When Alfred Stieglitz met Georgia O’Keeffe in 1916, the 52-year-old photographer and 28-year-old painter began a passionate love affair that led to their marriage in 1924 and an artistic adventure of ups and downs until Stieglitz’s death in 1946.
At the time, Stieglitz was already part of the New York City art establishment. In the early 1900s he founded the Photo-Secession, a movement to accept photography as an art form. His own work, particularly his city scenes, won praise for its softness and depth.
He also established his own gallery, where he exhibited O’Keeffe’s early abstract drawings before falling in love with her and considering her his muse.
After the couple wed, they moved into the Shelton Hotel (bottom image in 1929). A 31-story residential hotel that opened just a year earlier on Lexington Avenue between 48th and 49th Streets, it billed itself as the tallest hotel in the world at the time, with commanding views of the East Side of Manhattan.
“The wedding, one of the largest and most fashionable of the season, brought out New York society—Astors, Belmonts, Havemeyers, Cooper-Hewitts, and others,” wrote Folpe. “Lungren seems to have observed the scene from the doorstep of his lodgings at 3 Washington Square, a row house converted into artists’ studios in 1879.”
After the swirl and excitement of this much-anticipated wedding, the couple mostly stayed out of the newspapers. Early on, they secured their own house on Washington Square. At some point they took up residence at Four East 86th Street.
And then, in 1909, came the split. “Sydney Smith’s Wife Sues for Absolute Divorce,” one front-page headline screamed. “Mrs. Smith did not take her usual place in the fashionable life of Newport last summer, but lived quietly with her children at a boarding house, and stories of marital unhappiness were revived in August when she and her husband [were part of] different parties at the Casino tennis matches, and did not speak to each other,” the story explained.
Stieglitz and O’Keeffe took advantage of these views. From their apartment on the 30th floor, O’Keeffe painted several images of what she saw outside her window in the 1920s—industry along the East River, the lit-up windows of skyscrapers lining the business corridors of East Midtown after dark.But one from 1928 struck me the most, and it’s simply titled “East River From the Shelton Hotel” (top image). Though the couple had very different styles and worked in different mediums, the painting feels very similar to a 1927 Stieglitz photo.“From Room 3003—the Shelton, New York, Looking Northeast” captures the same expansive cityscape of neat and uniform low-rise tenement blocks and belching smoke along the riverfront.
Both works seem to hint that the East Side which came of age in the late 19th century would soon give way to the tall, sleek city of the Machine Age that Stieglitz and O’Keeffe were currently part of.
JONES BEACH WATER TOWER ANDY SPARBERG. ED LITCHER, ED LITCHER, M FRANK 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
Shortly after the United States entered World War II in 1941, the nation quickly mobilized for war and nearly all able-bodied men under the age of forty-five volunteered or were drafted into the armed forces. This left a major gap in the nation’s industrial workforce, just at the time when increased war production was desperately needed. In order to fill these ranks the government began to promote the hiring of women as industrial workers. Amid initial opposition to the idea, the Office of War Information (OWI) was created to produce promotional posters, advertisements, and news stories to gain much needed support for these and other home-front war efforts. In 1942, Alfred T. Palmer, the official photographer of the OWI, began visiting aviation production plants across the country and photographing their female workers.
Palmer’s World War II factory photographs of women aviation workers were created for the OWI between 1942 and 1943, and they comprise some of his best and most well-known work. Women at Work presents twenty-one of these photographs from the collections of the Library of Congress. These compelling, high-contrast, color prints depict their subjects as they were; focused and determined to play an important part in the production of military aircraft to win the war in the air. These images also serve to document the rapid technological advancement of war-time aviation and aircraft production, which reached an astounding total of 324,750 aircraft.
A North American Aviation B-25 Mitchell bomber is prepared for painting on the outside assembly line at the North American Aviation plant, Inglewood, California 1942 Alfred T. Palmer (1906–93) photograph Library of Congress LC-USW36-240 R2012.2601.00
Workers install fixtures and assemblies to a tail fuselage section of a Douglas-built Boeing B-17F bomber at the Douglas Aircraft Company plant, Long Beach, California 1942 Alfred T. Palmer (1906–93) photograph Library of Congress LC-USW36-128 R2012.2601.002
An operator of a riveting machine joins sections of wing ribs to reinforce the inner wing assemblies of Douglas-built Boeing B-17F heavy bombers at the Douglas Aircraft Company plant Long Beach, California 1942 Alfred T. Palmer (1906–93) photograph Library of Congress LC-USW36-102 R2012.2601.009
Assembling a wing section for a North American P-51 Mustang fighter plane at the North American Aviation plant, Inglewood, California 1942 Alfred T. Palmer (1906–93) photograph Library of Congress LC-USW36-249 R2012.2601.006
Reproduction of Grand Central Terminal light fixture in RIHS Visitor Center Kiosk, mounted on our Guastavino ceiling.
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)
SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM AVIATION COLLECTION
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
FROM WIKIPEDIA: Alfred T. Palmer (17 March 1906 – 31 January 1993)[1] was a photographer who is best known for his photographs depicting Americana during World War II,[2] as he became an Office of War Information photographer from 1942 until 1943.[3]
November 1942. “Grenade throwers. Ready to make a shipment of pineapples to Hitler, Hirohito & Co. An infantryman at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, holds a double handful of deadly grenades that may one day blast open a road to Berlin or Tokyo.” 4×5 acetate negative by Alfred Palmer for the Office of War Information.
Civilian defense. Much time is saved by the use of the teletype to spread important messages during air raids. Individual telephone calls to the various defense centers are unnecessary, since the teletype will present the information on paper to all centers simultaneously
Stars over Berlin and Tokyo will soon replace these factory lights reflected in the noses of planes at Douglas Aircraft’s Long Beach, Calif., plant. Women workers groom lines of transparent noses for deadly A-20 attack bombers. October 1942. Alfred Palmer. (OWI)
Lunchtime brings a few minutes of rest for these women workers of the assembly line at Douglas Aircraft Company’s plant, Long Beach, Calif. *Sand bags for protection against air raid form the background.
Title: U.S. Marine Corps, bedding down a big barrage balloon, Parris Island, S.C.
