train engines, an historic map of the extensive ATSF route and posters of the Super Chief train in its glamour days when Hollywood stars passed through Albuquerque headed to California. Historic brass plaques, copies of Western Union telegrams and collages of newspaper accounts of the building’s opening prove the importance of the structure in the city’s history.
There’s a spacious main floor lounge with crisp, modern furnishings, a fabulous breakfast buffet with three kinds of quiche and a pet-friendly first floor. A major change to the hospital is the entrance. What was once a circular drive-in area and archway for ambulances is now a sunroom surrounded by an enclosed patio with well-kept gardens and flowers. The former exit is now used as the front of the building. In the lobby, a guest book fills with family comments and compliments.
A modern destination
Opened in October 2010, hospital rooms have now become 74 hotel rooms with a No. 1 listing on Trip Advisor for both leisure and business travel in Albuquerque and a AAA Four Diamond rating. The fourth floor sports a rooftop bar named The Apothecary Lounge, with dramatic views to the north, south and west. At sunset the roof has become a magnet for the city’s younger crowd.
Where patients once recovered from illnesses, now there are small group meeting rooms, banquets and blushing brides. The Parq Central is fast becoming a New Mexico destination for weddings and family reunions. I like the windows that open, the full-tile showers, the fluffy towels and robes and greeting other guests in the morning as we pad down the hall barefoot to coffee and tea set up where nurses once read patients’ charts.
Because my grandfather worked for a railroad, we traveled by rail. I remember riding a Pullman car with my mother late into the night and watching farms and fields come and go in the darkness. Now, like everyone else, I fly. A great advantage for Durangoans is the shuttle service at the Parq Central. You can leave your car at the hotel, get a ride to the Albuquerque Airport, and then when you return, spend the night in luxury before driving home.
In a world of cookie-cutter chain motels on Interstate 25, it’s refreshing to have a small, intimate historic hotel in the city’s center. I’ve stayed there a few times, and I’ll be back to support historic preservation and to soak up more railroad history.
gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu. Andrew Gulliford is a professor of history and environmental studies at Fort Lewis College
Since it is late and I have not unpacked, the story will continue. More on Amtrak across the country to follow.
Nite, Judyb
WEDNESDAY PHOTOS OF THE DAY
Ruth and Irving Berdy checking out souvenirs at the Albuquerque train station in 1942, just one year after they were married. To this day there are souvenir sellers meeting all the trains arriving at the station.
A MORE RECENT BRIDAL COUPLE
Melanie and Jose Medrano, married September 26, 2021
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The controversial politics of presidential memorials.
BELMONT FREEMAN
NOVEMBER 2012
The achievements of a postwar generation that brought to professional design practice a vigorous sense of mission — at once artistic, cultural, and political — are more evident than ever. In an ongoing and occasional series, historians and critics offer new assessments of modern masters.
An apparition has risen in the middle of the East River in New York City. A gleaming white vision of serene architectural perfection, it is also a specter from the past. I speak of Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, the monument to President Roosevelt that Louis I. Kahn designed in 1973 and that only now has been realized. Commissioned at a moment when the New York State Urban Development Corporation was seeking to transform Welfare Island — a forlorn sliver of land that lies between midtown Manhattan and Queens — into a middle-class residential neighborhood, the project, situated at the southern tip of the island, was aborted after Governor Nelson Rockefeller and other political sponsors left office and as New York City, in the mid-1970s, slumped into near-bankruptcy. In the years that followed, attempts to revive the park floundered and Kahn’s design attained legendary status as his most compelling unbuilt work. Only after the turn of the 21st century, and in a vastly changed New York City, did the political, cultural and economic stars finally align to give life to the memorial project. It is a testament to the power of both the Roosevelt and the Kahn legacies, and a cause for rejoicing.
A deceptively simple composition, the memorial park is supreme Kahn, melding megalithic forms from ancient Egypt with modernist minimalism, while the strict symmetry and axial plan recall Kahn’s beaux-arts formation. One approaches from the north, mounting a broad set of stairs to a parterre of grass flanked by precisely aligned rows of trees. The lawn tapers and slopes downward, performing one of the place’s many tricks of manipulated perspective. The garden funnels attention onto a massive stone block with a niche that holds a larger-than-life-size bronze bust of FDR by the sculptor Jo Davidson, the one figurative representation of Roosevelt at the memorial. It is on the south side of the portrait altar that the prize space awaits; a square chamber open to the sky, which Kahn dubbed “The Room,” enclosed on three sides by 12-foot-high walls of white North Carolina granite and open on the south to a spectacular view down the river, encompassing the buildings of the United Nations, close across the water.
Stone platforms invite one to sit and read the inscribed text of FDR’s famous “Four Freedoms” speech and to contemplate the view. The craftsmanship is extraordinary. 1 The massive granite blocks that enclose the temple-like chamber — each reportedly weighing 36 tons — are set precisely level, with an open one-inch gap between the stones. The finely honed sides of the six-foot-thick stones bounce the light into one’s eye to uncanny effect. The cut slabs that comprise the battered walls of the twin ramps that lead from the memorial to the riverside esplanades — sloped in two directions and tapered — are specimens of stereometry worthy of a master mason of the Renaissance (cut and positioned, I am sure, by computer-guided machinery, but when Kahn’s office produced the design drawings no such aid was available). This is architecture that speaks to me, and in a familiar voice: I studied at the University of Pennsylvania while Kahn was still alive and teaching, and very much the dominant force at the design school. I feel Lou’s spirit here.
Louis Kahn, Sketch of Four Freedoms Park. [Image courtesy of Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission]
Kahn’s site plan and renderings of the Four Freedoms Park carefuly compose the monument’s relationship to the river and to the United Nations, but they scantly reference any of the built infrastructure on Roosevelt Island (as Welfare Island was renamed in 1973), which at the time was home to several old and forbidding institutional buildings and the newly planned residential enclave then under construction. As it happens, the context is quite felicitous. Immediately adjacent to the park sit the remains of the 1845 Smallpox Hospital designed by James Renwick; a grim schist structure that is now a melancholy ruin. A reminder that the island was a zone of quarantine, the ruins of the hospital might also recall the destruction of war; bombed-out remnants of London or Dresden. As such they form the ideal prelude to the cleansing environment of Four Freedoms Park, through which one is delivered in stately progression to a vision of the United Nations and the possibility of a future without war. It is hard to imagine a more optimistic work of art, which delivers its message of redemption at the levels of material detail, human occupancy and the city at large.
I came away from my first visit to Four Freedoms Park exhilarated and uplifted, but those feelings were gradually replaced by mild depression. The fact is that in 2012 the optimism of Kahn’s vision is hard to sustain. The United Nations, which was founded with the utopian aspiration of preventing the recurrence of war, has proven ineffectual in that mission, riven as the institution is with mistrust and factionalism. The United States, universally admired in the immediate post-World War II period for its altruism and policies of social uplift, is now perceived by much of the world as a heavy-handed superpower intent on maintaining cultural, economic and military dominance — and provoking increasingly violent resistance in response. I also despair of the state of public architecture in this country. How telling it is, that our best new monument is one that had been cryogenically preserved for almost 40 years. I feel confident in positing that this FDR monument could not be designed today or, more to the point, would not be approved by any commissioning committee.
