Covered barges were once heavily employed in the New York port areas to lighter (i.e., load, transport, and offload) various non-bulk, perishable cargoes from and to ship or shore.
There is uncertainty regarding the evolution covered barges, but similar to other barge types by the late nineteenth century the covered lighter barge was predominantly scow hulled (flat-bottomed, with raking ends. Using either a stanchion or bulkhead hull system, the barge featured a one-story structure or shed covering most of the deck, with all cargo carried on deck.
Often barn sided, two large sliding doors opened port and starboard when cargo was handled over the gangway. A hatch at the margin of the roof allowed for vertical hoisting of goods when possible.
Vents positioned at each end of the shed (attached to large ice bins) provided refrigeration for perishable items. Filled with ice through hatches in the roof, the vents circulated cool air top and bottom. When necessary, a stove, installed in the center of the shed, circulated warm, dry air.
Some companies preferred centered penthouse cabins over the usual stern counterpart. The higher elevation permitted a 360-degree view of surroundings and, perhaps more importantly, wasted no cargo space.
Some covered barges featured hoisting gear. A single mast with booms rose above the center of the deck house. Part of the rooftop cabin accommodated a steam-, or later, oil-or gasoline-powered winch.
Many captains lived on board with their families; the size of the cabin varied from a shed to a family’s permanent residence. Besides providing extra security, night-time operations (towing, moving, loading, etc.) required the captain’s presence.
Of 208 un-rigged boats owned by one company in 1918, 89 housed families with children ages one through 10, 71 had captains and their wives, and 48 had captains living alone on the boat.
Living conditions on board no doubt varied, but general descriptions mention crowded, damp, foul-smelling rooms. “The general impression given is that of dirt and disorder,” one observer reported in 1918.
Some companies tried to accommodate their employees if possible, providing stoves, furniture, etc., while others provided nothing at all. One company (200 un-rigged boats) provided nothing for its employees.
As a vessel type, the wooden-hulled, covered barge is well documented; numerous plans exist, several examples along waterfronts have been extensively recorded.
Replaced in time by steel covered barges, the last wooden-hulled covered barges were built in the 1950s.
A barge variation, the A-frame crane barge was most likely adapted from mid-to late nineteenth-century shore-based lifting equipment such as the stiff leg. These towed cranes were employed in ship salvage, dock and pier construction, and repair and cargo transfers. The cranes and hoisting machinery are situated atop scow hulls.
Builders also developed several types of scows capable of dumping garbage and dredge spoil at sea, or depositing breakwater/shoreline extension fill. Of the types that were developed, including the hopper barge, the side-dumping scow, and the hinged scow, the hopper barge was the most common, possibly due to its functional design.
Plans of a 1927 six-pocket (hopper) dump scow (a hopper barge) show that instead of a raked bow and stern seen on a typical scow, the hopper barge has curved ends forming one-quarter or a circle from the keel to deck.
Another dump scow type was the side-dump scow. Similar in hull configuration to the basic scow, it had bulkheads similar to those of a rock scow. It differed from both in that its deck was not level, but rather sloped downward 45 degrees on either side of the longitudinal centerline between the end bulkheads.
This sloped deck was divided into sections by additional transverse bulkheads, with the “cargo” held in place and later released by bay doors at the base of the sloped deck.
The Derrick or Stick Lighter
Open-decked derrick lighters were employed in New York port areas to lighter (i.e., load, transport, and offload) various cargoes from and to ship or shore. Early stick lighters, as they became popularly known, likely because of prominent timber masts and cargo booms, had boat-shaped hulls, pointed bows, and elliptical sterns.
There is uncertainty regarding an association between this configuration and lighters or sailing craft, but by the late nineteenth century the derrick lighters were predominantly scow hulled.
We do know that the advent of the steam tow was a significant impetus in the use, acceptance, and profusion of this vessel type, the combination of the steam tow and barges making the sailing lighter uneconomical and thus contributing to its demise.
The employment of the scow hull for this vessel type, as seen on so many of the later barges and work platforms, may have been associated with the economic practicality in building this type of hull (i.e., less boat-building craftsmanship, fewer curved timbers), as well as its proven functional aspects.
The derrick lighter had a single sturdy timber mast stepped in one of two locations, either in the center of the deck or at the stern just in front of a small crew cabin. If the mast rested aft, only one cargo boom pointed forward. In the former case, there would be two cargo booms, one pointing forward and one pointing aft.
The cargo booms were usually rigged like a sailing ship’s fixed gaff in the central mast configuration. Fitted with wooden jaws to allow lateral swinging, and held at a constant angle by fixed wire topping lifts, they would be positioned about three-quarters of the way up the mast.
The masts measured around 50 feet in height. In the central mast arrangement, the boat had two lighter masts at the bow and stern just forward of the cabin. Three masts around 20 feet high had sheaves mounted near their tops for lines used in hoisting the ends of a tarpaulin used in the protection of cargo.
In 1985, Norman Brouwer recorded the intact derrick lighter L.V.R.R. No. 462, grounded at Edgewater, New Jersey. The boat, built at Mariner’s Harbor, Staten Island in 1926, measured 104.5 feet in length, 32 feet in breadth, 7.8 feet depth of hull.
A large winch house stood on deck aft, with mast and boom positioned directly in front of the house. The largest openings in the deck, small rectangular hatches, provided access and ventilation.
A system of longitudinal bulkheads and timber pillars linked by crossed diagonal timber braces supported the deck. The derrick barge had more diagonal braces at the side rather than natural knees. A continuous row of windows spanned the front of the deck house.
The cabin measured 6 feet 2 inches across the windows, 14 feet 9 inches at the side of the deckhouse ande featured tongue-and-groove details.
Later derrick lighters were fitted with steel A-frames and steel booms in place of their wooden counterparts. The wooden scow hull was eventually replaced with a steel barge hull, retaining its steel A-fame.
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Historical styles dominated 19th-century architecture in the United States. American architecture, like the country itself, was young and wanted to connect to European historical styles that brought sophistication and cultural status to the new edifices of the United States. American vernacular architecture was made of wood—and to many, American architecture was anything but cosmopolitan. Among the most popular styles was the Classical revival which reinterpreted the forms of Greek and Roman architecture. The adaptation of Egyptian architecture, especially obelisks, as funerary markers and memorials was also widespread. Americans were used to seeing banks and financial buildings modeled on the ancient Parthenon, libraries that recalled the Pantheon, or an obelisk celebrating the legacy of a president, like George Washington.
There was also a limited revival of the architecture of the ancient Near East, which many scholars today call ancient Western Asia. In late 19th-century and early 20th-century New York City, the use of historical styles was often about finding a way to stand out from the crowd, to distinguish one’s building, business, or restaurant. These styles were exotic and different. The reception—the reinterpretation and adaptation—of ancient Assyria and ancient Western Asia enjoyed a brief moment of popularity in New York City, as we can see in four such buildings.
In the early 20th century, newly minted millionaires flocked to expensive, late-night establishments known as Lobster Palaces, where lobster and champagne were served after the theater. These restaurants competed with each other for deep-pocketed clients by creating over-the-top interiors.
