On a blistering hot day, we would get in the car and off to Nathan’s either in Oceanside, Long Island or Coney Island for a yummy hot dog!! Probably followed by a Carvel Iced custard. What a fun way to escape the heat. (while sticking to the plastic covered car seats)
On July 20, the country celebrates National Hot Dog Day, the commemoration of a delicacy synonymous with New York City and summer. The origins of the hot dog can be traced to German immigrant Charles Feltman, who sold frankfurter sausages on a long bun as a convenient snack for hungry beachgoers during the late 1860s. More than 150 years later, New Yorkers still love hot dogs as a quick and affordable meal and there is no shortage of great spots throughout the city to grab a frank. From internationally-known Nathan’s Famous to local favorites like Papaya King, here are 10 iconic hot dog joints in NYC.
Papaya King 179 East 86th Street This Upper East Side hot dog haven has been feeding New Yorkers since the 1930s and is known for its tasteful combination of hot dogs and tropical fruit juices. Unfortunately for many of the storefront’s loyal patrons, the renowned establishment may be facing its end, as the property it sits on was sold to a new developer last year for $21 million whose plans to demolish the site were filed with the city on June 28, 2022, according to the New York Times.
Nathan’s Famous In celebration of national hot dog day, one of the food’s founding fathers is offering their famous dogs for free. On July 21 from 6:30 a.m. to 9 a.m., the Coney Island hot dog institution Nathan’s Famous is setting up a cart in Rockefeller Center. While it established its notoriety on Coney Island’s boardwalk, Nathan’s has grown to be one of the largest hot dog brands, with its products being marketed for sale at approximately 78,000 locations across the country, according to the company.
Image courtesy of Crif DogsCrif Dogs 113 St. Marks Place, Manhattan First opened in 2001, Crif Dogs changed the hot dog game when it introduced its signature deep-fried, bacon-wrapped dogs and other creative combinations into the mix. New Yorkers quickly fell in love with Crif’s unique style of hot dogs and two decades later, it’s still one of NYC’s best. In addition to hot dogs, Crif’s also serves burgers, tater-tots, and drinks. In celebration of National Hot Dog Day, Crifs is offering a special “Franks and Dranks” deal from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. nightly, which includes a build-your-own Crif Dog and a drink for $7.95. Please Don’t Tell (PDT), the speakeasy situated behind Crif Dog through an inconspicuous-looking phone booth, will be offering cocktail specials to celebrate the special occasion.
Image courtesy of Feltman’sFeltman’s of Coney Island Considered the inventor of the hot dog, Feltman’s was established in 1867 on Coney Island by Charles Feltman, a German immigrant who invented the food as a quick, cheap, and easy meal for beachgoers to enjoy. Feltman’s grew to become one of the world’s largest restaurants at the time, growing from a humble pushcart to a block-long pavilion serving more than five million customers a year. Feltman’s offers home delivery and their products can be found in grocery stores throughout the nation.
Image courtesy of David Joyce on FlickrGray’s Papaya 2090 Broadway, Manhattan Since 1973, Gray’s Papaya has loyally served hungry New Yorkers from its location on the corner of Broadway and 72nd Street. The story goes that in the early 1970s, Papaya King started to franchise and opened a non-company store at 2090 Broadway. In 1973, owner Nicholas Gray closed his Papaya King branch and reopened it as Gray’s Papaya and the rest is history. Gray’s Papaya has made a name for itself with its own signature hot dogs and fruit drinks. Gray’s also offer breakfast foods like bagels, donuts, and egg & cheese sandwiches. They offer nationwide shipping on their products through Goldbelly.
Image courtesy of ercwttmn on FlickrKatz’s Deli 205 East Houston Street, Manhattan Perhaps best known for their towering deli sandwiches, Katz’s also offers customers incredibly tasty frankfurters. In fact, their hot dog was voted the best in NYC by Grubstreet in 2018. You can visit the store and get one in person, or order for delivery on Katz’s website.
Image courtesy of Tjeerd Wiersma on FlickrPastrami Queen 138 West 72nd Street A, and 1125 Lexington Avenue #2, Manhattan Pastrami Queen is highly regarded as one of the best delis in NYC, holding up against the likes of Katz’s and other iconic institutions. In addition to being known for their namesake, Pastrami Queen’s hot dogs have received great acclaim. In 2021, Pastrami Queen’s frankfurters were featured on Eater NY’s list of the city’s best hot dogs.
Chelsea’s Papaya 171 West 23rd Street, Manhattan Another establishment influenced by the aforementioned Papaya King, Chelsea Papaya has been serving the Chelsea area the indistinguishable combination of hot dogs and tropical fruit juice for decades. They also offer pizza, hamburgers, fries, and much more. Their loyal customers rave about the chili cheese dog.
Schaller’s Stube 1652 Second Avenue, Manhattan First opened as a butcher shop in 1937 by German immigrants, the Yorkville storefront is now run by third-generation owner Jeremy Schaller. Schaller’s Stube is known for its creative selection of German classics and extensive variety of sausages. Make sure you’re hungry because Schaller’s sausages are regarded for their enormity. The New York Times in 2015 described Schaller’s kielbasa as “obscene in scale, python-thick and making a mockery of the hot-dog bun suffocated beneath it.” Besides hot dogs, Schaller’s is also known for its fried chicken, mac & cheese, and soft pretzels.Frankel’s Delicatessen 631 Manhattan Avenue, Brooklyn Frankel’s Deli is a contemporary adaptation of a classic NY Jewish deli, serving up sandwiches, smoked fish, bagels, and more to loyal Greenpoint customers. Frankel’s offers a meal combo for their hot dogs as well. Dubbed the “recession special,” the deal includes two hot dogs with mustard and sauerkraut and a drink for $10. Customers can order Frankel’s for pick up or delivery through DoorDash.
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Though the city past and present certainly has its dark pockets and little-traveled lanes, Gotham never really had many alleys, even in its earliest days. The creators of the 1811 Commissioner’s Plan, which laid out the street grid, wisely knew that real estate would be too valuable to intentionally leave undeveloped.Some 18th and early 19th century alleys became true streets, others got wiped off the map. A few continue to exist. I’m a fan of Theater Alley, beside Park Row near City Hall, was once home to Manhattan’s theater district. Three-block Cortlandt Alley makes for an evocative cut-through from Franklin Street to Canal Street.
