Born in 1883 the child of a single mother, Fred Fillmore French grew up in poverty in the Bronx. The New York Times would recall, “Still a child, he peddled papers, ran errands, washed windows, and mowed lawns.” By the early 1920s, he was among the foremost real estate developers in New York City and on December 17, 1925 announced the Tudor City plan–the largest housing project ever undertaken in mid-Manhattan.
Four months earlier, in August 25, the Fred F. French Operators, Inc. filed plans for a 38-story office building to be erected at the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 45th Street. On the site stood the 1869 Church of the Heavenly Rest and two former mansions.
from the collection of the New York Public Library
On February 1, 1926, Buildings and Building Management said, “The Fred F. French Company is the architect.” The article explained that the firm’s in-house architect H. Douglas Ives would lead the project and “John Sloan, of Sloan & Robertson, New York, is the consulting architect.” It added, “the facades of the four lower stories will be of Indiana limestone.”
Ives and Sloan created a striking anomaly in Art Deco architecture. The building’s dramatic series of setbacks were enhanced by its highly unusual rectangular form. The architects emblazoned the sandy-colored brick with spectacular polychromed terra cotta ornaments drawn from ancient Mesopotamia. (In fact, H. Douglas Ives described the design as “Mesopotamian.”)
The architects’ water-color washed rendering was released in 1929 (copyright expired)
Some of the massive terra cotta panels were four-feet long. Ives explained to reporters that the sunburst images stood for “progress,” the Assyrian-style griffins represented “integrity and watchfulness,” and the heads of Mercury were meant to spread “the message of the French plan.” The ground floor was trimmed with bronze panels depicting Assyrian winged lions.
The architects brought the Near Eastern motif into the lobby. The vaulted ceiling was decorated with polychrome designs. The panels of the 25 guilt-bronze doors depicted bearded Mesopotamian genii and women engaging in various aspects of commerce and industry. John Sloan designed the eight crystal chandeliers and even the griffon-decorated bronze maildrop.
Completed in 1927, the Fred F. French Building filled with a wide variety of tenants, among the first being Seligsberg & Co., brokers; the Chicago-based James P. Marsh Company, makers of pressure gauges; and the newly-formed Photomaton, Inc., “engaged in the operation of the automatic camera,” according to The New York Times. In 1928 the American Broadcasting Company moved in.
In addition to those business concerns, organizations leased space. Groups that signed leases in 1928 included the World Anti-Narcotic Union; the American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen; and the Aviation Country Clubs, Inc. (all three of which were newly-formed); as well as the Netherland-America Foundation; and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
The lobby elevator doors depict women and Mesopotamian men engaged in commerce. image by Bebgsurg
The Colonial Sand Company, the offices of which were on the 31st floor, was an initial tenant. Its president was Generoso Pope, who most often Anglicized his first name to Gene. On September 30, 1928, The New York Times reported that Pope had purchased Il Progresso Italo-Americano, “said to be the oldest and largest Italian daily newspaper published in this country.” Pope announced, “that the policies and personnel of the paper would remain the same.”
Another initial tenant was Van Heusen Products, Inc., founded by John M. Van Heusen. Starting out working in a bank, Van Heusen had an inventive bent. He quit his bank job after inventing a non-slip shoulder strap for female lingerie and a non-slip men’s garter. He invented several shoemaking innovations before perfecting a semi-soft collar for men’s shirts. He founded his Van Heusen shirt company in 1921.
Two years after the Fred F. French Building opened, the Great Depression crippled the nation. It prompted certain otherwise respectable businessmen to turn to crime. Walter E. Pruzan’s office was here in 1931. The 51-year-old had been president of the Boyish Form Corset Corporation until its collapse in 1929. Now, he dealt in real estate. The New York Times said that former business associates of Pruzan “said he was virtually penniless, although before his corset business went into bankruptcy he was estimated to be worth $250,000.” Pruzan’s problems worsened when he and his wife separated on November 19, 1931. He moved into the Hotel Lincoln (today the Milford Hotel).
The following month, on December 7, Pruzan and Lario Legnani, a former priest, walked into the office of Weingarten, Eisenman & Co., also in the French Building, and attempted to cash a $6,700 B. M. T. stock certificate. The firm, of course, checked the certificate’s serial number. The New York Times reported, “The number, according to the police, is one of twenty-four certificates lost or stolen about a year ago.” Pruzan and Legnani were arrested for forgery of a stock certificate.
Pruzan was released on $1,500 bail. Almost a month to the day later, on January 4, 1932, Pruzan shot and killed himself in his office here. He left a note that said in part,
Only God can help men who have fallen financially, because friends turn their heads away from you and their backs to you…It is easy to slide down, but very difficult to climb back when you are more than 50 years old.
On April 3, 1930, The New York Times reported that the 39-year-old Generoso Pope “was honored by the Italian Government on Monday when he received the official honorary title of Grande Ufficiale of the Crown of Italy.” The article noted, “The award is among the highest conferred by the Government of Italy.”
Two years later, in the spring of 1932, Generoso Pope notified authorities that he was receiving threatening letters from racketeers. Detective Eugene Canevari was assigned to guard him. On May 21, Pope’s secretary, Salvatore Pino answered a call from a man who demanded $1,000. Pino suggested that he come to the office to receive the cash. Shortly afterward, Nathan Robinson and Michael Comparetto arrived and Pino showed them into Pope’s office, where Detective Canevari was hiding.
One of them said, “We need $1,000. I have a brother who has been locked up by the police for carrying a revolver, and I want $1,000 to help him.” He paused and said, “Of course you know who we are; we’re racketeers.”
The New York Times reported, “Canevari popped out of his hiding place and the conversation was over.” As it turned out, the men were not gangsters. Robinson was a chauffeur and Comparetto was a salesman.
Political upheaval overseas prompted new tenants in 551 Fifth Avenue. On August 29, 1933, The Daily Worker reported on Professor Alfons Goldschmidt’s arrival in America. The newspaper called him the, “noted German economist exiled by the Nazi regime.” It said, “He will lecture throughout the country under the auspices of the American Committee Against Fascist Oppression in Germany, whose offices are at 551 Fifth Avenue.” A similar organization operating from the building the same year was the American Committee for the Relief of Victimized German Children.
