The vibrant colors of Mexico come to NYC for a unique Orchid Show at NYBG!
Photo Courtesy of New York Botanical Garden
Extraordinary as the New York Botanical Garden’s orchid shows always are, this year’s is unlike anything that has come before. The current exhibit, Mexican Modernism, inspired by the renowned and Pritzker Prize-winning midcentury Mexican architect Luis Barragán (1902-88), is utterly new. It is an unprecedented extravaganza of color, serenity, and flamboyance. Or, as the New York Timessays, NYBG balances “simplicity of conception with opulence of execution.” This weekend is you last chance to see the show!
Guests entering the Orchid Show at the Haupt Conservatory
The simplicity of execution derives from Barragán’s ideas about color, light, nature, and geometric shapes. The opulence of execution lies with the thousands of orchids chosen for their beauty and diversity. The show is installed in three galleries of the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory: the main gallery, the Palms of the World Gallery with its reflecting pool, and two additional seasonal galleries. Excellent signs will guide you.
An Explosion of Color Inspired by Barragán
NYBG’s arches take full advantage of Barragán’s love of deep, dynamic colors.
NYBG has chosen a Barragán masterpiece, Gilardi House in Mexico City, as inspiration for the orchid showcase. I toured the house with Fluenz, a Spanish-immersion company which offers tours of the home conducted by the current owner, Eduardo Luque. Luque has maintained it meticulously. Eduardo’s father, Martín Luque, an advertising executive, had agreed in 1975 to let Barragán design the house around an existing jacaranda tree. Fifty years later, the tree continues to thrive in Mexico City, while a replica serves as a star of the exhibit in the Bronx.
Casa Gilardi’s jacaranda tree saved by Barragán—and starring in the orchid show
The orchid show’s interpretation of Barragán’s jacaranda tree is a fabricated steel sculpture painted blue and adorned with purple and pink orchids. The orange and white orchids planted in the white stucco wall reflect another Barragán principle: flowers can be happy most anywhere, even in seemingly hostile environments.
A fabricated steel sculpture inspired by the jacaranda tree saved by Barragán in Mexico City
A sister exhibit of spectacular photographs by Mexican-born photographer, Martirene Alcántara, is in NYBG’s adjacent Ross Gallery. This might seem a distraction from the orchids, but no. NYBG explains in its signage that “Photography was a critical tool to market and sell Barragán’s unique aesthetic. He was keenly aware of creating spaces that were not only tranquil and beautiful, but that also photographed well.” Sadly, much of his work has been demolished, with the result that “a large part of his legacy lives on in the incredible photos that capture his vision.” NYBG encourages visitors to take photos throughout the show.
The Garden Blooms Inside and Out
As visitors walk through the many rooms of the exhibit, they repeatedly encounter the magnificence of the Haupt Conservatory both inside and out. Orchids thrive within, and the NYBG’s glorious planted trees can be seen bursting into bloom through the glass windows.
Orchids bloom inside the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory and weeping Japanese cherry trees, Prunus pendula, thrive outside
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OUR 9/11 TREE IN FULL BLOOM AT THE CHAPEL PLAZA
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NY BOTANICAL GARDEN
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In the middle decades of the 20th century, Maurice Kish was probably not unlike many of his South Williamsburg neighbors.
[“Poultry Market,” 1940]
Born in Russia in 1895, he immigrated to New York as a teenager, settling in Brownsville with his family. He served in the military and left it in 1919.
Like so many other immigrants, Kish held a hodgepodge of jobs including “poet, amateur boxer, Catskills dance instructor, and factory worker in New York City, where he painted flowers on glass vases,” according to the Smithsonian Institute.
Kish also became a labor activist, a not uncommon cause in a New York hit hard by the Depression. By the 1940s he’d settled into a tenement at 70 South Third Street in Williamsburg with his two brothers and a fourth man identified in the 1950 census as a lodger.
“End of Day’s Toil,” 1932
But what set Kish apart was his talent and passion as a painter. Schooled at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design, he often used his skills to focus on the work and economic struggles in the neighborhood around him.
“As an artist, Kish’s main subjects were cities and the human activity within; a labor activist, he used his canvases as a vehicle for telling the stories of industrial workers,” states the Smithsonian Institute.
Williamsburg must have provided plenty of material. His apartment would have been close to the East River waterfront, where thousands of workers toiled at industrial sites like the Domino Sugar Factory, which features in his 1932 painting “End of Day’s Toil.”
“Job Seekers,” 1932
“The men’s bowed heads convey their exhaustion after a long, hard day’s work, but the smoke serves as a reminder that they will have to return to the same tomorrow,” states the Smithsonian, which owns the painting.
“Kish based the factory buildings in the foreground on New York’s Domino Sugar factory, located on the East River and shown here with boats in the background,” per the Smithsonian.
The subdued “Job Seekers,” also a sympathetic portrait of the workers on the East River waterfront, is in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. “Here, industrial sites tower over faceless laborers, and all is described in the dull, dark tones indicative of the harsh monotony of their lives,” the museum website states.
“Around East River,” 1940s
Kish didn’t only paint factory workers and small businesses. “Around East River” is a colorful and stylized glimpse of tugboats plying the gray river, with chimney smoke blending into a smoky sky. “Ice Skating at Dusk” has a gracefulness and loveliness to it.
He painted the Washington Arch in Washington Square Park, and the dismantling of the El in the 1930s. His work contains landscapes, nudes, and portraits, many in a folk-art kind of style in direct contrast to his social realist paintings of the 1930s and 1940s.
Kish moved to Queens at some point after 1950, and he died in 1987. Like so many artists, he garnered some notice during his lifetime but very little if any after his death. He captures an era in New York history no one alive today remembers.
[Title not known, about 1940]
With the Domino Sugar factory transformed into high-end offices and lofts and the Williamsburg waterfront now a recreational mecca, all that remains of Kish’s Williamsburg are the tenement apartments.
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Tulips in Bloom in front of 405 Main Street
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[Top image: Ashcan_Daily; second image: Smithsonian Institute; third image: Brooklyn Museum; fourth image: Artsy; fifth image: Live Auctioneers]
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“Try to imagine New York City without Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Jefferson Market Courthouse, the Flatiron Building, or the brownstones in Stuyvesant Heights, Greenwich Village, Brooklyn Heights and the St. Nicholas Historic Districts.”
Bowne House, Main Street S. and Franklin Place, Queens, 1929. Landmarked 2/15/1966. Borough President Queens collection, NYC Municipal Archives.
These words are printed on a brochure distributed by New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1975, ten years after Mayor Robert F. Wagner signed the bill that established the agency on April 19, 1965.
The story of landmark preservation in New York City neither begins nor ends in 1965, and the collections of the Municipal Library provide the documentation.
Mayor Wagner’s subject files and the records of City Planning Commissioner William F. R. Ballard (1961-1969) in the Municipal Archives are good resources to explore the topic beginning in the early 1960s and leading up to establishment of the Commission in 1965.