Mechanics Alley in 1850Then there’s Mechanics Alley. In the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge approach and flanked by exhausted tenements and squat commercial spaces, this mostly abandoned strip of rough asphalt used to run from Cherry Street to Monroe Street, according to the 1850 street map above.Today, it reaches three full blocks to Henry Street between Market and Pike Streets. Though it tripled its size by subsuming another now-forgotten lane a few blocks up, Mechanics Alley is about as marginalized as a street can get. It’s possible to walk up and down it several times in the middle of the day and not spot another human.
The lack of foot traffic makes sense in this patch of Lower East Side. Stuck between two bridges and steps from the East River, it’s no longer a densely populated part of Manhattan. But how did Mechanics Alley come to be in the busy post-colonial city, when this neighborhood was teeming with people? How did it get its name, which suggests cars and garages?It all has to do with the waterfront. In the late 18th century, shipbuilding yards “covered the waterfront all the way to Corlears Hook, attracting carpenters, smiths, shipwrights, coopers, chandlers, joiners, sail makers and rope makers,” stated reporter Daniel Schneider in a 2000 New York Times column.
According to Schneider, Mechanics Alley began appearing on maps in the early 19th century. At the time, these and other artisans and craftsmen were called mechanics, he wrote. “New York was one of many American cities to have a Mechanics Row, Alley, or Place near the waterfront, usually where ships were built and repaired,” he explained.Sure enough, Manhattan had another Mechanics Alley—actually Mechanics Place—which spanned second and third streets on the east side of Avenue A, per Valentine’s Manual of Old New York in 1922.Avenue A wasn’t exactly on the waterfront. But this main street in today’s East Village was close enough to what used to be called the Dry Dock District, a 19th century center of shipbuilding along the East River where thousands of dockworkers, shipbuilders, and mechanics once lived and worked.
A second Mechanics Place existed off Rivington Street between the now-demapped Lewis and Goerck Streets, states oldstreets.com.Another author advanced a different idea of how this alley got its name. “Though no documentation exists for the name of this short alley, it may be associated with the early history of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen,” wrote Sanna Feirstein in Naming New York: Manhattan Places and How They Got Their Names.“Formerly founded in 1785 and still in existence today, the Society’s original mission was to advance and protect the political and economic interests of American craftsmen,” explained Feirstein. “Though their first meeting hall was at Broadway and Park Place, they owned land in the Chatham Square area, giving rise to the speculation that their organization may be the basis for this alley’s name.”
Theater AlleyThe mechanics may be gone, along with the riverfront industries that relied on their skills. Their organizations have moved away as well; the General Society occupies a beautiful building on 44th Street.But ghostly Mechanics Alley, marked up with graffiti and mostly hidden beside a bridge approach, is a monument to the tradesmen and craftsmen who helped build the modern city.
ANSWER WILL BE REVEALED ON WEDNESDAY Illegally park motorcycles parked outside Island House
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Send your response to: rooseveltislandhistory@gmail.com THERE ARE TWO ILLEGALLY PARKED MOTORCYCLES PARKED OUTSIDE ISLAND HOUSE. NEITHER CYCLE HAD A LICENSE. WHEN CALLED PSD, REFUSED TO RESPOND. SUNDAY 5P.M.
WEEKEND PHOTO
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WEEKEND, JULY 16-17, 2022
THE 729th EDITION
Going Up: Uncovering the Art Deco Elevators of
Landmarked Building Interiors
6 SQ FT
DANA SCHULZ
Chrysler Building elevators via Wally Gobetz on Flickr Earlier this week, we visited the New York School of Interior Design‘s latest exhibit, Rescued, Restored, Reimagined: New York’s Landmark Interiors, which, on the 50th anniversary of New York’s landmark legislation, features photography and information about more than 20 public spaces, known and little-known, that have been designated as interior landmarks. Looking through images of restored Broadway theaters, perfectly preserved coffered rotundas and period furniture, we couldn’t help getting stuck on one often-overlooked element–the elevator.
For most of us who live in a high rise or work in a typical office building, the elevator doors are just another blank wall that we stare at, only paying attention when they open and usher us in. But when the city’s great Art Deco buildings were rising, the elevators were an extension of the lavish ornamentation and geometric details of the façade and interior lobby. We’ve rounded up some of our favorite Art Deco elevators in landmarked interiors, which means they’re all publicly accessible so you can check them all out first hand.
The Film Center Building lobby, looking toward the elevator bay, via Wiki Commons
The Film Center Building (630 Ninth Avenue) has become the unofficial poster child for NYSID’s exhibit, and it’s for a good reason. Built in 1928, at the height of the Art Deco movement, the 13-story Hells Kitchen building boasts a “highly individualistic version of the Art Deco style,” thanks to architect Ely Jacques Kahn. Its interior lobby was designated a landmark in 1982, at which time the Landmarks Preservation Commission lauded the elevator bay and its modernist, striped design. This motif carries over to the elevator doors themselves, though some were painted prior to the designation. At the far wall of the elevator lobby is one of the interior’s most striking features, a polychromatic, geometric mosaic.
Chrysler Building elevator door, via 6sqft (L) and elevator interior, via Wiki Commons (R)
This one goes without saying. William Van Alen‘s design of the Chrysler Building is one of the most recognizable in the world. When it was completed in 1930, it briefly held the title of the tallest building in the world until the Empire State Building surpassed it 11 months later. Knowing it would grab this sky-high title, it’s no wonder Van Alen paid such close attention to the four banks of eight elevators. Their elegant Art Deco design features not only on the doors, but on the interior as well.