Evelyn Bower was employed as a stenographer in the 25-floor office of Dr. Philip G. Cole in 1938. The 39-year-old arrived 15 minutes early on November 13 that year in order to type a note to Cole’s secretary, Mabel Bennett. It read, “The keys for the office and another note will be found in my pocketbook in my desk.–E.” The Evening Post said, “Then she removed a glass ventilator from a window, opened it and jumped.”
Mabel arrived a few minutes later. A second note in Evelyn’s handbag, “disclosed that she had decided to commit suicide two months ago but waited until her death would cause the least possible inconvenience in the work of her office,” said The Evening Post. Readers might have rolled their eyes when The Standard-Star reported, “Police investigated to determine whether her death was accidental.”
The Fred F. French Building continued to attract a variety of tenants. In 1950, the California Texas Oil Company signed a lease for the eighth through eleventh floors. Other tenants in the early 1950s were the Jamaica Tourist Board and the Italian Diplomatic Office’s Consulate General Commercial Attaché.
In 1990, a two-year restoration of the Fred F. French Building was initiated, supervised by Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates. Senior architect on the job, Diane Kaese, told The New York Times columnist Christopher Gray that the colorful panels were “some of the biggest pieces of terra cotta I’ve ever seen in my life.” Gray commented, “If the large panels look like small bursts of color from afar, they are cascades close up,” noting the “glazes of plum, orange, yellow, gold, [and] tropical green.”
As it was in 1927, the Fred F. French Building is a unique Midtown architectural presence–its colorful panels with ancient iconography like nothing else in the city.
Happily, it is an individual NYC landmark, and its lobby was designated a landmark in 1986. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004.
I walked into the Fred F. French Building yesterday and found a glorious lobby and entrance.
In the Neighbohood
Mac has been shining shoes on the corner of 42nd and Fifth Avenue for over 20 years
A LONG SERVICE ON ROOSEVELT ISLAND
EDWARD BURNEO HAS BEEN OUR UPS DELIVERY PERSON FOR 20 YEARS. HE IS RETIRING THIS WEEK AFTER 35 YEARS WITH UPS.
THANKS FOR ALWAYS DELIVERING FOR US.
YOUR ROOSEVELT ISLAND FRIENDS
CREDITS
Daytonian in Manhattan 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.
After being rejected by Robert Moses and leaving his mark in cities around the world, Noguchi secured his own legacy in NYC. A new exhibit celebrates it.
“I traveled around the world six times over like a homeless waif. New York is the center from which ideas radiate all over the world,” renowned sculptor Isamu Noguchi told The Village Voice in 1959. Like Robert Rauschenberg’s New York uptown at the Museum of the City of New York, the Noguchi Museum exhibit, Noguchi’s New York, compresses the work of a great and productive artist into his obsession with his home city. And it’s a delight, well worth the trip to Long Island City.
The far-from-easy to find Noguchi Museum in an industrial area of Queens—facing a Costco Wholesale store on one side and decrepit manufacturing buildings on another—was sited, designed, and built by Noguchi himself. Opened in 1985, it was the first museum in the United States founded by a living artist to show the artist’s work.
It has one of the most unconventional entrances of any museum in New York.
(Left) Photo by Nicholas Knight
You enter through a small-ish Alice-in-Wonderland type door on 133rd Road, and are immediately greeted by museum employees, who gesture towards a second door that takes you to an outdoor space full of Noguchi sculptures—some bold, some modest, some intimidating, all engrossing. Explanations are few. The art work stands on its own. As you walk through the sculptures you’ll see the garden, still austere from winter and wonderfully Noguchi-like. He liked pebbles.
Noguchi converted the original prefab factory building into an expansive museum to showcase his work, placing many of his sculptures in front of windows looking into the garden.
(Left) “Downward Pulling #2” (1972) is made of Spanish Alicante marble and Marquina marble. (Right) “The Opening” (1970) is made of French rose marble and Italian white marble. Surviving Projects in New York “I’m really a New Yorker. Not Japanese, not a citizen of the world, just a New Yorker who goes wandering around like many New Yorkers,” said Noguchi late in life. He had moved to New York at age seventeen in 1922, and lived here between travels around the world. Hoping to make his city a better place, he proposed thirty known projects over the years, from monumental earthworks and playgrounds to plazas and gardens. Most were never realized, according to the Noguchi Museum.
Noguchi worked on his tribute to journalism, entitled “News,” from 1938 to 1940.
AP had run an international contest to select the best design for this important space in midtown Manhattan. Noguchi, who won, was described in 1940 by Time Magazine as a “muscular, California-born, Japanese-Irish sculptor, who submitted a small-scale plaster model depicting five symbolic figures (editor, reporter, photographer, teletype and telephoto operators) straining eyes and ears for news.”
Noguchi spent a year sculpting a full-scale plaster model (17 by 22 feet), which took up his entire studio from floor to roof. He shipped the model in five pieces to Boston’s General Alloys Co. to be cast into stainless steel. William H. Eisenman, secretary of the American Society for Metals, concluded, “It is easily the outstanding achievement of the decade in American foundry practice, probably an all-time high.”
In its guide to the art in its complex of buildings, Rockefeller Center says, “Soaring above the entrance to 50 Rockefeller Plaza, this dynamic plaque symbolizes the business of the building’s former tenant, the Associated Press. One of the major Art Deco works in the Center, it depicts five journalists focused on getting a scoop. AP’s worldwide network is symbolized by diagonal radiating lines extending across the plaque. Intense angles and smooth planes create the fast-paced rhythm and energy of a newsroom. News is the first heroic-sized sculpture ever cast in stainless steel and the only time Noguchi employed stainless steel as an artistic medium.”
A second sculpture still standing is Red Cube, an immense steel rhomboid punctured by a distinctive hole and standing in front of the Marine Midland Bank at 140 Broadway.
Noguchi’s Red Cube, installed in 1968
The Noguchi Museum notes that, “What initially seems to be a fairly straightforward design, this commission from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is a carefully articulated response to both the surrounding towers of the Financial District and open plaza spaces nearby. Noguchi’s elongated rhomboid mass in painted red steel offers its viewer a subliminal tool to harmonize the man-made canyon surroundings.” The gleaming aperture has an effect similar to a Nikon camera: you look through and up to the building captured in the lens.