Creator(s): Palmer, Alfred T., photographer Date Created/Published: 1942 May Medium: 1 transparency : color. Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-fsac-1a35182 (digital file from original transparency) LC-USW361-1055 (color film copy slide) Rights Advisory: No known restrictions on publication. Call Number: LC-USW36-1055 <P&P> [P&P] Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
Title: Section of the batch house at a plant of the Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corporation, Toledo, Ohio. In the bins are stored the raw materials for the batch from which fiberglass materials vital to the war effort are produced
Workers in the huge tank Chrysler arsenal near Detroit, putting the tracks on one of the giant M-3 tanks. These rolling arsenals weigh twenty-eight tons, are capable of speeds over twenty-five miles an hour and are equipped with 75 mm. field artillery gun and a 37 mm. anti-aircraft gun, as well as four mounted machine guns and various unmounted arms its crew may carry. The tanks are powered by 400 horsepower Wright Whirlwind aviation engines.
Title: A carpenter at the TVA’s new Douglas dam on the French Broad River, Tenn. This dam will be 161 feet high and 1,682 feet ong, with a 31,600-acre reservoir area extending 43 miles upstream. With a useful storage capacity of approximately 1,330,000 acre-feet, this reservoir will make possible the addition of nearly 100,000 kw. of continuous power to the TVA system in dry years and almost 170,000 kw. in the average year
The Whispering Corner outside Oyster Bar Grand Central Terminal, with Guastavino tiled ceiling Matt Katz, Aron Eisenpreiss, Jay Jacobson, Andy Sparberg, Hara Reiser, Gloria Herman from Jay Jabobson: The whispering corner in Grand Central Terminal used to be a place where impecunious young men would go on a date. He would ask the young woman to stand in the whispering corner, and then he would go to the other corner to whisper his endearing sentiment. For some, it was a cost effective way of proposing marriage. For others, it was simply, “Let’s have dinner!” at the adjacent Oyster Bar!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
WIKIPEDIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Philip Guston was born Philip Goldstein in Montréal, Canada, in 1913 to Russian emigrés from Odessa. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1919. In 1925, he took a correspondence course in cartooning. As a high school student in 1927 he made friends with Jackson Pollock. After both were expelled for distributing a broadside that satirized the English department, Guston studied on his own. He had his first solo exhibition at Stanley Rose’s bookshop and gallery in Los Angeles in 1931. He joined the mural division of the WPA in 1935 and over the next seven years completed various mural commissions, having moved to New York at Pollock’s urging in 1937. Beginning in 1940, Guston taught at several colleges throughout the United States; in 1975 he received the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award from the College Art Association. In 1951, Guston painted his first abstract works, which lead to the first solo exhibition of his abstract work at the Peridot Gallery in New York. In 1967, Guston relocated permanently to Woodstock, New York, and gradually shifted from abstraction to cartoon-like still lifes and figure studies. Guston died in Woodstock in 1980.
National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996)
Philip Guston’s parents came to Canada from Russia at the turn of the century and Philip grew up with the surname Goldstein, which he changed to Guston in his twenties. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1919 where, unable to secure a job, his father committed suicide. As a child Guston found comfort in drawing, hiding in the closet at night to draw by the glow of a single hanging bulb, an image that would appear in his later paintings. In 1927 he entered Los Angeles’s Manual Arts High School, where he met his lifelong friend Jackson Pollock. The two rebellious young artists hit it off, but their unruly behavior got them expelled. The dapper Guston ended up on the back lots of Hollywood working as a film extra. In the early 1930s he visited Mexico, where public murals about the Mexican Revolution fired his own social consciousness. After moving to New York he promptly joined the mural division of the Works Progress Administration. Guston associated with several activist leftist groups through the 1930s. He painted abstract works from the late 1940s until around 1970, when he returned to a cartoonish kind of representational painting. He died of a heart attack just before his sixty-seventh birthday. (Storr, Philip Guston, 1986)
Philip Guston, Early Mail Service and Construction of Railroads (mural study, Commerce, Georgia Post Office), 1938, tempera on fiberboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the Internal Revenue Service through the General Services Administration , 1962.8.77
Philip Guston’s mural study shows the history of mail service on the frontier, from the days when sacks of mail arrived on horseback to the coming of railroads and telegraph lines that displaced much of the mail traffic. Artists working for the government in the 1930s considered themselves members of America’s workforce and sympathized with laborers. After Guston submitted his study, government officials noted that he had lavished more attention on the workers than the rest of the image and specified that “The strength of drawing reflected in the two workmen laying the rails … is the quality of draftsmanship we would like you to characterize in the entire design.” The bureaucratic process required that Guston submit several versions of the composition to the superintendent of the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture. After he had made the revisions required by the officials, the composition was approved for the post office in Commerce, Georgia. He finished the mural in 246 days and was paid $510 for his efforts. (Edward B. Rowan to Philip Guston, January 4, 1938, SAAM curatorial file)
Philip Guston, Painting No. 6, 1951, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1974.96
Philip Guston, “Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.”–St. Thomas Aquinas, Two Precepts of Charity, 1273. From the series Great Ideas of Western Man., 1952, oil on paper mounted on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Container Corporation of America, 1984.124.112
Philip Guston, Painter III, 1960, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc., 1969.47.59
Painter III is an anxious, agitated painting that was completed shortly before Guston rejected abstraction and returned to recognizable imagery. “When the 1960s came along,” he said, “I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The [Vietnam] war, what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of a man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything — and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue.” In 1970 he shocked the New York gallery scene when he opened a show that featured paintings with cartoon-like images of clocks, eyes, the soles of shoes, and other seemingly symbolic forms.
Philip Guston made a name for himself as an abstract expressionist, but by the late 1960s he had grown weary of “all that purity.” He began creating crudely rendered and emotionally charged paintings filled with cartoony figures and mundane objects. The artist’s shift in creative practice, referenced in this work’s title, was not a slow and graceful transition but an abrupt right turn. Transition shows Guston hiding behind a canvas, as if taking refuge from the blast of bad press he received after his new work was shown in 1970. A tiny, clownish doorway suggests a move from one place to another, while the clock near the center points to the artist’s canvas, as if ticking away the time Guston had left to paint. At once comic and disturbing, the painting is a surreal mix of allegorical and personal references.
Rebuilder: Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation, 1938, to Q Car. Service: 1908-1969. Routes: Brooklyn elevated lines, 1908-1923; Astoria and Flushing …
GLORIA HERMAN, ALEXIS VILLAFANE, ARON EISENPREISS, PAT SCHWARTZBERG, GOT IT,
ANDY SPARBERG GOT THE DETAILS 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
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Sarah and Angelina Grimke are revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North. Yet retellings of their epic story have long obscured their Black relatives.