Grand lobby at Radio City, via Wiki Commons (L); bronze elevator doors, via 6sqft (C); elevator interiors, via 6 sqft (R)
Radio City was almost lost to the wrecking ball in the late ’70s, but thanks in part to a “Saturday Night Live” commentary by John Belushi it was preserved. The work of architect Edward Durell Stone and interior designer Donald Deskey, Radio City’s lobby is one of the most iconic in the performing arts world. Its elevator doors are nothing too fancy on the outside, but inside they feature gilded ancient Roman persons, an element of the Art Deco style. Further, the system of elevators servicing the Great Stage is so advanced that that the U.S. Navy used identical hydraulics for World War II aircraft carriers.
Fred French Building lobby, via MacResource (L) and elevator doors, via Lynn Redmile for Flickr Commons (R)The 38-story Fred French Building is a favorite for Art Deco lovers, thanks to its colorful terra cotta façade ornamentation. Built in 1927 to the designs of H. Douglas Ives and Sloan & Robertson, the building has a rather small lobby, but its Babylonian motifs are artfully painted in bright blue and gold, and it boasts Roman travertine floors, St. Genevieve marble walls and patterned glass chandeliers. It also features heavily detailed cast bronze elevator doors, which give the terra cotta a run for its money.
Elevators in the Empire State Building lobby, via Wiki CommonsWhile surprisingly the least decorated of all the elevators we’ve mentioned, those in the Empire State Building are still some of the most iconic for their geometric, Art Deco design that mimics the famous setbacks of the tower. The marble interiors of the elevators feature full stencils of the building. In 2011, the Empire State Building worked with Otis Elevator Co. to upgrade all 68 elevators, the largest elevator modernization of its kind in the world.Know of any other Art Deco elevators? Let us know in the comments!
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The architect James Renwick Jr. was closely associated with our Island. He designed our famous smallpox hospital; he was the supervising architect for the building of our lighthouse and possibly responsible for the design of Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary. Of course, Renwick also designed St Patrick’s Cathedral on 5th Avenue.
Few of us know more about him. So, let’s delve a bit more into the story of one of New York’s most successful architects and one much involved in our history.
Renwick was born in 1820, into a wealthy and well-educated family. His mother, Margaret Brevoort, came from an affluent and socially prominent New York family. His father, James Renwick, was an engineer, architect, and professor of natural philosophy at Columbia College, now Columbia University.
A gifted kid, Renwick attended classes at Columbia at age 12, graduating with a degree in engineering in 1836 and earning a master’s degree three years later. When he graduated, with his father’s connections, he became a structural engineer with the Erie Railroad and then served as supervisor on the Croton Reservoir, acting as an assistant engineer on the Croton Aqueduct. Renwick may have been involved with the High Bridge, but his only known completed work was a fountain in Bowling Green.
He received his first major commission at the age of twenty-three in 1843 when he won the competition to design Grace Church. This was a big deal. The Grace Church congregation was one of the wealthiest in the city, composed of many prominent New Yorkers. The Church had been located at Broadway and Rector Street since its formation in 1808, but the Rector and his congregation were thinking of moving uptown, following the northern migration of its fashionable members.
Renwick was not formally trained as an architect. His Wikipedia biography tells us “His ability and interest in building design were nurtured through his cultivated background, which granted him early exposure to travel, and through a broad cultural education that included architectural history.” (If this is what it takes, I could have been an architect!) Is there a back story? Maybe.
Grace Church would be built on the Brevoort country estate, composed of 86 acres between East 9th and 18th Streets and Fifth Avenue to the Bowery. This was Renwick’s mother’s family. When Henry Brevoort died in 1841, his son, Henry, Jr., began selling off the family lands and, two years later, the Grace Church trustees purchased the large plot at the northeast corner of Broadway and East 10th Street. The abrupt bend in Broadway, attributed to Brevoort’s stubbornness in keeping the new Broadway off his property, provided a perfect site for the church.
As seen here in around 1890, the site at the abrupt turn of Broadway provided an advantageous setting — photo NYPL Collection
Brevoort, Jr.’s nephew was James Renwick Jr., a young engineer with an interest in architecture, but without formal credentials. Nonetheless, Renwick was given the commission to design the new Grace Church – an example of architectural nepotism?
The rector, Thomas House Taylor, had toured Europe looking at church designs. He determined that the new church would be in the Gothic style, a style which sought to revitalize medieval Gothic architecture, competing with the neoclassic style which had dominated public construction since the early days of the Republic. (Until the last decades of the 19th century, Gothic Revival was the preeminent style in Europe and North America.) And so, Grace Church would be the first significant Gothic Revival structure in Manhattan.
Renwick’s youth and inexperience notwithstanding, Grace Church was a huge success. Clearly, Gothic Revival clicked with him, and he became a major actor in this new movement. His Grace Church design was much praised, and for a full generation after it was built, it was the most fashionable church in New York. Construction immediately began on the church rectory and this, too, emerged as a Renwick triumph. And Renwick was launched on a remarkable career.
New contracts came quickly. In 1846, Renwick won the competition to design the Smithsonian Institution Building in Washington, DC. The Smithsonian Institution had been established with funds from James Smithson (1765–1829), a British scientist who left his estate to the United States to create “at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” (Interestingly, Smithson had never been to the US and had no connections with anyone here.) “The Castle,” as it was commonly called, was built between 1847 and 1855, designed in Romanesque style, as requested by the Smithsonian Board of Regents
Smithsonian Institution Building, Washington, DC. Wikipedia
In 1849, Renwick designed the Free Academy Building (City College of New York) at Lexington and 23rd. It was one of the first Gothic Revival college buildings on the East Coast. The building was plumbed for both water and illuminating gas and on each floor was found the last word in modern innovations—drinking fountains supplied with fresh water from the Croton Reservoir.
photograph from the collection of The New York Public Library
Soon, he went on to design what is considered his finest achievement, and his best-known building, St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He was chosen as architect for the Roman Catholic cathedral in 1853, construction began in 1858, and the cathedral opened in May 1879. St Patrick’s was built in what was the rural fringe of the city. It faced Columbia University gardens across 5th Avenue, and hospitals, asylums, and other public institutions were found along the nearby blocks on the avenue. The church’s design included references to the variety of Gothic styles from European nationalities that had become part of the New York Catholic Diocese.