The Four Freedoms Park is too austere and insufficiently didactic. It leaves the viewer with too much interpretive leeway for today’s political and cultural climate in which scripted narratives prevail. Our society seems no longer able to invest meaning in abstract form. At least when it comes to the design of our monuments, Americans have lost faith in abstraction or, worse, have come to suspect abstract design as somehow masking a subversive message. Ever since Maya Lin’s masterful, geometrically pristine Vietnam Veterans Memorial (designed in 1981, which puts it much closer in age to Kahn’s FDR monument than to Michael Arad’s 9/11 Memorial) was accused of being a crypto-defeatist emblem of shame and subsequently compromised by the addition of “heroic” figurative sculpture, public monuments in the U.S. have been pressed to hew a didactic, representational design program. Thus the unencumbered, pluralistic expanse of the Washington National Mall — scene of massive public gatherings and historic demonstrations — was in 1997 interrupted by Friedrich St. Florian’s retrograde World War II Memorial; a composition with eagle-topped baldachins and neoclassical pillars clad in martial ornament, with fully advertent imperialistic overtones.
Now consider the sorry story of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C., the design of which is currently being fought over, behind the scenes and in the press. Frank Gehry, one of the greatest abstract artists of our time, inexplicably got himself entangled in the design of a monument of the most literal, representational type. According to the website of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission, the monument is to consist of two sets of sculptural groups depicting Eisenhower’s achievements as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and as 34th President of the United States. The larger-than-life-size statues are set on stone plinths and backed by slabs carrying texts. A third, centrally situated statue represents Eisenhower as a boy in Kansas, “looking out onto his future achievements”; a maudlin touch that has attracted considerable ridicule.
As if the heroic sculptural ensembles were not grand enough to honor the memory of a president distinguished by his personal modesty, Gehry Partners propose to surround the four-acre Eisenhower Square with 80-foot-tall “tapestries” made of woven metal — I’m sure they will dazzle — depicting the landscape of Kansas and elements of Eisenhower’s Abilene home. The screen rudely blocks the façade of the Lyndon B. Johnson Department of Education Building; not a lovely piece of architecture, but the affront is conspicuous. The alley thus created is euphemistically called the LBJ Promenade. (I can hardly wait until a commission is assembled and some hapless designer is engaged to design a monument to Lyndon Johnson.) The metal mesh pictorials remind me of gargantuan scroll paintings, or film strips that create the background, literally and narratively, for the sculptural groups that are the iconic “stills” from the Eisenhower story.
The official website notes that the sculptures will be in-the-round reproductions of famous photographs, perhaps to reassure us that the representations will be “objective,” and not subject to the interpretive license of some sculptor with unreliable motives. 2 What was Gehry thinking? Surely he would know that when you try to tell a story with such literal imagery you inevitably invite commentary and complaint; hence the well-publicized meddling by the Eisenhower family and members of Congress, who have been picking the Gehry design apart since it was first unveiled. 3 The imbroglio is a reminder that monument-making is not about the person whose life is being commemorated; it is about us, about the culture and politics of the moment and how we want the story to be told.
As I sought to contextualize Kahn’s Four Freedoms Park and Gehry’s Eisenhower Memorial, I recalled that the first modern American monument of the didactic, scenographic genre — at least as far as I know — was another memorial to Franklin Roosevelt. Located in Washington, D.C., and designed by Lawrence Halprin for a competition won in 1974 — making it contemporary to the Kahn FDR monument — the memorial was not funded and completed until 1997. Significantly, it is the work not of an architect or a sculptor, but of a landscape architect, who departed from traditional notions of monuments to create a themed park. The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial occupies seven and a half acres on the Tidal Basin and consists of four outdoor rooms enclosed by stone walls, plantings and water elements, and containing a collection of statues, bas reliefs and inscriptions that depict signal events in Roosevelt’s four-term presidency — the Great Depression, the War, a fireside chat, Roosevelt’s funeral cortege and so on. Eleanor Roosevelt gets her own niche with a statue that is, as I witnessed when I visited this past summer, the favorite photo-op spot for tourists.
Top: FDR Memorial, Washington, D.C. Sculpture of Franklin Roosevelt and Fala by Neil Estern. [Photo: Raul 654, courtesy Wikimedia Commons] Bottom: FDR Memorial, 1945, Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. [Photo: Nick-D, courtesy Wikimedia Commons]
The various sculptures are the work of an estimable group of artists, including Leonard Baskin, Robert Graham and George Segal, who offer vigorous and stylistically disparate interpretations of their assigned chapters of the Roosevelt story. After the memorial opened, controversy was fomented by advocates for people with disabilities, who felt that the single statue of FDR, seated with his dog Fala, did not make it sufficiently explicit that Roosevelt could not walk. Consequently a “Prelude” scene was added at the entrance to the park, with a bronze statue of the president in a wheelchair. I’m sure that Roosevelt would have loathed this depiction. Throughout his administrations he assiduously avoided being photographed in a wheelchair or in any situation that highlighted his disability, as he did not want to be known as the crippled president. But, of course, it’s really not about him. I suspect, in fact, that FDR would disapprove of the entire memorial park, as effective as it is. Roosevelt once expressed his wish that any memorial to him be no more than a single block of stone, the size of his desk. 4 Just such a monument was installed not long after his death, at Pennsylvania Avenue and Ninth Street, in front of the National Archives — but such a simple memorial doesn’t work for us today. The various narrative tableaux of the FDR Memorial serve a purpose identical to that of the pictorial stained glass and altar decorations in a medieval cathedral, which was to instruct an illiterate population on the lives of Christ and the saints. I fear that we are back to the task of instructing a historically illiterate population that has little knowledge of Franklin Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower and what they did or why they should be remembered. They have to be shown.
Not far from the FDR Memorial stands the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial, dedicated in August 2011. Neither abstract nor scenographic, the MLK Memorial returns to the old-fashioned genre of the single heroic statue. Despite gargantuan scale that would feel more at home in a Central Asian dictatorship and some heavy-handed symbolism — King’s form emerges from “a rock of hope” extruded from “the mountain of despair” — the memorial has the often-neglected virtue of a single focus. I like the fact that in this memorial — unlike the proposed Eisenhower monument — simply representing the person of Martin Luther King, Jr. is considered sufficient; that there is no need to illustrate the events of his life in pictorial form. A humanely scaled wall with inscriptions of King’s indelible words provides more than adequate supporting material. Like Mahatma Gandhi, King was a principal protagonist and enduring symbol of a social and political movement that resists imaging other than singular personification.
The egregious flaw in the design of the King Memorial, however, is the siting. Located on the northwest embankment of the Tidal Basin, the statue has no choice but to fix its gaze across the water onto the memorial temple of the slave-owning president Thomas Jefferson, and to turn its back to that of the emancipator, Abraham Lincoln. The official MLK, Jr. Memorial website credits authorship of the memorial to ROMA Design, a San Francisco-based architecture, landscape and urban design firm with a portfolio of significant public work. Strangely, given the centrality of the heroic statue, the sculptor is nowhere named. I suspect that this is a deliberate effort to suppress the memory of the protests that surrounded the selection of the Chinese artist Lei Yixin for the job. Many supporters of the memorial project felt that the commission should go to an African-American artist, while human rights activists declared that a sculptor whose principal credit was a monument to Mao Zedong was unfit to produce a portrait of Martin Luther King (carved of Chinese granite, no less). Along with site selection, design and iconography, even the execution of a monument can become politicized.
The completion of the Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island is nothing short of a miracle. New York City and the world owe a deep debt of gratitude to Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park LLC, which persevered in raising money and moving bureaucratic mountains to complete the monument, and to the design and construction team that executed Kahn’s conception so expertly. 5 That Kahn’s austere design survived the process virtually intact is remarkable. The custodians of the vision successfully deflected political pressures to add didactic elements to the memorial proper. An interpretive visitors’ center that may or may not be built within the ruins of the old hospital should house any such content at a safe remove, and the call to remind everyone that Franklin Roosevelt was stricken with polio in midlife and physically disabled thereafter will be answered by the installation of a sculptural group in a landscaped park to the north of, and out of sight from, the Kahn-designed memorial.
