Our recent blog highlighting Municipal Archives collections that document the New Deal included a description of the records of the New York City Unit of the WPA Federal Writers’ Project. The NYC FWP provided meaningful employment for more than 300 writers, journalists, editors and photographers during the Great Depression. Although the collection includes research materials and draft manuscripts for 64 books, only a handful were published, notably the New York City Guide, and New York Panorama.
This week we are posting an article about the Fulton Fish Market from one of the unpublished manuscripts – Feeding the City. As is typical of many FWP manuscripts, the name of the author is not clear (it may have been “McLellan”), but it is dated: October 1940.
“Manhattan Casts its Reflection in East River,” South Street, from pier, ca. 1937. WPA Art Project Photograph. Photographer: Suydam. WPA FWP Collection, Municipal Archives.
No other wholesale market anywhere offers such an extensive supply of sea food as Fulton Fish Market. London’s famous Billingsgate has long been the world’s largest fish market, but in variety Fulton far surpasses it. During the busy season, early spring to late fall, 160 varieties of fishes and shellfishes from all parts of the world are available here to the 1,633 retail outlets that cater to the City’s diverse tastes.
Fishing boats at the dock, East River, November 1937. WPA FWP Photograph. Photographer: E.M. Bofinger. WPA FWP Photograph Collection, NYC Municipal Archives
Delivering halibut, Fulton Fish Market, ca. 1937. Fishery Council Photograph. WPA FWP Collection, Municipal Archives.
The Department of Markets estimates that no more than one-quarter of these fishes and shellfishes arrive by boat. The bulk is brought in trailer trucks from railroad terminals and points along the coast. Fresh-water fishes such as eels and carps, bought by certain racial groups, are shipped in alive by rail or are water-borne by Hudson River barges. Freshly caught whole fishes come in by the boatload, but gutted and packaged fishes, both fresh and frozen, arrive by truck from sheds and icehouses adjoining the landing piers in the ports of Boston, Gloucester, and New Bedford. Enormous frozen swordfishes, stiff salt cods, and millions of tins of sardines, sprats, tunas, mackerels and kippered herrings arrive by tramp steamers and transatlantic freighters. Not more than 10 per cent comes from waters contiguous to the City. The major portion is from commercial fisheries whose boats operate on the Newfoundland Banks and off the New England coast, from Gulf fisheries, and those of the Pacific coast. The greater part of the live-lobster supply comes from Maine, while from South Africa come large shipments of frozen tails of the spiny lobster. Other varieties of frozen or preserved fishes and shellfishes come to Fulton Fish Market from points as far distant as Japan, the Baltic states, Portugal, North Africa, and Alaska. Dried and flaked fishes are shipped from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, from Maine and Massachusetts. From the Mississippi and its tributaries in the southern States and from the Great Lakes arrive the fresh-water fishes so important in the diet of the City’s Jewish population.
South Street, near Peck Slip, October 1938. WPA Art Project Photograph. Photographer: Libsohn. WPA FWP Collection, Municipal Archives.
The day’s work begins in Fulton Market at 2 a.m. when trawlers, draggers, and smacks draw into the docks along the lower East River to discharge their cargoes. Selling begins precisely at 6 a.m. when a gong clangs three times. Buyers, representing jobbers and retailers, scurry among the stalls of the market’s 100 wholesale dealers, making their selections. Stalls are on piers, in the market’s new buildings, and in the nine-block area west of South Street.
Fish vendors, South Street, ca. 1937. WPA Federal Writers’ Project Photograph. Photographer: Clifford Sutcliffe. WPA FWP Collection, Municipal Archives.
Ninety per cent of the market’s sales are handled on a commission basis and selling must be concluded by one o’clock in the afternoon. After the boats unload, workmen begin wielding knives, cleavers, clippers, and scalers, preparing tons of fishes, and arranging them on beds of cracked ice for rush delivery to jobbers and retailers. The action along the waterfront is fast and furious since fish is one of the most perishable of commodities.
Hundreds of trucks are unloaded along the sidewalks where countless crates, vaporous and dripping wet from over-night refrigeration, are piled high. Empty trucks rumbling away are replaced by others belatedly reaching their destination. Retailers’ and jobbers’ trucks are loading up, a seemingly interminable stream of vehicular traffic.
Sidewalk stand, Fulton Fish Market, October 1937. WPA FWP Photograph. WPA FWP Collection, Municipal Archives.
“Whale and five chickens,” shouts a floor salesman, moving about in thick-soled rubber boots. A handler disappears into a refrigerated compartment and emerges hugging a huge halibut and five small ones. He drops these into a barrel and the “whale and five chickens” are ready to be packed for the last lap of their journey from the salty depths to the neighborhood fish store.
Monday is the big day at Fulton Fish Market. Produce sold on Mondays is in the retailers’ stores on Tuesdays, and so the shrewd housewife does not have to wait until Thursday or Friday to shop for sea food. On Tuesdays, stocks are fresher and larger, and prices are apt to be lower than during the rush later in the week.
When South Street was a cobblestone thoroughfare, unpleasant odors hung over this 200-year-old market. Today odors are being banished, for South Street, 75 feet wide, is now paved with asphalt, and new buildings constructed between Piers 17 to 20 by the Department of Markets form the beginning of a model fish market.
Peck Slip and South Street, ca. 1937. WPA Federal Art Project Photograph. WPA FWP Photograph Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.
The huskies who man the fishing boats are among the most picturesque of those who go to sea for their living. Many are of Norse origin. Others are down-easters whose Yankee forebears fished the banks along the North Atlantic coast; Portuguese, Italians, and Newfoundlanders also form a large group. Like other seafarers, these fishermen have their superstitions. Few will leave the piers on Fridays. When the Friday morning rush is over, they descend into their cabins and sleep until Saturday morning, or wander along South Street on shopping tours.
The entire supply of sea food once came by boat, but the fishing fleet is gradually diminishing. Skippers in the distant fishing grounds head their craft for home port, to load the catch into railway express cars or specially constructed trucks with insulated bodies, which rush to the wholesale markets. The airplane, too, enters into the picture, bringing from the west coast, southern, and Canadian waters luxury sea food such as turtle, terrapin, salmon, pompano, Florida crabmeat and stone crab, mountain stream trout, and frog’s legs. Many of these expensive products are packed in special tins and cartons for flight to LaGuardia Field, and are trucked to the market or delivered direct to retail outlets, clubs, and hotels.
Peck Slip, between Front and South Streets, ca. 1937. World Telegram Photograph. WPA FWP Collection, Municipal Archives.
Four stories of limestone, brick, terra cotta, and granite, the building has the imposing, fortress-like look of a typical bank building from turn of the century New York City—when savings bank failures weren’t uncommon and financial institutions wanted to instill a sense of trust and strength to entice potential customers.