Renwick’s commissions included the Corcoran Gallery of Art (now home to the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery), in the Second Empire style, in Washington DC (1859–1871); first major buildings on the of Vassar College campus (1861–1865); Saint Bartholomew’s Church (1871–1872) at Madison Avenue and 44th Street (now demolished); All Saints’ Roman Catholic Church (1882–1893) in Harlem. Renick was responsible for the main building of the Children’s Hospital on Randall’s Island, the Inebriate and Lunatic Asylums on Wards Island and, of course, his work on our island.
Not all of Renwick’s creations were public buildings. He designed the St. Denis Hotel, completed in 1853, which stood at the corner of East 11th Street and Broadway. The property, owned by the Renwick family, had been given to them by Henry Brevoort and the hotel was named for its first proprietor, Denis Julians. It was said to be “one of the handsomest buildings on Broadway” by Miller’s New York As It Is, Or Stranger’s Guide-book to the Cities of New York, Brooklyn and Adjacent Places. The St. Denis originally featured elaborate terracotta ornament, meant to compliment and reference Grace Church across the street. It was host to numerous historical figures over the course of its lifetime, including President Abraham Lincoln, First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Mark Twain, Roscoe Conkling, Chester A. Arthur, P.T. Barnum, and Sarah Bernhardt.
The St. Denis as seen on a postcard, circa 1908.
The Renwick is a loft building, running the entire block from Broadway to Fourth Avenue behind Grace Church, designed in 1887. It was meant as a utilitarian structure for offices, storage, and manufacturing, but it features vivid Gothic detail to serve as an appropriate backdrop to Grace Church. Aside from signage, the building is almost completely intact to its original design, from the gothic arches and tracery to the more robust, industrial Romanesque detailing of the Fourth Avenue façade. One architectural historian writes, “The harmony between this structure, built as a store and manufacturing building, and one of the most delicate and important Gothic Revival structures in the United States, is nothing short of remarkable”.
Renwick was involved in several housing developments this same area, south of Union Square. One is what is sometimes called “Renwick Row,” ten houses at 20-38 West 10th Street built in 1856 (except for No. 38, built in 1858). This row or “terrace” of houses was built in the Anglo-Italianate style and clad in brownstone, with a continuous rusticated base and second-floor balcony originally spanning the entire row.
Another terrace attributed to Renwick is the Renwick Triangle, at the intersection of East 10th Street and Stuyvesant Street. Also Angle-Italianate in style, this terrace fronts both Stuyvesant Street (Nos. 23-35) and East 10th Street (Nos 114-128), with a dramatic, acutely cornered building at the tip of the triangle.
Renwick was well connected in society from his birth, with family wealth so that he never had to work, clearly extremely intelligent, enjoyed a very active and impressive career and was highly regarded during his lifetime. He married once, to Anna Lloyd Aspinwall, had no children, and so far as I can tell, was involved in neither financial nor marital hanky-panky. He died in 1895 at his home at 28 University Place and his obituary in The New York Times described him as “one of the foremost architects in this country.”
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On this national holiday in France, we will travel without tickets, passports or TSA. Enjoy our look at this once grand rail hall now a wonderful museum. Fasten your seatbelt
HistoryThe site was occupied by the Palais d’Orsay [fr], intended for the Council of State. It was begun in 1810 but not completed until 1840, when its ground floor was occupied by the Council. In 1842 the Cour des Comptes was housed in the first floor. After the fall of the French Second Empire in 1870, the Paris Commune briefly took power from March through May 1871. The archives, library and works of art were removed to Palace of Versailles and eventually both the Conseil and the Cour des Comptes were rehoused in the Palais-Royal.The largely empty Palais d’Orsay was burned by the soldiers of the Paris Commune, along with the Tuileries Palace and several other public buildings associated with Napoleon III, on the night of 23–24 May 1871, an event which was described by Émile Zola.[2] Electric trains operating in the Gare d’Orsay, ca. 1900The site was purchased by the Compagnie Paris-Orléans, which erected the monumental terminus station for its railways to southwestern France. The station had electrified tracks, modelled on the Baltimore Belt Line electrified railway which had been completed in 1895. The station was constructed in Beaux-Arts style and the western and southern sides of the building included the 370-room Hotel Palais d’Orsay.
By 1939 the station’s short platforms had become unsuitable for the longer trains that had come to be used for mainline services, and the Gare d’Orsay was closed to long-distance traffic, though some suburban trains of the SNCF continue to use its lower levels to this day. The Hotel Palais d’Orsay closed at the beginning of 1973.The former station was used as a collection point for the dispatch of parcels to prisoners of war during the Second World War, and after the war as a reception centre for liberated prisoners on their return; a plaque on the side of the building facing the River Seine commemorates this latter use.The structure served as the setting for several films, including Orson Welles‘ version of Franz Kafka‘s The Trial, and is a central location in Bernardo Bertolucci‘s The Conformist. General Charles de Gaulle held a press conference in the ballroom of the Hotel Palais d’Orsay on 19 May 1958 at which he announced his “availability to serve his country”, ushering in the end of the French Fourth Republic.As well, it was the inspiration for the larger Penn Station in New York City when Alexander Cassatt, president of Pennsylvania Railroad, traveled on his annual trip to Europe in 1901.
In the 1970s work began on building a 1 km-long tunnel under the station as part of the creation of line C of the Réseau Express Régional with a new station under the old station. In 1970, permission was granted to demolish the station but Jacques Duhamel, Minister for Cultural Affairs, ruled against plans to build a new hotel in its stead. The station was put on the supplementary list of Historic Monuments and finally listed in 1978. The suggestion to turn the station into a museum came from the Directorate of the Museum of France. The idea was to build a museum that would bridge the gap between the Louvre and the National Museum of Modern Art at the Georges Pompidou Centre. The plan was accepted by Georges Pompidou and a study was commissioned in 1974. In 1978, a competition was organized to design the new museum. ACT Architecture, a team of three young architects (Pierre Colboc, Renaud Bardon and Jean-Paul Philippon), were awarded the contract which involved creating 20,000 square metres (220,000 sq ft) of new floorspace on four floors. The construction work was carried out by Bouygues.[6] In 1981, the Italian architect Gae Aulenti was chosen to design the interior including the internal arrangement, decoration, furniture and fittings of the museum. The arrangement of the galleries she designed was elaborate and inhabited the three main levels that are under the museum’s barrel vault atrium. On the main level of the building, a central nave was formed by the surrounding stone structures that were previously the building’s train platforms. The central nave’s structures break up the immense sculpture and gallery spaces and provided more organized units for viewing the art.[7] In July 1986, the museum was ready to receive its exhibits. It took 6 months to install the 2000 or so paintings, 600 sculptures and other works. The museum officially opened in December 1986 by then-president François Mitterrand.