Unlike at the FDR memorial in Washington and the proposed Eisenhower monument, which impose a narrative on the visitor’s experience, at the Four Freedoms Park in New York the visitor is ennobled with the trust — the freedom — to formulate his or her own thoughts in an unencumbered environment of serene tranquility. But design compromises are made. When I first visited Roosevelt Island in August, I marveled at the visual purity of the ensemble — the broad entry stair, the gracious sitting-height perimeter walls, the multiple stone platforms of The Room — true to Kahn’s design and perfectly acceptable in 1974 but clearly not in compliance with today’s hyper-protective codes. Returning in early October, I noticed the addition of stainless steel handrails on the stairs — elegantly minimal, but not part of the original design — and I was told that the lawyers and insurance carriers were still debating the installation of more safety barriers on a work of art that is neither a building nor a conventional landscape — a depressing reminder of how fear of litigation perverts the design process today.
The creation of a public monument is a fraught business these days — just ask Michael Arad, who drove himself to the brink of insanity defending his once-simple design for the memorial at the World Trade Center site. That the pristine work of an architect nearly 40 years dead should rise intact, in today’s contentious political, legal and aesthetic climate, is, again, a wonder. And how timely it is that the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt should be honored in such eloquent fashion at a moment when powerful political forces in this country seek to dismantle it. In the case of Four Freedoms Park, it is clear that the design itself gave propulsive force to the drive to complete the project, both through its clarity and visual power and with the awareness that this was New York City’s final opportunity to build a work — his last — by one of America’s greatest architects. In the end, Four Freedoms Park is as much a monument to Louis Kahn as it is to Franklin Roosevelt. Abstract form worthy of the noble abstract concepts that it honors — Four Freedoms Park tells us that there is hope, after all.
TUESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
THE LINDEN TREES HAVE THRIVED AND LEND A NEW VIEW OF THE MEMORIAL
MONDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY LIGHTHOUSE PHOTO
BY ELEANOR SCHETLIN (C) RIHS
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
Source: PLACES JOURNAL
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We will be away from our computer for a week and during that week your assignment is to learn more about our 6 Island landmarks. I am sure you will find lots of information from these designation reports. I promise there will not be a quiz when I return.
FROM THE ARCHIVES
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2021
THE 479th EDITION
THE LANDMARK
SMALLPOX HOSPITAL
DESIGNATION REPORT NEW YORK LANDMARKS
PRESERVATION COMMISSION 1975
The Lighthouse
The Lighthouse at the northern tip of Roosevelt Island
This small Lighthouse stands at the northern tip of Roosevelt Island on a projection of land which was at one time a separate island connected to the main land by a wooden bridge. Local legend maintains that during the 19th century a patient from the nearby Lunatic Asylum was permitted to build a stone fort on this outcropping as he feared an invasion by the British. When plans were formulated to build the Lighthouse, this patient was allegedly persuaded to surrender the fort only after much cajoling and a bribe of bogus money. The tale continues that the patient himself demolished the fort and built the new Lighthouse, carving the inscription:
This is the work Was done by John McCarthy Who built the Light House from he bottom to the Top All ye who do pass by may Pray for his soul when he dies.
While construction of the Lighthouse cannot actually be credited to the diligent Mr. McCarthy, the warden of the Lunatic Asylum did specifically mention in his annual report of 1870 an “industrious but eccentric” patient who had built near the Asylum a large section of seawall, thereby reclaiming a sizable piece of land. The warden further remarked that this patient “is very assiduous, and seems proud of his work, and he has reason to be, for it is a fine structure, strong and well built.” Whether or not this patient was the model for the legend of the fort and Lighthouse builder, a connection of the Lighthouse and the Lunatic Asylum is a historical fact. In May 1872, City official resolved to “effectually light” the Asylum and the tip of the island. The following September, the Lighthouse was completed , with lamps furnished by the U.S. Lighthouse Service. The stone structure was built under the direction of the Board of Governors of the Commission of Charities and Correction, the body which administered the numerous City institutions on the island., At that time. The supervising architect for this Commission was James Renwick, Jr.
James Renwick, Jr. (1818-1895), was son of a highly regarded professor at Columbia College. He began his notable career in 1836 as an engineer supervising the construction of the great Distributing Reservoir at 42nd Street for the Croton water supply system. In 1840, his drawings were selected in a competition for the design of Grace Church, which, at that time, was New York’s wealthiest and most fashionable congregation. Renwick, only twenty-five and entirely self-trained as an architect, achieved instant recognition. During his long and highly successful career he designed many important buildings, including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, the Main building at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, the William E. Dodge Villa (now Greyston Conference Center) and St. Patrick’s Cathedral-both designated landmarks, as is Grace Church. As an art collector and yachtsman, Renwick’s association with the Charities and Corrections Board, in all likelihood, had philanthropic motivations. He designed the Workhouse, City Hospital and Smallpox Hospital on Blackwell’s Island (as Roosevelt Island was then known); the Inebriate and Lunatic Asylum on Ward’s Island; and the main building of the Children’s Hospital on Randall’s Island. He also designed several smaller structures, among them, the Lighthouse on Roosevelt Island.
The Lighthouse is approximately fifty feet tall and is constructed of rock-faced, random gray ashlar. The stone (gray gneiss) was quarried on the island itself, predominately by convict labor from the Penitentiary on the island, and was used for many of the institutional buildings erected there. The Lighthouse is encircled by a small yard paved with flagstone. An entry walk at the south is flanked by stone bollards which have pyramidal tops carved with simple trefoils. The Lighthouse is octagonal in plan and vertically organized according to the tripartite division of the classical column-base, shaft and capital. The base is separated from the superstructure by a series of simple moldings which are interrupted to the south side by a projecting gable above the single entrance doorway. This doorway, which an incised pointed arch above a splayed keystone with flanking corbels, is designed in a rustic version of the Gothic style. The stepped stones of the Lighthouse are pierced above the doorway by two slit windows which light the interior staircase. The top of the shaft is adorned with Gothic foliate ornamentation in high relief, separated by simple moldings from the brackets which support the observation platform. These elements form the crowning feature of the Lighthouse. The octagonal lantern, originally surmounted by a picturesque conical roof is of glass and steel. It is surrounded by a simple metal railing.
The rock-faced stone and the sparing uses of boldly scaled ornamental detail give the Lighthouse the strength and character of a medieval fortification. In its isolated setting, the Lighthouse is a prominent and dramatic feature of Roosevelt Island.
MONDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
PHOTO BY ELEANOR SCHETLIN RIHS (C)
WEEKEND PHOTO
THE ORIGINAL SMALLPOX HOSPITAL BUILDING
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)
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
We will be away from our computer for a week and during that week your assignment is to learn more about our 6 Island landmarks. I am sure you will find lots of information from these designation reports. I promise there will not be a quiz when I return.
FROM THE ARCHIVES
WEEKEND, SEPTEMBER 25-26, 2021
THE 478th EDITION
THE LANDMARK
SMALLPOX HOSPITAL
DESIGNATION REPORT NEW YORK LANDMARKS PRESERVATION COMMISSION 1975
Smallpox Hospital
Located at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, this fine Gothic Revival structure was originally constructed for the treatment of the “loathsome malady” known as smallpox. For many years it was the only institution of its kind in New York City. It is now a picturesque ruin, one which could readily serve as the setting for a 19th century “Gothic” romance.