The allegorical figures are part of this strength and trust. The train the woman holds is a symbol of industry; the caduceus suggests commerce, according to the LPC report. The key in the man’s hands represents prudence, and the cornucopia is a sign of plenty.
Credit: McLaughlin Aerial Subject: Flushing Meadow Park Subject: Aerial photographs Subject:New York World’s Fair (1939-1940) Subject:Parks–Flushing Meadows-Corona Park Description:Aerial view, Flushing Meadow Park Amphitheatre. Date:July 1941
Flushing Meadow Park Swimming Pool/Amphitheater. Young people cavort in pool; Amphitheater backdrop.
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
NEW YORK CITY MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
LUNAR NEW YEAR CELEBRATIONS ARE CONCLUDING THIS WEEK, SO WE ARE TAKING A QUICK TRIP TO THE CHINESE CUISINE WORLD WITH STEPHEN BLANK.
FROM THE ARCHIVES
MONDAY,JANUARY 30, 2023
ISSUE 899
Chinese Food in NYC – Answers and Questions
STEPHEN BLANK
I had Covid recently. No serious symptoms except extremely tired and loss of taste. My taste is now back, and I’ve been hankering for good Chinese food. Such thoughts trigger my research button and here we are.
The first known Chinese restaurant in America, Canton Restaurant, opened in San Francisco in 1849. (By the way, today, according to the Chinese American Restaurant Association, more than 45,000 Chinese restaurants operate across the United States, more than all the McDonald’s, KFCs, Pizza Huts, Taco Bells and Wendy’s combined.)
The story begins with Chinese immigrants to California in the mid-nineteenth century—mostly from Canton province—drawn by the Gold Rush and fleeing economic problems and famine in China. Though some headed to the gold fields, most Chinese immigrants to the San Francisco Bay provided services for the miners as traders, grocers, merchants and restaurant owners.
Eating houses run by Chinese sprang up around town and won a reputation for high-quality food and unusually low prices. An all-you-can-eat meal could cost as little as $1 – less than half the price of what was available elsewhere. “The best restaurants,” one patron recalled, “were kept by Chinese and the poorest and dearest by Americans.” Chinese dishes were offered but much of what they served was western. One early menu lists “Grilled Dinner Steak Hollandaise” and “Roast California Chicken with Currant Jelly,” with “Fine Cut Chicken Chop Suey” presented as just another option.
The next wave of Chinese immigrants came to work on the railroads, and Chinese food places grew up along the railway, spreading across the country. In 1855, 38 Chinese were recorded in New York, all males. Some early Chinese New Yorkers were sailors and traders who arrived directly in New York’s port and decided to stay, but many of our early residents arrived not from China directly, but from the western United States, particularly after anti-Chinese riots in San Francisco in 1877. In the mid-1870s, the New York Times counted around 500 Chinese immigrants, most of them men, half living in what now call Chinatown – the area defined by three streets that still form its heart: Mott, Pell, and Doyers.
At this point, the story becomes confusing. The Chinese Exclusion Act forbidding Chinese immigration was passed in 1882 and the flow of Chinese was halted. At this point, there were only about 100,000 Chinese people living in the US – and no more could arrive legally until 1943 when the Exclusion Act was revoked. So, the number of Chinese entering the US was low: 14,800 in the 1890’s and a record low of 5,000 in the 1930’s.
But the number of Chinese restaurants in New York City seems to have increased – indeed, “by 1903,” an exhibit at the Museum of the Chinese in America said, “over 100 chop suey houses existed between 14th and 45th Streets, from the Bowery to Eighth Avenue” and the number of Chinese restaurants in New York City quadrupled between 1910 and 1920. We are told that late-1800s versions of New York hipsters head into Chinatown after new tastes for adventurous palates. They discovered the novel flavors of Americanized Chinese dishes like chop suey and egg foo young, popularizing them to the point that they spread throughout the city. Chinatown was “teeming” with people in the 1880s, we read. So, where did all these people come from? More light!
Was this “Chinese” food? And what the hell is Chop Suey? Different kinds of Chinese restaurants appeared in the City. Some were fancy, upmarket places. In 1897 Port Arthur Restaurant opened, the largest Chinese restaurant in the city. It became a magnet for “slummers” – American tourists looking to do something exotic in the evenings. They sat at mahogany tables inlaid with mother of pearl, listened to music played on a baby grand piano and congratulated themselves on their spirit of adventure. When Port Arthur became the first Chinese restaurant in the city to obtain a liquor license, it became even more risqué and fashionable. (Such an odd name: Port Arthur was a Manchurian city that Russia had forced China to lease it to them, as an ice-free navel base. It was seized by Japan in 1904. The whole thing was a symbol of China’s decay.)
Almost surely, it did not have an all-Chinese menu. In a 1903 article about Chinese restaurants, the Times described one patron who ventured to a Chinese restaurant: “A man might wish to treat his wife or a friend to a dish of chop suey after a theatre, but could not eat the stuff himself. He must either go hungry or be satisfied with tea and rice. Consequently he lets his wife have her chop suey, while he orders, from the American side of the bill, broiled ham or broiled chicken, according to how much money he wishes to spend.”
Some very Chinese: Nom Wah Tea Parlor first opened at 13–15 Doyers Street in 1920 as a bakery and tea parlor. For most of the 20th century, Nom Wah served as neighborhood staple, offering fresh Chinese pastries, steamed buns, dim sum, and tea. Tourists came later.
Chop suey? In the 1920s American eaters were “shocked” when they were told “the average native of any city in China knows nothing of chop suey.” One food critic called chop suey “the biggest culinary prank one culture has ever pulled on another.” Others argue chop suey was indeed of Chinese origin. Where exactly its roots lay has been debated; but it was probably first cooked in Taishan, in Guangdong, where most early immigrants had grown up. More properly written tsa sui (Mandarin) or tsap seui (Cantonese), its name means something akin to “odds and ends”.
Was this an Americanized Cantonese cuisine? That’s what we were told. But anyone who has dined in a Cantonese restaurant knows that the cuisine is heavily seafood, very little like what we ate. Throughout the early 20th century, “Chinese” dishes became sweeter, boneless, and more heavily deep-fried. Broccoli, a vegetable unheard of in China, started appearing on menus and fortune cookies, a sweet originally thought to be from Japan, finished off a “typical” Chinese meal. Hardly Cantonese.
What is important is that an Americanized Chinese cuisine did emerge in the 1920s-30s – of various roots, but always looking to the customer’s tastes – and flowered after the war when immigration doors were open again. Regardless of its authenticity, the adaptation of Chinese cooking to American palates was a key element in the proliferation and popularization of Chinese cuisine in the United States.