One of these Lobster Palaces known as Café de l’Opéra (at Broadway and Forty-Second Street) was remodeled in 1909. Its new décor reinterpreted and combined designs, art, and architecture from Assyria, Babylon, and Achaemenid Persian in one large mash-up of motifs from ancient Western Asia. According to The Architects’ and Builders’ Magazine, “Khorsbad (sic) or Perseopolis (sic) or an ancient Persian Tomb” inspired the main dining room which had three stories of seating around a central court with a fountain, whose central feature was a Mesopotamian ziggurat topped with an illuminated orb, tucked inside a pavilion supported by black marble columns. The capitals of these columns, rather than being decorated with Assyrian motifs, were actually replicas of the Achaemenid Persian bull capitals from the audience hall (apadana) of the palace of Darius I at Susa.
Postcard of the Grand Staircase, Café de l’Opéra (photo: author)
Painted lions, a central motif in the palaces of ancient Iraq and Iran, adorned the balcony landing. The monumental staircase was carpeted and flanked by pairs of gilded lions and colossal lamassuthat rose to the balconies and upper floors, which TheNew York Times reported “was modeled after the famous staircase in the Temple of Persepolis.” A reproduction of the 1891 painting The Fall of Babylon by the French painter Georges Rochegrosse covered the lofty side wall of the main dining room. There was little interest in archaeological accuracy—rather the appeal of these exotic motifs was that they were historical and melodramatic. These design choices were also full of implied debauchery, which was very appropriate considering that Lobster Palaces were often establishments where men took their mistresses while their wives were tucked up at home on Long Island or the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
These interiors played directly into many of the American and European stereotypical views of the Middle East or Western Asia as exotic, sensual, and sexualized. They embodied the inaccurate but powerful Oriental fantasies that Americans and Europeans created in their art and literature starting in the 19th century. While these motifs were highly original, the service at Café de l’Opéra was subpar (the food often arrived cold) and the dress was too formal. It soon went out of business despite its unique décor.
The ziggurat, the stepped pyramid of ancient Western Asia, was a natural inspiration for New York’s skyscrapers. In his 1929 book The Metropolis of Tomorrow, the delineator and architectural illustrator Hugh Ferris noted the ziggurat (which he identified as Assyrian) embodied the New York zoning law of 1916. This law required that buildings have setbacks to allow light and air to circulate and reach the ground level. As a result, skyscrapers built in a step-pyramid style were incredibly popular. Ferris’s confusion suggests that archaeological accuracy and knowledge was not as important as in other receptions of ancient Assyrian art and architecture. That said, modern ziggurats dotted New York City’s skyline
130 West 30th Street (1927–28)
Setbacks and ziggurat shape at 130 West 30th Street, New York (photo: author)
Between 1927 and 1928, Cass Gilbert was hired to design a loft building at 130 West 30th Street. While commercial lofts were designed with utility in mind, their exterior aesthetics could help distinguish them from other buildings. Hiring Cass Gilbert, who had designed the famous Woolworth Building and countless other masterpieces, was another way for the developer to attract tenants in the competitive landscape of Manhattan’s garment district. One Hundred Thirty West 30th Street had architectural setbacks, as required by the 1916 zoning law, which gave the building a ziggurat-like appearance. Glazed terracotta friezes with mythical Neo-Hittite griffins and Syro-Hittite sphinxes decorated the building’s six setbacks. Lamashtu, a fearsome demon in ancient Mesopotamia, stood guard at some of the corners. These polychrome tiles and the setbacks differentiated the top of this building from its surroundings.
Main Entrance, 130 West 30th Street, New York (photo: author)
Over both the front and service entrances was the same terracotta relief of a hunting scene, with two male figures in a chariot shooting arrows at deer. The source for this relief is not those from the North-West palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, but rather, they are based on Neo-Hittite reliefs. The Louvre has a nearly identical scene from the kingdom of Milid (Malatya) in southeastern Anatolia and northern Syria dating from 1200 B.C.E. The ziggurat setbacks and Neo-Hittite sphinxes and griffins were unique in New York’s architectural landscape. The abstract aesthetic of the two-toned terracotta tiles and the building’s clean lines reflect the aesthetics of Art Deco, the artistic style that was emerging in the 1920s. Western Asian, Egyptian, and Minoan styles were already influencing Art Deco motifs and designs. The building feels undeniably more modern than skyscrapers that used historical styles.
Fred French Building (1927)
Ancient Assyrian art was used to decorate two other prominent New York City buildings: the Fred French Building and the Pythian Temple. Again, Assyrian motifs were intended to distinguish these buildings rather than to be archaeologically accurate. Between 1925 and 1927, the property developer Fred French erected his headquarters at 45th Street and Fifth Avenue. The diverse artistic traditions of ancient Western Asia inspired the Fred French building’s interesting top and setbacks, as well as bright polychrome terracottas and the decoration of the two lobbies and street-level façades.
Fred French’s in-house architect, H. Douglas Ives, worked with the firm Sloan & Robertson on the skyscraper. They adapted “Assyrian or Chaldean forms of ornament” for the flat surfaces of the building. For his design, Ives referenced the polychrome Tower of the Seven Planets, another name for the Tower of Babel, and observed that setbacks would permit planted terraces, like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Ives called the style “Mesopotamian,” although this seems to have been a catch-all for the use of architectural and artistic forms from ancient West Asia.
Faience reliefs and setbacks, Fred F. French Building, New York (photo: Tony Hisgett, CC-BY-2.0)
Colored tiles, which always had an important place in the architecture of ancient Western Asia, figured prominently here. On the north and south façades of the building’s top, there are identical polychrome faience reliefs that center on rising suns, which symbolize progress, flanked by winged griffins, symbolizing watchfulness and integrity. Separated from the sun and griffins by two Corinthian columns are two golden beehives, each surrounded by five bees, which have symbolized thrift and industry since antiquity. The reliefs, with their glossy and polychrome finish, helped the Fred French building to stand out in New York’s Midtown skyline during the day. At night, the building’s crown was illuminated, adding to its prominence in the cityscape. The head of Mercury, the Roman god of commerce, appears on the building’s eastern and western sides.
The 5th Avenue Entrance, Fred F. French Building, New York (photo: Chris Sampson, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The building’s two lobbies and decorated façades are unique. The Fifth Avenue entrance featured lamassus and Pegasus (here mixing ancient Western Asian and Greek forms), as well as victory-like figures in the spandrels, that framed the door. The gilt-bronze doors are decorated with winged griffins, while Assyrian palmettes, lotus flowers, lions, chevron bands, merlons, winged bulls, and volutes adorned the Fifth Avenue lobby.Scaled-down double bull capitals inspired by the palace of Darius the Great in Susa were also included, as was a polychrome ceiling. The lobby and main entrance on 45th Street were similarly decorated.
The Pythian Temple (1927)
Designed by Thomas W. Lamb, the Pythian Temple (at 135 West 70th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues) is one of New York’s most original buildings and combines the artistic and architectural traditions of ancient Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt. Completed in 1927, the Pythian temple served as a lodge for the Knights of Pythias, a fraternal organization.
The main entrance is embellished with a golden inscription set against a black tile background and framed by two crowned asps, each with an ankh and two Egyptian-style vultures. Above the inscription there are polychrome terracotta tiles, evocative of Babylonian brickwork, and Egyptianizing plant motifs, where open and closed lotus leaves alternate. At the top, there was the inverted triangular, multi-color symbol of the Pythian Knights, flanked by two muscular griffins.