One of the earliest documents in Wagner’s subject file folder is a copy of his press release dated June 19, 1961, announcing the appointment of a “committee of prominent citizens …for the purpose of developing a program for the preservation of structures of historic and esthetic importance in the City.”
Six months later, Wagner issued another press release stating that his new Committee had recommended the establishment of a Landmarks Preservation Commission to begin the work of identifying historic structures. Soon after, in February 1962, Wagner requested $50,000 in the budget to fund the new Commission. Receiving approval in early April, he appointed twelve members to the Commission under the leadership of architect Geoffrey Platt.
Mayor Wagner’s Commission could act in only an advisory capacity. It quickly became evident that it would need significantly greater power to protect historic buildings and districts. Using documents in Wagner’s files and the records of City Planning Commissioner Ballard, researchers can explore the ensuing back-and-forth with councilmembers that took place over the next few years as they crafted what would become Local Law 46 of 1965. In essence, the new Law provided that the “Temporary” Landmarks Preservation Commission become a permanent Commission with control over the building exteriors in historic districts.
The Flatiron Building, ca. 1936. WPA Federal Writers’ Project collection, NYC Municipal Archives. Landmarked 9/20/1966
New York County “Tweed” Courthouse, ca. 1955. NYC Municipal Archives Collection. Landmarked 10/10/1984.
Ballard’s files are notable for the comments solicited and received from interested parties regarding the proposed legislation. His files contain a transcript of City Planning Commission member Harmon Goldstone’s testimony before the Council on December 3, 1964. Goldstone spoke eloquently about the benefits and necessity of the Landmarks law. In his statement, he cited “a quotation attributed to a former Republican President: ‘I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lies. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.’ —Abraham Lincoln.” Addressing concerns regarding limitations on private property proposed by the legislation, Goldstone noted: “Just as the zoning power, the police power, the power of eminent domain must take precedence over the interests of the individual, so it is proposed to protect the public interest in our common past.”
Taking up the question of what motived Mayor Wagner to create the Landmark Preservation Committee (and later Commission) in the early 1960s, Ballard’s files provide some clues. Again, Goldstone’s testimony is pertinent: “It was, in fact, at the suggestion of James Felt, then Chairman of the Planning Commission, and with the advice of Maxwell Lehman, Deputy City Administrator, that Mayor Wagner appointed in May 1961, a committee of interested citizens to explore the problem.” The Municipal Archives’ holdings include records created by James Felt during his term as City Planning Commissioner (1956-1963). The inventory does not list an obvious subject in his records, e.g. “Landmarks,” but a closer examination of his correspondence might reveal additional intelligence about what motivated Felt to make the suggestion to Wagner.
Landmarks Preservation Committee brochure, 1988. NYC Municipal Library.
The Municipal Library collection also serves as a resource to answer what prompted Mayor Wagner to create the Commission. Among the Library holdings are several published sources that discuss the historical antecedents of the preservation movement. For example, a report published in 1989 by the Historic City Committee of the Municipal Art Society of New York, entitled “New York, the Historic City,” included a section on the “Background and Development of the New York City Landmark Preservation Commission.” According to the report, “The real flowering of historic preservation in America… came in the decades after World War II as a building boom began to actively threaten historic buildings across the nation.” Not surprisingly, according to the report, growing opposition to Robert Moses played a role: “In Manhattan the modernist glass and steel skyscrapers which had begun to fill midtown, and the white brick apartment buildings interrupting residential rowhouse blocks, coupled with the cumulative effect of thirty years of Robert Moses’ urban renewal work in all boroughs, began to generate citizen interest in the cityscape as it stood.”
Another important impetus, according to the report, came from the Brooklyn Heights Association. In the late 1950s, the Association drafted legislation proposing landmark protection for its historic neighborhood. According to the report, this action made it clear to the city’s political powers that “…historic preservation would be supported by the grass-roots citizenry.”
Alice Austen House, Staten Island, ca. 1940. Landmarked 5/13/69. 1940s Tax Department photographs, NYC Municipal Archives.
Returning to Wagner’s file, two carefully clipped and mounted newspaper articles may also point to a motivation for the legislative action to preserve landmarks. From the New York Times on April 2, 1962, an article announced establishment of the Commission. Tellingly, the story quickly dispensed with the facts of the new Commission in two sentences. It then continued for several paragraphs describing the then-impending demolition of Pennsylvania Station: “Mr. Platt, asked about the architects’ protest over the planned demolition of Penn Station, said he personally regretted that his commission had come into being too late to try to save the terminal.”
Pennsylvania Station, 1961. Demolished 1964. Mayor Robert F. Wagner papers, NYC Municipal Archives.
The second clipping is an editorial that ran on March 3, 1962, in which the author, Elias S. Wilentz, decried the imminent destruction of the “historic Walt Whitman building as part of its [Housing and Redevelopment Board] plan for Cadman Plaza urban renewal.” The writer noted that the building, “where the great poet helped set the type and print the first edition of “Leaves of Grass” in 1855, marks the central event in Whitman’s life and one of the most historic occasions in our nation’s cultural history.” Like Penn Station, the protests came to naught and the Whitman building vanished.
Further research in Municipal Archives and Library collections will undoubtedly shed light on the origins of the preservation movement and New York City’s pioneering agency.
High Bridge, Aqueduct and Pedestrian Walk, Harlem River at West 170th Street, Borough of The Bronx, to High Bridge Park, Borough of Manhattan, ca. 1926. Landmarked 11/10/1970. Municipal Archives Photograph Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.
The Municipal Library collection is also a rich resource for information about the Commission after its establishment in 1965. All landmark designation reports are easily accessible online via the Library’s Government Publications Portal. Searching the Library catalog pulls up dozens of entries for reports, audits, guides and publications about the Commission and its work. The Library’s vertical files are stuffed with clippings and ephemera charting the trajectory of the often-controversial City agency and its subsequent history – fights over designations, court challenges, etc.
Soon after Mayor Wagner signed the bill in 1965, the Landmarks Preservation Commission got to work. Six months later, the Commission notified the Mayor that a public hearing would be held on October 19, 1965, to consider designation of City Hall, the Municipal Building, New York County [Tweed] Courthouse, Surrogate’s Court (Hall of Records), the Brooklyn Bridge and Fire House, Engine Company 31, at 87 Lafayette Street.
The Surrogates’ Courthouse and the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, ca. 1939. Landmarked 2/15/1966. 1940s Tax Department photographs, NYC Municipal Archives.
Jack Lutsky, Wagner’s “Legal Aide” dutifully forwarded the notice to several relevant City offices requesting comments. One response is worth noting. “Dear Mr. Lutsky,” Bradford N. Clark, the Commissioner of the Department of Public Works wrote, “The designation of the Surrogates Court (Hall of Records) is considered appropriate. However, it should be pointed out that the long-range plans for the Manhattan Civic Center contemplate the demolition of this building…”.