The other three surviving works are the Sunken Garden at Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza, the Unidentified Object now in front of the Met Museum on Fifth Avenue, and the museum itself.
Noguchi’s Friends and Colleagues in New York and Abroad
Noguchi did not belong to any particular movement, says the museum, but he collaborated with artists working in a range of disciplines and schools. One of his most dramatic collaborations was with Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo in Mexico City. His first public commission came from the Mexican government in 1936.
With post-revolutionary fervor in the 1920s the government had urged artists to inspire the nation with nationalist pride and visions of historical achievement. A dramatic result was Mexican muralism, virtually its own school of painting.
History Mexico is not only Noguchi’s first realized public artwork, four years before his Rockefeller Center sculpture, it is still extant and magnificent. Located on the second floor of the Mercado Abelardo L. Rodriguez in Mexico City’s historic center, it remains astonishingly vivid and dominant, its composition of concrete and pigmented cement as alive today as in 1936.
History Mexico was commissioned by the Mexican government, which paid Noguchi $88.
Alex Ross, Managing Editor of The Isamu Noguchi Catalogue Raisonné, callsHistory Mexico “one of the great anti-fascist works of the last century.”
Despite his profound sympathy for the struggles of the working classes, Noguchi himself became uncomfortable with his use of obvious symbolism, for example the huge red fist of labor in the center. But in an interview at the time with the publication, New Masses, he said aspirationally, “Capitalism everywhere struggles with inevitable death—all the machinery of war, coercion, and bigotry are as smoke from the fire. Labor awakens with the red flag. And youth, through education, will see the world creatively more abundant, with equal opportunity for all.”
Later, in 1979, he wrote that his art in Mexico had been inspired by love and “the affection that surrounded me” (an affair with Frida Kahlo), and that “Diego chased me twice with a gun, but fortunately did not shoot.”
A very different public commission came from UNESCO, which commissioned Noguchi in the mid-1950s to plan a garden in Paris outside its main building that had been designed by architects Marcel Breuer, Pier Luigi Nervi, and Bernard Zehrfuss. Rock formations collected from different sites in Japan along with ponds and plantings form the core of the garden, which he called “The Peace Garden.”
Noguchi’s Peace Garden for UNESCO in Paris, photographed through the fence
Back in New York
Noguchi had created stage sets as early as 1935 for Martha Graham, as well as for Merce Cunningham, composer John Cage, and choreographers Erick Hawkins and George Balanchine.
(left to right) Isamu Noguchi, Bed for Martha Graham’sPhaedra’, 1962 (fabricated 2021). Canvas, plaster, wood, paint. Shrine of Aphrodite for Martha Graham’s ‘Phaedra’, 1962 (fabricated 2021). Paint, canvas, wood, metal. The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, NewYork, 552-EC1-1;552-EC1-3
After his travels Noguchi had hoped to return to Greenwich Village, where he had lived from 1942 to 1949. His biographer, Hayden Herrera, wrote that on MacDougal Alley in the Village Noguchi “had two brick buildings that once closed off the alley’s end. Number 33 included not only his studio, but also a garden with a large tree and a flagstone path flanked by shrubbery and even a small fishpond.”
A plaque honoring Noguchi’s residence was installed by Village Preservation on the facade of 52 West 10th Street and unveiled in a special ceremony this week.
Photo Courtesy of Village Preservation
Masayo Duus, another biographer, wrote in Journey without Borders that during a brief affair with Noguchi the French-American diarist Anaïs Nin had written in her diary, “Noguchi’s studio in MacDougal Alley, is one of the loveliest places in New York. The houses are small, the streets are of cobblestones, there are gas lanterns. It is an echo of English or French streets. At the closed end is a wall with trees behind. The houses and streets are each different in shape and decoration. It is intimate and mysterious.”
Such real estate riches would be astonishing today. He called his haven a “sign of providence.” He was surrounded by artists, including Europeans who had fled the war.
Yet when he returned to New York a decade later he found himself priced out of the Village, and started thinking about moving to the far cheaper waterfront area of Queens. In 1961, he relocated to a 3,200-square-foot warehouse in Long Island City.
And that, Dear Reader, is why we have the sublime Noguchi Museum in Queens.
Noguchi’s New York
On the way to the stairs leading to the second floor, you’ll see this wonderful quote of Noguchi’s:
Like a lot of New Yorkers, I was one of those bitten by some kind of an idealism … New Yorkers after all felt a special relationship to the world. They were on this island looking out on the whole damn world, which they had to do something about. My way was not the way of words, but the way of doing things, making something which might sort of approach that which one felt the world could be. Little spots here and there, so that instead of going to the moon, you bring the moon to you. – Isamu Noguchi, 1980
Works from Isamu Noguchi’s MacDougal Alley studio period, 1940s
Four decades later, the Museum remains one of Noguchi’s greatest sculpted environments. It also embodies his decades-long effort to sculpt the urban landscape of New York into a more humane, natural space for connection and creativity. For an artist whose civic ambitions were often blocked by the formidable New York city planner Robert Moses—who scorned Noguchi’s unconventional plans—the Museum’s opening represented a triumph over city politics.
Asked how he felt about the achievement, Noguchi replied, “I feel I’ve outsmarted Mr. Moses, is what I feel.”
A LONG SERVICE ON ROOSEVELT ISLAND
EDWARD BURNEO HAS BEEN OUR UPS DELIVERY PERSON FOR 20 YEARS. HE IS RETIRING THIS WEEK AFTER 35 YEARS WITH UPS.
THANKS FOR ALWAYS DELIVERING FOR US.
YOUR ROOSEVELT ISLAND FRIENDS
CREDITS
UNTAPPED CITIES The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum 9-01 33rd Road (at Vernon Boulevard) Long Island City, New York 11106 718.204.7088 info@noguchi.org 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.