In 1850, the construction of a new hospital was under consideration. It was also at this time during which smallpox patients were cared for in what Resident Physician William Kelly described as “a pile of poor wooden out houses on the banks of the river.” Unlike numerous other medical institutions built by the City on the Island in the 19th century, the Smallpox Hospital was not planned exclusively for charity cases. Due to the seriousness and the contagious nature of the disease, paying patients were also admitted. Although vaccination against smallpox was a common medical practice by the mid-19th century, the disease continued to plague New York City. Smallpox often afflicted immigrants, and as such, increasingly more stringent quarantine measures were instituted. Even as late as 1871, smallpox continued to reach epidemic proportions in New York. During the Civil War many soldiers and immigrants, were stricken with the disease.
The original Smallpox Hospital (the north and south wings are later additions to the building) was built between 1854-56 and designed by James Renwick Jr. It was first opened for public inspection on December 18, 1856. When the old buildings were destroyed by fire, patients had to be transferred to the new hospital which was not yet complete. Nevertheless, the Resident Physician, William Sanger, reported that the new building was “admirable,” an opinion which was also voiced by the professional staff during the following years. The Smallpox Hospital accommodated one hundred patients with charity cases in wards on the lower floors, while a series of private rooms on the upper floors was devoted for paying patients. In 1875, the Board of Health assumed control of the Smallpox Hospital, which had previously been administered by the Commission of Charities and Correction, and converted the building into a home for the nurses as well as the Maternity and Charity Hospital Training School. This school, established in 1875, was associated with Charity Hospital (later City Hospital), located just to the north of the Smallpox Hospital. As the training program expanded, a residence for the student nurses became necessary. The Smallpox Hospital became available for this purpose after a new hospital for the treatment of smallpox and other contagious diseases was built on North Brothers Island. This transition also reduced the danger of the disease spreading to Blackwell’s Island population, which by the end of the century numbered some seven thousand.
The Island was renamed Welfare Island in 1921, a reflection of the general nature of its use. In the course of the 20th century many of the institutional buildings there became inadequate and obsolete, among them, City Hospital, which in the 1950’s was relocated to new buildings in Queens. The main hospital building as well as the former Smallpox Hospital were abandoned. The Smallpox Hospital fell into disrepair and its deterioration continued at an ever accelerating pace. In the late 1960’s, despite its condition, it was included as part of a list of buildings on the Island considered worthy of preservation by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and the noted architectural historian, Henry-Russell Hitchcock. The New York State Urban Development Corporation undertook certain measures to reinforce the walls of the structure under the direction of the prominent New York architect, Giorgio Cavaglieri. Presently, the building remains an uninhabitable ruin with all the romance which any great work of architecture retains as long as its general outlines can be discerned, evoking memories of its past.
As with many of the buildings erected on the Island, the Smallpox Hospital is faced with locally quarried gray gneiss. The hospital, which is three stories in height, is essentially U-shaped in plan, a configuration formed by the later addition of the north and south wings which flank the original central block of building. This central portion has a low-pitched hip roof which was originally crowned by a tall crenelated cupola with pointed arch openings. The original west facade, now recessed between the wings, is symmetrically arranged with a slightly projecting central pavilion that is three bays in width and projecting end pavilions that is one bay wide. These portions of the building are surmounted by the picturesque crenelated parapets. The windows of the first two floors are rectangular with six-over-six sash, and those on the third floor are designed with pointed, straight-sided arches consisting of stone blocks mitred at the top, an interesting and unusual design. The dramatic focal point of the building is the entryway, which features a heavy stone porch surmounted by a crenelated bay, similar in design to the stone oriel windows of the wings. The entry is further enhanced by the massive tower-like structure above, with a recessed Gothic pointed arch on corbels, crowned by crenelations, and a smaller freestanding pointed arch. The end wings were designed in character with the original central block; the south wing, the work of architects York & Sawyer, was built in 1903-04, and the north wing was added by Renwick, Aspinwall & Owen, successors to the firm of James Renwick Jr., in 1904-05. The only aspect of these wings not inspired by Renwick’ original gothic Revival design was a mansard roof with dormers, intended to provide additional space.
James Renwick, Jr. (1818-1895, pictured to the left), was one of New York’s most fashionable and successful architects. In 1840, he achieved notoriety with his Gothic Revival design for Grace Church, selected in a competition when Renwick, who was entirely self-trained as an architect, was only twenty-five. Renwick designed many other buildings elsewhere New York City, three of which are now designated New York City Landmarks. They include Grace Church, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the William E. Doge villa (now the Greyston Conference Center in the Bronx). These three, like the Smallpox Hospital, are in the Gothic Revival style which Renwick favored in the early years of his career. Later in his career, he would also design buildings in the French, Second Empire style. A notable example of this was Charity Hospital on Roosevelt Island. For several years Renwick was Supervising Architect for the Commission of Charities and Correction, during which he designed the Workhouse, the Lighthouse, as well as the Charity and Smallpox Hospitals, on Roosevelt Island; the Inebriate and Lunatic Asylums on Ward’s Island; and the main building of the Children’s Hospital on Randal’s Island.
The Smallpox Hospital could easily become the American equivalent of the great Gothic ruins of England, just as the late 13th century Tintern Abbey in Monmouthshire, which has been admire and cherished since the 18th century as a romantic ruin. Plans have been made to transform the southern tip of Roosevelt Island into a park. Ruins in park settings were so greatly enjoyed in Europe during the 18th century that small “garden fabrics”, which were purely ornamental structures, were built in ruins found on various estates. The Smallpox Hospital, in a park setting, would be of comparable picturesque interest. In Fascination of Decay (1968), Paul Zucker stated that ruins can be “… an expression of an eerie romantic mood … a palpable documentation of a period in the past … something which recalls a specific concept of architectural space and proportion.” The Smallpox Hospital possesses all these evocative qualities.
BEFORE THE WINGS WERE ADDED (1898-1904), THE ORIGINAL HOSPITAL. THE ADDITIONS WERE FOR THE CONVERSION TO THE NEW YORK TRAINING SCHOOL FOR NURSES.
FRIDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
STRECKER LABORATORY BEFORE IT WAS RESTORED AND BECAME A POWER CONVERSION STATION FOR THE NY TRANSIT AUTHORITY
Funding Provided by: Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation Public Purpose Funds Council Member Ben Kallos City Council Discretionary Funds thru DYCD Text by Judith Berdy
We will be away from our computer for a week and during that week your assignment is to learn more about our 6 Island landmarks. I am sure you will find lots of information from these designation reports. I promise there will not be a quiz when I return.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2021
THE 477th EDITION
THE LANDMARK
STRECKER MEMORIAL LABORATORY
DESIGNATION REPORT
NEW YORK LANDMARKS PRESERVATION COMMISSION
1975
Strecker Memorial Laboratory
The small Romanesque Revival Strecker Memorial Laboratory is located at the southern end of Roosevelt Island, originally situated between the Smallpox Hospital and the now demolished Charity Hospital. Before Charity Hospital was demolished, the Laboratory provided an interesting contrast to both Hospitals in terms of scale and style. Designed by New York architects Frederick Clarke Withers & Walter Dickson, the building was constructed in 1892 and was administered under the direction of Charity (later City) Hospital to conduct pathological and bacteriological work. The building was the gift of the daughter of a Mr. Strecker, and as Dr. Charles G. Child Jr. wrote in his history of City Hospital (1904) it was “an illustration of what lasting good an intelligent woman can do to perpetuate the memory of a dear one.”