At any time about 3,000 art pieces are on display within Musée d’Orsay. Within the museum is a 1:100 scale model created by Richard Peduzzi of an aerial view of Paris Opera and surrounding area encapsulated underneath glass flooring that viewers walk on as they proceed through the museum. This installation allows the viewers to understand the city planning of Paris at the time, which has made this attraction one of the most popular within the museum.Another exhibit within the museum is “A Passion for France: The Marlene and Spencer Hays Collection”. This collection was donated by an Marlene and Spencer Hays, art collectors who reside in Texas and have been collecting art since the early 1970s. In 2016 the museum complied to keeping the collection of about 600 art pieces in one collection rather than dispersed throughout other exhibits. Since World War II, France has not been donated a collection of foreign art this large. The collection favors mostly post-impressionist works. Artists featured in this collection are Bonnard, Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Odilon Redon, Aristide Maillol, André Derain, Edgar Degas, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.[8] To make room for the art that has been donated, the Musée d’Orsay is scheduled to undergo a radical transformation over the next decade, 2020 on. This remodel is funded in part by an anonymous US patron who donated €20 million to a building project known as Orsay Grand Ouvert (Orsay Wide Open). The gift was made via the American Friends of the Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie.[9] The projected completion date is 2026, implementing new galleries and education opportunities to endorse a conductive experience.[10]
BROADWAY AND HOUSTON STREET NINA LUBLIN, ED LITCHER, GLORIA HERMAN, ALEXIS VILLAFANE ALL GOT IT RIGHT!
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Where life in New York City was lived “on the steps”
Between the cramped spaces, poor ventilation, and shadowy hallways, life inside a New York City tenement could be hard to bear, especially in warm weather. For relief, people headed to their outside steps: men buried themselves in the newspaper, women rocked babies, small kids played games. In a pre-air conditioned city, front stoops were lively places. It’s unclear exactly where Ashcan painter George Luks captured this scene outside a rundown building. But he appropriately named the painting “On the Steps”—where much of life played out in New York’s tenement districts.
It’s unclear exactly where Ashcan painter George Luks captured this scene outside a rundown building. But he appropriately named the painting “On the Steps”—where much of life played out in New York’s tenement districts.
MORE ART BY GEORGE LUKS OF THE NEW YORK STREET SCENES
Houston Street
George Luks – Armistice Night – Google Art Project.jpg
TUESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NINA LUBLIN GOT IT!!
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In 1906 Milan hosted the World Exhibition which, significantly, focused on the theme of transportation. The occasion for the exhibition was the inauguration of the spectacular Simplon Tunnel, connecting Milan to Europe’s major cities.
The opening up of commercial and cultural connections unleashed a burst of buoyancy. Milan became associated with the first aesthetic movement to praise the potential of the modern metropolis.
The cult of technology was central to Italian Futurism. Whereas the Romantics had recoiled in horror from the machine, the Futurists embraced it with zeal. Futurist artists were inspired by the spectacle of industrialism. They intended to wrench Italy from her retrospective dream of an antique past into the dynamic world of the industrial present.
Futurists aimed at “killing the moonlight” in the surge towards a dynamic future of technological advancement. The moon was synonymous with superstition and Romantic myth. It had to be erased by the glare of man-made light bulbs. Giacomo Balla’s 1909 painting “Lampada ad arco” (Street Light) is the movement’s iconic image of the moon being subsumed by artificial street light. Tiny vectors of red, blue, and yellow spring forth from the radiating source of electrical illumination. The future was a light switch.
Milan & New York
The future began on February 20, 1909 when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his “Manifesto of Futurism” on the front page of Le Figaro. Written in assertive and quasi-militaristic style, it celebrated machine civilization. In this, his first of countless manifestos, he called for the replacement of an “anachronistic” and backward-looking society (promising to “destroy the museums, libraries, and academies of every kind”) with an alternative reality based on the ethic of speed and technology.
Marinetti, known as the “caffeine of Europe,” was a master in attracting attention. Launching a series of raucous campaigns, he traveled back and forth across the Continent, giving interviews, arranging meetings where he mocked “passéist” artists (his attack on John Ruskin during his visit to London was a notorious example). Champion of the grand tradition of “being booed,” he welcomed hostile responses to his crusade, viewing those as symptoms of its artistic vitality. Following in his footsteps, Futurist artists advocated radical social and cultural reform.
Inevitably, the noise reached New York. On December 24th, 1911, the magazine section of the New York Herald carried a full-page illustrated article entitled “The New Cult of Futurism Is Here.” The story was based on an interview with French-born André Tridon that took place at the artist’s studio in East 19th Street, Gramercy Park, Manhattan. Tridon was introduced as America’s “archpriest of Futurism.”
Paying tribute to Marinetti for naming the group of rebels, Tridon insisted that members of the movement shared a sound “contempt for tradition.” Shifting attention to the American cultural landscape, he attacked the “piffle” of literature because authors slavishly followed a “feeble” English tradition rather than looking ahead. In good Futurist fashion (Marinetti had declared “war” on pasta an absurd gastronomic religion), he drew a parallel with cooking: American cuisine was “almost as dreadful as cooking in England.” Art and literature needed a stronger stomach.
America’s greatest contribution to the arts according to Tridon was its capacity for creating a self-reliant architecture. Ridiculing the tendency to build banks and stock exchanges upon the models of ancient Greek temples, he juxtaposed a photograph of a cumbersome Neo-Classical building against a soaring skyscraper. Hygienic, attractive, and an economiser of effort and time, the skyscraper perfectly suited the needs of a metropolitan setting – it was ‘a perfect machine.’