New York Martin guitars are rare and worth a fortune. My wife bought me a (Nazareth) Martin for my 60th birthday, my pride and joy. I also have a traveling-size Martin given to me by Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul and Mary fame) at the behest of our own Ethel Romm. I met Chris Martin IV at Rudy’s music shop some years ago and he gave me a Martin tee shirt which I wear proudly. M
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.
STARTS AT 12 NOON AT RIHS VISITOR CENTER FOR HISTORY PLAQUE DEDICATION
ISSUE #1665
JOIN US FOR THE DEDICATION OF THE NEW PLAQUE AT THE VISITOR CENTER AT 12 NOON
JOIN US FOR A FAMILY FUN
AFTERNOON VISITING OUR HISTORIC MARKERS. *ENJOY THE ACTIVITIES AT EACH SPOT. *GET YOUR PASSPORT STAMPED **RETURN TO VISITOR CENTER FOR A GIVEAWAY
BLACKWELL HOUSE
STRECKER LABORATORY & SMALLPOX HOSPITAL
LIGHTHOUSE PARK
CHAPEL OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
CREDITS
PROGRAM SPONSORED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND YOUTH CENTER ROOSEVELT ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION. Judith Berdy
A NOTE FROM A READER
Matthew Katz wrote:
New York Martin guitars are rare and worth a fortune. My wife bought me a (Nazareth) Martin for my 60th birthday, my pride and joy. I also have a traveling-size Martin given to me by Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul and Mary fame) at the behest of our own Ethel Romm. I met Chris Martin IV at Rudy’s music shop some years ago and he gave me a Martin tee shirt which I wear proudly. M
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
The Lombardy city of Cremona is the birthplace of the violin. The name of Antonio Stradivari became a metaphor for perfection, and his presence sparked a cult of Cremonese violins.
Born in 1644, he continued a lengthy line of local luthiers who since the sixteenth century had produced fine instruments.
The town of Markneukirchen in Saxony’s Vogtland was the unofficial capital of a German and Czech cross-border region known as the “Musikwinkel” (music corner).
For its production of stringed instruments, the town enjoyed the reputation of a “German Cremona.” Immigrants from the region carried a rich tradition with them and, over time, would upgrade America’s musical landscape. Cremona calls for classical music; Markneukirchen stands for the modern age.
Music & Migrants
After the Thirty Years War, Bohemian Protestants from the Catholic town of Graslitz (Kraslice) fled their homes during the Counter Reformation and settled over the border. They brought the art of violin making with them.
In 1677, twelve refugee craftsmen came together and founded the Violin Makers’ Guild (Germany’s oldest continuous trade union). They codified standards of workmanship and turned the town into a hub of excellence. Over time, bow makers and string producers settled there as well.
At the same time, a start was made with guitar and zither production. Makers of woodwind instruments and French horns settled in the region at the turn of the eighteenth century. Almost the entire range of orchestral instruments became available in a single town.
Craftsmen worked from home, instructed apprentices, and sold their goods to wholesale dealers. With the march of industrialization, the manufacture of instruments largely kept its character as a cottage industry.
Rather than making entire instruments, artisans would concentrate on single parts such as fingerboards or tailpieces and supply them to an expert for completion. The region developed a range of specialisms.
The nineteenth century marked a peak in output. London’s 1851 World Exhibition put Markneukirchen on the export map. The American market took notice and there was a diplomatic effort to encourage trade relations.
In 1893, a Consular Agency was set up in the town, serving the instrument trade (until its closure in 1916) by easing the import processes for giant retailers like Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Ward.
Manufacture expanded rapidly. In 1913, the “Musikwinkel” produced forty percent of the world’s string instruments, totaling over 150,000 violins a year. Until the Second World War, it was one of the largest global centers of instrument making.
While many of its violins were affordable, Markneukirchen also maintained the benchmarks for quality instruments, being home to prominent dynasties like Heberlein, Hamm, and Roth.
King of Guitars
Vogtland’s violin making was regulated by guilds. In the early 1800s, the guitar was a relatively recent instrument, and most producers were members of the Cabinet Makers’ Guild.
Violin makers claimed exclusive rights to the manufacture of stringed instruments and the guild exercised its privilege to prevent their rivals from producing guitars.
Christian Frederick (Friedrich) Martin was born on January 31, 1796, in Markneukirchen into a family of woodworkers. He learned his trade in Vienna as an apprentice to leading guitar maker Johann Georg Stauffer.
Returning to Saxony, Martin joined the Guild of Cabinet Makers and soon clashed with violin makers who tried to stop him from applying his trade. Unwilling to accept the locality’s confining rules, Martin moved to the city of New York.
In 1833 he opened a workshop at 196 Hudson Street in Manhattan’s Lower West Side, producing instruments modeled after those of his Viennese mentor. The original building at the corner of Hudson and Vestry Streets has not survived, but a bronze plaque commemorates the site where this immigrant built his first American guitars.
In 1839 he moved to Nazareth, Pennsylvania, where he set up a workshop at the corner of Main and North Streets. Once settled there, his guitars evolved in shape and quality, whilst his reputation grew.
By the late 1840s, he had abandoned the Stauffer characteristics and developed a style of his own. During the Civil War sales increased as Martin’s portable “parlor” guitar became a means of relaxation for the troops.
Martin’s main distributor was Charles A. Zoebisch & Sons, a firm also known for producing brass instruments. Its founder Carl August Zoebisch, born in 1824, was an immigrant from Saxony too, arriving in New York in January 1842.
Having started his business in Mott Street, he traded from 1866 onward at 46 Maiden Lane, Lower Manhattan. The link between the companies endured until 1898, when Martin took on its own distribution.
By the end of his working life (he was succeeded by his son in the family firm), clients hailed Martin as the undisputed king of the acoustic world. Despite its European roots, he had transformed the guitar into an iconic American instrument that gave shape and substance to the nation’s modern musical landscape.
Spanning all genres, from country, R & B, or folk to rock & roll, the legends of song have endorsed Martin’s guitars. Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Neil Young, Paul Simon, Eric Clapton, Ed Sheeran, and many other performers have strummed his creations.
The company stuck to its main mission throughout the decades: building acoustic guitars, never tempted to sell its soul to the electric market.