In The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family (Liveright, 2022), Kerri Greenidge presents a parallel narrative, shifting the focus from the white abolitionist sisters to the Black Grimkes and deepening our understanding of the long struggle for racial and gender equality.
Greenidge’s narrative centers on the Black women of the family, from the brilliant intellectual and reformer Charlotte Forten, to Angelina Weld Grimke, who channeled the family’s past into pathbreaking modernist literature during the Harlem Renaissance. In a grand saga that spans the eighteenth century to the twentieth and stretches from Boston and beyond, Greenidge reclaims the Black Grimkes as complex, often conflicted individuals shadowed by their origins.
A new edition of South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City (Fordham University Press, 2022) by Jill Jonnes with foreword by Nilka Martell chronicles the ongoing revival of the South Bronx, thirty-five years after this landmark of urban history first captured the rise, fall, and rebirth of a once-thriving New York City borough — ravaged in the 1970s and ’80s by disinvestment and fires, then heroically revived and rebuilt in the 1990s by community activists.
Though now globally renowned as the birthplace of hip-hop, the South Bronx remains one of America’s poorest urban congressional districts. In this new edition, Jonnes’ looks at the present generation of activists who are transforming their communities with the arts and greening, notably the restoration of the Bronx River. For better or worse, real estate investors have noticed, setting off new gentrification struggles.
Jill Jonnes holds an M.S. from Columbia Journalism School and a Ph.D. in American History from Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World; Conquering Gotham: Building Penn Station and Its Tunnels; and Urban Forests: A Natural History of Trees and People in the American Cityscape.
In January 1840 the steamboat Lexington left Manhattan bound for Stonington, Connecticut, at four o’clock in the afternoon on a bitterly cold day carrying an estimated one hundred forty-seven passengers and crew and a cargo of, among other things, baled cotton.
After making her way up an ice-encrusted East River and into Long Island Sound, she caught fire off Eaton’s Neck on Long Island’s north shore at approximately seven o’clock. The fire quickly ignited the cotton stowed on board.
With the crew unable to extinguish the fire, the blaze burned through the ship’s wheel and tiller ropes, rendering the ship unmanageable. Soon after, the engine died, and the blazing ship drifted aimlessly in the Sound away from shore with the prevailing wind and current.
As the night wore on, the temperature plummeted, reaching nineteen degrees below zero. With no hope of rescue on the dark horizon, the forlorn passengers and crew faced a dreadful decision: remain on board and perish in the searing flames or jump overboard and succumb within minutes to the Sound’s icy waters.
By three o’clock in the morning the grisly ordeal was over for all but one passenger and three members of the crew — the only ones who survived. The tragedy remains the worst maritime disaster in the history of Long Island Sound.
Within days, the city of New York‘s Coroner convened an inquest to determine the cause of the disaster. After two weeks of testimony, reported daily in the press, the inquest jury concluded that the Lexington had been permitted to operate on the Sound “at the imminent risk of the lives and property” of its passengers, and that, had the crew acted appropriately, the fire could have been extinguished and a large portion, if not all, of the passengers saved.
The public’s reaction to the verdict was scathing: the press charged that the members of the board of directors of the Transportation Company, which had purchased the Lexington from Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1839 (he had the boat constructed in 1835), were guilty of murder and should be indicted. Calls were immediately made for Congress to enact legislation to improve passenger safety on steamboats.
Death by Fire and Ice: The Steamboat Lexington Calamity (US Naval Institute Press, 2022) tells the little-known story of the sinking of the Lexington.
The book explores the ongoing debate in Congress during the nineteenth century over its power to regulate steamboat safety; and it examines the balance Congress struck between the need to insulate the nation’s shipping industry from ruinous liability for lost cargo, while at the same time greatly enhancing passenger safety on the nation’s steamboats.
Author Brian O’Conner graduated, magna cum laude, from St. John’s University in 1974, with a BA in Government and Politics. He attended St. John’s School of Law, where he served as Publications Editor of the Law Review, graduating with a JD in 1977 and starting a legal career serving as a Law Clerk to a judge on the New York Court of Appeals. In 1979, he joined Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP as an Associate in the Litigation department, became a Partner in 1987 and the firm’s General Counsel in 2017. He is now retired and lives in Northport, NY, on Eaton’s Neck, which plays a prominent role in the story of the Lexington’s sinking.
This book by Tracy Horn is available at the RIHS Visitor Center Kiosk.
Ten Days in a Madhouse, a continuing best seller available at the RIHS Visitor Center kiosk
Following Nellie Bly is available at the RIHS Visitor Center Kiosk
Iconic New York Coloring Book is available at the RIHS Visitor Center Kiosk
For 19 years our best-selling book of Roosevelt Island history, available at the RIHS Visitor Center kiosk
The family of Dr. Herman Bauer, the Executive Director of CIty Hospital, in front of Blackwell House. They lived on the island until City Hospital relocated to Elmhurst in 1955.
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
Sources
NEW YORK ALMANACK
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Over the last many years, the RIHS has received numerous requests from authors, film-makers, playwrights, students and scholars.
Occasionally, we actually see the finished product. Here are some of the end-products:
In 2018 Travis Russ contacted the RIHS about gay prisoners at the Penitentiary on Welfare Island. He and his team scoured our archives and started on a quest that has lead to a new theatrical production “The Gorgeous Nothings” about the “Fag” prisoners in 1930 Penitentiary and Workhouse here.
“The Gorgeous Nothings” is a product of Life Jacket Theatre Co. and has held it’s first reading recently..
Linda Fairstein contacted us when she was still a Prosecutor in the District Attorney’s office about our island history.
Stacy Horn contacted us numerous times while writing “Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York“
Elizabeth Barlow Rogers followed up on her original book “Forests and Wetlands” and used our story to tell of the development of the current island community.
When Bruce Becker was developing the Octagon, the RIHS shared all the information we had on the building architecture. The material we provided was used to obtain approval for the historic restoration and Federal funding of the landmark Octagon.
Ten years ago Architect Tom Fenniman asked for photos of the lighthouse and from them and more research our landmark lamp has been restored to its original appearance.
Plaque with history of the Cornell Tech campus is located at the northeast corner of Bloomberg Center.
Graduate Hotel has a treasury of island history from Nellie Bly, the Penitentiary, Mae West and Queen Kapiolani place throughout the building including the elevators.