Interestingly, Tridon’s reflections on modernist architecture preceded those of Marinetti. In 1913 the latter admitted that despite grand ambitions, Futurist architecture was a construct that remained unrealized. It was Milanese architect Antonio Sant’Elia whose name would become synonymous with Futurist urban planning. In 1914, he exhibited a series of visionary drawings for the “New City” and published a “Manifesto of Architecture” in which he envisaged the city as an integrated entity condensed around the central presence of a power station, the “cathedral of the electric religion.”
Sant’Elia died in October 1916 at the age of twenty-eight, killed in a war he and other Futurists had so enthusiastically embraced, thus leaving his imagined future for others to explore.
Armory No Show
Futurist painting first manifested itself outside Italy in a major touring exhibition at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris in February 1912 and then, after its London showing in March, moved on to Berlin, Brussels, and other European cities.
In London, the exhibition was shown at the Sackville Gallery and included thirty-four works by Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini. It received extensive press coverage. Marinetti gave a lecture at the Bechstein Hall in Wigmore Street, Westminster, which according to The Times reviewer was read in French with such an impassioned torrent of words that some of his audience “begged for mercy.”
By the time that the organizers of New York’s ground-breaking Armory show started their preparations (the exhibition opened in February 1913), American art lovers were relatively well informed about the new movement. They had seen reproductions of some paintings, come across citations from Futurist manifestos, and read an English translation of Boccioni’s preface to the original exhibition catalogue. All this produced a flurry of hostile commentary in the popular press.
The concept of Futurism that emerged from Tridon’s interview was that modernists should follow the Italian example, discard obsolete lessons from the past, and welcome the dynamic originality that modern technology brought to bear. From there it was a small step to conclude that Futurism was a mere manner of thinking that placed emphasis upon doing away with a stagnant past whilst glorifying movement and mobility.
Tridon was the first to articulate the persistent dichotomy between a definition of Futurism as an Italian manifestation and one encompassing avant-garde activity in general. It was this application of the term “futurist” to vanguard European art in general rather than specifically denoting the motion-driven movement originating in Milan, that infuriated Marinetti. He refused the invitation to take part in the Armory show.
By insisting that Futurism was a uniquely northern Italian movement, Marinetti proved himself to be as “parochial” as the idolaters of the past he so vehemently attacked. He failed to grasp the fact that New York could be precisely the fertile metropolitan environment that members of his movement yearned for.
Panama Pacific
In 1915 the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) was organized in San Francisco to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal and showcase to the world the city’s recovery from the devastating 1906 earthquake. The Fair offered visitors (almost nineteen million people paid a visit in the ten months of its duration) a view of the latest industrial developments; they could ride around a replica Grand Canyon; sail on a model of the Panama Canal; or be entertained by a rotation of bands and performers. The Palace of Education and Social Economy presented public health programs by promoting eugenics. Celebrating mankind’s forward march, attendees could enter a living Pueblo Village (Arizona) that was occupied by members of the Zuni and Hopi tribes. Progress was in that sense a sadly misconceived concept.
The PPIE also exhibited over 11,000 paintings, sculptures, prints, and photographs. Housed in national sections at the Palace of Fine Arts, visitors were presented with walls of paintings and large-scale murals.
A Norwegian by birth and a former student at Antwerp University, John Nilsen Laurvik had been an American resident since 1901. A prominent photographer, art critic for such papers as the New York Evening Post and the New York Times, and translator of Henrik Ibsen’s correspondence, he was a cosmopolitan intellectual. He served on the PPIE Art Commission and acted as Director for the Palace of Fine Arts. With war spreading throughout Europe, he still managed to secure works of art from a range of countries.
Having traveled to Venice, Laurvik arranged a meeting with Marinetti and persuaded him to send a collection of works to the Fair. The inclusion of a Futurist gallery was also supported by Marinetti’s friend Ernesto Nathan, Mayor of Rome, and Head of the Italian Commission to the PPIE. Assigned a gallery to themselves (Gallery 141), forty-seven paintings and two sculptures were exhibited. None of these works was reproduced in the official Fair’s catalogue, but Boccioni’s essay “The Exhibitors to the Public” which had appeared previously in exhibition catalogues in Paris and London was reprinted for the occasion.
It was the first time that a collection of Italian Futurist paintings was exhibited in the United States, but the movement was not made welcome in San Francisco. Futurism’s first decade had been its most explosive and innovative period, but the works on show received little attention other than journalistic derision and ridicule (a similar disinterest was evident in 1917 when Severini exhibited his work at New York’s Gallery 291 on Fifth Avenue).
After the First World War, the members’ intense nationalism led to an alliance with Italy’s National Fascist Party. Although Futurism continued to develop new areas of focus and attracted a ‘second generation’ of Futurist artist, its political association with Benito Mussolini was a further obstacle to a wider appreciation of the movement in American art circles.
With Italy’s return to democracy, a political push was advocated for the re-establishment of cultural exchange between the two nations. It was decided that New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) would hold an exhibition of Twentieth Century Italian Art in 1949, but its curators Alfred Barr and James Thrall Soby were confronted with a major hindrance: the sparsity of modern Italian art in American museums. From May to June 1948 they made a “grand tour” of Italy, not only to select exhibition materials but also to make a determined effort to fill the gap in MoMA’s holdings. Their endeavors made an impact. Today the Museum has a rich public collection of Futurist art.
WOMEN’S HOUSE OF DETENTION JOYCE GOLD, ANDY SPARBERG, ED LITCHER AND MANY MORE!! WE NOTICE THE BUILDING NAME WAS ON THE IMAGE…OOPS!!
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
JAAP HARSKAMP NEW YORK ALMANACK
Sources
Illustrations, from above: Lampada ad arco, 1909 by Giacomo Balla (Museum of Modern Art); Marinetti’s foundation manifesto of Futurism; portrait of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, 1915 by Carlo Carrà (Private collection); Power Station, In: La città nuova, 1914 by Antonio Sant’Elia; Dynamism of a Soccer Player, 1913 by Umberto Boccioni (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco); Danseuse blue = Blue Dancer, 1912 by Gino Severini (Private collection); Panama-Pacific International Exposition poster; and George Giusti’s catalogue cover for Twentieth-Century Italian Art exhibition. (MoMA).