Mandolins, ukuleles, and electric guitars have featured in the company’s catalogues, but to connoisseurs the word “Martin” simply meant a classic flat-top acoustic guitar. America made music on Saxon-inspired instruments.
Civil War
During the 1850s Saxony’s instrument makers, primarily from Markneukirchen, emigrated to escape restrictive guild practices and political unrest, carrying their specialized skills to the United States.
Rudolph Wurlitzer was born on February 1, 1831, in nearby Schöneck where his father ran a family business of music distribution. The family had a long history of producing and selling (stringed) instruments, stretching back to the seventeenth century when Nicholas Wurlitzer began making lutes.
Little is known of Rudolph’s life (there is no biography). He joined the family firm after leaving school, but it is unclear why he made the decision to emigrate. Twenty-two-year-old Rudolph boarded a transatlantic liner in Bremen (the immediate reason to leave may have been a dispute with his father) and docked in Hoboken, New Jersey, in June 1853.
He arrived penniless and with no knowledge of English. Having started work in a New York City grocery shop, he quickly made his way up. He then moved to Cincinnati where he became part of the city’s large German-speaking immigrant community and set up his own company. Ambitious, energetic, intelligent, and frugal, he concentrated on what he knew best – the trade in musical instruments.
At the time, most instruments were expensive imports from Europe, and the business model involved a long supply chain and high transaction costs.
Rudolph’s connections gave him a competitive advantage as a was able to exclude the middlemen. He bought instruments directly from Saxon producers (and family members) and made them available for retail at relatively low prices.
The relationship was one of mutual advantage. Wurlitzer profited from his commercial networks in the “Musikwinkel,” while his home region benefited economically from his presence as a major American importer.
On September 19, 1868, Rudolph married Leonie Farny, an immigrant from Alsace, at Cincinnati’s Lutheran Church. Making their home on Franklin Street, the family kept a strong German identity and, at the same time, integrated fully into American society (he had been a naturalized citizen since October 1859).
His contracts with the army during the Civil War and the Spanish-American War were signs of mutual respect. Drums, trumpets, and bugles played by United States soldiers during the Civil War bore Wurlitzer’s name.
The Rudolph Wurlitzer Company went from strength to strength with America’s growing passion for music and entertainment. The company offered a wide selection of instruments in its 200 page-long catalogues, mostly focused on “conventional” instruments.
Towards the end of the century, the firm became increasingly aware of public interest in mechanical music devices. The leisure industry began making new demands.
Mighty Wurlitzer
The development of automatic instruments gathered pace. Barrel organs took over Manhattan’s streets and fairs; coin-operated pianos played ragtime in packed saloons. With the craze for silent movies came the introduction of “orchestrions,” mechanical organs that imitated the sounds of a complete orchestra.
Eugene de Kleist was born Eugene von Kleist in Düsseldorf in 1853 (of Prussian noble stock), but changed his name after spending time in London where he built barrel organs for merry-go-rounds.
Wurlitzer would become the sole distributor of his products, including the 1899 “Tonophone,” a commercially successful coin-operated piano played by a pinned cylinder. When De Kleist withdrew from business, Wurlitzer took over his factory.
In 1910, the company bought an insolvent enterprise owned by the eccentric Cheshire-born Robert Hope-Jones. A pioneer in applying electrical technology, he sold his patent for what would become the company’s greatest triumph, an organ that went down in the history of cinema as the “One Man Orchestra.”
Otherwise known as the “Mighty Wurlitzer,” the organ was equipped with trumpets, tubas, clarinets, oboes, chimes, xylophones, drums, and other sound effects.
With the advent of silent movies in the 1920s, it became an international success. The introduction of sound (“talkies”) spelled the end for silent film. Organs were replaced by speaker systems. The “Mighty Wurlitzer” went out of fashion.
The company (and the music industry in general) survived the Great Depression thanks to the jukebox. Its rise coincided with the end of Prohibition and then reopening of countless bars and clubs. “Put a nickel in it” was the slogan – and dance away.
Early jukeboxes used heavy and fragile shellac 78-rpm records. Rival companies competed to improve the mechanism, leading to the so-called “Battle of the Speeds.”
Introduced by RCA in March 1949, the invention of the 45-rpm vinyl record accelerated the spread of the jukebox. It improved sound quality, increased capacity (100 selections), and lowered production costs. The 45s became synonymous with the “single,” featuring a hit on the A-side and an added song on the B-side.
The root of the word “jukebox” goes back to the coastal plain and Sea Islands of South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida where “Gullah,” a creole of West African languages and English, was spoken by enslaved people brought to the region in the eighteenth century.
The word “jook” meant disorderly or rowdy. A “jook joint” was a dance hall, gaming room, and brothel, all rolled into one. Early boxes were known as “nickel-in-the-slot machines,” until around 1937 when Time magazine popularized the nickname jukebox.
A novelty in the 1920s, the jukebox transformed into a post-war cultural icon. Omnipresent, the vogue was associated with an emerging youth culture. Located in diners, coffee bars, roadside cafés, soda fountains, and amusement arcades, these boxes provided a hub where teenagers could spend time together, dance, and socialize.
They allowed them to control their choice of music at their own chosen venues. Wurlitzer was the market leader, its name almost synonymous with the machine. Stylish and colorful designs added to their popularity both in America and Europe.
Wurlitzer’s vanguard role was enhanced by the participation of Paul Max Fuller (born in Corisca in 1897; and died in Buffalo in 1951), the most talented box designer of the era.
The company stopped producing jukeboxes in 1974; by that time, the firm had sold more than 750,000 of them. New electronic music devices caused the company’s decline. Japan took the lead instead.
C. F. Martin and Rudolph Wurlitzer were young immigrants who made a career in music, showing a commitment to traditional quality and artistry that was emblematic for their enterprises. The former provided uniquely American acoustics for over a century of contemporary music, while the latter supplied the soundscape of entertainment that shaped popular culture.
One stood for the creation of music, the other served its dissemination and consumption. Within their own realms, both men represented a Saxon creative versatility they brought to the United States, securing a niche of professional esteem for themselves in the nation’s diverse musical history.