When Christies was about to auction “Blackwell’s Island” by Edward Hopper, the RIHS provided historical information, images and details that were used in the catalogue in 2013. The painting was sold to Crystal Bridges Museum in Benton, Arkansas for $17,000,000.
When the RIHS was asking to acquire the trolley kiosk, extensive research had to be done and submitted for the building to be relocated to the island, This lead to an abundance of information on the Queensboro Bridge, Trolley System and development of Queens.
The vent shaft building opposite the subway station has been revealed and soon the wooden covers on the fence will be removed and a lovely mosaic will be revealed.
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
Sources
JUDITH BERDY
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
What happened to the young couple who held an 1896 winter wedding on Washington Square
December 12, 2022
It’s a lovely wintry scene that captures excitement, romance, and the Gilded Age beauty of a snow-covered Washington Square.
I’ve always been curious about the scene. Who, exactly, is getting married here? A little digging led me to the names of the bride and groom—and what happened after the vows were recited and the reception ended.“This picture shows New York’s upper crust arriving at the Square on the afternoon of December 17, 1896, to attend the wedding reception for Fannie Tailer and Sydney Smith held by the bride’s parents in their home at 11 Washington Square North,” wrote Emily Kies Folpe, in her 2002 book, It Happened on Washington Square. (Above, the row containing Number 11 circa 1900)Fannie Tailer and Sydney J. Smith weren’t just typical new rich New Yorkers. Both came from old and socially prominent families. The Tailers were even part of the “Astor 400″—the infamous list of the highest echelon of society in the city, at least according to Caroline Astor and her social arbiter, Ward McAllister.
The couple met at the annual horse show, one of the events that marked the opening of the social season in Gotham. Tailer was an accomplished rider, while Smith was the scion of an old New Orleans family.Their engagement hit the papers in 1895. Tailer “is justly considered not one of the prettiest but one of the handsomest young women in the ultra-fashionable set,” wrote the New York Times. About Smith, the Times stated that he had “sufficiency of worldly goods, is popular, [and] is more than well endowed with good looks.”The wedding itself took place at 3 p.m. at Grace Church, at Broadway and 10th Street. Though many rich families had moved to elite neighborhoods like Murray Hill and upper Fifth Avenue in the 1890s, Washington Square North was still an acceptable place for a prominent family to live. Grace Church remained the choice place for these Greenwich Village residents to worship.
“The wedding, one of the largest and most fashionable of the season, brought out New York society—Astors, Belmonts, Havemeyers, Cooper-Hewitts, and others,” wrote Folpe. “Lungren seems to have observed the scene from the doorstep of his lodgings at 3 Washington Square, a row house converted into artists’ studios in 1879.”After the swirl and excitement of this much-anticipated wedding, the couple mostly stayed out of the newspapers. Early on, they secured their own house on Washington Square. At some point they took up residence at Four East 86th Street.And then, in 1909, came the split. “Sydney Smith’s Wife Sues for Absolute Divorce,” one front-page headline screamed. “Mrs. Smith did not take her usual place in the fashionable life of Newport last summer, but lived quietly with her children at a boarding house, and stories of marital unhappiness were revived in August when she and her husband [were part of] different parties at the Casino tennis matches, and did not speak to each other,” the story explained.
After the divorce, Mrs. Smith married C. Whitney Carpenter, a “broker” according to the New York Daily News. Still active in society, she seemed to live out her life in privacy, though she divorced a second time. She passed away in 1954, and her estate of $80,000 was divided between her two sons.Sydney Smith also married again, to Florence Hathorn Durant Smith. He died in 1949 at age 81. He held the distinction of being the oldest member of the Union Club, which he joined in 1881, according to his New York Times obituary.[Top image: Wikipedia; second image: New-York Historical Society; third image: Brooklyn Citizen; fourth image: New-York Tribune; fifth image: Baltimore Sun]
A MODEL OF THE KAWAMATA PROJECT IN THE 1980S, SURROUNDING THE SOUTH END OF THE SMALLPOX HOSPITAL WITH A WOODEN CONSTRUCTION
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
Following the mid-nineteenth century revolution in steamship building, transatlantic passenger transport became a profitable enterprise. Travel went global, giving rise to an intercontinental “travel industry.”
Commercial oceanic transportation boomed. Bremen-based NDL (Norddeutscher Lloyd) and Hamburg-based HAPAG (Hamburg Amerikanische Packetfahrt Aktiengesellschaft) became the largest shipping companies in the world.
Organized a generation before German unification, the ports of Bremen and Hamburg were semi-independent city states. With a rapid installation of modern facilities, their main stream of revenue became migration. These cities out-rivaled Le Havre, Liverpool, Antwerp and Rotterdam in an increasingly competitive market. By the mid-nineteenth century steamship lines began providing faster and more affordable “services” to migrants.
In spite of improvements, passengers experienced cramped conditions when traveling on migrant ships. All of them were required to provide sufficient clothing and bedding for the voyage. Even cabin class passengers had to outfit their own berths. Handbooks of “good advice” were published to help passengers prepare for the crossing and provide information about the choice of ship, the best time to sail, and give tips on fitting up of a berth. In spite of all that, the transatlantic trek remained a hazardous undertaking.
Fire was a continuous risk. In September 1858, an estimated five hundred migrants died after a blaze on SS Austria on its way from Hamburg to the city of New York. Disease on the long sea voyage was rife and countless passengers died of cholera or typhus on board ship. The ominous spectre of disaster haunted travelers on their seemingly endless journey.
Initially, German vessels were constructed in British shipyards, but by the mid-1890s – helped by Germany’s rapid industrial and technological expansion – companies had started placing orders with local steamship builders. These shipping lines would take the main share in the transportation of two transatlantic flows of mass migration.
Between 1840 and 1880, German migration to the United States was at its peak. When the number of German emigrants fell sharply in the 1890s, the New York-bound exodus from Central and Eastern Europe took over. Hamburg and Bremen were the nearest ports of embarkation for large numbers of Jewish migrants escaping persecution in the Russian Empire.
Rival companies started competing with each other to make the fastest crossing. To reach New York in record tempo became a race for glory (and customers). By the 1890s the accolade “Blue Riband of the Atlantic” had come into circulation for the ship that completed the trip with the highest average speed (the term itself was borrowed from horse racing). Cunard refused to recognize the title, fearing that pace would be put above passenger safety.