This version of Chinese cuisine became the generic model – the Chinese restaurant menu in Buffalo was the same as in Detroit or, for that matter, in Winnipeg (and this is the truth, Lagos). Some restaurants were more upscale, some much less. But the cuisine was almost entirely the same. There were no surprises, no matter where we found a Chinese restaurant, it would taste the same.
Ultra-Americanized “Chinse” food (note “Chinese” is never mentioned). Wikipedia
From generic to regional specialization In the 1960s and ‘70s, that generic Chinese menu underwent dramatic change. The Chinese restaurant community rapidly diversified its menus. Why? One reason was newcomers from different regions. The liberalization of American immigration policy in 1965 brought new arrivals from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the northern provinces of China, who in turn brought with them the foods they had enjoyed in areas like Hunan, Sichuan, Taipei and Shanghai.
I think another reason was that younger, more educated Chinese realized that selling a commodity – the generic menu – would never make much money. They knew that the key was differentiation, developing new more focused products.
Finally, and a bit later, many better-off young people from China began coming to the US for education or jobs. To them, the generic American-Chinese cuisine made no sense.
The result in New York was grand – the opening of new Szechwan restaurants on the Upper West Side and then, hooray, Hunan on Second Avenue. Shanghai, Beijing. All sorts of new tastes. And then, Flushing.
But note, a recent GrubHub survey finds that old standards are still among the most often ordered: General Tso’s Chicken (also the 4th most popular dish of all), Crab Rangoon, Egg Roll, Sesame Chicken, Wonton Soup, Fried Rice, Sweet and Sour Chicken, Orange Chicken, Hot and Sour Soup and Pot Stickers. Not completely Old Timey, I guess, but hardly the cutting edge of Chinese food today.
First of all, people in cultures all around the world have long bought cooked food to bring home (see Pompeii). Certainly in China, where domestic cooking facilities were modest for most. So, doing the same in Chinese communities here did not mark a change. What is interesting is that non-Chinese joined in – and take-out became identified with Chinese food, and that Chinese restaurants adopted take-out as a brand. And long before today’s food delivery services, New York’s Chinese restaurant delivered. Why? When? Who?
The little paper box? Some say the boxes resemble the old pails used to bring home oysters. It’s certainly an American invention. Patented by inventor Frederick Weeks Wilcox in 1894, in Chicago, he called it a “paper pail,” a single piece of paper, creased into segments and folded into a (more or less) leakproof container secured with a wire handle on top. It’s not found in China. The question is “Is there a reason this particular container became so closely associated with Chinese food in the United States?”
And where did take-out in these boxes begin in the US – and when? Can we trace this back to a single restaurant?
I regret, dear reader, more questions than answers. And we can’t even trust a (non-Chinese) Fortune Cookie for to show us the way.
Thanks for reading, Stephen Blank RIHS May 15, 2022
THE ENTRANCE TO THE 63RD STREET/LEXINGTON AVENUE F/Q SUBWAY STATION.
LAURA HUSSEY 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
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
OVER 50 YEARS FROM TUBE PLACEMENT TO L.I.R.R.MIDTOWN DIRECT UNDER ROOSEVELT ISLANDDIRECTLY INTO GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL
We have an original of this 1971 brochure describing the process of building the 63rd Street tunnel. I will be glad to give you a clear copy for you to read.
Judith Berdy
MY TRIAL RUN
I decided to try to get to Jamaica thru the new line. I left Roosevelt Island on the F train to 42 Street Bryant Park. Exit train at rear and take staircase “S” shuttle thru new passage.
At the end of the passage you are on the “S” shuttle platform. Board the train for the 3 minute ride to Grand Central.
At Grand Central look for exit to the left directly into LIRR area.
You are now under the new One Vanderbilt building. You are exiting the subway system. Follow the signs to the LIRR, It is a rather long walk
Take the elevator or escalator down to LIRR area.
The directional signs are the best to follow. The map on the wall needs studying .You are walking south from 42 Street north to 48 Street under Vanderbilt Avenue. There are street entrances, which I have not explored, As you go along the concourse passage there is art, two public bathrooms (easy to find) and escalators leading down to a mezzanine level and then to the track levels. There are two track levels also. The track to the Jamaica train was 303 and easy to find. In simple terms there are 4 access points to each track from 45,46 47 a 48th Streets plus and entry from Park Avenue and Grand Central.
I did not worry, I figured this out after studying the map when I got home.
Since there are only shuttles running to Jamaica the next few weeks, the schedule indicated the schedule was ever 30 minutes.
There are graphics in light boxes all over the terminal. My favorite is the LIRR route map stretched out over 8 panels. Easy to read and vibrant!!!! Many mosaics decorate the vast walls. Too many to photograph and study today!
One the mezzanine level mosaics of wildlife decorate the panels. I feel this deer is lost in the woods,
Finally down to the track and on to the 1:59 p.m. local to Jamaica. I did find 3 lone vending machines in the terminal selling tickets. The conductor on the way out gave me a free ride, seeing my curiosity.
After local stops at Woodside, Forest Hills, & Kew Gardens we arrive at Jamaica. A MTA staff member gave me a map of Grand Central for me to study on the way home.
Twenty minutes later, I am back on the train to Grand Central. This conductor accepted my $5- fare for the in-city fare.
I met some wonderful, enthusiastic staff members and they should be proud of a project that took over 50 years and billions to complete.
FROM ED LITCHER: Fraunces Tavern is a museum and restaurant in New York City, situated at 54 Pearl Street at the corner of Broad Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. DeLancey built the current building as a house in 1719. The small yellow bricks used in its construction were imported from the Dutch Republic and the sizable mansion ranked highly in the province for its quality. His heirs sold the building in 1762 to Samuel Fraunces who converted the home into the popular tavern, first named the Queen’s Head. Periodically known as Boltons Tavern or The Coffee house.
ANDY SPARBERG, PAT SCHWARTBERG, HARA REISER, LAURA HUSSEY AND ARLENE BESSENOFF ALL GOT IT RIGHT!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
NEW YORK STATE 1971
JUDITH BERDY
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Washington, D.C., 1921 or 1922. “UnionStation waiting room.” National Photo Company Collection glass negative.
Circa 1906. “Union Station, Indianapolis.” If we step on it (but not in it) we just have time to make the 3:25 to Terre Haute. 8×10 glass negative
Cincinnati, Ohio, circa 1905. “Central Union Station.” You there in the window — get to work! 8×10 inch glass negative, Detroit Publishing Co.
