Bellevue Hospital is considered the oldest public hospital in the United States. Although its historical beginnings date back to Dutch settlement in the 1600s, the institution was officially founded in 1736 by the British on the second floor of a poorhouse, four decades before the outbreak of the American Revolution.
In spite of its contribution to the development of medical care in the metropolis, the hospital’s name occupies a dim place in New York City’s collective consciousness. In the later nineteenth century, the institution struck fear and disquiet in the hearts of New Yorkers. A grim sight on 1st Avenue and 26th Street, Bellevue was synonymous with degradation and death.
When a psychiatric unit was added to the hospital in the 1930s, its dire reputation grew even darker. An eerie red brick structure surrounded by an iron spiked fence, it inspired nightmare tales and horror films.
Most of the hospital’s Manhattan history has been recorded, but a strong Scottish connection with its early development needs further emphasis.
Infamy & Innovation
At the time of New York City’s massive expansion, Bellevue Hospital was overrun with victims of epidemics, homeless people, alcoholics, abandoned children and patients ranging from the suicidal to the homicidal.
Overcrowded and understaffed, conditions were abysmal. Antiseptic practices were poor and filthy surgical theatres not fit for purpose. In 1876 it was reported that nearly half of all amputations proved fatal due to a poor and ill-equipped working environment.
When in 1879 Harpers New Monthly Magazine ran an article on New York hospitals, it described Bellevue as serving the poorest of the poor, the dregs of society and the semi-criminal. Its wards were “filled with wasted souls drifting through the agonies of disease toward unpitied and unremembered deaths.”
For all this infamy and maybe because of it, Bellevue was also a pioneering place. It played a vanguard role in the battle against major epidemics, such as tuberculosis, typhus and yellow fever. It was the first American hospital to run a maternity ward; it established a nursing school (1873) and ran a children’s clinic, apart from playing a leading role in the search for new and effective medicines.
During the Civil War, the United States Army sent many of its wounded back there for medical care. Surgeon Colonel Edward Barry Dalton, a veteran of the conflict, had himself witnessed the urgent need to send injured soldiers for professional treatment as speedily as possible.
He introduced what is believed to be the first functioning ambulance in the city of New York, a horse-drawn wagon with removable slatted beds in the back, replete with medical equipment, morphine and brandy.
Wall of the Unknown Dead
In 1866, New York’s first professional morgue opened on the grounds of Bellevue Hospital. The term morgue is Old French for face or visage. Over time the word was applied to the space where unclaimed dead bodies awaited identification.
During the later nineteenth century, the Paris morgue was located on the Quai du Marche-Neuf, just behind Notre Dame. Two-thirds of the corpses that entered the building were retrieved from the Seine, being suicides, drownings or murders.
The morgue’s assistants methodically noted down the particulars of each corpse. The naked bodies, often in a horrible state of decay, would be displayed for three days on twelve brass-lined stone slabs propped up in the morgue window for the public to view and possibly recognize. This showcase became a piece of entertainment in Paris. People of all ages would visit the famous windows of death.
As both an object of macabre fascination and a theme of the new literary vogue for sensational subjects, the Paris mortuary bewitched the Victorian imagination. Thomas Carlyle, Frances Trollope, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Charles Dickens, Walter Pater and many others left accounts of their visits.
When living in Paris in 1855/6, a trip to the morgue inspired Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “Apparent Failure,” a moralistic poem about suicide.
Bellevue on the East River followed the Parisian example, but its staff made an interesting addition.
In 1867, the hospital established a Photographic Department where Oscar Mason (ca. 1830 – 1921), a thirty-seven-year-old portrait photographer, took pictures of anonymous corpses and hung them up for family or friends to identify the body. Mason established what New Yorkers would label as the “Wall of the Unknown Dead.” He subsequently created early criminal mugshots modeled after the Wall.
The Bellevue psychiatric hospital was erected on hospital grounds in 1931, a few blocks to the north of the main hospital on 1st Avenue. This haunting structure was once home to Mark David Chapman, on the night he shot John Lennon. Charlie Parker, Allen Ginsberg, Eugene O’Neill, William Burroughs and Sylvia Plath all stayed here at one point, as did Norman Mailer after he stabbed his wife.
The population of people who used its mental health facilities peaked in 1955 at 90,000. For locals, Bellevue was the end of the road. It was Manhattan’s Bedlam. So how did it all start?
An Early American Illustrator
Alexander Anderson was born to Scottish immigrant parents on April 21, 1775, near Beekman Slip, Manhattan, two days after the first bloody battle in the American War for Independence had taken place at Lexington and Concord. Many Scottish-Americans supported the Revolution, be they statesmen, soldiers or citizens.
Two signers of the Declaration of Independence, John Witherspoon and James Wilson, were of Scottish descent and so was naval hero John Paul Jones.
Alexander’s father John Anderson was a “rebel” printer and publisher of a newspaper called The Constitutional Gazette which opposed James Rivington’s loyalist Royal Gazette. He was also responsible for printing New York’s first edition of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in February 1776. By far the most influential tract of the American Revolution, the pamphlet had first been published a month previously by Robert Bell in Philadelphia.
When the British took possession of Manhattan in August 1776, the family escaped to Greenwich, Connecticut, but John lost nearly all of his books and printing materials on the way. They returned home soon after the British had departed. John Anderson would later run an auction house from his shop at 77 Wall Street.
Young Alexander Anderson took an early interest in the skill of local engravers and silversmiths. At the age of twelve years he made his first attempts at engraving on copper. By 1794 he was employed by William Durell, bookseller at 19 Queen Street, to copy the illustrations of a popular little English work entitled The Looking-Glass for the Mind.
The original images were engraved on boxwood and produced by Thomas Bewick, the pioneer of wood-engraving. Anderson soon adopted and mastered the technique.