Entrance of the Pythian Temple, 135 West 70th Street, New York (photo: author)
Four massive columns flank the main entrance on each side. The capitals are composed of two bearded, male heads with headdresses that derive from male figures in ancient Assyrian sculptural reliefs. At the east and west ends of the building, there are pairs of lamassus. The building was converted into condominium apartments in 1982, the middle section of the building was completely remodeled and most of the details were removed. The upper third is divided into three levels with setbacks and draws heavily on Egyptian architectural and sculptural traditions. It includes four seated, polychrome statues of pharaohs based on the statues from the famous site of Abu Simbel, which Ramesses II erected in the mid-13th century B.C.E.
Architecture inspired by ancient Assyria and ancient Western Asia did not become wide-spread in New York or the United States. Rather in the first three decades of the 20th century, architects and patrons used exotic Assyrianizing and Neo-Hittite motifs and architecture strategically to help their skyscraper, restaurant, lodge, and a loft to stand out in New York’s competitive urban landscape.
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Lincoln Center Unveils Renderings for Western Side of Campus
I LOVE THE UPPER WEST SIDE
Tuesday, May 20, 2025
ISSUE #1453
Aerial view from Amsterdam Avenue looking east; visible is a new streetscape, gardens, and theater. Rendering by Brooklyn Digital Foundry.
It was about two years ago that Lincoln Center launched an initiative to make the Amsterdam Avenue side of its campus a bit more welcoming, and to “break down barriers, physical and otherwise, between Lincoln Center and local community and audiences.”
In March 2024, the performing arts organization announced it had hired designers for the job–Hood Design Studio, WEISS/MANFREDI, and Moody Nolan–who would soon “deliver a major revitalization, providing open space for New Yorkers and state-of-the-art performance areas for artists from across the globe.”
Now, Lincoln Center has released initial renderings of the campus in its future form, with construction set to begin next year.
One of the biggest changes will be the removal of the wall along Damrosch Park, which will be replaced by a series of open entrances to better connect the campus with its neighbors to the west. Sidewalk improvements and increased greenery will accompany these entrances, along with more benches and lighting.
View from Amsterdam Avenue looking into Damrosch Park; visible is new streetscape. Rendering by Brooklyn Digital Foundry.
“The new design eliminates the visual and physical barrier wall at Damrosch Park to create a more welcoming edge to the campus, to better serve close neighbors including residents of New York City Housing Authority campuses at Amsterdam Houses and Addition, students of Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, and the five high schools at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Educational Complex,” a press release states.
View of SE corner of Amsterdam Avenue and 65th Street looking at New York Public Library for the Performing Arts with seating area and mirror façade. Rendering by Brooklyn Digital Foundry.
Plans also include new park space and a new outdoor theater. The park will feature a lawn, tree groves, and a water feature. The space will be open for everyday use and will also equipped to host events and performances.
View from within Damrosch Park looking west; visible is new water feature, lawn, and trees. Rendering by Brooklyn Digital Foundry.
The new outdoor theater will have room to fit up to 2,000 people, will be surrounded by new landscaping, and will feature a bar and a shaded overlook with tiered seating. The design of the permanent structure will “bring audiences closer to performances and to allow for use of the park during shows,” the press release states.
View of amphitheater and audience area during performance looking southeast towards 62nd Street. Rendering by Brooklyn Digital Foundry.Aerial view of amphitheater and audience area during performance, looking east. Rendering by Brooklyn Digital Foundry.View of plaza area in front of amphitheater, looking northeast towards Josie Robertson Plaza. Rendering by Brooklyn Digital Foundry
The cost of this project will be about $335 million. About 65% of that funding is already in place, with major support from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation ($75 million), The Starr Foundation, and a $10 million contribution from New York State.
Lincoln Center says the project builds on recent efforts to make its campus more inclusive and accessible—like the renovation of David Geffen Hall and programming such as Summer for the City. They’re also planning a new NYCHA Neighbor Summer Pass to offer free performances to residents of nearby public housing.
The project is being developed alongside NYC Parks and the Department of Transportation. While Damrosch Park will stay a performance space, it’ll also gain new community features like shaded seating and misting areas for hot days.
More details are expected soon, including plans for lighting and art along the walkway that leads from Amsterdam Avenue to the 1 train.
Construction is slated to begin during spring 2026 and be complete by spring 2028.
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Looking south from the Great Lawn in Central Park, one can appreciate New York City’s transforming skyline: pencil-thin supertall skyscrapers, the product of creative air rights transfers and complex real estate negotiations. But despite all the change, there is one building that is still a prominent member of the skyline, albeit only 450 feet tall, Barbizon Plaza.
One of New York’s art deco gems, the Barbizon boasts an iconic gold top, crowned with what looks like the pipes of an organ shining against a backdrop of contemporary glass towers. But the tower’s current crown, a decent post-modern design, isn’t original and pales in comparison to its initial form.
Constructed between 1928 to 1930, the Barbizon Plaza featured a one-of-a-kind four-story glass atrium top, consisting of both structural glass tiles and hollow glass blocks. It was the first glass-pinnacled skyscraper, and the first building in the country to use glass blocks as a wall material. But it wasn’t just the glass that made it iconic but the lighting. Other extraordinary tops in town were illuminated by external floodlights but not the Barbizon. In this case, the light came from within – floodlights reflecting against glass mirrors that could change color. Indoors, the top was a fitness center and a solarium. Sun rays would filter in through the glass blocks during the day but at night the internal floodlight would filter out making the top a true, full-blown lantern that glowed like the moon.
“The Barbizon Plaza’s rooftop was evocative of a jewel-like garden folly set atop the New York City skyline. At a time when many architects built skyscrapers along Central Park with whimsical rooftops above the Park’s treetops, the Barbizon Plaza’s shimmering glass lantern stood out amongst the others. ” — Elizabeth Fagan,
Designed by Laurence Emmons, the Barbizon Plaza’s crowned top highlighted a building for New Yorkers meant for the spotlight. It was a hotel catered to artists and musicians. The building had soundproof rooms, auditoriums, art studios, and all the amenities they would need during their residencies. With Steinway HQ just a few steps away and Carnegie Hall up the street, this was the place to be. Throughout the years it also became a gathering point for homophile associations such as the Mattachine Society and today is part of the LGBTQ+ historic places of the city. But as Midtown Manhattan changed, so did the Barbizon. It lost its top in the 80s when Donald Trump bought the hotel and the building next door to develop condos. Initially, the plan was to demolish the whole thing and build a new tower facing the park but eventually, he realized it was more cost-effective to keep the current structure and renovate it. Trump put in charge his trusted architect Frank William who widened the windows and covered the iconic top in gold.
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The American Fine Arts Society building, home to the Art Students League, is a landmarked gem at 215 West 57th Street, its front doors swinging open at frequent and regular intervals, offering a glimpse of the teeming creative life that still hums inside. From its founding in 1875, the Art Students League has sought to explore and express ideas outside the artistic norms of the time, particularly the concepts emerging from the avant-garde movements in Paris and Munich.
Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe, Robert Rauschenberg, and Robert Smithson are just a few of the notable artists who were once students at the Arts Students League. The 1966 Landmarks Designation Report describes the society’s illustrious heritage glowingly: “The roster of former League students, members, and instructors…reads like a Who’s Who in American Art. The School has had a tremendous influence on art in this country. The membership lists are studded with names of the famous, representing every idiom of the arts.”
Today, over 5000 students a year take a wide range of affordable art classes at the League under the direction of world-class artists and teachers. We recently took a tour to learn more about the organization’s history and the secrets of its building on 57th Street.
Courtesy of the Art Students League
The Art Students League’s home at 215 W. 57th Street was designed by prolific architect Henry J. Hardenbergh, known in New York City for designing the Dakota Apartments, the first Waldorf hotel, the Plaza Hotel, and more. A landmarked historic district on the Upper East Side, the Hardenbergh/Rhinelander Historic District, bears his name and is one of the smallest historic districts in Manhattan.
The French Renaissance-inspired building combines an ornamented façade with a balanced (and nearly symmetrical) architectural design. It was built at a cost of $400,000, which would be equivalent to around $9 million in 2017 dollars, when adjusted for inflation. An article in the New Outlook contends that within the new building, “it may be pretty safely predicted the artistic spirit of New York will henceforth find its chief theatre.”
On the first floor of the Art Students League building is a tiny but well-stocked art supply store, a true hidden gem known primarily just to students and art insiders. There is no sign on the outside of the building to denote its existence. But despite its small footprint, the store is wildly successful. According to Ken Park, the former Director of Communications and Institutional Fundraising, “Art supply reps tell us that the League’s Art Supply Store sells more products per square foot than any other store they know. We carry more than a thousand kinds and colors of professional grade paint.”
There are several skeletons scattered through the Arts Students League building, available for observation and drawing. But a very special one is on the second floor, the skeleton of Mafalda Brasile Hicks, a former student of the League who died in March 2010. Before her death, Hicks expressed a desire to serve as a model for future classes and her family donated her skeleton to the Art Students League, the first-ever type of bequest to the school.
Hicks herself had a fascinating history – she was born in Newark, New Jersey and was a talented singer since she was a child, performing on live radio. She studied visual art at Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts and served in the Marine Corps during World War II, based in North Carolina where, according to an article in the Art Students League’s in-house magazine, she applied her talents “drawing maps and developing visual training aids. She also sang with the big band orchestras, entertaining military troops.” She took classes at the Arts Students League after the war
Half floors are one of our favorite things in old buildings – the Metropolitan Museum has some curious ones, and the Art Students League building has two half floors – Floor 2 ½, which hosts the library, and Floor 4 ½, which serves as storage. You can access the 2 ½ floor library through the stairwell or view it through an elevated window from the exhibition gallery.
On June 2nd, 1875, the Arts Students League was founded by a group of students and instructor Lemeul Wilmarth, who were dissatisfied with the traditional teaching at the National Academy of Design. The all-volunteer organization rented a single 20×30-foot room in the mansard roof of 108 Fifth Avenue, a four-floor building at the corner of 16th Street, to hold life drawing classes modeled on the practices of a Parisian atelier with natural light flowing in from the skylights above.
The students paid a tuition of $5 a month, but also volunteered to do organizational and maintenance tasks. A Board of Control was founded to govern the new organization. Within two years, the curriculum was expanded to include portraiture, sketch classes, composition classes, as well as lectures on anatomy and perspective. The Arts Students League would move to 38 West 14th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues in 1882, to 143-147 East 23rd Street in 1887, and finally to its current home at 215 W 57th Street in 1892. Many of the studios today still have large windows to allow in light, such as the clay studio above.
The American Fine Arts Society was incorporated in 1889, an initiative of Howard Russell Butler, a Princeton and Columbia Law School graduate. Butler had a vision to construct a building that would combine New York City’s new art societies and offer space for publicly accessible exhibition galleries. Butler raised funds for the building by creating a stock corporation, and in the process met Andrew Carnegie who hired him, while allowing him to spend part of each work day to paint.
The Arts Students League is one of three constituent organizations that founded the American Fine Arts Society, which also included The Architectural League of New York and the Society of American Artists. The 57th Street building soon became the locus point for art in New York City, and the Landmarks Designation Report contends that “practically all major fine arts exhibitions were held in the American Fine Arts Society’s galleries until 1941.” The three organizations would share the 57th Street building until 1941 when the Society of American Artists merged with the National Academy of Design and moved to its own building.
Today, the Arts Students League offers 100 studio classes in drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, welding and assemblage. Most classes work with a live model, maintaining the atelier tradition—the impetus of the League’s founding – where a master artist works alongside students There’s a welding studio, woodworking studio, and bronze-making studio (although the bronze is poured off-site),
Affordability remains an important aspect of the school’s mission—with classes ranging from $120 to $400 a month. The classes are by subject, with students across a range of skill levels. In 1879, work-study scholarships were established for students who could not afford the tuition, and financial aid continues to be available today through not only work-study but also merit based scholarships and grants.
There are also travel workshops to international destinations, along with short workshops held in New York City on specific themes.
The Vanderbilt Galleries. Photo courtesy of the Arts Students League
In 1893, a large exhibition in the American Fine Arts Galleries included an impressive array of European art from private collections, including work by Rembrandt, Diego Velásquez, J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, and Thomas Gainsborough. George Washington Vanderbilt II, son of William Henry Vanderbilt who would build the Biltmore estate in Asheville, North Carolina, gifted the American Fine Arts Society $100,000 to build new galleries. The connecting column-free gallery, built on West 58th Street, is known as the Vanderbilt Gallery and was modeled on the Galeries Georges Petit in Paris, particularly the inclusion of a 26-foot skylight ceiling.
The ceiling of the former Vanderbilt Galleries today
A fire destroyed the galleries in the 1920s, but they were rebuilt. Since the end of World War II, the space has been used as a bifurcated studio space, converted to accommodate the sudden surge in students at the League supported by the G.I. Bill. The exhibition gallery today is located on the second floor of the building, in a light-filled room that was originally used as a dining hall and lecture hall. Fun fact: an original oak and pink marble mantel sits in a storage area behind one of the exhibition walls.
The ceiling of the former Vanderbilt Galleries today
A fire destroyed the galleries in the 1920s, but they were rebuilt. Since the end of World War II, the space has been used as a bifurcated studio space, converted to accommodate the sudden surge in students at the League supported by the G.I. Bill. The exhibition gallery today is located on the second floor of the building, in a light-filled room that was originally used as a dining hall and lecture hall. Fun fact: an original oak and pink marble mantel sits in a storage area behind one of the exhibition walls.
The Central Park Tower, a supertall high-rise developed by Extell, is the second tallest building in the United States (after 1 World Trade Center) and the tallest residential skyscraper in the country, at a height of 1,550 feet. The ground floor hosts Nordstrom’s New York City flagship store and about 12 floors above the Art Students League building, a cantilevered portion of the skyscraper hangs over the historic landmark, thanks to air rights purchased from the League.