Confessional Migration
In 1871, Otto von Bismarck united a patchwork of self-standing states to form the German Empire. Soon after unification a bitter power battle erupted between the government of Prussia and the Roman Catholic Church. The Iron Chancellor faced Pope Pius IX.
Known as the “Kulturkampf ” (culture war), a series of legislative measures were passed aimed at reducing the influence of the Church in public life, most notably the Pulpit Law (December 1871) which banned members of the clergy from discussing matters of state with their flock. The School Supervision Law (March 1872) curtailed the Church’s influence in education, but more severe measures were being prepared with the intent of eliminating once and for all the “Jesuit Menace” to the new German nation.
The Jesuit Law (July 1872) dissolved the order of the Society of Jesus. Its facilities were closed down and individual members were subject to restrictions of communication and/or movement. The most severe blow to the Catholic Church came with the passing of the Monasteries Act (May 1875) which banned all religious orders from Prussian territory with the exception of those dedicated to the care of the sick and disabled.
Although many of these laws were revoked in the course of subsequent decades, their initial impact was severe. The “struggle for culture” reached both major religious centers and remote villages, as agents of the State banned or arrested priests and closed down gathering places. Protestant polemicists and progressive politicians castigated Catholics as ignorant minions of a clerical hierarchy, hampering the forward march of civil society.
The Kulturkampf triggered not only a campaign of Catholic resistance, either active or passive, but also prompted a wave of confessional migrations, often involving the displacement or repatriation of entire monastic communities. Neighboring Holland and Belgium were the closest destinations for victims driven out by the new Prussian legislation. Others decided to leave Europe altogether and seek a new life the United States.
Whereas previous generations of German migrants originated predominantly from northern territories, under Prussian rule they fled the southern Catholic states.
Rome of the West
The Congregation of Franciscan Sisters, Daughters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, was founded in 1860 by Mother Clara Pfänder. Three years later a Motherhouse was established in Salzkotten, a (salt producing) town in the district of Paderborn, Nordrhein-Westfalen.
Once Bismarck’s anti-Catholic agenda was set in motion, Clara was compelled to send her sisters into other countries. During that turbulent time she received a request from the Bishop of Paderborn.
In October 1871 a petition had been delivered to Father Ernst Andrew Schindler of St Boniface Catholic Church in Carondelet, a neighborhood in the in the south-eastern part of St Louis, Missouri, requesting the establishment of a local hospital that could cope with the sharp growth in the number of accidents on the railroads and in local factories. Industrialization came at a cost.
Originally populated by French-speaking immigrants before German incomers started to outnumber them, St Louis had a strong Catholic identity which was reinforced when Pope Pius IX elevated the city to an Archdiocese in July 1847. St Louis acquired the nickname “Rome of the West.”
Schindler himself originated from Westfalen. He contacted the Bishop of Paderborn, asking him for support in initiating the medical project in his city. The latter urged Mother Clara Pfänder to accept the challenge as part of her missionary work program which, at the same time, would offer her nuns a chance to escape Bismarck’s repressive regime.
In December 1872 a first group nineteen of sisters arrived from northwest Germany to be employed as nurses in Carondelet’s newly founded Saint Boniface Hospital. Three years later, five more Franciscan sisters set out on the long odyssey to Missouri to take up their duties of care.
Tragedy at Sea
The S.S. Deutschland was an iron emigrant passenger steamship of the Norddeutscher Lloyd. Built by Caird & Company in Greenock, Scotland, she entered service on October 7, 1866, and arrived in New York three weeks later on her maiden voyage.
On Saturday December 4, 1875, Henrica Fassbänder (28 years old), Barbara Hültenschmidt (32), Norberta Reinkober (30), Brigitta Damhorst (27) and Aurea Badziura (24) joined a large group of migrants in Bremerhaven to set sail for New York aboard the Deutschland.
Once at sea, the weather conditions were getting worse by the hour. Caught in a heavy snowstorm, Captain Eduard Brickenstein and his colleagues on the bridge had no idea of ship’s position until, at 05:00 the next day, she struck the notorious Kentish Knock offshore sandbank at the entrance to the Thames Estuary, about 20 miles from the port of Harwich.
Distress rockets were fired to attract the attention of passing ships, but they went unnoticed or were (as was claimed by the Captain in the aftermath of the disaster) discarded by other vessels. The crippled ship began to take on water and as the tide rose she failed to lift off the shoal as had been hoped and expected.
As the wind rose to gale force, command was given to abandon ship. The order caused panic and confusion. One boat reached the shore with only a single survivor. The remaining boats were washed away or destroyed by the stormy seas.
More than twenty-eight hours passed before help arrived at last. The paddle tug Liverpool sailed from Harwich at daylight and rescued sixty-nine passengers and eighty-six crew members who had remained on the wreck. Some sixty people lost their lives.
To this day, the exact identities and numbers of those who perished remain uncertain due to discrepancies and inaccuracies in the passenger lists.
When disaster struck the sisters prayed with fellow passengers, giving priority to them in the rescue attempts whereby they themselves found death in the wild waters. Henrica Fassbänder’s body was never recovered.
Jesuit Priest & Poet
Four dead nuns were brought to St Francis of Assisi Church on The Grove in Stratford, East London. The Funeral Mass was led by Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, Archbishop of Westminster.
In his homily he praised the courage of the victims: “When at length a means of escape was at hand, they refused and allowed others to take their places and to save themselves.” The sisters were buried in St Patrick’s Cemetery in Leytonstone, a mile down the road.
When the widely reported news of the ship’s sinking spread around the globe, Gerard Manley Hopkins was studying for the priesthood at St Bueno’s (Jesuit) College in North Wales, having deserted the Anglican Church. By that time he had decided to stop writing poetry, burning all his poems in a self-ignited bonfire. His religious superior however urged him to dedicate a poem to commemorate the disaster and its tragic loss of life.
For the poet, there was a “personal” aspect to the devastating tale. Hopkins himself was born in Stratford and, for the first ten years of his life, he lived at 87 The Grove across the road from the Church where the funeral service had taken place.
His poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland” touched many hearts, but raised eyebrows too as it did not follow the standard form of English poetry. Incorporating details gathered from extensive press reports that followed the tragedy, Hopkins set out to present man’s struggle to see the hand of God in the midst of apparent evil. But where did this wickedness stem from?
It is a striking fact that the poet does not refer to the nuns as missionaries. Instead, he paints an image of five young women who were driven into exile and paid the ultimate price in their search for religious freedom. As Hopkins put it: “Rhine refused them: Thames would ruin them.”