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August Robert Ludwig Macke (3 January 1887 – 26 September 1914) was a German Expressionist painter. He was one of the leading members of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). He lived during a particularly active time for German art: he saw the development of the main German Expressionist movements as well as the arrival of the successive avant-garde movements which were forming in the rest of Europe. As an artist of his time, Macke knew how to integrate into his painting the elements of the avant-garde which most interested him.[1] Like his friend Franz Marc and Otto Soltau, he was one of the young German artists who died in the First World War.
August Macke – Three girls in yellow straw hats 1913
August Macke 1914
Early life August Robert Ludwig Macke was born in Germany on 3 January 1887, in Meschede, Westphalia. He was the only son of August Friedrich Hermann Macke (1845–1904), a building contractor and amateur artist, and his wife, Maria Florentine, née Adolph, (1848–1922), who came from a farming family in Westphalia’s Sauerland region. Shortly after August’s birth the family settled at Cologne, where Macke was educated at the Kreuzgymnasium (1897-1900) and became a friend of Hans Thuar, who also became an artist. In 1900, when he was thirteen, the family moved to Bonn, where Macke studied at the Realgymnasium and became a friend of Walter Gerhardt and Gerhardt’s sister, Elisabeth, whom he married a few years later.The first artistic works to make an impression on the boy were his father’s drawings, the Japanese prints collected by his friend Thuar’s father and the works of Arnold Böcklin which he saw on a visit to Basel in 1900. In 1904 Macke’s father died, and in that year Macke enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, under Adolf Maennchen (1904-1906). During this period he also took evening classes under Fritz Helmut Ehmke (1905), did some work as a stage and costume designer at the Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, and visited northern Italy (1905) and Netherlands, Belgium and Britain (1906).
August-Macke1900 Artistic career 1907–1914 Rokoko,1912, oil on canvas, 89 x 89 cm, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Norway Tightrope walker, 1913Thereafter Macke lived most of his creative life in Bonn, with the exception of a few periods spent at Lake Thun in Switzerland and various trips to Paris, Italy, the Netherlands and Tunisia. In Paris, where he traveled for the first time in 1907, Macke saw the work of the Impressionists, and shortly after he went to Berlin and spent a few months in Lovis Corinth‘s studio. His style was formed within the mode of French Impressionism and Post-impressionism and later went through a Fauve period. In 1909 he married Elisabeth Gerhardt. In 1910, through his friendship with Franz Marc, Macke met Kandinsky and for a while shared the non-objective aesthetic and the mystical and symbolic interests of Der Blaue Reiter.Macke’s meeting with Robert Delaunay in Paris in 1912 was to be a sort of revelation for him. Delaunay’s chromatic Cubism, which Apollinaire had called Orphism, influenced Macke’s art from that point onwards. His Shops Windows can be considered a personal interpretation of Delaunay’s Windows, combined with the simultaneity of images found in Italian Futurism.The exotic atmosphere of Tunisia, where Macke traveled in April 1914 with Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet was fundamental for the creation of the luminist approach of his final period, during which he produced a series of works now considered masterpieces. August Macke’s oeuvre can be considered as Expressionism (in its original German flourishing between 1905 and 1925), and also as part of Fauvism. The paintings concentrate primarily on expressing feelings and moods rather than reproducing objective reality, usually distorting colour and form.Macke’s career was cut short by his early death in the second month of the First World War at the front in Champagne, France, on 26 September 1914. His final painting, Farewell, depicts the mood of gloom that settled after the outbreak of war. This was also the same year that he painted the famous painting Türkisches Café in München (1914).
WOMEN’S HOUSE OF DETENTION 6TH AVENUE AND 8TH STREET, MANHATTAN SEE TUESDAY EDITION FOR ANSWERS
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
Sources
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Finally, at 2 p.m. on Friday, 4 days after the sidewalk was fenced off,( probably with the nudging by our local politicians who were contacted) a pathway was established.
FROM THE ARCHIVES
WEEKEND, JULY 9-10, 2022
THE 723rd EDITION
Mae West and Sex Updated
Stephen Blank
I thought it would be interesting to write an RIHS essay about Mae West’s Broadway play, Sex, the play that led to her arrest and brief incarceration in our island’s jail. What research revealed was a more interesting tale. Sit back in your seat and enjoy the show.
Here’s what we knew. On February 9, 1927, Mae West was charged with obscenity for a play she had written and was starring in. The play was called Sex. Cops closed it down and hauled in Mae, who wound up here in our jail.
The story turns out to be much more than that. Mae is not the only player in this drama-comedy and Sex is not the main subject.
Irving Lippman/John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images
First, West wasn’t busted after just a few performances. The play had been poorly reviewed. But bad press had not kept audiences away and it had been open for more than a year.
The New York Times considered it to be a “crude and inept play, cheaply produced and poorly acted” while Billboard condemned it as “the cheapest most vulgar low show to have dared to open in New York this year.” In a 1925–26 New York theater season with new plays by O’Neill (The Great God Brown), O’Casey (Juno and the Paycock), and Coward (Hay Fever), critics agreed that Sex was the rock bottom.
Nonetheless, for more than a year, Sex drew full houses, playing 375 performances. The play outlasted nearly all the competition and was the only play on Broadway to stay open through the summer 1926 season into the following year. Variety christened its heroine, a Montreal lady of the evening with a fondness for sailors, “the Babe Ruth of stage prosties.” Thousands (some say 325,000!) people had already been in the audience, including members of the police department and their wives, judges of the criminal courts, and seven members of the district attorney’s staff before the New York Police Department decided it was obscene.
Mae explained, “When you tell people a play is naughty, they rush to see it. I can’t help that, can I? People thought it vulgar, ridiculous, or funny, or a perfectly terrible play, laughed—and sent their friends to see the show”. The New York Times explained in 1928 that “It became the fad in not a few quarters to see ‘Sex’ two or three times, and some of our best people were caught entering or leaving Daly’s Sixty-third Street Theatre.”