He established himself as an artist, producing engravings for books, periodicals and newspapers. He illustrated the earliest editions of Noah Webster’s best-selling Spelling Book and millions of school children were familiar with his monogram “A.A.” in the corners of woodcuts in educational books.
In 1804 he adapted Bewick’s A General History of Quadrupeds for the American market and created forty engravings for an edition of Shakespeare. He was celebrated as “America’s First Illustrator” and “The Father of American Wood Engraving.”
Young Anderson had taken special delight in making copies of anatomical figures from medical books. It would be a lifelong passion. In 1808 he executed on wood more than sixty illustrations for an American edition of The Anatomy and Physiology of the Human Body by the Scottish anatomist Charles Bell. Medicine played a crucial part in his life and there was a time that he appeared to pursue a double career.
Scotch-Irish Patriots
After his fourteenth birthday and in spite of his passion for art, Anderson was apprenticed to the physician Joseph Young. It was a decision made for him by his parents. The idea of medicine was motivated by Alexander’s early interest in copying anatomical figures from text books, but the selection of their son’s master was significant.
John and Sarah Anderson most likely wanted him to pursue a socially useful profession in the city of New York’s independent but chaotic early development, rather than chase an individualistic career in the arts. Their Scottish identity remained strong, but they were patriots too and there was certainly a political motivation behind this choice.
Joseph Young was born in 1735 in Little Britain, Orange County, into a family of Scotch-Irish immigrants. During the 1760s he settled in Albany where he practiced medicine. In 1776 he joined the Albany Sons of Liberty and was appointed surgeon to the Ninth Connecticut Regiment of the Continental Army.
In 1778, he joined the staff of the Albany hospital. Three years later, he was promoted to hospital physician surgeon and served to the end of the war. He then removed to New York where he continued to practice medicine until his death in 1814. In their own individual ways, John Anderson and Joseph Young had been committed to the same cause.
Alexander received his license at the age at twenty. In his first year of medical practice he continued his artistic work and engraved a series of anatomical drawings on wood. In 1798 he produced a full-length and elaborate human skeleton copied from a 1747 edition of engravings by the German-born Dutch anatomist Bernard Siegfried Albinus.
Yellow Fever
Founded in 1736, Bellevue was established by the British as an alms house. Located in the old common ground that is today City Hall Park, the second floor of the property provided six beds for the sick and insane. By 1795, it had expanded to accommodate nearly eight hundred urban paupers. That year, Anderson was appointed the institution’s first resident physician.
His immediate challenge was to deal with an outbreak of yellow fever in the city. As treatment options were limited, he witnessed many patients perish. The inability of medical staff to intervene deeply frustrated him. The burden of his task affected his mental well-being.
In his grim recollections of the epidemic, he admitted to a state of great depression. In a detailed list written in his hand, 238 yellow fever patients were admitted between August and October. One hundred and thirty-seven died.
When the epidemic ended, he sought an academic qualification to enhance his personal ability as a physician. In May 1796, at the age of twenty-one, he received the degree of Doctor of Medicine from the faculty of Columbia College. The subject of his inaugural dissertation (dedicated to Joseph Young) was “Chronic Mania.”
What motivated the young man to study this topic? Was he trying to deal with his own mental problems after the Bellevue experience?
With the city of New York’s burgeoning population and the alarming spread of contagious diseases, it became necessary to find a larger property to expand space for quarantine. In 1798 the commissioners purchased “Bel-Vue,” a parcel of land on Manhattan’s east side near Murray Hill, named for its fine view of the East River and the surrounding fields (the hospital was formally named Bellevue in 1824).
While New York Hospital on Broadway (opened in 1771) catered to high society, Bellevue became a refuge for the poor and destitute, mostly immigrants living in the slums of Lower Manhattan. Since its inception, Bellevue did not charge for treatment, acting as the hospital of last resort for the city’s most troubled inhabitants. It treated presidents and paupers alike.
When another, even more serious outbreak of yellow fever occurred in 1798 (more than 2,000 people died in the epidemic), Anderson returned to Bellevue as resident physician. He resigned a few weeks later after his three-month-old son, brother and father all died in the epidemic. His wife and mother passed soon afterwards.
These devastating losses would haunt him for the rest of his days. Emotionally drained and deeply depressed, he gave up his career as a physician and decided to devote his life to creative endeavors.
Having enjoyed a productive career as an engraver, Anderson died in January 1870. That same year the US Census Bureau recorded New York’s population at a milestone number of 942,292 citizens, affirming its status as the nation’s most populous city.
Bellevue’s ambulances were busier than ever that year, attending to 1401 emergency calls routed through the police. Anderson had been one of the pioneers who had been prepared to risk to own lives during severe epidemics in order to shield fellow New Yorkers from suffering.
CREDITS
JAN HARSKAMP NEW YORK ALMANACK
Illustrations, from above: New York Alms House, later Bellevue Hospital (Library of Congress); Stanley Fox, “A Scene in the New York Morgue: Identification of the Unknown Dead,” wood engraving (Harper’s Weekly, July 7, 1866); an engraved self-portrait of Alexander Anderson at eighty-one; Anderson’s list of yellow fever patients, 1795 (New-York Historical Society); and the Bellevue Hospital Ambulance.
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.
Image courtesy of the NYC Economic Development Corporation
A decade-old plan to fill in the gap in the East River greenway near the United Nations is finally moving forward. The city’s Economic Development Corporation last week issued a request for proposals (RFP) from contractors to supervise the construction of the proposed esplanade, which will span less than a mile between East 41st and East 53rd Streets, as first reported by Gothamist. The project is the city’s latest effort to reach its goal of creating a 32-mile cycling and pedestrian path along Manhattan’s waterfront.
Image courtesy of the NYC Economic Development Corporation
East Midtown Greenway opened in December 2023. Photo courtesy of Skanska
“The release of this RFP is another critical milestone towards completing the remaining gaps in the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway,” Adrien Lesser, vice president of media relations and public affairs at NYCEDC, told 6sqft in a statement. “Following last year’s opening of the East Midtown Greenway segment and Andrew Haswell Green Park, today’s RFP represents another major step forward by the Adams administration and NYCEDC to finish the long-envisioned Manhattan Waterfront Greenway.”