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Niblo’s Garden was a venerable name in the theater business. Its first shows dated back to the presidency of Andrew Jackson. The finest Shakespeareans and grandest divas graced its stage. Its audiences witnessed New York debuts of Italian operas, the dancing of the polka, and the military antics of the French Zoaves. The original theater at the corner of Broadway and Prince Street burned in 1846. Newly rebuilt on the same spot, Niblo’s reopened in 1849.
The theater’s greatest triumph opened on a September evening in 1866. The ballet corps of The Black Crook pranced out before an overflow crowd.
For six hours, the dancers exhibited a charm, beauty, and grace never before seen in America, or so judged the critic of the New York Evening Post. The New York Times was less kind, describing dancers wearing no clothes to speak of performing “such unembarrassed disporting of human organism [as] has never been indulged in before.”
Both papers concluded the show would be a tremendous success. When the initial run ended four hundred seventy-four performances later, no one could argue. Burlesque had come to New York and the city loved it.
The production starred Maria Bonfati as Stalacata, Fairy Queen of the Golden Realm in Germany, 1600. Stalacata saves the simple villager Rodolphe from the designs of Count Wolfenstein, who lusts after his fiancé Anima. The Count has enlisted Hertzog, the “Black Crook,” to capture Rodolphe.
Hertzog has a deal to sell one soul each year to the devil in exchange for immortality. Rodolph is this year’s victim. Queen Stalacata rescues Rodolphe from Hertzog’s clutches as her army defeats the Count’s force. Demons drag the Black Crook Hertzog to hell. Rodolphe and Amina live happily ever after.
So much for the plot, which had nothing to do with the play’s acclaim. Audiences flocked to it for the burlesque – song, dance, buffoonery and sparsely-covered flesh.
The playbill offered such dazzling numbers as “Naughty, Naughty Man,” a “Grand Amazonian March,” and “A Dazzling Transformation Scene Revealing the Nymphs of the Golden Realm.”
Photographs of the leading ladies and the ballet corps sold briskly. During a revival in the early 1870s, the vice hunter Anthony Comstock, just beginning his forty-year battle against obscenity, indicted one smut dealer reportedly for selling photos of dancers on stage in The Black Crook.
Their legs outlined in tights beneath short skirts were to risqué for the judge as well. He sentenced the dealer to one year’s imprisonment at hard labor and a $500 fine.
Niblo’s revived The Black Crook in 1872, which turned out to be a sort of last hurrah for the theatre. Three months after the show closed, Niblo’s burned to the ground a second time.
The New York Herald delivered a eulogy. With The Black Crook, Niblo’s had inaugurated a new era of gaudy spectaculars, the paper said. While lamented by respectable society, these proved enormously popular among the public, particularly for those enjoying “an exhibition of leg development.”
In this “corruption of the popular dramatic taste Niblo’s has been the principal sinner, and the baneful and demoralizing influence it exerted was felt from one end of the Union to the other.”
The eulogy was premature. Niblo’s again rose from the ashes. In a new building, its fourth revival of The Black Crook opened on August 18th, 1873. The Herald described “the event as far from literary as possible, and with very little affinity to anything dramatic.” But the critic admitted that “if the size of the audience is any criterion from which to judge of the success of the piece it will have another long run.”
Indeed The Black Crook’s run was far from over. The show enjoyed another revival in 1873 and a movie version released in 1916. And today Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery honors the legacy of one of its most famous residents, William Niblo, with an annual spectacular that “unleashes jaw-dropping talents: fire-eaters, musicians, contortionists, dancers, and so much more!”
The 2025 extravaganza is scheduled for July 12th.
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ORIGINAL CHECK FOR $13,900 FROM THE CITY OF NEW YORK TO PAY FOR THE PURCHASE OF BLACKWELL’S ISLAND (PARTIAL PAYMENT) JAY TARTELL/ NY MEDICAL COLLEGE ARCHIVES
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Public Domain Review
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.
Matthew Goodman explores the life and writings of Elizabeth Bisland, an American journalist propelled into the limelight when she set out in 1889 – head-to-head with fellow journalist Nellie Bly – on a journey to beat Phileas Fogg’s fictitious 80-day circumnavigation of the globe.
Elizabeth Bisland at the time of her trip, from the frontispiece to In Seven Stages — Source: the author’s own scan.
On the morning of November 14, 1889, John Brisben Walker, the wealthy publisher of the monthly magazine The Cosmopolitan, boarded a New Jersey ferry bound for New York City. Like many other New Yorkers, he was carrying a copy of The World, the most widely read and influential newspaper of its time. A front-page story announced that Nellie Bly, The World’s star investigative reporter, was about to undertake the most sensational adventure of her career: an attempt to go around the world faster than anyone ever had before. Sixteen years earlier, in his popular novel, Jules Verne had imagined that such a trip could be accomplished in eighty days; Nellie Bly hoped to do it in seventy-five.
Immediately John Brisben Walker recognized the publicity value of such a scheme, and at once an idea suggested itself: The Cosmopolitan would sponsor its own competitor in the around-the-world race, traveling in the opposite direction. Of course, the magazine’s circumnavigator would have to leave immediately, and would have to be, like Bly, a young woman –the public, after all, would never warm to the idea of a man racing against a woman. But who should it be? Arriving at the offices of The Cosmopolitan that morning, Walker sent a message to the home of Elizabeth Bisland, the magazine’s literary editor. It was urgent, he indicated; she should come at once.
Each month for The Cosmopolitan Elizabeth Bisland wrote a review of recently published books entitled “In the Library.” She was a reader with refined tastes and wide-ranging interests; the subjects covered in her first few columns included Tolstoy’s social gospel, the fourteenth-century tales of Don Juan Manuel, the collected poems of Emma Lazarus, and a two-volume history of the Vikings by the Norwegian author Hjalmar Hjorth Boyeson. Born into a Louisiana plantation family ruined by the Civil War, Bisland had moved to New Orleans and then, a few years later, to New York, where she contributed to a variety of magazines and was regularly referred to as the most beautiful woman in metropolitan journalism.
Detail from the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine as it appeared in the late 19th century — Source.
At the time of her race around the world Elizabeth Bisland was twenty-eight years old. She was tall, with an elegant, almost imperious bearing that made her appear even taller; she had large dark eyes and luminous pale skin and spoke in a low, gentle voice. She reveled in gracious hospitality and smart conversation, both of which were regularly on display in the literary salon that she hosted in her small apartment, where members of New York’s creative set gathered to discuss the artistic issues of the day. Bisland’s particular combination of beauty, charm, and erudition seems to have been nothing short of bewitching. One of her admirers, the writer Lafcadio Hearn, called her “a sort of goddess,” and likened her conversation to hashish, leaving him disoriented for hours afterwards. Another said, about talking with her, that he felt as if he were playing with “a beautiful dangerous leopard,” which he loved for not biting him.