The famous artists who were students at the Arts Students League include Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, Norman Rockwell, Alexander Calder, Georgia O’Keefe, cartoonist, Al Hirschfeld, Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Stella, John Marin, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Jacob Lawrence, and James Montgomery Flagg. Notable instructors have included Thomas Hart Benton, John Sloan, Max Weber, George Bellows, Daniel Chester French, William Merritt Chase, Thomas Eakins, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
Each fall, the lobby and second floor gallery of the Arts Students League are host to the annual Instructors’ Exhibition, a presentation of work by current instructors. The tradition, which launches the fall exhibition season each year, goes back to the 19th century.
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Together with her husband Rem Koolhaas, Vriesendorp began working on a series of illustrations depicting New York City’s defining structures in the early 1970s. Vriesendorp described her creations as an “in-depth analysis of the possibilities provided by architecture, and accordingly mark the moment when the rigid corset of modernism seemed to be entirely exhausted.”
“Flagrant Delit“, arguably the most iconic of these ones, is a representation of post-coital Empire State and Chrysler Buildings caught in bed by the Rockefeller Building, representing “one of the most beguiling attempts to depict the unconscious double-life of modern architecture
Flagrant Delit (Caught in the Act),Madelon Vriesendorp, 1975.
Her work was vastly used for book and magazine covers, notably on the cover of Delirious New York in 1978 by Rem Koolhaas. “The World of Madelon Vriesendorp: Paintings/Postcards/Objects/Games” a 40-year retrospective of the artist’s career first premiered in London in 2008. Madelon Vriesendorp founded Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) with Koolhaas in the early 70s.
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More than 1,000 people attended Sophie Irene Simon Loeb’s funeral in 1929. Her untimely death at 52 was an abrupt end to a life dedicated to social change. Loeb is the subject of this stunning pastel portrait in The New York Historical’s collection, and in this post, the Center for Women’s History dives into her life story.
Penrhyn Stanley Adamson (1877–1957), artist. Sophie Irene Simon Loeb (1876–1929), 1923. Pastel on paper, canvas. The New York Historical, Gift of Dr. Warren Smadbeck, 1942.486
Sophie Simon was born on July 4, 1876, in Russia, and immigrated to Pennsylvania with her parents in 1882, when she was six. Before her father died ten years later, five more siblings were born. While still attending high school, she helped sustain the family by working part-time in a local store. At age twenty, she married Anselm Loeb, the owner of the store, but the marriage didn’t last long.
In 1909, newly divorced and energized, Loeb moved to New York and found a job as an investigative journalist at The Evening World, Joseph Pulizer’s newspaper. Like photographer Jacob Riis, Loeb reported on the lives of impoverished New Yorkers living in the Lower East Side. While doing this work, she became passionate about child welfare. Her own life experience as an adolescent orphan ignited her advocacy for child welfare and led her to focus on conditions in the institutions where the city’s poor children were sent when they lost one or both parents.
For The Evening World, Loeb interviewed widowed mothers whose children were taken and placed in orphanages. At the time, poor mothers were seen as unfit to care for their children and many of the social safety-nets that are in place today did not exist. Loeb researched the conditions and finances behind the city’s orphan asylums and found that the city would actually save money if it paid mothers directly instead of separating children from their families and placing them in rundown orphanages.
Loeb’s professional status helped to advance her volunteer work and advocacy, leading to sweeping social changes that still resonate today. Loeb took advantage of her platform and reputation as a journalist to push for major improvements to the lives of New York City residents. Like other reformers and activists of the time, she demanded that the government address issues of poverty. Loeb founded the Child Welfare Committee of America, served as the president of the Child Welfare Committee of New York for seven years, and participated in the first International Child Congress in 1926. Her advocacy led to the 1915 passage of the Widow’s Pension Law, which prevented the separation of families after the loss of a breadwinning parent, a law that is still in place. In 1920, she published Everyman’s Child, a book that promoted ideas about government responsibility to provide food and education for every child regardless of their means.
Though Loeb never remarried or had children of her own, she devoted herself to New York City’s children. When she died of cancer on January 18, 1929, thousands mourned her passing. Her obituary in the New York Times marked her wide-ranging influence on the betterment of city life: “Though her interest centered in the child, it extended, as did Jacob Riis’s, to the building of better tenements, to the cleaning up of the slums generally, to providing of school lunches and public playgrounds, to protecting of poor tenants and to a score of other matters of community welfare.”
Frederick Roth (1872–1944), sculptor. Loeb Memorial Fountain, 1935–36. Granite. Photos by Jeanne Gutierrez
Seven years after Loeb’s death, the philanthropist August Heckscher, who worked alongside her to campaign for the addition of city playgrounds, donated a drinking fountain in her name. The fountain, carved from 25 tons of pink granite by Parks Department sculptor Frederick Roth, features 13 characters from Alice in Wonderland and was unveiled in 1936 as part of the refurbishment of the Heckscher Playground, the first playground to be built in Central Park. In 1986, the fountain was relocated from its original location at Central Park South and Seventh Avenue to Central Park at East 77th Street—across the park from The New York Historical, where Loeb’s portrait was recently featured in the exhibition Women’s Work.
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Scenes of New York City: The Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld Collection
THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL
Wednesday, May 14, 2025
ISSUE #1448
This collection exudes New York. Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld have amassed a stunning array of works honoring their hometown, from its bustling harbors to its Harlem diners, Village speakeasies, sleek skyscrapers, and gritty streetscapes. Their promised gift to the New-York Historical Society invigorates the Museum’s 20th- and 21st-century holdings and amplifies the story of a place at once enthralling, mystifying, and inspiring.
Art by Keith Haring, Jacob Lawrence, Andy Warhol, Giorgio de Chirico, and Georgia O’Keeffe, among others, brings the city to life. The 130 paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings in the collection spotlight New York-centric movements like Abstract Expressionism and Pop, probe Gotham’s layered past, and trace the rhythms of the metropolis and its daily life.
To match the multiple facets captured in this portrait of the city, the New-York Historical Society invited multiple New Yorkers to respond to select objects in the collection. Their commentaries appear under the heading “COMMUNITY VOICE.”