“These remarkable capital projects will not only improve the quality of life for New Yorkers but expand opportunities to commute by bike or foot while enjoying spectacular views of the East River. ”
To fill the gap, the esplanade will be constructed atop pillars spanning the waterway. Preliminary contract documents indicate that the expansion will open by the end of 2028 and cost roughly $120 million, according to Gothamist.
In April 2017, former Mayor Bill de Blasio announced it would cost $100 million to close the gap.
Last December, the city opened another section of the greenway, between East 53rd and East 60th Streets. The $197.6 million expansion delivered three acres of public open space, a new pedestrian walkway, a pedestrian bridge, landscaping, and a separate bike lane.
However, the greenway still reaches a dead-end before travelers reach the U.N., forcing bikers and pedestrians to travel along First and Second Avenues instead.
Plans to fill the gap in the greenway date back to former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration.
Other transportation infrastructure improvements will arrive on the East Side in the coming weeks. As reported by Streetsblog, city officials plan to install a protected bike lane along the First Avenue tunnel between East 40th and 49th Streets before the U.N. General Assembly begins on September 10.
Filling in the gaps in the East River greenway builds upon Mayor Eric Adams’ effort to expand the city’s greenway network by 40 miles and bring the total length of greenway corridors to 60 miles.
Additional greenway projects underway include the seven-mile continuous Harlem River Greenway in the Bronx. The new corridor aims to reconnect Bronxites to the Harlem River waterfront, which has been largely inaccessible since the construction of the Major Deegan Expressway in the 1930s.
The city has also identified future projects in the outer boroughs, including Queens’ northern waterfront, southern Queens from Spring Creek Park to the Jamaica Bay shoreline, Staten Island’s waterfront, the South Bronx, and an 11-mile stretch from Coney Island to Highland Park.
CREDITS
6SQFT
PHOTO OF THE DAY
WE REPORTED TO RIOC THE DETERIORATION OF THE BACK PORCH STEPS ON SUNDAY. TODAY, WE SAW THE AREA ROPED OFF. JUST WONDERING WHY THE WOOD IS DETERIORATING LESS THAN 4 YEARS FROM THE BUILDING BEING REBUILT?
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.
The Montauk Club House is an astounding Venetian Gothic building completed in 1891—when Brooklyn was a separate city and glorious townhouses made Park Slope one of the most architectural rich neighborhoods in New York.
While taking in the beautiful interior of the building, my eyes landed on a very utilitarian old-school mailbox tucked away above a radiator near the entrance.
On it was a message, asking users to remember to use “zone numbers” before they drop their letters in the box.
PERCHED ON A POLE AND WAS WELL USED
Are ZIP codes a later version of zone numbers? According to the Library of Congress (LOC), ZIP codes were introduced nationally in 1963 to make sorting mail less time consuming for postal workers and therefore speed delivery.
But the LOC also explains that assigning towns and cities a unique number wasn’t a new idea; in 1943 the United States Post Office introduced zones numbers to many cities, and as the number of zoned cities increased over the next two decades, a new system had to be established.
So it seems the mailbox is carrying two separate messages: one from the early 1960s reminding people to use ZIP codes, the other possibly from as early as the 1940s asking users to add the zone number to the address.
ZIP codes have been standard in my lifetime, but apparently the switch from no code at all or a two-digit code was a big deal to people at the time. The LOC stated that it took until the end of the 1960s for the five-digit code to become widely used.
Here’s an example of a Greenwich Village antiques shop that had store signage still noting their two-digit postal code. (Sadly, the store is gone, but I appreciated the fact that they kept the code in their address, a vestige of another era.)
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.
Since 1952, COLER Nursing and Rehabilitation Center has faithfully catered to the needs of our city’s residents. While no longer an acute care hospital, COLER now excels in providing specialized services in rehabilitation, long-term care, and comprehensive memory care units.
COLER’s physical structure didn’t receive substantial attention until Hurricane Sandy in 2011 severely damaged its infrastructure. In the subsequent years, a significant transformation occurred with the relocation of all services, including electrical and phone systems, from the basement to the 2nd and higher floors.
In recent years, Executive Director Stephen Cattullo has led the way in rejuvenating the physical environment. His successful collaborations with staff and resident groups have brought about vast improvements, enhancing the living conditions for both residents and staff.
The staff dining hall, with its fresh makeover, opened its doors this very week. The aim was to create an environment that feels warm and inviting, enhancing the pleasure of your meal breaks. This reenergized space is ready to be your go-to place for unwinding and refueling during meal times.
Jovemay Santos, Therese Mumfakh and Judith Berdy joined in the opening celebration.
YARD SALE CONTINUES ON MAIN STREET.
After a successful sale at COLER, THE Auxiliary members brought housewares, jewelry and other goodies to the Saturday Flea Market.
Katy, Judy, Marie Marie and Moriko at the Saturday Flea Market
Mary Coleman, the Island’s most generous volunteer was offering her advise on merchandising. Thanks Mary!
Never too early to start holiday shopping!
Maria and friend loved the framed bathtub picture!!!
FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT VOLUNTEERING AT COLER, JOINING THE HOSPITAL AUXILIARY OR THE COMMUNITY ADVISORY BOARDS CONTACT: VERNA FITZPATRICK (COMMUNITY ADVISORY BOARD) VERNA10044@YAHOO.COM JUDITH BERDY (AUXILIARY) JBIRD134@AOL.COM JOVEMAY SANTOS (VOLUNTEERING) JOVEMAY.SANTOS@NYCHHC.ORG
CREDITS
NYC Health+Hospitals JUDITH BERDY
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
PHOTOS OF THE DAY
REMEMBERING SPEEDY
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Most people don’t properly understand the built environment of their childhood until they grow up, and even then maybe not until they’ve lived somewhere else and come home. Growing up in Queens, I didn’t question some of the styles around me that are not unique to the borough but are definitely concentrated there. One of my favorites, now, is the fake Tudor half-timber apartment house.
pic
In terms of architectural history, it’s gibberish. No Tudor building every looked like this, and the “timbers” on the facade are veneer a couple of inches thick, nailed to a brick wall built like every other apartment house constructed under the Multiple Dwelling Law. In other words, the appearance pretends to be historical but is not, and the appearance implies a form of construction that it is not.
But…
Many of the people who moved to these apartments – Harding Court, above, was constructed in 1923 – were moving from Old Law tenements, which often had fancy front facades but were terrible inside. The newer buildings had much better apartments but the architects wanted to keep them from being plain brick boxes, and so added ornament to the facades. For whatever reason, possibly because it was a style that had not been used in the older tenements, fake-Tudor was common in Queens in the 1920s and 30s. I’ve know plenty of people born between 1920 and 1940 for whom these buildings looked classier than other styles.
The timber veneer and projecting elements are hard to maintain, and this particular building has been stripped of much of the ornament. I think that’s simultaneously more honest, less ridiculous, and sadder. Exuberant gibberish is not so bad as an architectural statement.
PHOTOS OF THE DAY
MORE PAINTINGS BY YVONNE SMITH NOW ON VIEW IN THE RIVERCROSS DISPLAY WINDOW
CREDITS
OLD STRUCTURES ENGINEERING DON FRIEDMAN
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.
In the history of public disturbances, food riots were a recurring form of collective action. Initially, most “bread riots” were non-violent demonstrations restricted to the marketplace as the production and supply of food were local matters. Participants argued with their bakers trying to force them to sell their products at a “just” price.
Harvest failures happened regularly and shortages were common, but sudden price rises that deprived people of basic provisions were blamed on authorities for failing to protect their constituents. A “moral economy” dictated that markets should be run for the benefit of people. To exploit customers was similar to looting. Profiteering by hiking prices in a period of dearth (greedflation) was considered a criminal act.
During World War I, hunger hit civilian populations worldwide as agriculture and food distribution were disrupted. Riots took place in Vienna, Amsterdam Petrograd, Melbourne, Tokyo and elsewhere.
The crisis also hit Rhode Island. To the anger of its large Italian population, pasta prices increased by sixty percent. The “Macaroni Riots” (also known as The Federal Hill Riots of 1914) started in August in Providence when raucous residents attacked the premises of wholesale trader Frank Ventrone, a fellow Italian immigrant.
From the outset, food disturbances wherever they took place have had one feature in common: women stood in the forefront of agitation.
Marching Women
Paris had set a precedent. For centuries, bread was a staple of French diet and a symbol of national pride. Feeding the fast growing capital became a challenge. The city’s insatiable demand for foodstuffs led to the exploitation and exhaustion of the agricultural hinterland. A series of poor harvests intensified food-insecurity. High bread prices and supply shortages in Paris during the 1770s sparked outrage.
In late April/May 1775, hunger set off an explosion of popular anger in the towns and villages of the Paris Basin. Over three hundred incidents of theft and violence were recorded. The uproar became known as the “Flour War.”
The tension simmered in subsequent years and boiled over again on the morning of October 5, 1789, when groups of women protested against soaring bread prices. They were joined by large numbers of hungry and disgruntled other protesters. Together they marched towards the Palace of Versailles.
The unrest quickly became intertwined with the activities of revolutionaries seeking political and constitutional reforms. Rioters ransacked the city armory for weapons, before the crowd besieged the palace. The Women’s March on Versailles was an early and significant event leading up to the French Revolution as armed Parisian women rallied together to demand the intervention of King Louis XVI himself.
This statement of female independence disrupted social conventions that confined women to their “duties” at home, whilst caring for husband (the “breadwinner”) and children. This realization sent shock-waves through the political establishment, fanning fears that food riots might ignite demands for social change. The threat of a hungry “mob” was to be met with force.
Flour Riot
Demands for fair prices tended to include accusations of hoarding and price-gouging by traders. Political authorities were attacked for being in cahoots with business elites. More often than not, food riots were fueled by the fury about economic mismanagement and political corruption. What may have started as a spontaneous protest would soon be marshaled by members of community groups or trade unions and others. That was the case in the city of New York’s Flour Riot of 1837.
The disastrous Great Fire in 1835 was followed by a period of economic hardship and food shortages. The city was starving. On February 13, 1837, a meeting was called to protest against the price of flour and grain which speculators had driven up to twice their normal price. A crowd of 6,000 people was stirred up by the eloquence of political agitators.
Rumors were circulating. Word was spreading that the firm of Eli Hart & Co., a large brick building in Lower Manhattan owned by a Troy firm, was hoarding barrels of flour in order to inflate its price. Rioters marched up to its premises between Dey Street and Cortlandt Street. They ransacked the store by dumping 500 barrels of flour and 1,000 bushels of wheat outside its doors. Standing knee-deep in spilled flour and wheat, women collected the priceless spoils from the pavement.
The rioters then took down a second flour warehouse, that of S.H. Herrick & Co at nearby Coenties Slip, before being brutally dispersed by members of the New York State Militia. The mayhem was quelled by blunt muscle power. The use of violence did not stop people from protesting in times of need. Bread and flour wars were followed by meat conflicts. (You can read a first hand account here.)
Kosher Manhattan
Newcomers to the United States brought their own culinary practices with them, whilst acquiring the nutritional customs of their place of settlement. The migrant inhabits two worlds. Traditional “home” recipes are part of a heritage that will be nostalgically conserved, but modification to availability is always necessary and inevitable.