AN EASY WAY FOR DRIVERS TO FIND COLER HOSPITAL ENTRANCE
(MORE DIRECTIONAL SIGNS ARE ON THE WAY)
CREDITS
NEW YORK ALMANACK llustrations, from above: A modern European instrument shop; “A Typical Family of Violin-Makers Outside Their Cottage” in Markneukirchen, ca. 1900; C.F. Martin Sr and his wife Otilia from a scrapbook page (courtesy Martin Guitar Museum); C.F. Martin bronze plaque at the intersection of 196 Hudson Street and Vestry Street; Making Drums for the Spanish American War in the Wurlitzer Cincinnati Factory, 1898; Wurlitzer 4/26 orchestral organ, 1928 (LIU Paramount Theater, Brooklyn); Wurlitzer Stores and Factory 1916; Paul Max Fuller designed Wurlitzer jukebox model 850 “Peacock” design, 1941. 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.
During the opening weekend of Greater New York, join us for MoMA PS1’s 50th Anniversary Block Party, a free celebration with our community partners featuring curator-led gallery talks, family activities, local food vendors, and music sets across the museum’s public plaza, courtyard, and galleries. The day features activations by artists, musicians, and local organizations including Asian American Arts Alliance, Discolocas NYC Fiesta Club, FAD Market, Flushing Town Hall, Lady Pink, Make the Road, M Wells, Malikah, Nuevayorkinos, Queens Botanical Garden, Queens Night Market, Queensboro Dance Festival, Queensbridge Photo Collective, Red Canary Song, St. James Joy, and Teen Art Salon. PS1 is your place for the best of the borough.
Online reservations have ended. Walk-up registration will be available on the day of the event; we encourage you to arrive early to make the most of the day.
GREAT PROGRAMS ON SATURDAY
Block Party Schedule
Opening Weekend: Greater New York All Day, Galleries Our signature survey of artists living and working in the NYC area returns for its sixth edition, coinciding with MoMA PS1’s 50th anniversary. Spanning three floors of the museum, the exhibition brings into focus over 50 multidisciplinary artists in the formative years of their careers. Join us for curator-led spotlight talks throughout the day in the exhibition galleries.
Food Vendors Selected by Queens Night Market All Day, Courtyard
FAD Market All Day, 2nd Floor FAD Market will bring together a special lineup of 60+ local artists, makers, and creative entrepreneurs, including select artists featured in Greater New York 2026. The market brings together independent creators working across art, design, and craft, on the museum’s second floor.
MoMA Kids ‘Once Upon an Artwork’ Screening 10 a.m.–2 p.m. Watch stories about art, told by kids and animated by artists. The series uses works of art in MoMA’s collection as a jumping-off point for children to imagine, play, seek adventure, and create worlds.
Family Workshops 10:30 a.m.–4 p.m., 1st Floor Quilting Circle with Queensbridge Photo Collective Extending their communal quilting practice, Queensbridge Photo Collective invites participants to sift through upcycled scraps, colors, and textures to collage portraits onto quilt squares.
Self-Defense Workshop with Malikah Through a variety of self-defense techniques, Malikah teaches a workshop to build mental strength, resilience, and community.
Mapping Home with NuevaYorkinos Inspired by NuevaYorkinos’ commitment to placekeeping, participants will collectively add to a map interpreting “home” through photos, drawings, and collage.
How To Take Up Space: A Mural Workshop with Lady Pink 10:30 a.m & 12:30 p.m., Courtyard Join legendary graffiti artist and painter Lady Pink for a hands-on mural workshop inspired by Foundations, her 2025 mural commissioned for the MoMA PS1 Plaza. In this workshop, she invites young artists, teens, and families to explore the power of taking up space through graffiti and mural-making techniques, using chalk spray paint to collaboratively create directly onto PS1’s courtyard walls. Learn more here. Additional RSVPs required.
DJ Set by Discolocas NYC Fiesta Club 12–3 p.m., Terrace This New York-based collective/club celebrates vinyl culture and storytelling through music led primarily by women. Guided by a strong feminine energy, Discolocas’ Block Party set features selectors La Lin & Loly Roots bringing funk, Latin house, salsa, Cumbia, and more to transform the dancefloor into a shared emotional space.
Dance Demonstrations by Queensboro Dance Festival 1–2 p.m. & 4–5 p.m., Terrace Join Queensboro Dance Festival on the dance floor with popup salsa demos (1–2 p.m.), and a house dance exhibition battle (4–5 p.m.). Queensboro Dance Festival tours across Queens all summer with free programming featuring Queens dance artists.
Zine-Making Workshop 2–3 p.m., Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore Learn to create zines and books in this all-ages workshop led by educator and artist Lauren Simkin Berke, author of the forthcoming book Zine Making and Bookbinding: A Beginner’s Guide in 25 Projects. Separate RSVP required.
DJ Set: St. James Joy 3–6 p.m., Terrace Saint James Joy is a Clinton Hill, Brooklyn-based collective and cultural platform known for transforming public spaces into vibrant, community-driven dance floors. For our 50th Anniversary Block Party, they bring their signature energy—joyful, inclusive, and deeply connected to the spirit of New York City.
Red Canary Song presents Fly in Power 4 p.m., 3rd Floor On the occasion of Touch the Heart in Homeroom, attend a screening of Fly in Power, a film that follows the community of Asian and migrant massage parlor workers, sex workers, and allies in Red Canary Song. The screening runs 78 minutes and will be followed by a panel discussion between organizers from the collective and Centro Corona. Additional RSVPs required.
TO REACH MOMA P.S.1
TAKE THE Q102 BUS TO THE LAST STOP. MOMA PS.S IS A FEW BLOCK WALK AT 22-25 Jackson Avenue Queens, NY 11101
COME ON SATURDAY, APRIL 25th DEDICATION OF NEW LANDMARK SIGN AT KIOSK 12 NOON EVENT IN COORDINATION WITH R.I. YOUTH CENTER
CREDITS
PRINTED MATTER 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.
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:
1. Pier 54
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.
2. The Jane Hotel
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.
3. Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary
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.
4. Titanic Memorial Lighthouse
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, and it is currently under restoration once again.
5. The White Star Office Building
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 survivors
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.