1978 Cut black and white photograph 15 7/8 x 15 7/8 in.
Promised gift of Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld, Scenes of New York City IL2021.51.102 Solomon LeWitt, known as Sol, executed Manhattan with Roosevelt Island Removed the year the Conceptual artist received a major retrospective at MoMA. It belongs to a series of works on paper (1967–80) that explore the different ways that LeWitt could alter black-and-white aerial photographs and maps. The work is also part of a group of torn-, folded-, and cut-paper compositions that LeWitt termed “hundred dollar drawings” because he wanted them to be sold for $100 in perpetuity—a rock-bottom price for a one-of-a-kind artwork at the time. For the series, LeWitt excised geometrical shapes or areas from satellite photographs or cartographic maps of recognizable cities, among them New York (as in this work), Chicago, Amsterdam, London, and Florence, leaving empty spaces. The 1978 MoMA catalogue describes each as a “cut paper drawing.” They demonstrate LeWitt’s conceptual explorations of different markmaking systems and embody his resistance to the commodification of art. The action of cutting away a part of the image liberates the map or photograph from its producer and its original purpose, he stated, because it becomes a different entity. The action also induces sensations of dislocation as geography is disembodied. In addition, LeWitt’s titles are intended as instructions to anyone interested in repeating his procedure—in keeping with the artist’s decommodification of art and what one critic calls his “wink at any belief in maps’ reliability.” A son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, LeWitt visited Hartford, Connecticut’s Wadsworth Atheneum as a child, which sparked his interest in art; he would develop into a major figure in the vanguard of later twentieth-century art. As a youth, he was employed as a graphic designer at Seventeen magazine and in the office of the architect I.M. Pei. In 1960, he took a low-level job at MoMA, and this and his discovery of Eadweard Muybridge’s serial photographs of locomotion clinched his decision to be an artist. Prolific in a wide range of media—drawing, printmaking, photography, painting, installation, and artist’s books—LeWitt helped summarize Minimalism and Conceptualism with his 1969 credo: “[T]he idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” The artist and others denied the materiality of New York School painting, the quickly understood logos of Pop Art, and the swift commercial success of both. LeWitt reduced art to its geometric essentials—an open cube as a modular unit—which he multiplied into “structures” (a term he preferred to “sculptures”) that filled their settings. The cubes themselves were empty spaces; only their outlines were physical. The next step in this reductivism occurred in 1968, when he began executing drawings directly on the wall, and then to his providing drawing instructions to be executed by assistants. LeWitt’s radical step transformed the act of drawing—yet without losing beauty. In fact, the artist soon added full color and environmental scale, as he expanded his diverse drawings from floor to ceiling and around doors, while upending conventional relationships between art and architecture. Likewise, his Manhattan with Roosevelt Island Removed defies expectations of what aerial photographs and maps do. His simple excision turns a black-andwhite sign system into an object—an altered glossy photograph— and displays the artist’s power over a potent emblem of New York. Conceptual Art for LeWitt was neither mathematical nor intellectual but intuitive. That he was a major figure in the art world of the 1960s and 1970s is not surprising. COMMUNITY VOICE The excising of Roosevelt (formerly Blackwell’s) Island makes me wonder whether LeWitt is making a statement about its dark history as a hub for institutions housing the sick, poor, imprisoned, and mentally ill. Does the erasure represent a call for reforming these institutions and a more humane treatment of their residents? Steve Hanon President, The New York Map Society ClassificationsDRAWINGS Collections
Scenes of New York City: The Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld Collection
View of the East River Looking North with the Hell Gate and Triborough Bridges from Manhattan
1951 Watercolor and black crayon on paper Unframed: 8 1/2 × 11 1/2 in. (21.6 × 29.2 cm) Framed: 14 1/2 × 17 1/2 in. (36.8 × 44.5 cm)
Promised gift of Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld, Scenes of New York City IL2021.51.18 This watercolor has a provenance from Edith Halpert’s pioneering Downtown Gallery, the first commercial art space in Greenwich Village that promoted avant-garde art. By 1945, the gallery had moved to 32 East Fifty-first Street, where the John Marin Room, operated by John Marin Jr., opened in 1950. An early American modernist, Marin is known for his abstract landscapes and freely painted watercolors. Together, the two works reveal the artist’s stylistic development between 1936 and 1951 toward greater freedom and breadth of execution and, above all, toward mastery of the medium. View of the East River Looking North belongs to a series of small watercolors from 1951 entitled “From New York Hospital,” which the artist produced from his sickbed. Looking out of his window while lying gravely ill, he began using a syringe to draw lines. In 1912, New York Hospital became affiliated with the Cornell University Medical College and moved to York Avenue between East Sixty-sixth and Sixty-seventh streets; today, after another merger, it is known as New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Unlike most of the works in Marin’s series—views looking downtown featuring more southern bridges across the East River—this watercolor has an uptown vista toward the arched Hell Gate Bridge (1912–16) and the Triborough Bridge (1936), renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. Marin created this limpid cityscape with freely applied black brushstrokes that are similar to strokes of Chinese calligraphy, and he varied the width of the layers of translucent washes that resemble pure staining. He also left large areas of bare paper—known as “the reserve”—to create much of the atmospheric sky and the East River’s water: both elements are made mutable with transient effects. Marin’s ability to render water benefited from the many studies he had made of it during summers in Maine. “In painting water make the hand move the way the water moves,” the artist advised in a letter of 1933. In his youth, Marin had wanted to become an architect, and his fascination with architecture, which is evident in these watercolors, became a constant theme in his works. After attending the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Art Students League in New York, like many of his contemporaries Marin went to Europe, and over the next six years obtained his first exposure to modern art. There, he mastered watercolor media and endowed his works with the sense of avant-garde freedom that became one of his hallmarks and allied him with like-minded figures in the art world. Introduced by the photographer Edward Steichen to Alfred Stieglitz, Marin was given his first one-person exhibition at Stieglitz’s avant-garde 291 Gallery in 1909. Four years later, Marin exhibited five watercolors in the landmark 1913 Armory Show. Then, in 1938, his art enjoyed a retrospective at MoMA, establishing him as a leading modernist. Among the first American artists to make abstract paintings, Marin is often credited with influencing the Abstract Expressionists. ClassificationsDRAWINGS Collections
Scenes of New York City: The Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld Collection
Mid Manhattan
1955 Charcoal, black ink, and watercolor on beige paper Unframed: 19 1/4 × 12 1/4 in. (48.9 × 31.1 cm) Framed: 24 1/4 × 25 in. (61.6 × 63.5 cm)
Promised gift of Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld, Scenes of New York City IL2021.51.19 Mid-Manhattan is Lyonel Feininger’s elegantly delineated ode to the vertical landscape of his birth city, which he executed a year before his death. The sheet’s distinguished provenance can be traced to the artist’s estate. Feininger is best known as a German-American painter and member of the Bauhaus (operative 1919–33), the German school of art and architecture famous for its modern approach to design. Its mission was to unite the fine and applied arts, the aesthetic and the functional, and to reconcile mass production with individual artistic vision. Architect Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, appointed Feininger to head its printmaking workshop. Not only did the latter teach at the Bauhaus with his friends Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, but he also designed the expressionistic woodcut cover for its 1919 manifesto, whose aspirational forms are allied with those of Mid-Manhattan. His allegiance to Bauhaus ideals of crystalline architecture is evident in the Hirschfeld Collection promised gift, as is his early experience as a draftsman and a master of expressive, often witty linear invention. In fact, Feininger‘s teenage career as a cartoonist in the United States and Germany was so successful that he only began to paint at the age of thirty-six. The artist’s foundational years in Germany inform Mid-Manhattan. A child of professional musicians who instilled in him a love of music, Feininger was also a pianist and composer. At the age of sixteen, he began studying at the Leipzig Music Conservatory, but his interest in drawing led him to transfer