From the mid-nineteenth century onward, Manhattan’s Lower East Side was home to large numbers of German immigrants. Known as Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), its community was as diverse as the home nation itself before unification in 1871. By creating a social space in the process of adaptation, hundreds of local saloons and beer gardens played a formative role. Nostalgia was a good lunch, a reminder of home.
Erected in 1863, the brick tenement at 97 Orchard Street – which is today home to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum – had five stories and was designed (its architect is not known) to house twenty families in three-room apartments, four on each floor. The average household contained seven or more people.
On November 12, 1863, Bavarian-born Johann (John) Schneider and his Prussian wife started running a lager beer saloon from the basement of this building. The couple lived in a bedroom adjoining the beer hall’s kitchen. The Schneiders advertised the opening of their business with the promise of a buffet consisting of pretzels, sausages, pigs’ feet and sauerkraut.
Two decades later the ethnic composition of the district was changing rapidly. In 1881 the relatively liberal-minded Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in Russia. The ascendance to the throne of his reactionary son Alexander III initiated an era of relentless pogroms and persecutions that made living conditions for Russian Jews intolerable, leading to mass emigration between that year and 1914.
The Lower East Side became the destination for millions of Eastern European Jews, the crucible of a new life in New York City. It was the “goldene medinah” (promised land) for those fleeing oppression. Four out of five descendants trace their roots to this pivotal neighborhood.
By the turn of the twentieth century Schneider’s saloon had given way to Israel and Goldie Lustgarten’s butcher’s shop (one of 131 kosher butchers in the area at the time). The family hailed from town of Stanislau in Galician Poland (then under Austrian rule).
Sometime in the early 1880s, Israel, his wife and six children left the city and made the long journey to New York. His presence in Orchard Street was brief. During a local riot that took place in May 1902 the front window of his shop was smashed. Soon after he appears to have gone out of business.
Meat Boycott
At the beginning of 1902, wholesale meat prices began to climb. Jewish butchers were the first to feel the heat, because kosher meat was more expensive. Prices had to reflect not only the wages of slaughterers and religious supervisors, but also the cost of transporting live cattle to the city of New York in order to conform to Jewish dietary law (kashrut).
In May 1902, butchers had staged a shutdown to pressure slaughterhouses and wholesalers into lowering their rates, but they were unable to force price reductions. Their customers accused them of price gouging. The majority of Russian and Eastern European immigrant families in the Lower East Side (then the nation’s most densely populated neighborhood) could no longer afford to buy the staple.
On May 14, 1902, as the price of kosher meat had jumped from twelve to eighteen cents a pound, mother of four Sarah Edelson called a meeting of local housewives at the Monroe Saloon in Monroe Street to discuss the crisis. Some five hundred people showed up, a much bigger turn-out than expected and the mood was angry.
Fanny Levy, one of Sarah’s neighbors and co-organizer, called for action and take on the might of the Beef Trust. It was decided to boycott butchers until they would reduce the price of beef.
The next morning some 3,000 women had assembled. Calling themselves the Ladies Anti-Beef Trust Association, its ad hoc membership split up in groups and picketed the kosher butcher shops in the Lower East Side and parts of Harlem and the Bronx, handing out leaflets that bore the image of a skull and crossbones and carried the slogan: “Eat no meat while the [Beef] Trust is taking meat from the bones of your women and children.”
Although many of the women had been in the United States for only a relatively short time and may not have managed much English, they made their collective voices heard. They felt angry enough to assert what they considered their newly gained American rights: the right to speak freely, protest publicly and demand fair prices.
Inevitably, there were violent scenes. Customers who ignored the pickets were heckled, pushed and pummeled; their parcels seized and the meat hurled into the gutters. Butchers who refused to shut their premises were attacked; their tools destroyed; their windows and fixtures smashed.
In trying to break up the protest, the police used brute force. Many participants were hurt or wounded. Eighty-five people were arrested and fined, three quarters of them women.
Meat & Monopoly
Three weeks into the boycott, the Beef Trust (temporarily) lowered the price for a pound of kosher meat by four cents. Although the event made controversial headlines in the press, the action highlighted the ability of (Jewish) women to organize and coordinate a movement throughout the boroughs.
The boycott would become a model for future protests (such as the 1907/8 rent boycotts) and was in many ways a precursor to larger scale strikes.
The basic problem was to identify the culprits who were responsible for the food crisis. Trapped in a cycle of scarcity and price rises, protesters aimed their anger at local suppliers who were as helpless in the process as their customers. On their side, butchers blamed the high cost of meat on “greedy” slaughterhouses. The root of problems however lay many miles away from Manhattan.
In an era of emerging trusts (companies banding together to control markets and fix prices), Chicago’s Beef Trust was one of those mighty cartels that held a stranglehold on the American marketplace until they were ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in 1905. Dominating the nation’s supply of meat products, it imposed steep price rises that were passed on to hundreds of Manhattan’s retail kosher butchers.
With the proliferation and intensification of commercial activity, food had become part of a free market system in which individuals had no agency. The traditional chain of food supply had been broken and become “invisible.”
What was once arranged locally, was now determined centrally; the community transformed into an economy. The market decided. The word no longer referred to a fair of shopkeepers and stallholders, but was applied as a euphemism for the most ruthless forces in the economic system.
Market meant the power of money. The concept of morality was deleted from economic theory.
CREDITS
NEW YORK ALMANACK “Illustrations, from above: Hungry people in Dungarvan, County Waterford, Ireland, attempt to break into a bakery during the Great Famine (The Pictorial Times, 1846); The “Ventrone Block” on Atwell’s Avenue, Providence, in 1910 (Providence Public Library); illustration of the Women’s March on Versailles, October 5, 1789; illustration of the Flour Riot 1837; Little Germany in Manhattan in the late 19th century; Jewish life in the Lower East Side; the 1902 Manhattan meat boycott covered in the national press; and “Tweedledee and Tweedledum” anti-Beef Trust cartoon (Udo J. Keepler, 1913). The text reads Before. The Meat Trust (to the small farmer): My friend, why don’t you raise a few cattle each year? The price of beef is high. You will make good money. After. The Meat Trust (to same small farmer): The price I offer for your cattle is low, is it? Well, you may take it or leave it, my friend. There is nobody else for you to sell to.”