Albany, New York, circa 1900. “N.Y.C. & H.R.R.R. station.” Temple of the New York Central and Hudson River Rail Road, topped off by a sculptural representation of Liberty and Justice over the state motto, EXCELSIOR. Also note the small sign behind the fire hydrant: DINNER NOW READY. 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Photographic Company.
Boston, Massachusetts, circa 1905. “North Station.” An update of this view. 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company
Worcester, Massachusetts, circa 1906. “Union Station.” Whose clock tower illustrates the campanile vogue in public architecture at its vertiginous peak. 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.
Atlanta, 1864. “Federal Army wagons at railroad depot.” And maybe Scarlett O’Hara in the distance. Wet plate negative by George N. Barnard.
Circa 1905. “Union Station, Toledo, Ohio.” Completed in 1886; replaced by the Central Union Terminal of 1950. 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Photographic Co
Circa 1900. “Union Station, Nashville, Tennessee.” 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.
Memphis, Tennessee, circa 1907. “Union Depot, Calhoun Street.” 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company
Detroit circa 1909. “Union Depot, Fort and Third Streets.” 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, … Company. View full size. Detroit’s second station. This was the smaller, and in my mind more beautiful, of Detroit’s …
Circa 1902. “UnionStation, Pittsburgh.” Detroit Publishing Co. View full size. Upper … supposed to be standardized. That’s my favorite part! UnionStation Why were so many train stations named “UnionStation“? …
1906. “Savannah, Georgia — UnionStation.” (Did anyone think of calling it Confederate Station?) 5×7 inch dry … Publishing Company. View full size. Not that Union I’m sure you know this, but others might not. Many cities in the US …
New York ca. 1910. “Pennsylvania Station. Track level, main and exit concourses, stair entrance.” 8×10 inch glass negative, Detroit Publishing Co.
New Orleans circa 1910. “Terminal Station, Canal Street.” Demolished in 1956. 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, … in 1956 after passenger service was relocated to the new Union Terminal. After station and tracks were removed the ground was landscaped …
1864. “Nashville, Tennessee. Rail yard and depot with locomotives.” Wet-plate glass negative by George N. Barnard.
Long Island RR Jamaica Station, looking west towards Manhattan, in early 1950s. The train on the right is steam-powered. The; the last such locomotive was retired in October 1955. Train on the left is an MP54 model electric train that was common all over the LIRR third rail lines until the last ones were retired in the early 1970s. Andy Sparberg
Laura Hussey also 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
The 1840s brought about a transformation in the nature of transatlantic shipping. With the development of European colonial empires, the forced transportation of African slaves had become big business.
Liverpool was the focus of the British slave trade. As a result of crusading abolitionist movements and subsequent legal intervention, the brutal practice declined there during that decade. But more or less simultaneously a new form of people trafficking took its place.
The flow of destitute migrants from Europe to the United States offered lucrative opportunities for Anglo-American shipping lines. The epoch established the cynical maxim that there is money in misery. Liverpool developed into the main port of departure for countless emigrants on the seemingly endless sea journey to New York. For all too many it proved to be a deadly voyage.
To this day, the image of migrants at sea remains an emotive but unresolved issue that has its roots in “business” models going back as far as the slave trade.
Liverpool & Slavery
Between 1550 and 1850, approximately twelve and a half million Africans were transported by English ships. Eleven million survivors landed in the West Indies and the Americas, the majority of whom were sold to Brazilian and Caribbean sugar plantations. The others went missing. Liverpool was central to Britain’s involvement. By the heyday of the Atlantic trade, one in six enslaved Africans made their forced journey aboard a Liverpool-registered ship.
In February 1781, with the 4th Anglo-Dutch War in full flow, the English brig HMS Alert captured the slave ship Zorg (meaning: care / caring) which operated from Middelburg delivering kidnapped Africans to the Dutch colony of Surinam to work on its plantations. Renamed rather oddly as Zong, she arrived at the Gold Coast of West Africa later that month where the slaver was purchased on behalf of a Liverpool syndicate led by James Gregson.
By the standard of similar ships, the Zong was small in size and designed to carry just under two hundred slaves. When she sailed from Africa in September 1781 bound for Jamaica, Captain Luke Collingwood had more than doubled the ship’s capacity, carrying 442 slaves in order to maximize profits.
When reaching a corridor near the equator known as “the doldrums” because of intervals of extreme heat and no wind, the ship sat stranded, short of water and food. Driven by the critical state of affairs, Collingwood gave the order that the numbers on board had to be reduced. Crew members threw 142 slaves over the side. On arrival, the insurers refused to pay the claim for compensation. The matter had to be settled in a British court.
The issues of who had committed the atrocity and why were not considered. The central question before the court was if the “lost cargo” was covered by insurance or not. A jury heard the dispute at London’s Guildhall in March 1783 and ruled in favor of the ship owners. The insurers appealed and the case came before Lord Chief Justice Mansfield. The latter rejected the verdict by pointing to new evidence which suggested the Captain and crew were responsible for the tragedy (Collingwood had died three days after his ship reached Jamaica).
Those responsible for the Zong massacre were never brought to justice, but the tragedy exposed the brutality of a trade that reduced African lives to mere items of commerce. Reports of the massacre increased momentum for the abolitionist movement, although it would take another half century before the United Kingdom passed the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.
Massacre at Sea
J.M.W. Turner was an outstanding marine painter and many of his canvasses depict storms at sea in which ships are torn apart and sailors struggle to survive. His unfinished “A Disaster at Sea” (c. 1835) was based on a real incident, the loss of the Amphitrite in September 1833.
The ship had sailed from Woolwich, London, bound for New South Wales. On board were over one hundred female convicts and twelve children. Gale-force winds drove the ship on to a sandbank off Boulogne, but the captain refused all rescue offers. The ship broke up and only three people survived. What political system could justify such cruel treatment of women and children?
Soon after this attempt, the painter would turn his anger on one of the deep and continuing injustices of his age. In 1840 Turner first exhibited “The Slave Ship” (originally titled “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying”) at London’s Royal Academy. It depicts a ship at the mercy of a tumultuous sea, leaving scattered human forms drowning in its wake.
The canvas was inspired by the tale of the Zong massacre in Thomas Clarkson’s The History and Abolition of the Slave Trade, the second edition of which had been published in 1839. The 1840 exhibition of the painting coincided with various international abolitionist campaigns (that same year, two anti-slavery conventions took place in London). A public display of this horrific event was intended to evoke a strong response to the barbaric slave trade. A powerful protest, Turner’s painting functioned as a call to political action.
To present-day viewers Turner’s manner of applying Edmund Burke’s concept that connects the Romantic “Sublime” with awe and terror when facing the forces of nature may be over-elaborate, but his contemporaries felt the full impact of this intensely dramatic approach. Abolitionists had found a formidable ally.