This poem is not just a lamentation for lost lives. As a literary “intervention” in Prussia’s ungodly and evil treatment of the Catholic Church, its tragic subject served the author to highlight the Jesuit case by using shipwreck as a metaphor for Bismarck’s attack on religion. Drowning migrants were used to direct attention from the sinking ship to an entirely different and essentially politico-religious narrative.
“On Saturday sailed from Bremen, American-outward-bound, Take settler and seamen, tell men with women, Two hundred souls in the round …”
Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875)
A 2020 performance celebrating Isadora Duncan at the Lighthouse Park.
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)
Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875)
Illustrations, from above: An 1875 caricature of Bismarck and Pope Pius IX playing a game of chess symbolizing the Kulturkampf (Culture War); “The wreck of SS Deutschland” (Illustrated London News, December 1875); “The Wreck of the Deutschland: Waiting for succour” (The Penny Illustrated Paper, Christmas issue, December 1875); Four nuns in open coffins at St Francis of Assisi Church, Stratford (Photo by local photographer Henry Friedmann); and Garrick Palmer’s “Wreck of the Deutschland,” 1975 (Wood engraving courtesy Aberystwyth University).
THIS PUBLICATION IS FUNDED BY:CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE JULE MENIN AND DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
Ten years ago I met Kathleen Griffin and learned of her project to bring aerial butterflies art to the Smallpox Hospital ruins. Like many projects on the island, this one went thru many twists and turns and RIOC administrations. Hundreds of hours were spent designing, engineering, fundraising, making prototypes. Unfortunately, there were so many concerns about the building stability and safety that the butterflies have never flown over the Smallpox Hospital.
I have not been in contact with Kathleen but she has other recent projects on her website and I remember her for her diligence and not being beaten down by the Island administrations.
The “Butterflies of Memory” is a public art piece inspired by the power of hope and transformation. We see the balance of architecture and history, literally shaken down by memories, releasing them as golden butterflies that carry it off into the sky. The project is a gift to the city, and will eventually travel. A shimmering image that reminds us that sometimes, despite life’s harsh realities, life is also more magical, more beautiful that we imagined it could be. Currently proposed for the Small Pox Hospital Ruins on Roosevelt Island, seventeen giant gold butterflies each thirteen feet in diameter will fly between 18 and 36 feet above the building, visually carrying it off. The project will be viewable to millions of New Yorkers. We have an educational outreach program designed to reach 500 New Yorkers as well.
THE RUINS Here is how it starts It’s February 2009. I’m driving down the FDR for the billionth time in my life, feeling sad and overwhelmed. I’m broke and living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Astoria, using my living room as a studio. I had come two months before to New York with a plan, and with solid work in place. But everybody I knew had lost their jobs. I remember that January being the longest month. I had been teaching, and doing production design, but it all kept falling through. Or you work on a project and receive a fraction of the pay you were promised or the check bounces. But my sister was in New York, and upstate was lonely…Around 70th Street, as I approach the rust-colored supports of the Queensboro bridge, I start thinking about the Ruins – the collapsed Smallpox Hospital on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, in the East River. I peer left, out the car window, past oncoming traffic, to see the building that I have loved since I was a little girl. I look to it for the comfort it has always provided me, and instead, I have a vision: Butterflies.There has always been this connection for me. As a child I the early 1980s I’d visit the city several times a week from New Fairfield, Conn. with my mother – a Bronx native. On the ride home we’d get stuck in rush hour traffic, and for me this only heightened my anticipation of leering at the Ruins. I saw the stone structure as an old castle, and I would imagine that someday I would renovate the palace and live there – the Queen of Roosevelt Island. Being a little girl, I always thought it was a castle.My mom was only 33, and I was six or seven, and we’d have these adventures — a return to this magical place, had crummy cars breaking down, and whenever the car broke down, someone would rescue us. New York in the 80s was wild. We’d go to a diner and they’d give us free donuts.Later, when I tell my friend from graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design about my project, she laughed. I always mentioned the ruins on road trips from Providence, she said. I have imagined them a thousand different ways over my lifetime.But today, I see a swarm of shining yellow butterflies over the building, carrying it off, magically transforming the Ruins; completing, perhaps, an idea I started as a young girl. It was like a dream that had always been floating just above the spires of the old Small Pox Hospital, waiting for me..
This is not at all typical of my sculptural work, which is usually acutely concerned with it’s material reality and physical presence. This piece lingers in a border space, something that is real and yet still feels like you are only seeing it and then finishing it or making it real in your head. Like a piece of poetry made real, crystallizing for a minute. I think the piece will seem very unreal when it is up, the sunlight flashing and flickering on the gold, heightened by the fact that it’s temporary. You will see it and then it will be gone, and you will wonder if you imagined it. It will only continue to exist as long as it is remembered.
STEP 2 DO A LOT OF BAD DRAWINGS
I began drawing butterflies about six years ago. They just started popping into my head. It was strange how they would come, I knew they were an important idea for my work, but it would seem that just as I was understanding why, the idea would disappear, and I was left with the feeling of having forgotten something important. I found myself struggling to remember the idea. So I began to draw butterflies. At that time I was still living and working in Birmingham, Ala.A year later when I moved up to Ithaca, New York, the butterflies were still appearing.I threw away the first year’s worth of my butterfly drawings, because they had no substance, they were just drawings of butterflies, the insect. This is the strange thing about drawing, sometimes you know you are just creating a space for an idea to grow, it becomes more of a muscular activity. I was deeply involved in other work at the time, so the butterflies were sedentary.By the second year, it was clearer that the butterflies were about the pulling of memory. In the drawings they began pulling on things, on buildings, people and objects, tearing them down, carrying them away, lifting them up. Sometimes the drawings were dark and the butterflies destructive, other times they were a rescue or transformation. On my studio wall in pencil, I wrote “the butterflies of memory come in their outrageous beauty, they come to tear the buildings down.” I began to think about architecture and the second construction inside it, the second building, the one created from memory. The building that can linger long after the first one falls.I started making butterfly sculptures and moquettes, but nothing I was happy with. They sort of lingered in my drawing room as piles of drawings began to build up. It was in these drawings that I worked out how the butterflies functioned conceptually, and why even now I think of this piece as much in terms of drawing as I do sculpture – in part because of the scale and visual distance created by the size and location of the piece, but also because of how the piece is meant to function visually.