PHOTO OF THE DAY
LITTLE FREE LIBRARY BOX LOCATED BY THE RIVERCROSS LAWN
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This story turns ugly rather quickly. From the New York Public Library scrapbook, The Hippotheatron and New York Cirque:
That’s 14th Street between Irving Place and Third Avenue, with an out-chapel of Grace Church next door.
As the name suggests, that weird building was a theater for horse shows, constructed in 1864. The NYPL has this flyer dated as 1864, but the name “Hippotheatron” was apparently not used until 1869, when it was already on its third owner. P. T. Barnum bought it in November 1872, and it burned down a month later. Four owners in eight years suggests that maybe making money from a building suitable for nothing but horse-shows wasn’t so easy. This is as good a place to warn about reading the newspaper accounts: the fire did not harm any people but killed a distressingly large number of animals, caged in the building for the shows. Given that the theater apparently had had well over 1000 people inside for some shows, this was the least-terrible bad outcome.
The structure of the building was interesting. The walls and roof were sheet iron; the roof was supported on a series of tension-rod girders supported at the perimeter and an intermediate ring of columns:
That engraving actually undersells the building’s size: the center performance ring was 43 feet, 6 inches in diameter; the building as a whole was 110 feet in diameter and the conical roof was 75 feet high. The way that the tension-rod girders run from the columns to the peak only would have worked if there was a compression ring there, but finding photographic proof of that is probably impossible. There was definitely some kind of ring beam there, as it was needed to support the peak cupola.
The biggest question in my mind is what, exactly, was burning? The newspaper accounts blame “gas” which probably means coal gas used for the lights, but that only provides the initial flame. The roof and exterior walls were iron and therefore not flammable. My guess is that the fuel for the fire was some combination of a wood floor, straw on that floor, and wood seating tiers.
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NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY OLD STRUCTURES ENGINEERING JOURNAL
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Is the Bronx the land of the forgotten amusement park? The borough’s death toll of defunct parks is impressive.
Starlight Park, which opened in 1920 beside the Bronx River and lasted into the 1930s, thrilled visitors with its roller coaster, bathing pavilions, and shooting gallery. Freedomland‘s attractions celebrated American history; this Disney-like park had a short run in the 1960s in Baychester. (Co-Op City took its place.)
And from the late 1890s to the 1940s, a spit of land jutting into the East River where it meets the Long Island Sound was once the site of a popular summertime resort district known as Clason Point. (Or Clason’s Point, as vintage maps have it.)
“Clason” came from Isaac Clason, a Scottish merchant and ship owner. In the early 18th century, Clason purchased one thousand acres of land in this corner of the southeastern Bronx, states Rob Stephenson in his Substack newsletter, The Neighborhoods.
Much of Clason’s land was devoted to farming through the 19th century. Then in 1892, a railroad builder named Clinton Stephens bought 25 acres near the waterfront and “began to develop the area as a recreation destination,” writes Stephenson.
“Stephens established ferry service from Manhattan and College Point in Queens, and soon weekend revelers were availing themselves of the casino, dancehalls, and drinking establishments that populated the point,” he adds.
Boats and steamers brought heat-addled city residents to Clason Point from Long Island, Mott Haven, and Manhattan, states the 2010 AIA Guide to New York City. A trolley arrived in 1910 for even greater access to this burgeoning seaside paradise.
Think of Clason Point as the Bronx’s answer to Coney Island. Bringing Coney-like attractions here was a canny move by developers like Stephens, since late 19th and early 20th century New Yorkers now had the leisure time to take day trips to seaside destinations in Brooklyn and Queens.
A ferry ride to Clason Point from the Lower East Side, Yorkville, and Bronx neighborhoods like Mott Haven was likely faster than a boat trip or railroad journey to Coney Island or Rockaway Beach.
The revelry sounds a lot like Coney Island, as well as “Little Coney Island,” a rollicking dance hall and pleasure garden district that popped up at the time on today’s West 110th Street.
“The attractions were dance halls and hotels, picnic grounds and a bathing pier, restaurants, a salt water pool, and places with names like Dietrich’s, Gilligan’s Pavilion and Killian’s Grove, Higg’s Camp Grounds, and Kane’s Casino,” wrote Philip Lopate in a New York Times article in 2000, quoting. from the 2010 AIA Guide to New York City.
Clason Point actually had two separate parks. One was the privately owned Clason Point Park, which appears to be the original resort opened by Stephens. Another, the delightfully named Fairyland, operated on leased land, according to a 2014 writeup on hubpages.com.
Despite Clason Point’s popularity and accessibility, there were a few drawbacks. The saltwater pool earned the nickname “the Inkwell” because it was filled with unfiltered polluted East River water. “One hates to speculate exactly what was in that ink,” comments the hubpages.com post.
Also, some of the rides malfunctioned—in one case with tragic results. In 1910, two of the cars on the roller coaster collided high in the air. Rescue workers had to retrieve stuck passengers with rope and a 75-foot ladder, according to a 2012 article by Bill Twomey in the Bronx Times.
Then, in June 1922, with approximately 80 passengers riding the 100-foot-high ferris wheel, a sudden storm toppled the ride.
“The wind appeared to lift the upper half of the wheel and toss it with its merrymakers into Long Island Sound,” reported The Evening World. “The collapse of the lower half followed, burying those in it under the wreckage.” Seven passengers were killed, and scores sustained injuries.
The ferris wheel disaster and filthy salt water pool didn’t spell the end of Clason Point (below, an abandoned dance hall) so much as Prohibition and the impending Great Depression did.