Migrant Trade
As the slave trade declined, Liverpool became engaged in another form of people trafficking by which greedy ship owners packed as many migrants as possible in the limited space on board to make spectacular profits. The city opened up the route across the Atlantic for countless European emigrants. It was – in all but name – a new slave trade.
When the influx of Irish migrants hit Liverpool with the start of the potato famine in 1845, an estimated 1.5 million desperate people crossed the Irish Sea heading for the city, three quarters of which then boarded ships to New York, Philadelphia or elsewhere.
Early migrant vessels were nicknamed “coffin ships” because of the horrific conditions on board and the number of people who did not survive the crossings. In 1847, 1,879 immigrants died on the voyage to New York, forcing governments to (reluctantly) impose regulations that would limit fatalities and improve the conditions of travel.
Whilst living in New York in 1818, British merchant Jeremiah Thompson had pioneered the concept of the sailing packet which was guaranteed to depart on schedule rather than (the traditional) waiting until its hold was full. Offering a time table, his Black Ball Line revolutionized the transatlantic trade. British and American merchants joined forces to take full advantage of the migration boom. The Liverpool firm of Caleb Grimshaw & Company, specialists in migration traffic, teamed up as agents for Thompson in 1842 to take charge of the Liverpool to New York route.
Sailing under the “New Line” flag, they secured passengers and freight for the Thompson packets (and many others). By 1845 the company was advertising a dozen or more ships at a time and dispatching them every five to seven days. Having changed the name to “Black Star,” the firm sent out more American migrant ships under their flag than any of its rivals.
Caleb Grimshaw
One of the vessels operated by Grimshaw was the wooden packet ship Caleb Grimshaw (named after the company’s late founder). Built at William Henry Webb’s shipyard in New York and launched in early 1848, she sailed from Liverpool’s Waterloo Dock to New York under command of Captain William Hoxie with a crew of thirty men, carrying a maximum of 427 migrants. Samuel Walters, Liverpool’s leading marine artist at the time, painted a portrait of the full-rigged ship in 1848.
The ship completed a total of five trips before disaster struck on her sixth crossing in November 1849 with 425 migrants aboard. A fire created panic and chaos. A lack of leadership drove some passengers to take matters into their own hands, lowering one of the ship’s boats which crashed into the water. Twelve people were swept away and drowned. Another boat was lowered by the crew, equipped with supplies of food and water for a select number of passengers.
The next morning, with the blaze raging, a boat was reserved for the captain’s wife and daughter who were joined by some of the first-class cabin travelers. Later that day Hoxie himself abandoned ship. The unfortunate migrants in steerage were left behind to fend for themselves, building survival rafts with remaining members of the crew on board.
Help arrived on the fourth day when the trading barque Sarah, sailing from London to Halifax, drew alongside. Her master David Cooke first rescued the passengers on the boats and rafts, leaving more than 250 passengers on board clinging to the burning wreckage. It took a total of ten days to save the last of the survivors and deliver them safely to the port of Flores in the Azores. When the Caleb Grimshaw finally sank, the lives of ninety migrants had been lost.
When news of the rescue spread in New York, Captain Cooke was granted the Freedom of the City and he and his crew shared a reward for their bravery. Although the tragedy caused angry exchanges in the British press, Captain Hoxie escaped official censure for leaving his ship prematurely. Questions were raised in Parliament as to the cause of the fire, but no one was held responsible or further action taken.
Art & Calamity
The pictorial representation of catastrophe in the centuries before the invention of photography took the shape of a visual commemoration of events with a narrative content. The 1666 Fire of London, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake or the 1794 eruption of Vesuvius were all treated in this manner.
More generally, disaster was treated as an allegory, demonstrating man’s insignificance when faced with the terrors of nature. Tiny painted figures face a panorama of atmospheric effects behind which hides the hand of a wrathful God. The might of a turbulent sea was there to remind us of our frailty and impermanence. This is the realm of mythological or Biblical retribution, the seascape of Rembrandt’s “Storm on the Sea of Galilee” (1633). Even the loss of the Titanic was interpreted by some moralists as divine “punishment” for man’s hubris.
Over time artists have paid ample attention to violent phenomena such as armed conflict and warfare. In the seventeenth century grand battles at sea were a favorite theme of marine painters. It was not the suffering of sailors, but the grandiose spectacle of warships in combat that made such paintings popular.
Calamity – and more specifically: calamity at sea is a much rarer theme in art history. There are few painted reminders of disasters in which overloaded migrant ships ran by unscrupulous owners went down with the tragic loss of many lives. Turner’s brush had highlighted the viciousness of the slave trade, but the urgent need to artistically record the maltreatment of migrants was obscured.
Ford Madox Brown’s “The Last of England” depicts a couple of emigrants sailing away from the country. Created in 1855, the artist painted the scene in his Hampstead garden; he himself and his wife posed as “suffering” migrants. Since Turner, public taste had changed. Pain and anguish were covered with a sugar coating of sentimentality; the destructive powers of the elements tamed for domestic use; the troublesome subject of migration was sanitized. Brown’s image has persistently been named one of the nation’s favorite paintings.
The rather pathetic nature of this painting becomes clear when put in the context of real events. On October 1853 the migrant ship R.M.S. Tayleur was launched on the River Mersey. Designed by William Rennie of Liverpool, the vessel was built within six months and chartered by the White Line. She left Liverpool in January 1854 on her maiden voyage with 652 passengers and crew on board. The ship’s master was young and inexperienced; the crew consisted of ill-trained seamen some of whom did neither speak nor understand English.
In poor weather conditions, the ship drifted off course and ran aground on the east coast of Lambay Island, close to Dublin Bay, and sank. An inquest blamed its owners, accusing them of neglect for allowing the ship to depart with faulty equipment (compasses). The number of people who lost their lives in the disaster varies from three to four hundred, depending on source. There were over one hundred women on board. Three survived.
HARA REISER, GLORIA HERMAN, VICKI FEINMEL ALL GOT IT RIGHT
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
NEW YORK ALMANACK
Illustrations, from above: diagram (1787) of the Liverpool-launched slave ship Brookes; the vessel is known to have carried 609 slaves at one time; 1782 woodcut of the Zong massacre; The Slave Ship, 1840 by J.M.W. Turner (Tate Gallery, London); The Caleb Grimshaw, 1848 by Samuel Waters; Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1633) by Rembrandt; The Last of England, 1855 by Ford Madox Brown (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery).
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
When you walk through the front doors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you enter a Neoclassical lobby that’s an architectural treasure in its own right—with dramatic archways, a marble floor, and a ceiling that seems to soar to the heavens.