Bisland herself was well aware that feminine beauty was useful but fleeting (“After the period of sex-attraction has passed,” she once wrote, “women have no power in America”), and she took pride in the fact that she had arrived in New York with only fifty dollars in her pocket, and that the thousands of dollars now in her bank account had come by virtue of her own pen. Capable of working for eighteen hours at a stretch, she wrote book reviews, essays, feature articles, and poetry in the classical vein. She was a believer, more than anything, in the joys of literature, which she had first experienced as a girl in ancient, tattered volumes of Shakespeare and Cervantes that she found in the ruined library of her family’s plantation house. (She had taught herself French while she churned butter, so that she might read Rousseau’s Confessions in the original.) She cared nothing for fame, and indeed found the prospect of it distasteful. So when she arrived at the offices of The Cosmopolitan, and John Brisben Walker proposed that she race Nellie Bly around the world, Elizabeth Bisland told him no. ※
She had guests coming for dinner the next day, she explained, and besides, she had nothing to wear for such a long journey. The real reason, though, as she would later acknowledge, was that she immediately recognized the notoriety that such a race would bring, “and to this notoriety I most earnestly objected.”
John Brisben Walker, however, had already made one fortune in alfalfa and another in iron and was in the process of making a third, in magazine publishing. He was not easily dissuaded, and six hours later Bisland found herself on a New York Central Line train bound for San Francisco.
A drawing of Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland as the “the rival tourists”, from the January 1890 edition of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper — Source
Elizabeth Bisland would write seven articles about her race around the world for The Cosmopolitan, which in 1890 were collected and published by Harper & Brothers as a book entitled In Seven Stages: A Flying Trip Around the World. Her account began:
If, on the thirteenth of November, 1889, some amateur prophet had foretold that I should spend Christmas Day of that year on the Indian Ocean, I hope I should not by any open and insulting incredulity have added new burdens to the trials of a hard-working soothsayer — I hope I should, with the gentleness due a severe case of aberrated predictiveness, have merely called his attention to that passage in the Koran in which it is written, “The Lord loveth a cheerful liar” — and bid him go in peace. Yet I did spend the 25th day of December steaming through the waters that wash the shores of the Indian Empire, and did do other things equally preposterous, of which I would not have believed myself capable if forewarned of them. I can only claim in excuse that these vagaries were unpremeditated, for the prophets neglected their opportunity and I received no augury.
Bisland was a published poet, and throughout the trip she wrote of her experiences in a highly lyrical, impressionistic style, paying special attention to the ever-changing scapes of land and sea. “In the night a hoar frost had fallen,” she wrote one morning, “that was to snow as sleep is to death; and the pale reaped fields, the sere meadows, and silent uplands were transfigured by the first gleam of day.” She delighted in sitting on the top deck of a steamship and watching the ocean for hours on end. “Sapphires would be pale and cold beside this sea,” she wrote on her trip across the Pacific — “palpitating with wave shadows deep as violets, yet not purple, and with no touch of any color to mar its perfect hue. It flames with unspeakable, many-faceted splendor, under a sky that is wan by contrast with its profundity of tint, and the very foam that curles away from our wake is blue as the blue shadows in snow.”
Prior to the around-the-world trip Bisland had never been out of the country before, and during it she discovered a love of travel that would stay with her the rest of her life. This was perhaps best exemplified in a late-night carriage trip she took to the Tanks of Yemen, a remarkable system of ancient stone cisterns. “Our footsteps and our voices echo in hollow whispers from the empty Tanks and the mysterious shadows of the hills,” Bisland wrote, “though we walk lightly and speak softly, awed by the vast calm radiance of the African night. . . . The world grows dreamlike and unreal in the white silence.”
Cattle to provide beef to an ocean liner anchored in Port Said, (ca.1900)
That was what the trip had given her, she would reflect later: the vividness of a new world, where one was for the first time, as Tennyson had written, Lord of the senses five. “It was well,” she told herself when it was all over, “to have thus once really lived.”
It’s instructive to note that in her book Bisland always described her undertaking for The Cosmopolitan as a “trip” or a “journey,” and never — not even once — as a “race.” Still, she was a loyal employee and she threw herself into the competition with vigor. Near the end of the trip, cold and sleepless and hungry, Bisland hurtled by train and ferry through France, England, Wales, and Ireland to catch the steamship that was her last chance to beat Bly, only to have to cross a storm-tossed North Atlantic in the worst weather that had been seen in many years.
In the end, Elizabeth Bisland succeeded in beating Phileas Fogg’s eighty-day mark, completing the trip in seventy-six days — which would have been the fastest trip ever made around the world but for the fact that Nellie Bly had arrived four days earlier.
She arrived home — as she had feared — famous. The race between Bly and Bisland was closely covered by newspapers across the United States, and heavy wagering on the outcome was reported in the country’s gambling houses. As early as the first week of the race, in San Francisco, Bisland was aghast at the steady stream of visitors who sent up cards to her hotel room with urgent messages scrawled on them, but who, she noted in In Seven Stages, had only “a desire to look at me — presumably as a sort of inexpensive freak show.” Unlike Nellie Bly, who upon her return to New York immediately set out on a forty-city lecture tour, Bisland did all she could to avoid the glare of publicity. She gave no lectures, endorsed no products, and did not comment publicly on the trip after the day of her return. Indeed, at the very moment when the American public’s interest in her was at its height, Bisland chose to leave the United States, setting sail for Great Britain, where she lived for the following year. In London’s literary society she met, among others, Herbert Spencer; the popular novelist Rhoda Broughton (the two women would collaborate on a short novel entitled A Widower Indeed); and Rudyard Kipling, who was as smitten with her as the men in New York had been. “I guess you’ll have enough men censer-swinging under your nose to prevent your waving the thurible too markedly under mine,” he wrote in a letter to her. “All the same and until you go after something else new I am grateful.”
Upon her return to New York Bisland married the corporate attorney Charles Wetmore, and together the two designed and built an estate on Long Island. Applegarth, as they called it, was in the Tudor style, made of brick, half-timbering, and stucco, with leaded windows and doorways framed in limestone. The stone fireplace in the drawing room was modeled on one belonging to Queen Elizabeth I, whom Bisland had long admired as having “rejected the whole theory of feminine subordination.”
A photograph showing the view from the water of the Applegarth house, Long Island in New York — Source.
Living at Applegarth Bisland would be highly productive as a writer: Between 1903 and 1910 she edited and wrote the introduction to the two-volume Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, and wrote the highly regarded autobiographical novel A Candle of Understanding as well as several essay collections in which she celebrated the pleasures of literature and forcefully decried the domination of women by men. “The oldest of all empires is that of man; no royal house is so ancient as his,” she wrote in an essay entitled “The Abdication of Man.” “The Emperors of Japan are parvenus of the vulgarest modernity in comparison, and the claims of long descent of every sovereign in Europe shrivel into absurdity beside the magnificent antiquity of this potentate.”
Photographic portrait of an older Bisland — Source: courtesy of Sara Bartholomew.
Bisland was a working writer right up until the very end of her life. In 1927, at the age of sixty-five, she published her final essay collection, entitled The Truth About Men and Other Matters. In it she considered relations between the sexes (in the title essay she observed, “The record of the race, hitherto accepted as the truth about ourselves, has been the story of facts and conditions as the male saw them — or wished to see them. . . . No secret has been so well-kept as the secret of what women have thought about life”), country living, travels in Japan; much of the book, though, was about growing gracefully old. In an essay called “Toward Sunset” Bisland observed, “That old age may be agreeable to others and tolerable to itself no other equipment is so necessary as a vigorous sense of humour.” But old age itself, she was quick to point out, “is not an amusing episode.”