“Fairyland went out of business in 1935, as did some of the other independent amusements,” states the hubpages.com post. “In 1949 the entire property was sold to developers who removed all the remaining amusements and converted the area into a private country club.”
Today Clason Point lives on as a New York City Park—the appropriately named Clason Point Park.
Visiting amusement parks was just one way city residents cooled off during the sweltering summer seasons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Click here and listen to Ephemeral New York and Carl Raymond, aka The Gilded Gentleman, on August 20 in a podcast episode titled “In the Good Old Summertime: Where the Gilded Age Played.”
We’ll delve into all the ways city residents found relief from summer heat in the Gilded Age, from the tenement districts to upper class townhouses. You’ll be glad we live in the age of air conditioning!
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Painter George Benjamin Luks was born in August 1867 in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. According to the 1880 census, his father was Polish and his mother born in Bavaria. The family then moved to the coal mining borough of Pottstown, Montgomery County, PA, where his father worked as a physician.
Living in the midst of a community of struggling Eastern European families, Luks was directly confronted with the toughness of the immigrant experience. It would determine his career as an artist.
In the Steerage
Luks began his studies at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Dissatisfied with the conservative standard of teaching, he left for Europe and spent time in Düsseldorf (a number of American painters had received their training at the city’s Art Academy). He visited London and Paris.
On his return in 1893 he became an illustrator for the Philadelphia Press. Meeting at John Henri’s studio, Luks was a member of the “Philadelphia Five” (with John Sloan, William Glackens and Everett Shinn). These painters rejected the “genteel” approach of contemporary artists and turned to the harsh depiction of ordinary life.
In 1896, Luks moved to New York City where he was employed as an illustrator by the New York World. A tough character, he embraced the gritty side of the metropolis in art and life.
His former Philadelphian associates had also settled in the metropolis and encouraged him to further explore his painted themes of “New York Street Life.” He joined a group of artists (later referred to as the Ashcanners) who rebelled against conventional academicism and “pleasing” impressionism.
These painters believed in the worthiness of working-class life as artistic subject matter. An urban realist, Luks focused on cityscapes and street scenes. In a series of paintings he captured the energy and hardship of the tenement districts and their occupants.
In 1900, in the middle of a period of mass movement from Europe to the United States (the Great Atlantic Migration) Luks created “In the Steerage,” a painting in which he depicted a group of migrants lined up against the rail of an ocean liner arriving in New York Harbor after an arduous voyage across the Atlantic. Migrants tended to crowd on deck once the Statue of Liberty was sighted.
Steamships made their first stop at a pier on the mainland. There, First and Second Class passengers were free to disembark without medical checks or personal questioning. Afterward, steerage passengers were crowded onto a barge or ferry and taken to Ellis Island (the “Island of Tears”) for inspection and examination.
In bold colors and brushwork George Luks communicates an emphatic image that reflects both the exhaustion of a long stay in steerage and the anxiety about what the future may hold.
Precarious Passages
The steerage was located immediately below the main deck of a sailing ship where the control strings of the rudder ran. In the early days of migration passengers were placed in the cargo hold where temporary partitions were erected to accommodate people and livestock. As soon as a ship had set its passengers on land, the furnishings were removed and preparations made for a return cargo of cotton or tobacco to Europe.
Early steamships of the 1830s and 1840s were expensive to run and only attracted those travelers who could afford the fare. The Irish Potato Famine and the repression that followed the failed 1848 uprisings in Europe, forced many families to flee in search of a new beginning. Within a decade, a huge migrant market was created. Fledgling ocean liner companies competed to exploit the opportunities offered by this desperate mass of humanity.
The transport of boat people (“self-loading cargo”) became a money-spinner as some steamers could hold over 2,000 passengers in steerage. Carrying them in the cheapest manner was enormously profitable. The word steerage now began to refer to the lowest category of long-distance travel. Destitute migrants needed to make the transatlantic crossing at minimum cost.
Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson had sailed in 1879 from Glasgow to New York to research “Steerage Types” and give his travelogue The Amateur Emigrant a sense of authenticity (the book was not published until 1895).
He described a very uncomfortable journey in company of the poor and sick, supplying an abundance of details about bedding arrangements, food rations, etc. In 1906, American investigative reporter Kellogg Durland sailed as a steerage passenger and delivered a blistering attack on the miserable state of affairs on board.
In a cut-throat market, the price of transatlantic travel was made affordable to even the poorest travelers, but conditions were atrocious. Crammed in cargo holds, migrants were treated as cattle. They slept in rows of shared bunks on mattresses filled with straw or seaweed. On stormy days, all hatches were sealed to prevent water from getting in, making the already stuffy air below unendurable. For millions of migrants, steerage conjured up images of squalor, abuse and disease.
Passengers had to bring their own food for the duration of the voyage, which could last as long as three weeks. Many starved to death during the voyage, their corpses flung over the side. Infectious disease (cholera and typhus; measles among children) was another cause of high mortality.
Early ocean liners were a new generation of slave ships. British and American governments introduced (advisory) legislation in the 1850s to prevent overcrowding, provide toilet facilities and guarantee rations of food and water, but ship owners responded slowly and reluctantly.
The migration statistics in the period between 1860 and 1914 are staggering; some fifty-two million people left different parts of Europe for America. It was the intensity of competition for a share of the lucrative market and not government intervention that forced upgrades.
Liners became bigger, faster and more refined. Because of negative connotations, companies re-marketed steerage as Third Class, but the journey remained a testing experience.
SS Kaiser Wilhelm II
With the rise of a global travel industry, rival companies started competing with each other to make fast and luxurious crossings. Oceanic transportation boomed. To reach New York in record tempo was a race for glory and customers. Bremen-based Norddeutscher Lloyd (NDL) became one of the largest shipping companies in the world.