to the Hamburg School of Art and soon afterward to the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin. He exhibited drawings at the Berlin Secession (1901–03), supporting himself by producing caricatures and cartoons, which allowed him to experiment with shorthand styles and abstraction. Although Feininger is not well known for his work in comics, his strips play an important role in the history of comic art. Becoming a member of the Berlin Secession in 1909, Feininger also associated with avowedly Expressionist groups, such as Die Brücke (The Bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). During trips to Paris, he was drawn to Cubism, especially the faceted planes of color in the works of Orphist Robert Delaunay. Like Delaunay, Feininger frequently focused on the urban landscape and its perceptually dazzling glass-walled buildings, as in the interpenetrating geometries of his ethereal Mid-Manhattan. When the National Socialist party came into power in 1933, it closed the Bauhaus and declared Feininger’s work “degenerate art,” exhibiting it in the 1937 exhibition of the same name, Entartete Kunst, the Nazis’ term for the spectrum of modern art. Before that exhibition in Munich, Feininger had escaped to the U.S., as had such Bauhaus leaders as Gropius and Anni and Joseph Albers, moving permanently in 1938 to a vastly changed New York City, which enthralled him until the end of his life. COMMUNITY VOICE Mid-Manhattan reminds me of the wonderful, unpredictable juxtaposition of buildings that makes New York’s skyline unique. I see both modern buildings and older buildings in this drawing. Feininger had been at the Bauhaus in Germany, and the architectural descendants of that movement were just making it to the United States when he drew this. I wonder if he was drawing what he saw out his window or what he imagined New York’s future to be. Frank Mahan Architect at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill ClassificationsDRAWINGS Collections
Scenes of New York City: The Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld Collection
New York
1940 Graphite, black chalk, black ink, watercolor, and white heightening on paper Unframed: 17 3/4 × 23 7/8 in. (45.1 × 60.6 cm) Framed: 24 1/2 × 30 in. (62.2 × 76.2 cm)
Promised gift of Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld, Scenes of New York City IL2021.51.48 Roberto Montenegro’s apocalyptic cityscape is populated by surreal creatures that morph into composite forms, and swim with fish in an aqueous atmosphere interpenetrating the geometric shapes of skyscrapers and earlier building types. Under a watchful eye with a crescent moon, this hallucinatory scene presents, among other things, a weeping eye that sprouts a female leg wearing high heels and a building in the shape of a skull. Winds whip disembodied faces around a wasteland that distantly evokes the southern tip of Manhattan surrounded by the sea. The Mexican artist may have included a self-portrait to the left of center in this personal vision, which is more than a disquieting visual nightmare, and today may seem prophetic. He has transfigured reality and created an oneiric world with its own puzzling laws and an iconography that remains too arcane to decipher completely. Although he claimed to be a “subrealist” rather than a Surrealist, Montenegro often mixed two elements: folklore and fantasy. New York reveals the artist’s awareness of Maurits Cornelis Escher, the Dutch graphic artist and illustrator, whose work showcases mathematical operations, impossible juxtapositions of objects, and explorations of reflections and infinity. Escher’s example may have encouraged Montenegro’s success as an illustrator. When the Mexican artist delineated this highly finished scene, he also must have known Pablo Picasso’s monochromatic painting Guernica (1937). In 1940, the Spaniard’s watershed antiwar statement was politically and artistically topical. During the Spanish Civil War, Guernica was exhibited in the Spanish Republican Pavilion at the 1937 Internationa; Expostion in Paris, and elsewhere, to raise money for war relief. At nearly two feet wide—unusual for a drawing—New York in scale and subject may testify to Montenegro’s experience as a muralist. In fact, he was one of the first artists involved in the Mexican muralist movement after the Mexican Revolution (ca. 1910–20). One of his classmates at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City was Diego Rivera, who helped establish the movement and became one of its leaders. Montenegro continued his artistic education in Europe, first in Spain and then in Paris (1907–10), where he met the Cubists Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris. When World War I broke out in 1914, he moved to Mallorca, painted his first mural, and earned his living as a fisherman—an experience reflected in New York. After moving back to Mexico permanently in 1921, he painted his most important murals at the former monastery and school of San Pedro y San Pablo in Mexico City, the church of which is now the Museo de la luz. Even though he did not consider himself a Surrealist, his works fuse diverse realities, seen especially in his beguiling self-portraits and portrayals of his colleagues and friends, including Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Montenegro’s passion for all things Mexican was manifested in his promotion of Mexican folk art and artisans through books and exhibitions in Mexico and the United States. ClassificationsDRAWINGS Collections
Scenes of New York City: The Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld Collection
Study for “Brooklyn Bridge”
1949 Charcoal and black and white chalk on paper Unframed: 39 7/8 × 29 1/2 in. (101.3 × 74.9 cm) Framed: 47 1/8 × 36 3/4 × 2 1/4 in. (119.7 × 93.3 × 5.7 cm)
Promised gift of Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld, Scenes of New York City IL2021.51.49 Georgia O’Keeffe’s powerful is dynamic and emotional. It has an eminent provenance from its original owner Doris Bry—O’Keeffe’s agent, confidante, and the noted scholar of Alfred Stieglitz, the artist’s husband. Bry acquired the large sheet directly from the artist in 1978, underlining that O’Keeffe valued it, keeping it with her for nearly three decades. That same year, O’Keeffe sold Bry another smaller, descriptive graphite sketch of one of the bridge’s towers with only a few cables delineated, which was likely O’Keeffe’s initial study. In the large drawing the artist placed the viewer inside rather than outside the bridge’s dynamic heart, its arches seemingly illuminated in white chalk with the cables swinging freely. O’Keeffe repeated the other tower with its crenelations, as in her initial sketch, in a smaller scale—either in the perspectival distance or like a footnote in a transparent experience of the bridge with two views telescoped together. This juxtaposition creates a simultaneity that endows the sheet with a complex and mysterious power. The artist loved to draw in friable charcoal, as well as in graphite, admiring its softness, boldness, and its ability to create threedimensional forms by smudging. She drew a few other bridges—among them two graphite sketches of the Triborough Bridge in New York (1936), and an unidentified bridge (1901–02)—but none have the immersive power of the Hirschfeld Collection sheet. The longest suspension bridge in the world when it opened in 1883, John A. Roebling’s engineering wonder captivated artists and writers alike. Although unique to her, O’Keeffe’s works on the Brooklyn Bridge theme contain a nod to the Italian-born American Futurist Joseph Stella, who depicted the span in numerous studies and in five oils. His fractured compositions of the fabled structure reflect his modernist approach while simultaneously recalling the stained-glass windows of Gothic architecture: a marriage of the old with the new. In O’Keeffe’s monumental drawing, her formal inventions rival those of Stella. Like O’Keeffe, Walker Evans in several of his photographic series of the bridge (1928–30) put the viewer within its cables. Pioneering abstractionist O’Keeffe executed her Brooklyn Bridge trio around the time she left New York—after settling Stieglitz’s museum-quality estate—to live in New Mexico. As a group, they may have been a salute to her success in the City, a monument to the ability of bridges to connect people and places, or a gateway to her new life. O’Keeffe was known to have driven down to Wall Street on Sundays and back and forth across the Brooklyn Bridge. Unlike the arches in the painting, those of the drawing suggest the lobes of a heart, creating a valentine to New York, where she and Stieglitz had launched their careers COMMUNITY VOICE O’Keeffe was among my favorite artists, long before she came into our collection. The eroticism in her pictures, including in this one, is subtle and palpable at the same time. Sarah and I both loved the Brooklyn Bridge for many reasons. Now, inspired by the artist’s amazing vision, we see the Bridge in a new way as this piece emotes a uniquely different powerful feeling. Elie Hirschfeld New York City real estate developer ClassificationsDRAWINGS Collections
Scenes of New York City: The Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld Collection
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Unidentified maker. Shirtwaist, 1890–1900. Cotton, needlepoint lace. The New York Historical, Z.1317
Between the 1860s and 1910s, the shirtwaist was a wardrobe essential, as popular a women’s garment as a pair of jeans are today. As a result, shirtwaists are an object of inquiry for many Center for Women’s History projects.