Pathological medicine made rapid advances during the 19th century, and laboratories such as this one reflect the increasingly scientific nature of its study and investigation. The first floor of Strecker Memorial Laboratory featured a room for the routine examination of specimens, an autopsy room, as well as a mortuary. On the second floor were rooms for more detailed research and experimentation. In 1905, the laboratory was remodeled, probably at the urging of the head pathologist Horst Oertel. Oertel was an emigrant to the United States and, as such, was well acquainted with the pioneering work in pathology being carried on in Europe at the time by prominent individuals such as Rudolf Virchow. The remodeling in 1905, which included the addition of a third story to the laboratory, provided facilities for histological examination as well as museum and library space.
In 1907, Oertel received an endowment provided by the Russell Sage Foundation, and thus the “Russell Sage Institute of Pathology” was first house in the Laboratory. When new facilities for this Institute were built, it relocated, while Strecker Memorial Laboratory continued to serve as the pathological center for City Hospital and the City Home (formerly Almshouse). Frederick Clarke Withers (1828-1901), the senior partner of the firm which designed the laboratory, was an Englishman trained in Great Britain, who came to the United States in 1852 at the invitation of the renowned American landscape architect, Alexander Jackson Downing. Unfortunately, Downing drowned that same year following the explosion off the steamboat Henry Clay. Withers then became associated with Calvert Vaux, Downing’s former partner. In 1857, Withers was one of the first individuals to be asked to join newly founded American Institute of Architects. Although he always retained this British citizenship, he volunteered for service in the Union Army in 1861. He returned home an invalid the following year, but soon recovered and resumed practice in New York City, joining Vaux and Frederick Law Olmstead in a partnership which lasted until 1871. In 1888, he formed a partnership with Walter Dickson (1834-1903).
Together, as supervising architects for the Commission of Charities and Corrections, they designed several buildings on Roosevelt Island, among them Strecker Memorial Laboratory and three brick structures for the Almshouse. With his former partner Calvert Vaux, Withers had previously designed several buildings for the Commission of Charities and Correction, most notably the High Victorian Gothic Jefferson Market Courthouse, located in the Greenwich Village Historic District, which is the best known of Wither’s works found in New York City. Among his other New York commissions were three commercial buildings at 448 Broom Street in the Soho Cast Iron Historic District, the high altar, reredos, the robing room of Trinity Church, and the lich gate of the “Little Church Around the Corner” (Church of the Transfiguration). Primarily considered an ecclesiastical architect,
Withers published the influential book Church Architecture in 1873. The Chapel of the Good Shepherd constructed between 1888-1889 on Roosevelt Island clearly illustrates his conception of church architecture. Walter Dickson who had practiced architecture in Albany for many years before coming to New York, designed the Albany Post Office and the Albany City Prison which replaced the original “Tombs.” Strecker Memorial Laboratory, although small in size, is monumental in its overall effect. Essentially Romanesque Revival in style, similar in manner to the late work of Henry Hobson Richardson, suggested by the broad arched openings and the use of rough-faced stone-gray gneiss, quarried on the island and used for many of its institutional buildings. The use of contrasting orange brick for quoins, sting courses, and the arches gives the building a vivid polychromatic effect that is reminiscent of Wither’s earlier compositions in the Victorian Gothic style. As a result of the non-ecclesiastic building type as well as the change in the style from Gothic, which Withers generally favored, to Romanesque it can be surmised that Dickson was largely responsible for the design.
The type of Romanesque Revival architecture which H. H. Richardson (1838-1886) developed became very popular among American architects in the 1880’s and early 1890’s. Broad arches, rough stone facing, modest use of polychrome, and the asymmetrical massing of elements are all hallmarks of the style. It was widely used for domestic, public, and institutional buildings. Montgomery Schuyler, noted 19th century architectural critic felt that the Romanesque Revival offered a firm foundation of which to build the elements of a “true and living architecture, such as for four centuries the world has not seen.” (Architectural Record I (October-December 1891). The Strecker Memorial Laboratory is designed in a late version of the Romanesque revival, characteristic of its date.
FRIDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
1969 VIEW OF ABANDONED STRECKER LABORATORY
THURSDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
TWO LOSSES ON ROOSEVELT ISLAND: REVEREND OLIVER CHAPIN, THE VICAR FOR 35 YEARS.
WE ALSO MISS THE MAIN STREET WIRE AND THE IMPORTANT PLACE IT HAD IN OUR COMMUNITY
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
We will be away from our computer for a week and during that week your assignment is to learn more about our 6 Island landmarks. I am sure you will find lots of information from these designation reports. I promise there will not be a quiz when I return.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2021
THE 476th EDITION
THE LANDMARK
CHAPEL OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
DESIGNATION REPORT NEW YORK LANDMARKS PRESERVATION COMMISSION 1975
Chapel of the Good Shepherd
The Chapel of the Good Shepherd, fully restored and recently rededicated, stands at the heart of the great new apartment complex built by the New York State Urban Development Corporation. Now attractively surrounded by a paved plaza, this late Victorian Gothic chapel is well integrated with its taller neighbors through the use of stone and brick in harmonizing colors, while at the same time it contrasts effectively with them both in scale and style. Designed by the prominent architect Frederick Clarke Withers, the chapel was begun in June, 1888 and completed the following year. It was the gift of New York banker George N. Bliss to the New York Protestant Episcopal Mission Society and was intended for use by the inmates of the Almshouse (later called the New York City Home for the Aged and Infirm).
The Almshouse was one of numerous charitable institutions maintained on the island by the City in the 19th century. In 1828, the City had purchased Blackwell’s Island, as it was then known, from the Blackwell family which had owned it for well over a century. The island was considered an ideal site for institutional development — as the Rev. J. F. Richmond wrote in his New York and its Institutions: the island, “separated on either side from the great world by a deep crystal current, appears to have been divinely arranged as a home for the unfortunate and the suffering, and a place of quiet reformatory meditation for the vicious.” During the course of the 19th century the City constructed a penitentiary, a workhouse, and many specialized hospitals.
Built in 1846, using stone quarried on the island and convict labor, the Almshouse originally consisted of only two buildings, separately housing men and women. However, by the 1890’s over a dozen buildings stood on its grounds, including the Chapel of the Good Shepherd, a Hospital for the Incurables, and the old Blackwell House, which was used as the residence of the Warden. The almshouse was capable of caring for about two thousand of the City’s poor, and the chapel itself had a seating capacity of four hundred. It also had a large reading room, a robing room for the clergy, and a room for the use of the Mission Society workers in the basement.
The general character of the use made of the island was reflected in its official renaming as Welfare Island in 1921. During the 20th century many of the institutional buildings on the island became inadequate and obsolete. Goldwater Memorial Hospital, the first modern hospital on the island, was opened in July 1939, and in the 1950s the old Metropolitan and City Hospitals on Welfare Island were relocated in new buildings in Manhattan and in Queens. The large Bird S. Coler Hospital and Home opened in 1952, replacing the function of the City Home which was subsequently closed. Ferry service to the island was discontinued in 1956 and the Chapel closed its door in 1958.
Redevelopment plans for Welfare Island — renamed Franklin Delano Roosevelt Island in 1973 — under the direction of the New York State Urban Development Corporation were begun in the late 1960s, and a survey of the existing structures was undertaken. On the basis of recommendations made by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and a report prepared by noted architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, the Chapel of the Good Shepherd and several other buildings were included in a list of structures especially worthy of preservation. New York architect, Giorgio Cavaglieri, who earlier had adapted the old Astor Library to a new use as the Shakespeare Festival Theater and the Jefferson Market Courthouse to a library, carried out the handsome restoration of the chapel, which was reopened in October of 1975.