Its liner Kaiser Wilhelm II was launched at Stettin in August 1902 in the presence of the German Emperor and joined her sister ships on a scheduled service between Bremen and New York City. In 1904 she won the “Blue Riband” for the fastest eastbound crossing of the North Atlantic.
Offering berths to 1,888 passengers, the ship’s interior was designed by Bremen’s most prominent architect Johann Poppe. He turned the liner into a floating Grand Hotel with a range of stylish amenities for affluent passengers. The First Class dining saloon was three decks high and decorated in German (Bremen) Baroque revival style. Displaying a life-size portrait of the Kaiser, it could seat 554 diners.
The golden age of ocean travel in the early twentieth century coincided with the emergence of the illustrated poster. Advertisers were driven to outdo their competitors with ever more appealing imagery. Shipping companies employed graphic artists to visualize leisure and modernity. Promotional posters transformed long distance travel into an alluring experience in the public imagination.
Glamour would remain central to promoting the image of ocean liners throughout the 1920s, although in reality these ship served the needs of a diverse public. NDL’s flagship Kaiser Wilhelm II mirrored society’s inequalities by offering extremes of luxury and comfort to a minority of wealthy travelers, whilst transporting large numbers of poor emigrants under the most basic of circumstances.
Edward Alfred Steiner was a Professor of Theology in Grinnell College, Iowa. Born into a Jewish Slovak-Hungarian family and educated in Vienna and Heidelberg, he had settled in the United States in 1886. He penned a number of books in which he detailed the experiences of immigrant Jews (although he had converted to Christianity himself).
In 1906, Steiner published On the Trail of the Immigrant in which he described the conditions in the steerage aboard SS Kaiser Wilhelm II where nine hundred passengers were packed like cattle. The flow of air was blocked, creating an unbearable stench.
A division between sexes was ignored, which meant that young women quartered among married passengers lacked privacy and protection. The food was miserable. Steerage on the world’s most prestigious ocean liner had barely improved.
Slumming at Sea
According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word “slumming” was first used in 1884 to refer to an increasing number of people who visited London’s poorest areas for either social observation or out of curiosity. By the 1890s the idea of “slumming it” in the East End had become a pastime for wealthy youngsters. The sight-seeing mania soon reached New York City. It was taken to sea as well.
First Class passengers would lean over their promenade deck railing and throw candy and pennies to children on the deck below. Slumming from above meant mixing with steerage passengers.
One of these slummers was photographer Alfred Stieglitz. In the spring of 1907, he and his family boarded the Kaiser Wilhelm II to visit relatives and friends in Europe. His wife Emmeline demanded luxury and Alfred purchased First Class tickets for their week-long passage on her account.
Once at sea, Stieglitz hated the stifling snobbishness of the quarters. He preferred to spend time at the end of his deck from where he could observe the crowd confined below. To his photographer’s eye, the ship’s steerage provided a framework for recording a moment of human drama. Using a hand-held Auto-Graflex camera with glass plate negatives, he captured the scene in a single picture.
Alfred was not able to develop the plate until he arrived in Paris and kept the photograph in its original plate holder until he returned to New York several weeks later – and put it aside.
Four years later “The Steerage” was first presented to the public when Stieglitz published the image in a 1911 issue of Camera Work devoted exclusively to his “new” style photographs, together with a Cubist drawing by Pablo Picasso. It then appeared on the cover of the magazine section of New York’s Saturday Evening Mail (April 20, 1912).
In 1913 “The Steerage” had its gallery debut, coinciding with the momentous Armory Show which introduced international avant-garde art to New York (George Luks was also well represented at the exhibition). Stieglitz intended to demonstrate that his photographs could rival the European vanguard.
Widely praised as a modernist masterpiece (Picasso was an admirer), “The Steerage” emboldened him to put his photography on a par with Cubist painting.
Golden Door & Returned Cargo
Stieglitz’s photograph captured the so-called steerage promenade. Every day at the same time passengers were herded on deck for their quarters to be cleaned. First Class travelers gathered on the upper decks to observe the spectacle. Looking at “The Steerage,” the photographer invites us to peek at the mass of migrants below. We are all invited to turn into slummers.
Stieglitz was aware of the fierce debates about immigration at the time and the ghastly treatment to which steerage passengers were subjected. His own Jewish father had joined the mass exodus from Germany, arriving in America in 1849 and making a fortune in the wool trade, but the photographer had mixed feelings about immigration.
Sympathetic to the plight of new arrivals, he objected to admitting the uneducated and marginal to the United States. Stieglitz may have felt for his subjects, but he denied that his work contained a statement. He was not promoting a social cause. He claimed that his only concern was to advance photography as a fine art.
At the time, the immigration service channeled millions of arrivals through the “Golden Door” of Ellis Island’s main inspection building, but some twenty percent of incomers were detained for health or legal reasons. Some recuperated sufficiently to enter America, but others were returned to their homelands.
When Stieglitz took his famous shot, the Kaiser Wilhelm II was sailing on its return journey from New York to Europe. It is a visual record of people who had been turned away by officials for reasons of ill-health, “moral disease” (that is: politically suspect), old age or excessive poverty and forced to go back home (the criteria for refusal were summarized in the 1907 Immigration Act, signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt).
How can one interpret this photograph other than as a critique of migration policies? Stylistic mastery reinforced the message, but questions remain. Were all passengers in this photograph to be considered “returned cargo”?
Being sent back from Ellis Island even more destitute than they were on the day of departure, what happened to these lost souls once they had disembarked in their countries of origin? Information is scarce, history has kept silent.
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CREDITS
Illustrations, from above: Robert Henri’s “Portrait of George Luks,” 1904; George Luks’ “In the Steerage,” 1900 (North Carolina Museum of Art); Fritz Rehm, poster for the Norddeutscher Lloyd (NDL), 1903; Alfred Stieglitz’s “The Steerage,” 1907; and Lewis Hine’s “Climbing into America, immigrants at Ellis Island, 1905” (The New York Public Library).
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