Newspapers were reluctant to advertise the play. No problem, Mae said, and plastered the town with posters. “When the newspapers refused my advertisin’, they gave me headlines about my havin’ my nerve producin’ such a play,” West said in a March 1934, interview with Movie Classic magazine. “I couldn’t’ve bought that space for any amount of money. That sent my prices up and packed ‘em in.
1926 Show Posters advertising Sex
Second, Sex wasn’t the only play that was closed that night. Three curtains were rung down and 40 actors and actresses, managers and producers were hauled off by the police to the 54th Street night court on charges of participation in immoral productions – Sex and also The Virgin Man and The Captive. All had been denounced as “dirt plays” by the city’s moral guardians. Mae wasn’t the only top name arrested: “The star turns of the late-night show at 54th Street were the respectable Helen Menken, playing a lesbian in The Captive, and the most unrespectable Mae West, writer and star of Sex.”
Sunday News front page, February 10, 1927
The raids didn’t just happen. The struggle between morals reformers and theater owners had boiled up in the past year. In the 1925-26 Broadway season, an unusually large number of plays had treated sexual issues. The French writer, Edouard Bourdet’s The Captive, starring the glamorous Helen Menken, dealt with a lesbian love affair. The Shanghai Gesture focused on the travails of Mother Goddam, a corrupt Chinese madame; Lulu Belle presented the story of a mulatto hooker who seduces everyone she meets, and, of course, Sex.
Unlike Sex, The Captive had been praised by critics: “Bourdet has wrought a play of gigantic proportions, of compassion and candor, and, above all, of terrific dramatic effect… From the moment that the sullen mystery is invoked until it lands its ultimate smash, the play proceeds with adroit balance and cunning. … Adapted sensitively by Arthur Hornblow, Jr. … The movement is intense, swift and perpetually provocative.” —John Anderson in the New York Evening Post (For movie fans, Basil Rathbone was the male lead of The Captive.)
Helen Menken and Basil Rathbone photo by Vandamm
Tension heightened when West’s second play, The Drag, opened in Bridgeport. Its plot involved a young woman married to a gay man, with lots of female eroticism and what, for the time, was a sympathetic view of gay men. West wanted to bring it to Broadway – and reformers were determined to keep it away.
All of this came to a head in February. The flamboyant mayor of New York, Jimmy Walker – no friend of the reformers – had left town with a girlfriend on a holiday in Florida. His deputy, Joseph V McKee, was in charge. McKee, a devout Catholic whose nickname was “Holy Joe”, launched the raids. The reformers didn’t stop with these three plays. On February 26, several burlesque theaters were raided, accusing entertainers of giving indecent performances.
It’s interesting that both The Captive and Sex had been acquitted of immorality by the Citizens’ Play Jury which was sponsored by the NYC DA. The DA had pledged acceptance of their verdicts, prior to the drive against immoral shows. This pledge was ignored in February.
The raids sheltered under New York State’s existing anti-obscenity statute which was a broad umbrella but lacked teeth since actions which would “tend to the corruption of the morals of youth or others” was charged only as a misdemeanor. In March 1927, reformers surprisingly won the support of Governor Al Smith to pass the Wales Padlock Bill, which allowed the DA to padlock a theater if it produced an “indecent” production featuring “sex degeneracy” or “sex perversion”, and to prosecute everyone associated with such a production. The Padlock law remained in force until 1967.
Like Sex, The Captive had been a major feature on Broadway for months. But it stayed closed. As one paper reported, “The leading lady, the manager and director, the stage director, another actress, and one elderly actor walked out of the limelight today among the central figures in the police raided public censored play, ‘The Captive,’ promising they would no longer appear in the play or try to put it on again in New York. The withdrawal of Gilbert Miller as manager, George Mondolf, Jr., as stage director, and Helen Menken, Winifred Fraser and Arthur Lewis meant the closing down of the show at the theater where it has been a big box office drawing card for several months. These members agreed not to appear again in their roles under any management… The closing of ‘The Captive’ was interpreted as the first victory of the city authorities in their moral crusade along Broadway.”
Like the others, Sex stayed closed. But, West, far from being shamed, knew she had an opportunity on her hands. So, when given the option to close Sex and have all charges dropped, she declined. She knew that in showbiz, crime paid. The grand jury’s claim that her “obscene, indecent, immoral, and impure drama” would tend to “the corruption of the morals of youth” was better than any rave review.
At West’s trial, “12 stout citizens, all male, made up the jury, and the chief prosecution witness, Sergeant Patrick Keneally of the Midtown vice squad, began reading out lines from the play in a thick Irish brogue. Unable to find actual profanities in the text, the prosecution alleged that the offence was in the way Mae West moved on the stage, and the hapless sergeant was requested to demonstrate this too. He declined, prosecution counsel explaining primly that ‘everyone in the police force is not a dancer’. ‘Nor an actor,’ retorted the defence.”
Mae West and Barry O’Neill, two of the principal actors of “Sex,” in the courtroom. Bettmann
West played her conviction and 10-day jail sentence (she was released two days early on good behavior) into an experience that would create Mae West, the social critic, satiriser of the age-old battle of the sexes and advocate of the primacy of the surviving woman. Even bedecked with gems, as Diamond Lil, she remained a model for all those who felt that her sassy rebellion against conventional morality was a precious gift in a prudish, harsh world, which soon plunged into the Depression.
Mae’s last words: “’Some of the papers called my earlier plays garbage, but that sort of garbage was what my patrons wanted and I gave it to them,” West told The New York Times in 1928. “And, besides, Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’ and ‘Sappho’ were called garbage and worse names than that when they were produced, and look at them now. ‘Ghosts’ is a classic, and maybe ten years from now they’ll want to see ‘Sex’ again and call it a classic ”
QUILT MADE BY RUTHIE STEVENS FOR HER SON’S CLASSROOM IN 1978, AT THE R.I. DAY NURSERY
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)
Fred French Building lobby, via 
Untitled