But amid the coolness of the stone and marble, there’s a feature of the museum’s “Great Hall” that adds an aura of warmth and life: the giant urns that contain beautiful oversize fresh flower arrangements.
These lovely blooms change weekly; they tend to reflect the seasons. And just like every work of art displayed at the Met, there’s a story behind them.
The flowers were the idea of philanthropist Lila Acheson Wallace. In the late 1960s, she funded an endowment that would allow Met administrators to purchase and display weekly “starburst” flower arrangements throughout the lobby.
“An ephemeral addition to an otherwise timeless space, the florals change every Tuesday thanks to the generosity of a single donor, Lila Acheson Wallace, whose endowment in 1967 funded fresh flowers in perpetuity,” reported the New York Times in 2016.
Wallace, who with her husband founded Readers’ Digest in 1922, was a major benefactor of the Met. Museum-goers may recognize her name above the entrance to the Lila Acheson Wallace wing, which opened in 1987 to exhibit modern art.
Though she passed away in 1984, her endowment continues to grace the Great Hall and bring a sense of the present to a building famed for its antiquities.
For some years in the 1980’s I worked for a travel agency doing corporate business trips for employees of Reader’s Digest.
Reader’s Digest, based in Pleasantville, NY was a large worldwide privately owned business.
Lilia and DeWitt Wallace, aside from owning the publishing business were art collectors. Their headquarters was famous for the impressionist art on the walls of all the offices. From the staff I learned that the environment was lovely and lots of amenities that other 1980’s offices did not offer.
Some of my time at the agency, we booked trips for staff to Paris. Mrs. Wallace was on of the donors (mostly American) to fund the restoration of Giverny, Monet’s home outside Paris.
I did visit Giverny shortly after it opened and a plaque to the American’s generosity was on the wall.
In the late 1990’s and corporate restructuring the art collection was sold and only memories remain of the long closed campus.
Every time I visit the Met, I smile at the flower arrangements and the plaque acknowledging Lila Wallace.
CAN STREET BRIDGE ARON EISENPREISS AND ANDY SPARBERG GOT IT RIGHT!
One of the more ornate features of the West Side Elevated Highway was the bridge constructed over Canal Street and opened to the public in February 1939. In November 1982, the bridge was ripped down and sold for scrap. I’m not sure of the exact date of the photography above (courtesy the Library of Congress) but it’s clearly after the entire elevated highway was closed. Notice the weeds growing from the highway partition!
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
EPHEMERAL NEW YORK
JUDITH BERDY
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
What the figures on the doors of a Third Avenue Gap store tell us about the building
The front doors caught my eye first. Heavy and bronze, these two doors at the entrance of the Gap store at Third Avenue and 85th Street feature intricate carvings and curious allegorical figures reminiscent of ancient Greece.
On one door, a woman balances a locomotive engine in her left hand and grips a caduceus in the right. Behind her is a sailing ship, and beside her head are the words “commerce and industry.”
The man on the opposite door holds a staff with a beehive at the top. In his other hand is a key, and at his feet a cornucopia. “Finance and savings” is inscribed at his shoulder.
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Classical figures like these are pretty much the last thing you’d expect to find as you walk into the Gap. But the same set of doors also exist on the 85th Street side of the building, and the allegorical images offer a solid clue about what this unusually dignified building in the heart of Yorkville was built for.
The building was once the home of Yorkville Bank—an Italian Renaissance Revival structure built to serve this growing middle- and working-class immigrant neighborhood in 1905, according to a 2012 Landmarks Preservation Commission report.
The cast-bronze doors, fabricated by John Polachek Bronze & Iron Company of Long Island City, arrived after a renovation in the 1920s.
Four stories of limestone, brick, terra cotta, and granite, the building has the imposing, fortress-like look of a typical bank building from turn of the century New York City—when savings bank failures weren’t uncommon and financial institutions wanted to instill a sense of trust and strength to entice potential customers.
The allegorical figures are part of this strength and trust. The train the woman holds is a symbol of industry; the caduceus suggests commerce, according to the LPC report. The key in the man’s hands represents prudence, and the cornucopia is a sign of plenty.
Four stories of limestone, brick, terra cotta, and granite, the building has the imposing, fortress-like look of a typical bank building from turn of the century New York City—when savings bank failures weren’t uncommon and financial institutions wanted to instill a sense of trust and strength to entice potential customers.
The allegorical figures are part of this strength and trust. The train the woman holds is a symbol of industry; the caduceus suggests commerce, according to the LPC report. The key in the man’s hands represents prudence, and the cornucopia is a sign of plenty.
Thankfully the Gap kept the doors, as well as the charming “YB” (Yorkville Bank, of course!) inscription above them.
Aerial view of City Hall (left foreground) in Lower Manhattan. Domed building to the right is the New York World newspaper office. I’m not 100% sure, but I am guessing that the photo is taken from the top of 15 Park Row, a building completed in 1899 that was then the tallest in the world at 391 feet (31 stories). It originally was an office building; today it still stands, repurposed as an apartment building. More info from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Row_Building FROM ED LITCHER: pre-1900 aerial view of New York City Hall Park and the surrounding buildings, including City Hall, the New York County (Tweed) Courthouse behind City Hall and to the right, the buildings of Park (Newspaper) Row, the World (the copper domed building) the Tribune and the New York Times.
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
WE ARE SENDING THIS ISSUE OUT EARLY, SO YOU CAN SUBMIT THE SURVEY AND TAKE A WALK IN BLACKWELL PARK AND SEE THE CONDITIONS. BELOW ARE 10 YEAR OLD IMAGES OF PARK THAT HAVE NEVER BEEN UPDATED.