The chapel is a large one, reminiscent in style of English parish churches. Indeed, the architect, Frederick Clarke Withers (1828-1901, pictured to the left), was an Englishman trained in Great Britain, who came to the United States in 1852 at the invitation of the renowned American landscape architect, Andrew Jackson Downing. Unfortunately, Downing drowned that same year following the explosion of the steamboat Henry Clay. Withers then turned to Calvert Vaux, Downing’s former partner with whom he became associated. In 1857,
Withers was one of the first to be asked to join the newly founded American Institute of Architects. Although he always retained his British citizenship, he volunteered for service in the Union Army in 1861. He returned home an invalid the following year, but recovered, and resumed practice in New York City, joining Vaux along with Frederick Law Olmstead in a partnership that lasted until 1871. He continued to practice architecture, and in 1888 formed a partnership with Walter Dickson.
Together as supervising architects for the Board of Charities and Correction they designed several buildings on Roosevelt Island among them the Strecker Memorial Laboratory and three brick structures for the Almshouse. In 1897, Withers retired to his home in Yonkers, New York. While the High Victorian Gothic Jefferson Market Courthouse, located in the Greenwich Village Historic District, is the best known of Wither’s New York City works, he had many other New York commissions, among them the commercial building at 448 Broome Street in the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District, the high altar and reredos in Trinity Church, the lich gate of the “Little Church Around the Corner” (Church of the Transfiguration), and the City Prison which replaced the original “Tombs.” Withers was primarily considered an ecclesiastical architect and published the influential book Church Architecture in 1873.
He was a strong advocate of the Gothic style for churches, and the Chapel of the Good Shepherd admirably illustrates his conceptions and ideas of what a church should be. In his book, Withers recommends the combining of different building materials for picturesque effect. The exterior of the chapel, constructed in a number of materials is richly textured and subtly polychromatic. The warm red brick of the walls, laid in a modified version of Flemish bond, is enlivened by the random interspersing of gray brick. Smooth brownstone windows and door enframements, quoins and ornamental detail contrast effectively with both the brick and rough-faced gray stone of the basement story. This gray stone, used for many of the institutional buildings on the island, is the “granite” (actually gray gneiss) which was quarried on the island since the 18th century.
The plan and massing of the chapel are simple and clear. Two projecting entrance porches, flanked by lampposts, lead to two ascending stairways within the deep narthex. Originally, one entrance was intended for the men of the Almshouse, the other for women. The stairways give access to a broad and spacious nave, five bays in depth, which terminates in the chancel and semicircular apse.
The bell tower features a broach spire, a type which was especially favored by Withers. It provides a strong and effective note of asymmetry. The bell of the tower, now displayed in the plaza, is five toned, since Withers found single toned bells “doleful and monotonous.”
The harmonizing red brick plaza surrounding the chapel and was designed by the architectural firm Johansen & Bhavnani. It provides a delightfully restful oasis enframed by tall apartment buildings. The architects carefully retained the old trees to the west of the church and provided benches on three sides. The decorative detail of the chapel is used sparingly but with sensitivity. The paired Gothic lancet windows between the buttresses on the flanks of the building are crowned by simple connecting drip moldings with foliate terminations. The large Gothic rose window of the entrance facade is set within a brownstone pointed arch enframement decorated with carved roundels. A third roundel appears near the apex of the gable. The original handsome stained-glass windows have geometric patterns except in the five windows of the apse which depict the four Evangelists, surrounding Christ, the Good Shepherd.
The relative austerity of the design of the chapel was probably considered the most suitable for a poorhouse chapel. Withers created a building of imposing simplicity and restraint which is both appropriate and picturesquely handsome. The chapel was commissioned by George M. Bliss (1816-1896), an important New York banker, who began his career in the dry goods business. Through successful speculation during the Civil War, he amassed a large fortune, and in 1869 he joined Levi P. Moron, later a Vice-President of the United States, in a banking business under the firm name of Morton, Bliss & Company.
In his later years he served as Treasurer of the Protestant Episcopal Mission Society which administered the Chapel of the Good Shepherd. Today the chapel serves a new and more general purpose, as a community center for the residents of the island’s new housing complex. It has also been rededicated to serve as an ecumenical place of worship.
THURSDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY REV. OLIVER CHAPIN, THE FIRST
ISLAND HISTORIAN AND LONG TIME MINISTER
WEDNESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
INMATES BEING WALKED IN FRONT OF ASYLUM
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
We will be away from our computer for a week and during that week your assignment is to learn more about our 6 Island landmarks. I am sure you will find lots of information from these designation reports. I promise there will not be a quiz when I return.
The Octagon, located a the northern end of Roosevelt Island, served as the administrative center and main entrance hall of the New York City Lunatic Asylum, one of the first institutions of its kind established in this country. Designs for the Asylum were prepared in 1834-35 by the noted New York architect, Alexander Jackson Davis, and the building was opened in 1839. His plans called for a much more elaborate scheme than was actually built by the City. The Octagon was to have been one of a pair within a great U-shaped complex, ordered around a central rectangular pavilion. As built, the single Octagon, from which two long wings extended, became the focal point of the building. Much admired in the 19th century for its architectural excellence, the Octagon now stands alone, the imposing geometric clarity and simplicity of its design fully revealed.
The City of New York purchased Blackwell’s Island, as Roosevelt Island was called in the 19th century, in 1828 with a view to institutional development; it was believed that the pleasant island surroundings would be conducive to both physical and mental rehabilitation. Construction of the Island Penitentiary began in 1829, and at the end of the following decade, the Lunatic Asylum was built. An Almshouse, Workhouse, and numerous charity hospitals were also built on Blackwell’s Island during the course of the century. The Lunatic Asylum was erected in response to the desperate need for proper accommodation of the insane. Previously, these cases had been assigned to a few overcrowded and poorly maintained wards in Bellevue Hospital. In the mid-19th century, the attitude towards the treatment and care of the insane underwent significant and progressive change. Recognition that they required medical assistance, not merely custodial restraint, led to the founding of such institutions as the New York City Lunatic Asylum. This change in attitude was, however, only gradual and is demonstrated by the fact that, in the early years of the Lunatic Asylum, patients were supervised by inmates from the Penitentiary under the direction of a small medical staff. The physicians in charge of the Asylum deplored this situation and in 1850 a suitable staff of orderlies and nurses was hired. Physical activity, labor, and entertainment were prescribed as therapeutic treatments for mental disturbances.
As such, the male patients of the Lunatic Asylum who were willing and able, worked in vegetable gardens or built sea walls in order to reclaim land, while female patients aided in housekeeping chores and worked as seamstresses. A library, for the most part the result of donations from publishing houses and private citizens, was formed, and weekly dances were held. At the recommendation of a resident physician, even a billiard table was purchased.
However, the Asylum was plagued with difficulties, primarily a result of over-crowding and financial inadequacies. In the early years the diet of the patients was inadequate and scurvy became a relatively common disease. Typhus and cholera epidemics afflicted the staff and patients alike in the 1860’s. When Charles Dickens visited in the United States in 1842, he was taken on a tour of the Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum where he much admired the architecture, calling the building “handsome” and the Octagon an especially “elegant” feature; but he further commented in his American Notes (1842): everything [at the Asylum] had a lounging, listless, madhouse air which was very painful.” Through the perseverance of the resident physicians and other concerned New Yorkers, conditions were gradually improved. Additional buildings were constructed to ease overcrowding and to separate violent patients from less serious cases. The facilities in general were made more pleasant and comfortable. By 1875, a contributor to Harper’s Weekly magazine was able to write, “Very few sane persons inhabit more healthy and convenient chambers.”