FIRST PHOTOS OF FINISHED BUTTERFLY
The golden touch
Gold leafing up close
The first gold leafed butterfly
THIS IS THE HELL OR HIGH WATER MARK, WHERE TIME IS CRUNCHING AND STAKES ARE RISING AND WINNING IS NOT ENOUGHThe project is moving faster and gaining steam, I have a series of fantastic new team members and planners. Amazing foundations are actually seeking me out, to become part of the project. But this is the time where failing is about not winning fast enough, so I think that I will be running until three days after the project is up.This is the time where the stakes raise and the partners raise and the numbers on both sides of the budget, in and out, go up. We are through the times of stitching things together with buttons and string. I meet with my business developers at least once a week, in a second floor office on 5th Ave., my business meetings do not include champagne anymore as often as they did this past fall and I am refining and rewriting – it is business.John Babashek, our project manager, and I go over and over our important letters and financial business. Just last week we were contacted by the James Jay Dudley Luce Foundation about working with them and having them join our project. Today I met with Rick Bell and Julie Trebault from the AIA New York Chapter about how to promote our partnership and a summer art show at the Center for Architecture. Friday I am going to Philadelphia with Bullet Magazine to meet with Humankind and check out the butterfly. We are building the structure that can lift the structure, so that I do not get sued, and so that I get everyone what they need so things are done right and well.As Charles, of Skyscraper likes to remind me, there is no turning back now, we’re like the British: “If you stop moving forward, we will shoot you.” So, we keep moving forward.
This is the New Year.But some years are more difficult than others, so perhaps their endings should be sweeter. The New Year can wake up like morning, as we hope for renewal, the difference between release and forgetting, what knowing makes us become.It has been a hard year.A year that reminds us how ugly the world can be. I grew up two towns from Newtown. In my personal world and in the world at large, sometimes life is uglier than we thought it would be, turning out very different than we imagined. In that you have to make a choice, to use that darkness to become something better or to fall into it – to die of it or to become the golden butterfly. To transcend, to fight back with a deeper commitment to beauty, to what you believe in. To purify that hardship. That destruction and madness can be met by our commitment to something better, purer.As an artist, and I mean that in the broadest sense of the word, particularly in New York City, it can be a very difficult life, and for myself and most creative people I know, you have battle with the question of “why am I doing this?” Why didn’t I become something that just made more money or had a safer track? But when things become horrible it becomes clearer, because it is those visions that allow us to see the world as it can be, who we can be. Medication may stop you from dying, but it teaches you nothing about living, or what is possible.And in those hard moments we turn to things that can. We touch at that moment, the creator and the receiver. Silently. At the moment that somehow lifts us, reminds us of who we are. The receiver, everyone who stands there, listening or looking, in that moment sees themselves more clearly, in a moment of beauty or wonder.That is the moment, together on both sides of that equation, we work towards it, that moment of transcendence.The other day I was hanging out with Charles from SkyScraper Steel. While perhaps not technically the artist, at this point, he is one of the people working almost as hard as I am to realize this, to actualize this particular vision. We were unloading the first golden butterfly next two his two now destroyed houses along the waterfront of Brooklyn. Rather than someone broken, or miserable, I see a friend who is still strong, more refined, who has gathered up his family and is figuring out, despite total destruction, how he will rebuild. He does not skip a beat, he works harder.For myself, it is a faith in this, my religion in a way, a commitment to hope and beauty, sometimes in the face of everything else.People ask me all the time why I am doing this, and I dance around the answer, but really that’s it.This piece is a release of memory, a transformation of it, an image of becoming all that we were meant to be, because, just when the caterpillar thought the world was ending, it became a butterfly.And it is what I want to give to my city, that image, and when you see it, I want you to think of only yourself.
JUST WHEN THE CATERPILLER THOUGHT THE WORLD WAS ENDING, IT BECAME A BUTTERFLY….KATHLEEN GRIFFIN
THE ARCHITECTURE TAKES A STEP FURTHER, IT IS THE CONTAINER THAT HOLDS HOW THE MOTION PLAYS OUT. A GREAT BUILDING RARELY SEEMS TO FORGET ITS DRAWING…KATHLLEEN GRIFFINEarlier this month, I met with with Rick Bell and Julie Trébault of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). We talked for a while about Butterflies of Memory, and it brought up issues of both the architecture and drawing of the butterfly. This piece was conceived of over such long period of time, and there are so many day to day technical elements that sometimes the more conceptual and artistic elements can get forgotten. But these points are very important. How the sculpture functions as a drawing – starting and finishing there, how it draws and creates line in the landscape and how its scale pulls us into the drawing.But I should explain more where I am coming from. In my studio process, I go between drawing and sculpture, primarily. I approach drawing as a conceptual thinking space, focusing on the delicacy of the line employed, the physical materials involved and how the two push and pull on the drawing. The lightness of the material creating a flexibility in the thought, a temporal moment like thought itself. The point of the pencil as the point of the thought, held just barely in position by the placement of that graphite and how it touches the paper.So drawing then becomes a kind of physical meditation. Drawing and redrawing the butterflies is, for me, thinking them into existence, thinking them into this space. The drawings are all part of that visual meditation.Also, drawing is an impossible thinking space, unrestricted by anything else. It is captured thought, it is a measurement of it, crystalized. So much more than painting. So much lighter.Then there is sculpture. If you ask me casually what I do, when I am not thinking too much, I will tell you I am a sculptor. More often than not I say artist, and this is why: all of this thinking and drawing, all this creation of conceptual place, hopefully develops ideas enough that they can come and join us here. We do not go to its place, it comes to us.This poetry in reverse, it is my end point. For my work, that is also about impossibility and wonder, making things that seem impossible, a physical poetry or idea, who lives with us, almost in opposition to the world as it is, demanding more, expanding this space, to hold it. Living in the wonder and impossibility of those pure ideas, feeling unrestrained in those possibility, held for a moment between disbelief and wonder. Where poetry is physical and surrounds us, where we are inside the drawing.This is what leads to my concern for material and, as often as possible, locking meaning inside that material – to refuse the illusion and transformation of a picture plane, of drawing or specifically painting or television or the computer, but to create something real. A boat that really is filled with 2,500 pounds of candy, butterflies that actually are gold, that do fly above our city.But in the case of this piece, the piece is so large and so far away, depicting a creature that is in and of itself so temporal, the piece itself will be temporal in that it becomes a drawing again. A butterfly more than perhaps any other creature is so temporal it almost refutes our three dimensions, remaining an idea too, a two dimensional expression. The gold on the butterflies like the gold leaf in the drawings, and it is a drawing in the landscape as well, pulling us into it, a larger drawing of the city. For a moment to look at it will be to be part of that drawing and the 60,000 pounds of steel on the building will be the same as the hard pencil lines that I lay against a ruler. A push-pull and the butterflies are here with us or we are in the drawing with it. It is this vibration that I greatly look forward to. To see if it gets pulled off. To see if it also feels like a drawing just as it seems impossibly real and among us.I have always read with a great jealousy the work of writers and poets whose work pulls us into the delicacy and place of their words. This will be the first piece I will have made whose scale is large enough to pull the viewer into its reality, and still as sculpture remain in ours. I am very excited about this.And then the architecture takes it a step further, it is the container that holds how that motion plays out. A great building rarely seems to forget its drawing. And the Ruins are not a random choice, they come with an intense variation of histories. A building that has lived a large and full life. The meanings also change, as those stories play out. The meaning of the building becomes the content or realization of that first drawing and the realities of those stories. This piece works with that architecture, imaging its content both as it is and could be, playing with and altering its story, flipping that relationship of drawing again. They become so many things twisting together it becomes simple again, it functions again, and as that drawing or poetry, we read into its meanings.