HAPPY LUNAR NEW YEAR AND WELCOME THE YEAR OF THE RABBIT ED LITCHER AND LAURA HUSSEY 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
ROOSEVELT ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY
JUDITH BERDY
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Courtesy Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Henry Lyman Saÿen worked as an artist and scientist throughout his career. He acquired several patents for his inventions, which included a new type of X‑ray tube and a steel billiard ball. He traveled to Paris in 1906 to produce illustrations for a New York department store and joined Henri Matisse’s class. Saÿen was one of the first painters to introduce modern art into the conservative culture of Philadelphia, and his large vibrant images of landscapes and still lifes shocked many people. An assistant at the department store even told the artist that “if that is the way you paint you will never put shoes on your child’s feet.” World War I forced Saÿen to return to Philadelphia, where he spent his weekends at his friend Carl Newman’s summer home, painting the Huntington Valley landscape. (Breeskin, H. Lyman Saÿen, 1970)
H. Lyman Saÿen, Self-Portrait, 1910-1913, encaustic on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of H. Lyman Sayen to his nation, 1967.6.17
H. Lyman Saÿen, Zinnias, 1909-1912, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of H. Lyman Sayen to his nation, 1967.6.23
H. Lyman Saÿen, The Thundershower (study for painting), ca. 1916, tempera, pencil and printed paper on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of H. Lyman Sayen to his nation, 1968.19.6
H. Lyman Saÿen, Valley Falls I, 1915, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of H. Lyman Sayen to his nation, 1968.19.1
H. Lyman Saÿen, Rooftops, Paris, 1909-1912, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of H. Lyman Sayen to his nation, 1967.6.15
H. Lyman Saÿen, Notre Dame, ca. 1907, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Colonel Harrison K. Sayen, 1967.137
H. Lyman Saÿen, Child in Rocker, ca. 1916, opaque watercolor on paper mounted on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of H. Lyman Sayen to his nation, 1967.6.3
H. Lyman Saÿen, Portrait of a Girl, 1909-1914, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of H. Lyman Sayen to his nation, 1967.6.13
H. Lyman Saÿen, Daughter in a Rocker, 1917-1918, tempera and collage on wood, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of H. Lyman Sayen to his nation, 1967.6.4
THE FORMER STEINWAY HALL THAT HAS BEEN INCORPORATED INTO NEW BUILDING AT 111 WEST 57 STREET. JAY JACOBSON, THOM HEYER,, ALEXIS VILLAFANE, GLORIA HERMAN GOT IT RIGHT. FROM ED LITCHER:
111 West 57th Street, also known as Steinway Tower, is a supertall residential skyscraper in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. Developed by JDS Development Group and Property Markets Group, it is situated along Billionaires’ Row on the northside of 57th Street near Sixth Avenue. The main portion of the building is an 84-story, 1,428-foot (435-meter) tower designed by SHoP Architects and completed in 2021. Preserved at the base is the 16-story Steinway Building (also Steinway Hall), a former Steinway & Sons store designed by Warren and Wetmore and completed in 1925, which originally carried the address 111 West 57th Street.
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.
Manhattan’s 57th Street, the world’s “most expensive” street, was laid out and opened in 1857 as the city of New York expanded northward.With the Hudson and East Rivers on either end, the area was until then largely uninhabited and clustered with small factories and workshops. As late as the 1860s, the area east of Central Park was a shantytown with up to 5,000 squatters.Half a century later it was Manhattan’s cultural heart and an intercontinental meeting place of artists, collectors and dealers.
57th StreetIn 1823, society doyenne Mary Mason Jones inherited the wasteland of what is today Fifth Avenue & 57th Street from her father, the President of Chemical Bank. In 1868 she commissioned architect Robert Mook to build her a spectacular mansion in the mode of a French chateau along with a row of similar marble dwellings (the project was completed in 1871). The block of five between 57th & 58th Street was treated as a single unit. After Jones moved into her corner mansion, she rented the remaining four to others in her social circle.Her initiative had an immediate impact. In the mid-1870s, wealthy New Yorkers began to put up “choice” family residences in a mixture of styles, from brownstone mansions to French chateaux and Gothic palaces. These grandiose erections were interspersed with structures dedicated to the arts.During the 1890s and early-twentieth century an artistic hub developed around the two blocks of West 57th Street from Sixth Avenue to Broadway. Predating the opening of Carnegie Hall in 1891, the thirty-eight Osborne Apartments at 205 West 57th Street were built to provide soundproof residences for musicians. During the mid-1920s, the piano showrooms of Chickering Hall and Steinway Hall were developed there. The composer Bela Bartok spent the last year of his life at 309 West 57th.On the south side of the street studio apartments were constructed that offered artists the advantage of light from the north, including the Rembrandt Studios at 152, Sherwood Studios at 58 (both demolished), and Rodin Studios at 200 West 57th Street. Childe Hassam worked in a double-height studio at 130 West 57th. The same street also served as headquarters of organizations such as the American Fine Arts Society, the Art Students League, and the Architectural League of New York.
Durand-Ruel Gallery
In 1839 Jean-Marie-Fortuné Durand and Marie-Ferdinande Ruel set up an art shop at 1 Rue de la Paix in Paris, naming it the Galerie Durand-Ruel. In 1865, their son Paul Durand took over the family business and moved the gallery to 16 Rue Lafitte with an additional branch at 111 Rue Le Peletier.During the 1860s and early 1870s he represented the landscape painters of the Barbizon School. He then became intrigued by a group of young Impressionist painters who, at the time, were lambasted by the critics and ridiculed in the press. When he filled three rooms of his Le Pelletier gallery with paintings for the second impressionist show in 1876, French critics were viciously hostile.Durand’s dealings with American collectors began during the 1860s, but were initially kept to short-term ventures such as exhibitions in Boston and Philadelphia. Struggling to make a living in Paris, he packed up some three hundred works in forty-three crates and sailed to America. In April 1886, the American Art Association (AAA) used its premises at 6 East 23rd Street to present a major exhibition of French Impressionism. The show consisted of 289 paintings that were assembled from Durand-Ruel’s stock.The favorable reception of the exhibition motivated him to open permanent quarters at Fifth Avenue & 42nd Street. It proved to be the cornerstone to his phenomenal success. Durand’s name became interlocked with the migratory history of Impression. He turned Manhattan into an Impressionist haven.Durand-Ruel & Sons was the official name of his venture which by 1893 included the participation of his sons Joseph, Charles and Georges. Having moved the firm’s location to 12 East 57th Street in 1912, the pioneering gallery supported a new breed of American art lovers in their foundation of some important private collections which, in turn, would form the basis of major museum holdings.Motivated by the success of Durand-Ruel, other galleries soon followed suit and relocated to “arty” 57th Street. It was just a matter time before additional exhibition spaces and auction houses opened up in the immediate vicinity. One of the newcomers was a young man named F. Valentine Dudensing.
Valentine & Foujita
Foujita exhibition the Valentine Dudensing GalleryIn 1926 the Dudensing name was well known in New York. Born in 1892, Valentine was the third generation of his family to be engaged in the art business. His grandfather Richard had emigrated from Germany in 1853 and worked as an engraver and printer.
In 1904 his father Frank opened the Dudensing Galleries at 45 West 44th Street, specializing in Barbizon School paintings and the work of young American artists. Valentine joined him after graduation in 1913. It was, from a dealer’s point of view, an exciting time. In the wake of the Armory Show there was a sudden interest in and enthusiasm for modern (European) art.
During a trip to Paris in the early 1920s, Dudensing became acquainted with Pierre Matisse, the painter’s younger son. Together, they conceived the project of a gallery managed by Dudensing in New York, while Matisse organized and curated art from Paris.