In 1894, it had been determined that municipal facilities could no longer adequately care for the great numbers of indigent insane. Ward’s Island also in the East River was consequently ceded to the State of New York, and all New York City mental patients were transferred to hospitals there. The Lunatic Asylum was renamed Metropolitan Hospital and became a general hospital with special emphasis on the treatment of tubercular patients. In the 1950’s the buildings on the Island were abandoned for new quarters in Manhattan. By the late 1960’s the Island redevelopment project of the New York State Urban Development Corporation, threatened the old Asylum with demolition. Fortunately it was decided, on the basis of recommendations made by the Landmarks Preservation Commission and a report prepared by the noted architectural historian, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, to preserve the central Octagon. Demolition of the two wings which projected at right angles to the south and west was completed in 1970, and temporary preservation measures were taken for the Octagon under the direction of the New York architect, Giorgio Cavaglieri, who also restored two other buildings on the island, the Blackwell House and Chapel of the Good Shepherd.
The Octagon has a complicated history of alteration and modification, which has been carefully traced by Jane B. Davies, an authority on the work of A. J. Davis. The original 1834-35 design by Davis was in what he termed the “Tuscan Style.” The Octagon was to have had a low-pitched hip roof with wide eaves and a central skylight. Construction of the Asylum had barely begun, however, when the City Council ordered work halted because of disagreements over the design. In 1837, work resumed, but Davis’ great U-shaped plan was reduced to a single octagon joined to a single east-west wing. The upper portion of the Octagon was altered to include a crenelated cupola and the architectural detail was changed to the Greek Revival style. Davis had intended the Octagon to house a kitchen, dining hall, day rooms, a laundry, and baths. It now became the administrative center and main entrance as well as the living quarters for the Resident Physician. This phase of construction was completed in 1839, under the supervision of two master-builders, as Davis was apparently no longer associated with the project. In 1847-48, a north-south wing was built repeating the style of the earlier east-west wing. Architect Joseph M. Dunn was commissioned in 1879 to alter the Asylum. He raised the wings one story in height and, to retain the visual prominence of the Octagon, added a dome-like convex mansard roof with Neo-Greco detail. To further enhance the Octagon, a new main entrance was constructed with a double staircase.
The Octagon, executed in the gray “granite” (actually gray gneiss) quarried on the Island in the 19th century, is a smooth-walled, crisply faceted structure, relying for its dramatic effect on the clarity of its geometry and the boldness of its silhouette. The fenestration is especially notable as the earliest surviving example of the “Davisean window”; paired windows appear at each floor, separated by heavy mullions and by simple stone transverse members, creating a very modern feeling of continuous verticality. A double staircase of stone that was originally covered by a wooden porch approaches the main entrance of the Octagon, at first floor level, and has heavy wing walls adorned by recessed panels. The walls of the building are free of any ornament and are crowned above the third floor by a simple projecting metal cornice with boldly scaled dentils and a paneled frieze beneath. At the center of the roof is the simple octagonal cupola surmounted by its dome-like octagonal roof. This tall, convex mansard roof is crowned by a heavy cornice and pierced by two tiers of dormer windows. The rectangular windows are enframed by Neo-Greco pilasters and pediments, and smaller dormers with oval windows appear above.
Exterior of the Octagon Tower showing front steps, before renovation.
The plan of the Octagon is composed of a central rotunda surrounded by four rooms, separated by corridors which radiate outward. The rotunda contains a spiral staircase constructed of cast iron with wood ionic columns encircling the high central stairwell- an especially beautiful space, described by Henry-Russell Hitchcock as one of the grandest interiors in the City.
Although the silhouette and proportions of the Octagon have been altered by the addition of Dunn’s mansard dome, the major credit for the design of the structure may be assigned to Alexander Jackson Davis (1803-1892), a native New Yorker and highly successful architect, who worked throughout the United States. In the early years of his career Davis was in partnership with the prominent architect Ithiel Town (1874-1844) with whom he designed the New York Customs House (now Federal Hall National Memorial), a designated New York City Landmark. During the period of his association with Town, Davis designed the Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum in addition to the state capitals of Indiana, North Carolina, Illinois, and Ohio, the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, and the Patent Office in Washington D.C. His commissions were, however not limited solely to public buildings; he was also responsible for numerous commercial buildings, churches and domestic structures, and was the author of two books Views of the Public Buildings in the City of New York (c.1830) and Rural Residences (1837). While Davis was a highly competent practitioner of the Greek Revival style (in his early twenties he made an intensive study of Greek detail), he was also well versed in many other styles, as his original “Tuscan” design for the Lunatic Asylum demonstrates.
The architectural historian, Talbot Hamlin, has praised Davis’ “consistent feeling for logical planning.” The original symmetrical plan made by Davis for the New York City Lunatic Asylum took into account efficient supervision of patients, ease of circulation, as well ample provision for good lighting and ventilation in the wards. Davis’ plan was a variant of the influential “panoptic plan,” which was centralized with radiating wings, developed in Great Britain by Jeremy Bentham (1742-1832), a philosopher and jurist interested in prison reform. While only a portion of Davis’ original proposal for the Lunatic Asylum was actually built, the plan still functioned very effectively. Davis’ New York City Asylum project was also significant in that it served as the prototype for his North Carolina Hospital for the Insane at Raleigh.
Dr. R.L. Parsons, Resident Physician of the Lunatic Asylum during the 1860’s, remarked in his annual report of 1865 that the Octagon “has a symmetry, a beauty and a grandeur even, that are to be admired.” These qualities are still in evidence, not only to the visitor to Roosevelt Island, but also from Manhattan where the picturesque silhouette of the Octagon is a prominent feature of the island’s skyline.
WEDNESDAY PHOTOS OF THE DAY INMATES OF THE ASYLUM BEING WALKED IN FRONT OF BUILDING
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
We will be away from our computer for a week and during that week your assignment is to learn more about our 6 Island landmarks. I am sure you will find lots of information from these designation reports. I promise there will not be a quiz when I return.
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2021
The
474 th Edition
From the Archives
R.I. Landmarks Week
Today:
Blackwell House
FROM THE NYC LANDMARKS PRESERVATION COMMISSION DESIGNATION REPORT, 1975
From the NYC Landmarks Preservation Designation Report – 1975
Blackwell House
This simple well-proportioned house, built for James Blackwell between 1796 and 1804, is the sole surviving building on Roosevelt Island which dates from the period when the island was still privately held property. The Blackwell family owned and farmed the island from the late 17th century until 1828, when it was sold to the City of New York. Blackwell’s Island, as it was long known, had been inherited by Mary Manningham Blackwell from her stepfather, Captain John Manning.
Captain Manning was granted a “patent” on the island by the British Governor Nicolls in 1668, a fortunate circumstance, since five years later, after mismanaging his command of New York’s Fort James during a Dutch attack, he was tried by court martial and publicly disgraced. Manning moved to his island retreat and evidently found solace there. Reverend Charles Wolley, writing in 1701, tells us that he had often gone to Manning’s Island to visit the Captain, “whose entertainment was commonly a bowl of rum-punch.”
In Dutch times the island was known as Varckens Eylandt, which translates to Hog Island. It was purchased from two Indian chiefs by Governor Wouter van Twiller in 1637 and was already being farmed by 1639 under land grants from the Amsterdam Chamber of the West India Company. Jan Alteras, Francois Fyn, Jonas Bronck and Laurens Duyts all farmed the island during the mid 17th century. The last of these by 1658, defaulted on his lease. But Duyt’s misconduct was far worse in the respects- he was banished from the province for “selling his wife into immoral slavery and for gross immoralities committed by himself.” Hog Island was confiscated by the British in 1667. During the Revolutionary War the island was occupied by the British and in 1782, when peace negotiations were in progress, American prisoners of war were quartered there.