FAVORITE SITE FOR BRIDAL PHOTOS IS THE WONDERFUL KWANZAN CHERRY TREE OUTSIDE THE RIHS VISITOR CENTER
CREDITS
Untapped New York
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.
Christianity banned beer from the sacred domain as the Roman clergy continued the Latin habit of drinking wine. The opposition: Christian wine versus pagan beer, was upheld even in the north of Europe. Believers accepted wine’s sacramental role, whatever their climates, social habits, or drinking customs.
The Catholic Church was, at the same time, actively involved in the lucrative business of beer making. The Reformation was not just a schism that breached the unity of the Church, it was also a revolt against clergy-imposed customs that brought about a drastic change – from herbs to hops – in beer production and consumption.
First recorded in the late tenth century, the word “gruit” stems from the Low Countries and refers to a mixture of herbs and spices used for flavoring and preserving beer.
In the eleventh century, Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV awarded privileges of production and sale to different local authorities, creating competition and variety.
Until the Reformation, brewing was a Catholic monopoly. Monasteries controlled the gathering and taxation of ingredients. As hops were considered an unwanted (invasive) weed, they were not taxed. For Martin Luther and other reformers using (wild growing) hops to brew beer was an act of rebellion.
When Luther married the runaway nun Katharina von Bora (ca. 1499-1552) in June 1525, the Wittenberg town council presented the couple with a barrel of “Einbeck” beer (the hops used in this Lower Saxony brew made the drink popular throughout the region and beyond).
Katharina was a competent person. Running a large household, she also managed a brewery. Luther considered beer a blessing to be enjoyed but not abused (he condemned drunkenness).
The boycott of “gruit” led to a shift in brewing practice and taste preference in the Low Countries and those parts of Europe where the Reformation took hold. Hopped beer became the rage.
There was a valuable economic factor to the “Beer Reformation” as well: hops provided a natural preservative, allowing beer to be shipped and exported more readily.
Massachusetts & Manhattan
English ale was a malt brew made from barley. The habit of livening beer with hops was introduced by Flemish refugees during the fifteenth century. There was initial resistance.
Henry VIII instructed the court brewer to ignore hops, and it was not until 1552 that Edward VI passed legislation to allow its application. The use of hops became so widespread that the Flemish/Dutch word “brouwerij” (brewery) replaced the English “brew house.”
Puritan settlers in Massachusetts viewed beer as a daily staple. Due to the long journey, the quality of imported beer was poor. Colonists had brought brewing skills from home but lacked a steady supply of ingredients.
In 1629, the Massachusetts Company began transporting cultivated hops from Europe, but producing its own was a priority. By 1640, observers noted that hops grew “fair and large” in the colonies. Massachusetts stayed a hop supplier for well over a century before production shifted to New York State.
In early urban settings polluted water was a health hazard. People drank thin or small beer instead (heavier beers were consumed on special occasions).
Most European towns had their own breweries that supplied local demand and that of surrounding countryside. Brewing and beer exports laid a foundation for Amsterdam’s prosperity. Dug in 1585, the Brouwersgracht (Brewers’ Canal) was the focus of the city’s rapidly expanding beer industry.
Settlers in New Netherland had a thirst for hopped beer. Manhattan’s first brewery was set up in 1612 in a log house by Dutch explorers Adriaen Block and Hans Christiansen, but it would take another two decades before the start of a permanent industry in New Amsterdam.
In 1633, the West India Company set up the first of several breweries at a location that would become known as Brouwers Straet (Brewers’ Street), close to the Heere Gracht (Gentleman’s Canal), a timber-lined stream constructed in about 1646 that provided water from natural springs.
It ran through what is now Broad Street, extending from the East River up to Pearl Street, ending near Beaver Street, and was dug to drain marshland whilst allowing ships to transport goods from the docks into the heart of the trading post.
Pollution was a problem. The tidal canal was described as a “foul-smelling open sewer,” but it did not impede the flow of beer. Brouwers Straet became the focus of the brewing industry. Oloff Stevense van Cortlandt was a prominent participant.
According to legend, his horse-drawn carriages spread so much dust that locals petitioned for the street to be reconstructed with cobblestones. Completed in 1658, this was New York City’s first paved street (now known as Stone Street).
Early brewers produced hopped beers. With the expansion of New Amsterdam, demand for the ingredient grew. New York State would become the nation’s main hop producer, supplying the demand of brewing giants in New York City via the Erie Canal after its opening in 1825.
Activities were set in motion in 1808 when James Coolidge planted the first hop yard in Bouckville, Madison County, and thrived until Prohibition after which production shifted to the Pacific Northwest.
Vigne & Valenciennes
Located in the Hainaut region, Valenciennes was a center of early Reformation in the Spanish Netherlands. After the fall of the besieged city to the Duke of Alba’s army, French and Walloon Huguenots (Protestants) suffered severe repression under Habsburg rule.
Throughout the 1570s, as persecution intensified, refugees from Valenciennes and the surrounding Artois region fled in large numbers toward safer areas, including the Dutch Republic.
By the late sixteenth century, Amsterdam had developed into a hub of religious refugees and economic migrants. In a mix of Flemish Protestants, Walloon Huguenots, German Lutherans, and Iberian Jews, immigrants formed a significant part of the population.
Housing these newcomers was a burden to the city authorities. At the same time, the WIC had serious labor shortages in the colonies. Offering families “opportunities” in New Netherland was one way of alleviating the issue.
The original Company plan was to send a small group of men to set up a fur trading post on Manhattan Island. The arrival of displaced Huguenot families in Amsterdam brought about a change in planning the colony’s future.
These refugees either volunteered or were encouraged (pushed?) to make the long journey into the unknown. In 1614, Hoorn-born Cornelis Jacobson Mey captained the Fortuyn (Fortune), a ship that sailed along the coast of what is now New Jersey. Cape May is named in his honor.
In 1625, Mey took charge of the Nieu Nederlandt (New Netherland) and landed the first thirty Walloon families in the colony.
Amongst them were Joris Janszen Rapaelje and his family, refugees from Valenciennes. Sara Rapaelje was born in June 1625, the first European girl seeing life in New Netherland. Guillaume Vigne and his wife and daughters were another family selected by the WIC. They too originated from Valenciennes.