This tailored bodice, worn tucked into a skirt, was a democratic equalizer donned by American women of all classes and races. It was among the first women’s clothing to be available ready-made in an endless variety of fabrics, styles, and price points. The wide variety of shirtwaist styles (sometimes called simply waists) made them a wardrobe staple, especially for younger women. Shirtwaists could be tailored with starched collars and cuffs in a masculine style or femininely soft and lightweight, with lace and needlepoint inserts like the example included in our 2023–24 exhibition Women’s Work. These popular garments could be paired with a light, matching skirt for a summer afternoon outing, or paired with a dark skirt for a woman working as a clerk, a salesperson, a teacher, a garment worker, or—as pictured here—a public health official.
They are literally thousands of doors lining the streets of Paris. Some are very simple doors, others are extravagant works of art. The styles of these doors tell about the history of Paris. As you walk across the 20 arrondissements of Paris, you will discover Gothic, Renaissance, Haussmann and Art Nouveau door styles. It is up to you to take the time to look for little details of these Paris’ most beautiful doors: mascarons, statues, bas-reliefs, gold-leaves, handles…
Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870–1942), photographer. Dr. Josephine Baker, head of the Child Hygiene Dept. of the Dept. of Health of C[it]y of NY, 1917–19. Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, The New York Historical
Shirtwaists could also be worn for leisure activities and sports, such as bicycling, sailing, tennis, and golf, that both pushed the boundaries of “acceptable” feminine behavior, and required clothes that allowed a full range of motion. Along with slightly shorter hemlines, many of these athletic outfits incorporated ties, tailored jackets, and shirtwaists. Sometimes they were paired with bloomers, the ballooning undergarments adopted by that time period as gym clothes in women’s colleges around the country.
Burr McIntosh (1862–1942), photographer. Woman with golf clubs, ca. 1900–10. Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, The New York Historical
The shirtwaist in The New York Historical’s collection was most likely sewn at home, perhaps using a paper pattern purchased from the several home-sewing magazines that were available during that time period. Women’s magazines of the time often included detailed descriptions of how to construct shirtwaists at home using a domestic sewing machine: a mid-19th century innovation that helped reduce the time-consuming task of dressing the family while increasing the number of clothes per person. For our Women’s Work exhibition, we commissioned dress historian and living-history specialist Kenna Libes to create a matching skirt that would closely illustrate how the shirtwaist in our collection would have been worn. She used historical patterns to recreate the skirt from lightweight linen, closely matching the one used to make the original garment
National Cloak and Suit Company. New York Fashions, 1908. Bella C. Landauer Collection of Business and Advertising Ephemera, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, The New York Historical
By the last quarter of the 19th century, shirtwaists were predominantly manufactured by low-paid women toiling in Manhattan’s sweatshops. Garment manufacturing labor was historically divided by gender and dictated by the type of garment. Men traditionally worked with finer, high-quality woolens requiring careful tailoring, while women made cheaper, looser-fitting garments, especially those worn by women themselves. But, by the mid- to late 19th century, these roles shifted. Immigrant men increasingly occupied jobs previously held by women and produced a greater number of women’s clothes in a task system: instead of making a garment from start to finish, each worker was in charge of one step in the manufacturing process. That also meant that skilled tailors who could fashion a garment from start to finish were increasingly unnecessary, replaced by low-paid workers, predominantly Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. The production of shirtwaists, children’s dresses, and robes became known as the “women’s industries,” because 95 percent of the workforce were young, unmarried women.
Ironically, many of the women toiling in New York’s massive factories, making ready-made shirtwaists for American women of every walk of life, were themselves wearing shirtwaists. In 1909 and 1910, thousands of garment workers left their sewing machines and marched the streets of Manhattan demanding better pay and better working conditions. Known as the “Shirtwaist Strikes” or the “Uprising of the 20,000,” it brought out a mass of demonstrators in their finest: white shirtwaists, paired with serious looking dark skirts, and fashionable hats that sent the message that their labor was respectable and worthy of a living wage, a clean and healthy environment, and a workday that did not extend from dawn to sunset. Sadly, despite the strides they made in 1909 and 1910, it took a horrifying disaster to bring meaningful change: in 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire claimed the life of 146 garment workers, mostly young Jewish immigrant women, and exposed the human cost of fashionable, affordable clothing. You can read more about the fire that claimed so many young lives in this post from our archives.
Frederick Hugh Smyth (1878-1949), photographer. Triangle Waist Co. Factory Fire, Washington Place & Greene Street, 1911. Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, The New York Historical
Don’t miss out on a chance to learn more about shirtwaists: visit Real Clothes, Real Lives: 200 Years of What Women Wore, an exhibition of garments from the Smith College Historic Clothing Collection, on view in our Joyce B. Cowin Women’s History Gallery until June 22, 2025.
Unidentified maker. Pink striped shirtwaist, ca. 1902–03. Cotton, mother-of-pearl studs. Smith College Historic Clothing Collection, SCHCC 2015.1.38
PHOTO OF THE DAY
MANHATTAN ABLOOM FROM CORNELL TECH
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NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY BLOG
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.
Who would have known that one day I’d be writing on Paris’ most beautiful doors! After all, when you end up living in Paris, you get so busy discovering the most famous monuments and museums (and stores!) of the city that it would seem quite a loss of time to look at little details such as doors. But doors are the reflection of what lies beyond, the Parisians’ homes. After all, they are part of the city’s history. After years of walking through the 20 arrondissements of Paris, I have compiled a few of my best photos of Paris doors. I’ve shared their exact location so you can also see them for yourselves!
They are literally thousands of doors lining the streets of Paris. Some are very simple doors, others are extravagant works of art. The styles of these doors tell about the history of Paris. As you walk across the 20 arrondissements of Paris, you will discover Gothic, Renaissance, Haussmann and Art Nouveau door styles. It is up to you to take the time to look for little details of these Paris’ most beautiful doors: mascarons, statues, bas-reliefs, gold-leaves, handles…
Madame de Maintenon, the future wife of Louis XIV, once lived in this mansion built at the end of the 16th century.
50, rue de Turenne, 3rd arrt. The emerald painted door of a former mansion
The tall doors of Notre-Dame cathedral are masterpieces that are often ignored by the thousands of visitors that enter the sanctuary each day. Take a look at their wrought-iron strap hinges and arabesques which were restored in the 19th century.
This Art Nouveau door dates from 1901. It was created by architect Jules Lavirotte in an exotic and intricate design. The centrepiece of the building is its extravagant doorway. The wooden door itself was depicted as a gigantic reversed phallus and is a frame with statues of Adam and Eve. Of all Paris’ most beautiful doors, this is probably the most eccentric one!
Another beautiful Art Nouveau door designed by architect Jules Lavirotte who lived there with his family. The entrance is decorated with fine stone carving and cast iron features.
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.