James and Jacob Blackwell, who had inherited the island from their father Jacob, found themselves in financial straits after the Revolutionary War and attempted to sell the property. In an advertisement of 1784 James was able to boast that his 107 acre island, “was about four miles from the city,” included among other amenities, “two small Dwelling Houses, a Barn, Bake, and Fowl House, a Cyder Mill, a large orchard, stone quarries and running springs.” A buyer could not be found, but by 1796 James Blackwell’s financial condition must have improved since it was about this time that the Blackwell House was built.
With the purchase of Blackwell’s Island by the City, its agricultural use gave way to institutional development, beginning in 1829 with the erection of the penitentiary. The Blackwell House became the residential quarters for various institutional administrators. In the late 19th century the warden of the island’s Almshouse lived here. The house was abandoned during the 20th century and by the late 1960’s was in an advanced state of decay, its only hope for survival being complete restoration. The New York State Urban Development Corporation, as part of its redevelopment program for the island, instituted a survey of existing structures.
On the basis of recommendations made by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, a survey by historian Loring McMillen in 1969, and a report prepared the same year by noted architectural historian Henry Russell Hitchcock, the Blackwell House was assessed worthy of preservation and restoration. The well known New York architect, Giorgio Cavaglieri, was commissioned to evaluate the buildings on the island and which were of special interest with a view to preserving them. In 1973, he carried out a complete and highly sympathetic restoration of Blackwell House.
This unpretentious clapboard farmhouse, built in the vernacular style of the late 18th century, now consists of a two-story main section and a one-story kitchen wing, constructed soon after the completion of the main building. A larger addition at the north, of later date, was razed during restoration and a root cellar entrance was constructed at the northeast corner of the main building. On the east, a spacious one story front porch has been restored and rests on the original stone foundations. A simple wood rail surrounds it, and the wood shingled roof rests elegantly on slim Ionic columns. This facade like that on the west, has two windows at each side of the simple central doorway, and five at the second story, all with six-over-six sash. A delicately scaled dentil course appears beneath the eaves of the gabled roof. Pairs of dormers project from this roof at the east and west. On the the west side, the doorway is sheltered by a simple pedimented portico, an addition in the Greek revival style.
The Blackwell House is one of the few farmhouses in New York dating from the years immediately after the Revolutionary War. Now utilized as a community center, it still rests on its original site, now a handsomely landscaped setting , which preserves much of the proper scale and relationship of the building to its surroundings.
TUESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
THE ULTIMATE BEFORE PICTURE OF BLACKWELL HOUSE
MONDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY ATRIUM OF MOTORGATE
JAY JACOBSON, JANET KING, ALEXIX VILLAFANE, GLORI HERMAN, LAURA HUSSEY, NANCY BROWN ALL GOT IT RIGHT!!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
Source: NEW YORK CITY LANDMARKS PRESERVATION COMMISSION
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
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
FROM THE ARCHIVES
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2021
THE 473rd EDITION
THE HISTORY OF THE
NEW YORK LICENSE
PLATE
from Untapped New York
There are more than eleven million vehicles registered in New York State, and New York City has about 12% of those (as of August 2021). Until 1901, these vehicles went unregistered, only identified by traits like their make, color and quality. Then-New York Governor Benjamin Odell, Jr. crafted a bill that required vehicle registration and the initials of the vehicle’s owner to be posted on the back of the vehicle. This bill, passed in 1901, would lead to the birth of the license plate.
Vintage car with a historic New York license plate on the set of Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
The first license plates did not resemble those of today. In fact, they were merely initials made of various materials of different colors and sizes. Some painted the letters directly on their vehicle. The reason for this new regulation regarding vehicle identification was that in legal cases, the government often preferred those who still traveled behind a horse. Traffic laws also varied by county, making it difficult for vehicle owners to consistently abide by the law. With Odell’s new act, vehicular laws would at least be consistent across New York State, and drivers would be held responsible for their actions.
After the act was passed on April 25, 1901, those in New York, especially in the city, celebrated. The New York Times reported that by May 2, 17 people had already applied for licenses. As the number increased, law enforcement found it more difficult to identify vehicles because of replicate initials. Some also used fake initials or posted initials without registering with New York State.
Vintage car with a historic New York license plate on the set of Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
In response. the New York State legislature passed a law that required each registered vehicle to have a number on its rear side. The legislature required the letters “NY” to appear next to the issued number as well. New York State decreed these homemade license plates to follow a black-and-white color scheme.
It was not until 1910 that New York State supplied vehicle owners with state-issued plates. However, these plates were only valid within New York State. If someone traveled frequently between two states, they would need a different license plate and issue number for each state.
The creatively designed license plates of today’s era did not show up until the 1980s. Until then, New York license plates simply consisted of the issued number on a bed of white, blue or gold. In 1986, New York State began issuing plates featuring a well-known symbol of New York City: the Statue of Liberty. Releasing the license plate shortly after the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty arriving in the United States, this simple and elegant plate would mark a change in vehicle history and commemorate New York City history simultaneously.
After two decades with this license plate, New York State decided to bring more symbols onto its license plate. The state placed Niagara Falls on the top left corner of the new license plate and the New York City skyline on the top right corner. Tied together by a silhouette of one of the three mountain ranges in New York City — the Adirondack Mountains, the Catskill Mountains, and part of the Appalachian Mountains — the updated New York license plate tied together the rural and urban aspects of New York.
New York began issuing this license plate in 2001.
New York State soon after decided to return to the classic blue and gold of the original state-issued New York license plates. These plates featured the words “Empire State” to acknowledge the wealth and resources in New York. With an outline of the state in the center of the plate, the updated New York license plate was sophisticated and clean.
New York began issuing this license plate in 2010.
In 2019, a new decade approached along with the need for an updated New York license plate. Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo claimed a new license plate was needed for better legibility on license plates for tolling, red-light cameras and other scanning devices, but others decried the measure as a way to increase state budget revenues. This time, the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles allowed New York residents to vote for one of five license plates designs (although some claimed the vote was rigged, as one of the designs included the Mario A. Cuomo Bridge named after the governor’s father). About 325,000 people participated in the vote. Winning by about 49 percent, the current New York license plate features Niagara Falls, a mountain range, the Statue of Liberty, the New York City skyline and a Long Island lighthouse. The word “EXCELSIOR” sits on the bottom of the plate, meaning “ever upward” in Latin. In 2021, New York State unveiled three NASCAR-themed license plates at Watkins Glen Racetrack.
Since Governor Odell passed the bill that mandated vehicle registration and identification, all 50 states have adopted the practice. When trying to see all 50 plates, passengers can try to find the variations of state license plates that have varied over the decades. Although Hawaii’s license plate has a rainbow, South Dakota’s license plate has Mount Rushmore, and Michigan’s plate features the Mackinac Bridge and a sunset, New York’s license plate stands out as one of the more creative forms of vehicle identification.
OUR LIGHTHOUSE IN ITS’ ORIGINAL FORM. THE TOWER WILL SOON BE RESTORED AND WILL THEN HAVE IT’S ORIGINAL ROUND POINTED TOP. JAY JACOBSON, ED LITCHER, HARA REISER, GLORIA HERMAN GOT IT RIGHT
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
Bella Druckman is a rising sophomore at Barnard College intending on majoring in English and Psychology. Hailing from Chicago, she betrays her hometown in her pizza preferences. When she is not exploring New York City, Bella can be found in her kitchen or writing her next article for The Columbia Daily Spectator, Her Campus, or Untapped New York.