The F. Valentine Dudensing Gallery opened on February 8th, 1926, at 43 East 57th Street with an exhibition of work by the Franco-Japanese painter Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita. It was the artist’s first American showing. While his work was acclaimed in Parisian circles (he was hailed as the “Japanese Ingres”), his work was virtually unknown in New York.The artist’s obsession with the female nude was highlighted with Déese de la neige (1924), a painting over six feet in length. Dudensing sold the painting of this lady with “porcelain” skin to Carl Weeks, a collector from Des Moines, Iowa, and owner of the highly profitable Armand cosmetics company who, at the time, was in the process of building Salisbury House, a grand manor that he planned to fill with his extensive art collection (the painting was donated to the Fogg Art Museum in 1974 by the owner’s son).The New York gallery was instantly hailed as an important venue for contemporary art. The show’s success was in part due to the gallery’s ground-breaking décor of pale grey walls, bare floors and abundant natural light from south-facing windows. Valentine created a Continental model that would followed by other Manhattan galleries. In 1927 he changed its name to the Valentine Gallery to distinguish it from his father’s art firm.
Valentine & Picasso
The Dudensing-Matisse partnership was hugely successful and lasted until 1931 when Matisse decided to open his own gallery in the Fuller Building on 57th Street where, for about six decades and some three hundred exhibitions, he introduced to New York some of the latest European art. He also promoted the careers of emerging American talent.Valentine’s program alternated between shows of contemporary French art, arranged with Matisse’s help as an agent and shows of American artists organized by Dudensing. The gallery presented the first American solo exhibitions of many (now household) names, including Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, and others. In addition Dudensing arranged retrospectives of the work of Henri Matisse, Chaïm Soutine and Maurice Utrillo.Valentine and his wife Margaret [Bibi] van der Gros, an American artist who had studied in Paris, befriended Picasso during the late 1920s. In a letter of November 1928 he complained to Matisse that he had been unable to find buyers for Pablo’s work, but his fortunes would change rapidly. In early December that same year he sold a 1906 gouache Woman with Kerchief to the prominent New York attorney and collector T. Catesby Jones. The latter was one of a small group of Picasso collectors in the city who had purchased work from other sources, either in Paris or elsewhere.This sale seemed to have been the catalyst Valentine needed to begin handling and promoting the artist’s work. According to its sales records, the gallery sold six Picassos in 1929 and seven in 1930. This sudden interest motivated Dudensing to present the first Picasso exhibition at the Valentine, by then located at 69 East 57th Street.Making initial arrangements for the show, Matisse visited Picasso in April 1930 and reported that the artist was very keen on the project and promised to lend pictures. Abstractions by Picasso opened in early January 1931 with works dating from 1914 to 1930 and became one of the gallery’s most notable exhibitions. It gained Dudensing the reputation as a leading dealer and connoisseur of Picasso’s work.Just days after Abstractions show closed, he was alerted to the fact that Pablo’s masterpiece Family of Saltimbanque (1905) was offered for sale. The painting had been owned since 1915 by Hertha Koenig, a private collector in Munich, who had pledged it as collateral for a bank loan on which she defaulted. Dudensing immediately alerted Chester Dale and negotiated a deal on his behalf. The painting was shipped to America and put on view at New York’s Museum of French Art. Today it is part of the Chester Dale Collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Spanish Refugees
Throughout the 1930s Dudensing sold more works by Picasso than any other European artist and he did much to promote and establish the painter’s reputation in America. He included Picasso’s paintings and drawings in numerous group exhibitions over the years and mounted seven solo shows between 1931 and 1939.
Early in the Spanish Civil War, the country’s Republican government commissioned Picasso to paint a mural for the 1937 International Exposition in Paris. Living and working in the capital, Picasso read in horror of the April 1937 German carpet bombing of Guernica, a Basque town that had sided with the Republicans against Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces. The latter had authorized the attack as a means of intimidating his opponents in the region. More than a thousand residents were killed.
In 1939, Picasso placed the painting in the care of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and decreed that it would not return from exile until democracy was restored in Spain. In May that year the American Artists’ Congress, chaired by the industrialist and gallery owner Sidney Janis, helped organize an American tour of Guernica along with a set of related drawings in order to raise funds for refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War.
Although MoMA’s new Goodwin/Stone Building at 11 West 53rd Street had opened that same month with enormous publicity, Picasso did not want the painting to be shown there fearing that the commotion would deflect attention from the serious purpose of the occasion. Janis selected the Valentine Gallery as the painting’s venue not only because its main room could accommodate the large painting, but also in recognition of Dudensing’s personal relationship with the artist.
The gala opening on May 4, 1939, was attended by nearly one hundred guests, including the former premier of the Spanish Republic, Juan Negrín, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt; and many other dignitaries. Two thousand visitors paid the admission fee to see Guernica during the show’s four-week run in New York. It left Willem de Kooning in awe; Jackson Pollock visited the gallery on various occasions to closely study the painting; for Lee Krasner it was a deeply emotional experience.
The painting was put on display in the Stendhal Gallery Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Chicago Arts Club, before returning to New York for a Picasso retrospective at MoMA. By then war had begun in Europe and dealers were feeling its effects. New York’s art world was changing. An influx of dealers fleeing the Nazis stiffened competition in the modern art market. One recent arrival from Berlin was Curt Valentin who opened the Buchholz Gallery at 32 East 57th Street in 1938 (in 1951 renamed as the Curt Valentin Gallery). Although Jewish, the latter had gained permission from the Nazi authorities to sell German art in America to help fund Hitler’s war efforts. The similarity between names caused confusion (which continues to this today).
In the spring of 1947, without a murmur to the press, the doors to the Valentine Gallery were left shut as the owner and his wife had quietly moved to France. Once Manhattan’s most influential dealer had departed, his name was soon forgotten. The man who had made Pablo Picasso a widely admired painter throughout the United States, lived his final years in obscurity tending to his cattle and vineyards.
Spain’s transition to democracy led to the approval of the 1978 Constitution. In 1981, eight years after Picasso’s death and an exile of forty-two years, Guernica arrived in Madrid for the very first time.
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
NEW YORK ALMANACK
Illustrations, from above: Mary Mason Jones’ marble mansion in 1917/8 (demolished in 1929); portrait of Paul Durand-Ruel, c. 1910 by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (The National Gallery, London); Foujita exhibition the Valentine Dudensing Gallery, East 57th Street, February 1926; Tsuguharu Foujita, Deésse de la neige, 1924 (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA); Picasso exhibition at the Valentine Gallery, November 1937; and Guernica, 1937 by Pablo Picasso (Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid).
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