Firstly, because one suffers from being forced to dwell in a house steadily falling to decay; a trial to the housekeeper, arousing a sense of some innate incompetence that the beams of the building should sag, doors open difficultly, windows dim with the dust of time, the outer complexion of the house grow streaked and grey with the weathering of many seasons. There is a certain desperation in the realization that no repairs are possible. . . . one braces one’s self to accept courageously the wrongs of time; to wear the lichens and mosses with silent gallantry.
Elizabeth Bisland died on January 6, 1929, at the age of sixty-seven. Today, all of her books are out of print, but she deserves to be better remembered than she is — for the gorgeousness of her prose, of course, and the clear-sightedness of her perspective on the condition of women, but also as someone who chose to turn away from the culture of celebrity just as it was dawning. Bisland never breached the promise she made to herself at the end of the race around the world: to conduct the rest of her life in such a way that no journalist would ever again see fit to put her name in a headline.
PHOTO OF THE DAY OVER 500 VISITORS AT THE KIOSK TODAY!
CREDITS
Public Domain Review
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.
Three works by sculptor John Chamberlain make their U.S. debut at
Rockefeller Center
6SQFT
Thursday, April 17, 2025
ISSUE #1427
All photos courtesy of Tishman Speyer
Large-scale sculptures by the late American artist John Chamberlain are making their first United States appearance at Rockefeller Center. On view from April 16 through May 29, “Chamberlain Goes Outdoors at Rockefeller Center” showcases three sculptures by Chamberlain, who was best known for his distinctive works made of scrap metal and aluminium foil. Free and open to the public, the installation offers a rare opportunity to experience one of Chamberlain’s final bodies of work.
Chamberlain, who passed away in 2011, created sculptures with crushed automobile steel, bringing the “Abstract Expressionist style into three-dimensional forms,” a press release reads. He also experimented with other mediums, including paintings with sprayed automobile paint and sculptures made of urethane foam.
By the 1970s, Chamberlain began creating large sculptures using heavy-gauge aluminium foil, shaped by kicking, punching, and even driving his car into the works. Later, he started crafting miniature sculptures from aluminium foil, which he later transposed into monumental sculptures in 2007.
Presented by Mnuchin Gallery, the “Chamberlain Goes Outdoors at Rockefeller Center” follows successful exhibitions in Amsterdam, Scotland, and London.
The featured works include “FIDDLERSFORTUNE (Pink)” (2010), “RITZFROLIC (Green)” (2008), and “BALMYWISECRACK (Copper)” (2010), the latter of which will be displayed publicly for the first time.
“We are delighted to introduce Chamberlain’s monumental ‘Foil’ works to New Yorkers against the iconic backdrop of Rockefeller Center,” Alexandra Fairweather, director of the John Chamberlain estate and stepdaughter of the late artist.
“Not since 2012, when his career was celebrated with a retrospective at the Guggenheim and a presentation of additional ‘Foils’ at the Seagram building, has there been such a significant public presentation of Chamberlain’s work in the city, and we could not have asked for a better opening date than his birthday, April 16. In tandem with the release of ‘Living with Chamberlain,’ our family aims to celebrate the legacy of the artistic visionary by engaging a new generation of collectors and art enthusiasts.”
Christie’s will also present “John Chamberlain: Foil & Form” through April 27, a curated selling exhibition featuring 11 works by the sculptor across Rockefeller Center. Free to the public, the exhibition spans different eras of Chamberlain’s career, from the 1980s to the 2000s, and includes seven small-scale “Foils,” two “Tonks,” and three tabletop sculptures, all on view at its headquarters at 20 Rockefeller Plaza.
According to Christie’s, the works together form a survey of the themes and ideas that shaped Chamberlain’s six-decade career, highlighting his signature blend of technical mastery, dynamic expression, and playful whimsy. The auction house will also launch a private sale starting on April 17.
Additionally, bookseller McNally Jackson will offer Assouline’s 280-page publication, “Living with Chamberlain,” at its Rockefeller Center location. The book presents a multifaceted look at what it means to share space with Chamberlain’s work, featuring interviews with collectors as well as personal and professional contacts of the late sculptor.
PHOTO OF THE DAY
Outside 455 Main Street
CREDITS
All photos courtesy of Tishman Speyer
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.
6 NYC Sites Connected to the Titanic Disaster of 1912
Untapped New York
Nicole Saraniero
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
ISSUE #1426
Just four days into its maiden voyage from Southhampton, England to New York City, the RMS Titanic, the “unsinkable ship,” hit an iceberg. The tragic sinking that followed, taking place over the final hours of April 14th into the early morning of April 15th, resulted in the loss of over 1,500 lives. While most of the passengers who set out for New York City didn’t make it to their final destination, just over 700 survivors eventually did make it to Manhattan.
New York City is inextricably linked to the infamous story of the Titanic and contains physical remnants of the incident. More than 110 years after the disaster, here are present-day sites that connect New York City to the history of the Titanic:
The shoreline of Manhattan was the intended destination for the Titanic‘sdoomed Atlantic crossing. The ship, run by the White Star Line, set sail from England and headed toward Pier 59 at Manhattan’s Chelsea Piers. In the 19th century, the Cunard and White Star Lines were the most popular ocean liner operators. The RMSCarpathia, run by the Cunard Line, had set sail from Manhattan just a few days before April 14th and was headed to Europe. On the fateful night of April 14th, it received the Titanic’s distress call. After retrieving over 700 survivors from the frigid icy waters of the Atlantic, the Carpathia reversed course and headed back to New York City.
On April 18th, the Carpathia did make a quick stop at Pier 59 to drop off the Titanic’s lifeboats, before docking at Pier 54 to let off its passengers. While the original pier building that once stood there was destroyed in 1991, a metal frame of the facade still remains to this day. You can even make out the words “Cunard White Star,” a remnant of when the two companies merged in the 1930s.
Now, the metal frame serves as an entryway to the newly constructed Pier 55 park, Little Island. Pier 54 had a bit of an unlucky streak. Just three years after the sinking of the Titanic, the Pier served as the starting point for the RMS Lusitania. Five days later, the ship bound for Liverpool was sunk by torpedoes from nearby German U-boats just off the coast of Ireland.
Photo courtesy The Jane Hotel
The Jane Hotel, located at 113-119 Jane Street, was originally built in 1907-08 as the American Seamen’s Friend Society Sailors’ Home and Institute. The purpose of this facility was to welcome sailors arriving at the piers on the Hudson River and offer them an alternative place of respite instead of the seedy waterfront dives, saloons, and boardinghouses available. The Institute comprised a hotel, a home for indigent sailors, and amenities such as a swimming pool, a bowling alley, a concert hall, a library, a chapel, and billiard rooms. In April 1912, the Institute housed a special group of guests, survivors of the Titanic disaster.