THE MEMORIES OF BUTTERFLIES AN ARTPIECE THAT WAS PLANNED FOR THE SMALLPOX HOSPITAL SITE
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
Towering figures made from miles of wire stretch along the Channel Gardens every year at Rockefeller Center. They are winged, robed, and haloed, each holding a 6-foot-long trumpet that heralds the holiday season. Much like the world-famous Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, these 12 angels, created by the artist Valerie Clarebout in 1955, are an annual presence at Christmastime.
Valerie Clarebout’s Angels in the Channel Garden
It took 75 pounds of wire to build each 8-foot-tall winged figure. The angels are arranged to face one another along the Channel Gardens, the fountains turned off, serenading passersby on the way to Center Plaza. In total, Clarebout used 76 miles of material, including 18 miles of aluminum wire and brass, and thousands of miniature lights to complete the celestial display.
While there is plenty of world-class art to be seen in and around Rockefeller Center, Clarebout’s sculptures are unique in their semi-permanence. “She’s the only artist whose work is regularly installed and removed for a period of time,” explains Christine Roussel, archivist at the Rockefeller Center Archive — where she’s responsible for all the photographs and documents between 1930 and 1996, the year Tishman Speyer acquired Rockefeller Center. Even more unusual, says Roussel, is Clarebout’s continued involvement with the project over the years: “She came back year after year to work on them.”
Born in the early 1900s, Clarebout studied at the Royal Academy of Art in London and Julien Studio in Paris before moving to the U.S. in 1952. Robert Carson, Rockefeller Center’s architect, soon hired the inventive sculptor to design angels for the Plaza. She went on to produce other collections that included jacks-in-the-box, 9-foot-tall snowmen, 12 elegant reindeer, and even one project comprised of 72 animals and four 8-foot-tall trees. She eventually made the angels we see today, working out of her New Fairfield, Connecticut, studio.
A year before passing away in 1982, Clarebout spoke to the New York Times about the angels, saying: “I love them. I love this time of year. Since I was a child I had a tremendous feeling for Christmas quite apart from a religious holiday. I used to lie on the ground and I thought I could feel the earth being reborn. That’s how I always thought of Christmas—as the rebirth of the earth. And now, of course, every year I think of it as bringing the angels back to life.”
In addition to her love of the Christmas season, Clarebout’s work and artistic style had a variety of other influences. She was an adventurer and traveled extensively to Mexico, South America, and Africa. Through her travels, she learned about practices in places around the globe and developed an interest in local crafts. Her mother was also a dressmaker, and can perhaps be credited with Clarebout’s fascination with embroidery. With the angels, in particular, she incorporated crafting techniques as a part of her process. “The angels’ wings, for instance, have this very thin wire mesh which she considered embroidery,” says Roussel.
Another source of inspiration, notes Roussel, was the song “All Things Bright and Beautiful” by Cecil Frances Alexander. The Anglican hymn, first published in Alexander’s 1848 book Hymns for Little Children, alludes to elements of the natural world. Clarebout’s interest in the natural world, which she also touches on in her comment to the New York Times, can be seen in her choice of material. While she used her signature wire to sculpt the angels and accompanying snowflakes, Clarebout chose, in this case, to paint the metal white, creating an illusion of birch or tree twigs that twist upward.
When the angels aren’t on display during the holiday season, they are stored in a climate-controlled warehouse. It takes the Rockefeller Center crew around 10 total hours to install and remove the angels and their bases each year, with each angel weighing 50 pounds. While Clarebout continued to care for them herself during her lifetime, they are now maintained and wrapped each year by decorators.
THURSDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY THE FORESTS AND WETLANDS OF NEW YORK CITY
BY ELIZABETH BARLOW The first book I read about Roosevelt Island and it’s history.
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
ROCKEFELLER CENTER
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
THE RUINS
This is not at all typical of my sculptural work, which is usually acutely concerned with it’s material reality and physical presence. This piece lingers in a border space, something that is real and yet still feels like you are only seeing it and then finishing it or making it real in your head. Like a piece of poetry made real, crystallizing for a minute. I think the piece will seem very unreal when it is up, the sunlight flashing and flickering on the gold, heightened by the fact that it’s temporary. You will see it and then it will be gone, and you will wonder if you imagined it. It will only continue to exist as long as it is remembered.
STEP 2
The golden touch
Gold leafing up close
The first gold leafed butterfly
THIS IS THE HELL OR HIGH WATER MARK, WHERE TIME IS CRUNCHING AND STAKES ARE RISING AND WINNING IS NOT ENOUGHThe project is moving faster and gaining steam, I have a series of fantastic new team members and planners. Amazing foundations are actually seeking me out, to become part of the project. But this is the time where failing is about not winning fast enough, so I think that I will be running until three days after the project is up.This is the time where the stakes raise and the partners raise and the numbers on both sides of the budget, in and out, go up. We are through the times of stitching things together with buttons and string. I meet with my business developers at least once a week, in a second floor office on 5th Ave., my business meetings do not include champagne anymore as often as they did this past fall and I am refining and rewriting – it is business.John Babashek, our project manager, and I go over and over our important letters and financial business. Just last week we were contacted by the 