After the survivors arrived at Pier 54, many different charitable organizations stepped in to help care for and house the survivors who didn’t have family in New York to take care of them. Crewmembers of the ship were given shelter, food, and clothing at the Sailors’ Home and Institute. They also received money from a collection that was drawn to help cover their lost wages. Four days later, the Institute held a memorial service for those lost in the tragedy. The building was run as a charitable facility for sailors until the 1940s, when it came under private ownership. Today, it is The Jane Hotel, a popular nightlife destination and hotel with budget-friendly rooms that still hold onto a nautical flair.
While crewmen went to the American Seamen’s Friend Society Sailors’ Home and Institute women from steerage were welcomed at the Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary for the Protection of Irish Immigrant Girls at 7 State Street, now called Our Lady of the Rosary Parish and the Shrine of St. Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton. The Mission was founded by Charlotte Grace O’Brien and housed inside the former James Watson House. It served as a way station for young immigrant girls.
Many of the women in steerage on the Titanic were Irish immigrants. At the mission, the women were entertained with music to help lift their spirits. The thirty survivors housed the Mission at were also given $25 each from a collection for their benefit.
One of the most well-known connections to the Titanic disaster in New York City is the Titanic Memorial Lighthouse at the corner of Fulton and Pearl Streets in the South Street Seaport. The lighthouse originally stood atop the roof of the Seamen’s Church Institute at the corner of South Street and Coenties Slip (now Vietnam Veterans Plaza). It was always intended to be a memorial to the 1,500 lives lost in the tragic sinking of the RMS Titanic.
The landlocked lighthouse was designed by Warren & Wetmore (architects of Grand Central Terminal) and crowd-funded by New Yorkers from all classes. It was dedicated on April 15, 1913, one year after the sinking. What makes this landlocked lighthouse unique is the time ball on top which dropped every day at noon from 1913 until 1967. The lighthouse was last restored in 1976, but a new effort will see the memorial restored in the near future.
The offices at 5-11 Broadway were home to a variety of maritime businesses, including the White Star Line, the maritime company that owned the Titanic. Inside the grand Hellenic Renaissance-style building were offices for the American Line, the American Scantic Line, and other shipping businesses and firms, as well as the Merchant Marine and the Navy. Constructed between 1895 and 1898, its interior columns were reportedly made of ship masts. The landmark is now the Bowling Green Offices.
On April 15th, as news broke of the Titanic’s sinking, concerned family members of people on board crowded the entrances to the office building, hoping to hear news of their loved ones. There was a similar scene at the White Star offices in London, where the New York Times reported officials posted a list of names of known survivor
Many of the passengers on the ship were from wealthy and notable New York families such as the Astors. Henry Clay Frick, J.P. Morgan, and George Washington Vanderbilt had tickets but didn’t sail. Some of the more well-to-do families of victims lost in the sinking erected elaborate memorials across New York City. One such memorial can be found at Straus Park. There, visitors will find a memorial by sculptor Augustus Lukeman and architect Evarts Tracy dedicated to the memory of Isidor and his wife Ida Straus.
The memorial features the reclining figure of a mourning woman over a fountain and the inscription, “In memory of Isidor and Ida Straus who were lost at sea in the Titanic disaster April 15, 1912, Lovely and pleasant were they in their lives and in their death they were not divided.” Originally from Germany, the Strau family moved to America in 1854. In 1888, brothers Isidor and Nathan became owners of R.H. Macy & Co. and opened the world’s largest department store at Herald Square. Other memorials to victims can be found at Grace Church on West 10th Street and Broadway where there is a memorial to Edith Corse Evans, in Central Park at 91st Street and 5th Avenue where there is a memorial to journalist William T. Stead, and at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine where a window is dedicated to John Jacob Astor IV.
PHOTO OF THE DAY
Remembering MOMO, the Coler “Healing Hound” Jovemay Santos and Momo celebrate holiday at Coler. Momo passed from a long illness last week. She was dearly loved by all at Coler and will be missed for her gentleness.
CREDITS
Untapped New York
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.
REMOVAL OF GLASS PANELS AT 540 MAIN STREET REVEAL A RAW SITE & DESTRUCTION OF A LANDMARK
Monday, April 14, 2025 ISSUE #1424
The removal of the symbolic glass panels in front of 540 Main Street was started last week. The careless maintenance of the structure was an excuse to remove it by C&C Management, typical of the actions of a management that is using removal of the panels instead of keeping up to their responsibilities to maintain the structure.
The vast gap with the raw walls hangs over the new open to the skies area.
There is no curb between 540 and the street, with a curb system now has to be planned.
Now a vast open space will lead to jay-walking before the 540/Chapel crosswalk.
TIME TO PRESERVE THE NORTH GLASS PARTITION BETWEEN 560 & 580 MAIN STREET
Paint the metal and wash the windows!!
This memorial to children lost was started by Doryne Isley, Manager who cared for the community and protected our sites. Her successors seemed to be only here for the revenue.
PHOTOS OF THE DAY
Original rendering by Jose Luis Sert for Main Street, 1969-1975
CREDIT
Judith Berdy
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.
World-renowned Black opera singer Marian Anderson (1897 – 1993) got her first big break after winning a 1925 singing competition sponsored by the New York Philharmonic. She performed at the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan in 1955, becoming the first Black artist to do so. Throughout her career, Anderson performed all over the world while also lending her talent to the struggle against racial injustice. The granddaughter of Black people once enslaved in Virginia, she sang at the March on Washington in 1963 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom that same year.
Back in April 1939 however, Anderson was denied access to auditoriums in Washington, DC, and instead performed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Anderson, a contralto, had been invited to sing at the nation’s capital as part of a concert series hosted by Howard University. Because she was already well known at the time, having spent years touring in Europe and the U.S., the university tried to book the Daughters of the American Revolution’s (DAR) Constitution Hall, the city’s largest indoor auditorium for her performance.
The facility had opened in 1929, but in 1932 the DAR had adopted a rule excluding African American musicians from performing there in response to complaints by some members against “mixed seating.” They refused to let Anderson perform in the space.
Eleanor Roosevelt, who was first lady at the time and a DAR member, resigned from the organization in protest. They still refused to allow Anderson to perform.
In her letter to the DAR, Roosevelt wrote, “I am in complete disagreement with the attitude taken in refusing Constitution Hall to a great artist… You had an opportunity to lead in an enlightened way and it seems to me that your organization has failed.”
Anderson then asked to use one of the local white public school’s auditoriums, but the D.C. Board of Education denied her request as well.
Because no other indoor venues in the city could or would accommodate Anderson’s performance, her manager Sol Hurok and Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP, with the support of Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt, arranged with then Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to allow her to perform on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
(No African-American has ever been appointed Secretary of the Interior; Gale Norton, the first women to serve in that role was appointed by by President George W. Bush and served form 2001 to 2006).
Anderson performed at the Memorial on Easter Sunday, April 9, dressed in a winter coat against the cold temperatures and standing on a makeshift stage.
A crowd of over 75,000 people attended the event, and its believed that millions more listened over the radio. Anderson opened her performance with “America (My Country, ‘Tis of Thee),” written in 1831.
After Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial concert, she subsequently sang at Constitution Hall on a number of occasions, starting with a concert to aid World War Two relief in January 1943 attended by Eleanor Roosevelt.
The DAR officially changed its “white performers only” policy in 1952, but the fight to integrate the DAR didn’t end there however.
The organization, along with the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Sons of the American Revolution, were all formed as all-white organizations in the late 19th century.
Almost 100 years later, in 1977, Karen Batchelor Farmer (now Karen Batchelor) from Detroit, was admitted to a chapter in Michigan as the first known DAR African American member.
In 1984 however, Lena Santos Ferguson was denied membership in the Washington DC DAR chapter because she was black.
Ferguson’s father Oviedo Santos was born in Cape Verde and came to the United States as a young boy. He worked on the docks at the Erie Lackawanna Railroad Station in Hoboken, NJ, and ran a coal barge in New York Harbor. The Santos’ had eight children and raised more than 40 foster children.
Lena Furgeson’s mother’s parents were Alphonso Gay, a white Maine sea captain who sailed coastal schooners, and Rosa King Gay, a black woman of Indigenous heritage. Alphonso Gay lost his life at the Battle of Cold Spring Harbor, Virginia during the Civil War.
His ancestors served during the Revolutionary War (and also helped settle towns in Massachusetts and Maine as early as 1630), thus making Furgeson eligible for membership.
Sarah M. King, the President General of the DAR at the time, told The Washington Post that DAR’s chapters have autonomy in determining members, saying “Being black is not the only reason why some people have not been accepted into chapters. There are other reasons: divorce, spite, neighbors’ dislike. I would say being black is very far down the line… There are a lot of people who are troublemakers. You wouldn’t want them in there because they could cause some problems.”
King later qualified her comments, saying that Ferguson should have been admitted, and that her application had been handled “inappropriately”.
When Furgeson was finally admitted to membership in 1984, the DAR changed its bylaws to bar discrimination “on the basis of race or creed.” In addition, King announced a resolution to recognize “the heroic contributions of black patriots in the American Revolution.”
Since that time, the DAR has supported a project to identify African Americans, Native Americans, and individuals of mixed race who were patriots during the American Revolution.
In 2018, Reisha Raney became the first black woman elected to serve as a DAR state officer in Maryland. In 2019, Wilhelmena Rhodes Kelly became the first African American elected to the DAR National Board of Management when she was installed as New York State Regent.
In June 2023, at the 132nd DAR Continental Congress, the organization voted to add an amendment to their bylaws that states the chapters “may not discriminate against an eligible applicant based on race, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.”
Colonel Teagan Livingston, a transgender woman and retired United States Air Force officer, joined the Daughters of the American Revolution in New Jersey in 2022.
Today, according to their website, “the Daughters of the American Revolution proudly practices a non-discrimination policy and encourages and celebrates diversity in our organization.”
In a statement posted to a webpage devoted to the barring of Anderson the DAR states “The National Society Daughters of the American Revolution deeply regrets that it did not give Marian Anderson the opportunity to perform her 1939 Easter concert in Constitution Hall, but today we join all Americans in grateful recognition that her historic performance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial was a pivotal point in the struggle for racial equality.”
DAR members participate in a variety of veteran and citizenship-oriented projects, including more than 200,000 volunteer hours annually to veterans in U.S. Veterans Administration hospitals and non-VA facilities; offering support to America’s service personnel in current conflicts abroad through care packages, phone cards and other needed items; sponsoring programs promoting the Constitution; participating in naturalization ceremonies; and marking and caring for veterans graves.
If you are a woman and think you’re related to someone who served in or supported the American Revolution, visit the DAR website to learn more about membership.
PHOTOS OF THE DAY
The hall between Island Houses 555 an 575 Main Street is now decorated in large reproduction photographs of the Island. In a project between the RIHS and Island House a group of historic photos now decorate the hallway.
CREDITS
Illustrations, from above: A kodachrome photograph of Marian Anderson taken January 14, 1940 by Carl Van Vechten, cropped (Yale University Library); Anderson performing at the Lincoln Memorial, April 9, 1939 (National Archives); and DAR Constitution Hall (courtesy DAR).
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.
Illustration from the “Projected Trends” section of Hugh Ferriss’ The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929) — Source.
In a dramatic, monochrome rendering in ink and charcoal, a fractal of pyramids and steps regenerates at different scales and angles. Vertiginous towers, the tallest outgrowing the frame, ascend from a base of tiered structures — ziggurats — rising in regular terraces. The roofs of lower blocks are dotted with miniscule trees that echo the larger, manmade shapes around them. They are the only living things visible at this scale, but an accompanying text tells us that this skyline is populated with people, citizens who enjoy the city’s elaborate roof gardens, sun porches, and open-air swimming pools.1
This was how Hugh Ferriss imagined the future of urbanism in his treatise Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929). Born in St. Louis in 1899, Ferris trained as an architect and forged a career for himself in a role for which he invented his own job title: “architectural delineator”, bringing other architects’ projects to life on paper. His portfolio, now held by the Avery Art and Architecture Library at Columbia University, speaks to his proximity to numerous major works of modern architecture and engineering, with renderings of Rockefeller Center, Works Progress Administration infrastructure projects, World’s Fairs, United Nations buildings, and various mysterious, unnamed structures of his own imagination, visions swimming up to us through Ferriss’ dramatic wash of line and shadow.2
Metropolis is a portfolio of Ferriss’ images annotated with reflections on the work he had participated in and the architectural changes he had witnessed during recent decades, when American cities, especially his adopted home of New York, exploded upward. He made modest trend forecasts for the near future: glass, he predicted, would be huge (true); hydroplanes would be everywhere (sadly not). In the final, most memorable section of the book, he sketched a distant City of Tomorrow. This city would be planned along rational lines to maximize human health and spiritual happiness through a three-part plan with districts for art, science, and business, each centered on aesthetically appropriate superblocks.3
In the early twentieth century, architects turned to a newly discovered past to craft novel visions of the future: the ancient history of Mesopotamia. Eva Miller traces how both the mythology of Babel and reconstructions of stepped-pyramid forms influenced skyscraper design, speculative cinema in the 1910s and 20s, and, above all else, the retrofuturist dreams of Hugh Ferriss, architectural delineator extraordinaire.
“The Art Center” from Hugh Ferriss’ The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929) — Source.“The Business Center” from Hugh Ferriss’ The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929) — Source.
Ferriss’ dramatic depictions of towering skyscrapers and lofty perspectives became, as media scholar Eric Gordon argues, the means by which “the image of the American urban future in the popular imagination took shape”.4 His futurism anticipated and influenced Norman Bel Geddes, as he created his Futurama for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the Walt Disney Company’s Tomorrowland, TV’s The Jetsons, and numerous other prognostications of the rational planned city, the elevated expressway, and the heliport.5
Yet Ferriss’ forward-looking vision also repeatedly evoked the ancient past. The pyramid skyscraper that he promoted was, in his own description, a “modern ziggurat”, the monumental architectural form of ancient Mesopotamian cities. Centered in modern-day Iraq, Assyria and Babylon were geopolitical superpowers of the first millennium BCE, empires discussed in both biblical and classical traditions which had once been considered lost to the desolating force of time. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the crumbled remains of ziggurat towers had inspired speculative reconstructions. By the 1920s, German excavations had exposed the well-preserved urban fabric of Babylon’s sixth-century BCE city walls and gates, parts of which were also partially reconstructed in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, looking rather Art Nouveau. Meanwhile, the nearby city of Ur was being excavated by thousands of workers in digs sponsored by the British Museum and the Penn Museum, turning up mass burials of gold-bedecked bodies. These new discoveries stirred those who read about them in the popular press to imagine an antiquity that was also somehow strangely modern: the women’s fashion in the Ur burials led to press jokes about these dead bodies as traces of the original flappers.6
Learning from the Past
At the time of Ferriss’ Metropolis, a question had bedeviled modern architects for decades: what could be learned from the traditions of the past? Were the great buildings of antiquity, particularly of classical Greece and Rome, eternal blueprints, a standard never to be bettered? Architectural training programs in the US during the early twentieth century suggested this was the case. But increasing numbers of builders worried that the adulation of the past produced dead, stagnant structures, irrelevant to the modern world. Wherever they came down on this matter (and there was a wide middle ground), numerous commentators with different aesthetic preferences could agree on damning random and eclectic historical borrowing — even if they might disagree on what constituted an example of that tendency.
Perhaps no writer treated this historicizing, classicizing eclecticism with more vitriol than the perpetually worked-up Ayn Rand. Her architectural-philosophical melodrama The Fountainhead, published in 1943 but set during the years that Ferriss was writing, was an insightful, if unsubtle, rant against these trends. She castigated architects who “competed on who could steal best, from the oldest source and from the most sources at once”, resulting in “shingled post offices with Doric porticos, brick mansions with iron pediments, lofts made of twelve Parthenons piled on top of one another.” She imagined a benighted public who celebrated a skyscraper which “offered so many columns, pediments, friezes, tripods, gladiators, urns and volutes that it looked as if it had not been built of white marble, but squeezed out of a pastry tube.”7
Ferriss was against this kind of inauthenticity too, advocating that modern buildings must follow the diktat of America’s great modernist innovator Louis Sullivan: form ever follows function. Architects of the future, Ferriss assures us, “will dismiss, as sentimentality, the notion that architectural beauty was once and for all delivered to the builders of ancient times. The employment of modern construction to support what are little more than classic or medieval stage sets, they will look upon as, at its most harmless, a minor theatrical art, but no longer as being Architecture”.8 He mocked this kind of “stage set” architecture in an illustration of the “Reversion to Past Styles” for Metropolis. He bemoaned this tendency’s persistence “despite the logical, and sometimes impassioned, pleas of leaders in modern design.” Still, stacks of “the same conventional forms” were appearing, and Ferriss believed it was his “duty to show what would happen if architects continued piling Parthenons upon skyscrapers!”9
THE ABOVE IS A PART OF A LONGER ESSAY ON FERRIS AND THE ZIGGURAT MOVEMENT. FOR THE CONTINUATION SEE: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/modern-babylon-ziggurat-skyscrapers-and-hugh-ferriss-retrofuturism/?utm_source=newsletter
At the time of Ferriss’ Metropolis, a question had bedeviled modern architects for decades: what could be learned from the traditions of the past? Were the great buildings of antiquity, particularly of classical Greece and Rome, eternal blueprints, a standard never to be bettered? Architectural training programs in the US during the early twentieth century suggested this was the case. But increasing numbers of builders worried that the adulation of the past produced dead, stagnant structures, irrelevant to the modern world. Wherever they came down on this matter (and there was a wide middle ground), numerous commentators with different aesthetic preferences could agree on damning random and eclectic historical borrowing — even if they might disagree on what constituted an example of that tendency.
Perhaps no writer treated this historicizing, classicizing eclecticism with more vitriol than the perpetually worked-up Ayn Rand. Her architectural-philosophical melodrama The Fountainhead, published in 1943 but set during the years that Ferriss was writing, was an insightful, if unsubtle, rant against these trends. She castigated architects who “competed on who could steal best, from the oldest source and from the most sources at once”, resulting in “shingled post offices with Doric porticos, brick mansions with iron pediments, lofts made of twelve Parthenons piled on top of one another.” She imagined a benighted public who celebrated a skyscraper which “offered so many columns, pediments, friezes, tripods, gladiators, urns and volutes that it looked as if it had not been built of white marble, but squeezed out of a pastry tube.”7
Ferriss was against this kind of inauthenticity too, advocating that modern buildings must follow the diktat of America’s great modernist innovator Louis Sullivan: form ever follows function. Architects of the future, Ferriss assures us, “will dismiss, as sentimentality, the notion that architectural beauty was once and for all delivered to the builders of ancient times. The employment of modern construction to support what are little more than classic or medieval stage sets, they will look upon as, at its most harmless, a minor theatrical art, but no longer as being Architecture”.8 He mocked this kind of “stage set” architecture in an illustration of the “Reversion to Past Styles” for Metropolis. He bemoaned this tendency’s persistence “despite the logical, and sometimes impassioned, pleas of leaders in modern design.” Still, stacks of “the same conventional forms” were appearing, and Ferriss believed it was his “duty to show what would happen if architects continued piling Parthenons upon skyscrapers!”9
THE ABOVE IS A PART OF A LONGER ESSAY ON FERRIS AND THE ZIGGURAT MOVEMENT. FOR THE CONTINUATION SEE: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/modern-babylon-ziggurat-skyscrapers-and-hugh-ferriss-retrofuturism/?utm_source=newsletter
PHOTOS OF THE DAY
THE DEMOLITION OF THE SYMBOLIC GLASS ATRIUM OF THE 540 EASTWOOD BUILDING C&C MANAGEMENT IS DESTROYING THE SYMBOLIC FACADE WITH NO COMMENT OR INPUT FROM THE PRESEVATION WORLD OR THE COMMUNITY.
CREDITS
Eva Miller is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL History whose research explores how modern scholars and artists have conceived of the ancient past and theorized the importance of “origins”. She is the author of Early Civilization and the American Modern: Images of Middle Eastern Origins in the United States, 1893–1939 (UCL Press 2024) and editor (with G. Crouzet) of Finding Antiquity, Making the Modern Middle East: Archaeology, Empires, Nations (Bloomsbury 2025). Among other areas, she has worked on self-Orientalising Jewish art, cryptozoological investigations of living dinosaurs attested in ancient Babylonian artefacts, anthropological theories on the evolution of languages and writing, and the role of art in science museums. She originally trained as an Assyriologist, earning her doctorate from the University of Oxford in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.
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.