The Vignes established a farm along the East River. Not long after their arrival, Jean (Jan) Vigne was born. He was the first European male born in New Netherland.
Jean Vigne prospered as a farmer and brewer. He was a prominent resident which prompted Peter Stuyvesant to select him as a “schepen” (magistrate) of the New Amsterdam settlement. That appointment highlighted an ominous contradiction in the running of the colony that would impact upon its future.
Vigne was one of New Netherland’s foundational generation, many of whom had escaped persecution at home to search for socio-religious freedom in America. Peter Stuyvesant by contrast was a hard-line Calvinist who was tasked to restore order in the chaotic colony.
His opposition to New Amsterdam’s religious pluralism added to the challenge of ruling the city. Authority degraded into authoritarianism.
Stuyvesant’s Prohibition
Prohibition refers to a ban on the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages and was in effect from 1920 to 1933 under the 18th Amendment. Its supporters formed an odd alliance.
Members of the evangelical clergy championed prohibition because of their faith; social reformers joined in because of the devastating effects of drunkenness on society; anti-liquor sentiments expressed by Ku Klux Klan sympathizers were rooted in the movement’s post-war hatred of (German) immigrants.
Conceived by Wayne Wheeler, leader of the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), the amendment aimed to reduce crime, alleviate poverty, and improve workplace efficiency. The complementary (Andrew) Volstead Act provided its enforcement guidelines. In America, the taps went dry.
The measure led to the rise of illegal bars (speakeasies) and bootlegging. It added a range of innovative terms to the US English vocabulary, but “prohibition” was not one of those linguistic inventions.
In fact, Peter Stuyvesant himself had introduced the term in his political and legalistic jargon, while trying to restrict activities that were believed to be a threat to the colony’s stability and/or the authority of the Dutch Reformed Church.
Director-General of New Netherland from 1647 to 1664, Stuyvesant began to collect taxes on the production and sale of beer, despite opposition from both brewers and residents.
In a crusade against drunkenness, he implemented draconian regulations to impose moral discipline in New Amsterdam. His policies focused on limiting alcohol consumption (banning the sale of liquor to Native Americans), restricting religious freedom, and enforcing strict Sunday observance.
He issued “prohibitions” against the settlement of Quakers whom he considered agitators. When residents of Flushing, Queens, challenged his authority (leading up to Flushing Remonstrance of 1657), he punished the town by implementing a “prohibition in future of all town meetings” without his permission.
Stuyvesant tried to dictate individual behavior by enforcing specific moral standards with acts and statutes (mandated morality) but ran into a wall of defiance. Even if the ends of his endeavor may have been acceptable to some, the means to achieve those were not.
Stuyvesant gave the word “prohibition” a negative connotation that lingered in the city’s collective memory.
Prohibition in New York City became a stand-off between federal law and individual liberty. New Yorkers rejected the ban of alcohol as an attack on personal freedom.
Immigrants, for whom local taverns and saloons served as hubs of mutual support, stood in the vanguard of protest. Many of them defied the law, demanding an end to the “Noble Experiment” (as Prohibition was nicknamed) by pointing out that its imposition hit the poor, the marginalized, and immigrant communities.
High rates of disobedience, mass consumption of illicit alcohol, rampant criminal activity, and the desperate need to increase tax revenue, caused the repeal of 18th by the 21st Amendment (ratified on December 5, 1933, the only Amendment to ever be repealed).
When the law took effect, an estimated 1.5 million barrels of beer were sold within the first twenty-four hours.
Squirrels Perched on East 74 Street
CREDITS
New York Almanack
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.
WELCOME HOME ARTIMIS CREW FROM SOMEONE WHO HAS WATCHED SPACE TRAVEL FROM ALAN SHEPHERD, JOHN GLENN, THE MOON AND BEYOND TO TODAY.
The 1894 Lexington Building –
151 East 25th Street
(aka 152 East 26th Street)
Weekend, March 11-13, 2026
Daytonian in Manhattan
ISSUE #1660
New Yorkers were served by a mélange of transportation options in the 19th century–horse-drawn street cars, cable and traction cars, and elevated trains. As the century drew to a close the numerous small firms were being rapidly consolidated as they were gobbled up by larger companies or merging.
On December 12, 1893 the Houston, the Broadway Railway and the South Ferry Railroad merged to form the Metropolitan Street Railway Company. Five months later the Lexington Avenue, the Pavonia Ferry Railroad and the Metropolitan Cross-Town Railway were added; and later in 1895 so was the Columbus and Ninth Avenue Railroad.
By then work was well underway for a power house to serve the firm’s gargantuan needs. The site engulfed nearly the entire block between East 25th and 26th Streets, between Lexington and Third Avenues. The well-known architectural firm of William Schicken & Co. had been commissioned to design what would be called the Lexington Building, completed early in 1896.
The Real Estate Record & Builders’ Guide, December 14, 1895 (copyright expired)
The architects created a dignified building that looked as much like a commercial structure as a power house. The Real Estate Record & Builders’ Guide called it “a monument of strength and beauty [which] marks the era of a new departure in modern and progressive building for that vicinity.” It described the “inviting facade” as being “as nearly perfect as the combination of stone, brick, steel and other fire-proof material would permit.”
The Renaissance Revival style structure was clad in speckled “Pompeiian” brick and trimmed in limestone and terra cotta. The 25th and 26th Street elevations were essentially identical, with massive arched openings at the ground floor, four-story arcades at the third through sixth floors, and regimented, symmetrical balance throughout.
Close inspection reveals exquisite details, like the thin terra cotta bands between courses of brick.
To provide interior light and ventilation the building engulfed a large court paved in white bricks. The steam power plant itself took up only the basement and first floor levels; the upper floors were always intended to be leased as office and factory space. And it appears that printing firms had always been anticipated as tenants. The floors were constructed to uphold 325 pounds per square foot; easily strong enough to accommodate heavy printing presses.
And, indeed, printing and publishing firms quickly moved in. Among the first were two bookbinding firms, Robert Rutter & Son, and William Launder. Publisher The S. S. McClure Co. also moved its gigantic operation into the building.
New-York Tribune, December 8, 1897 (copyright expired)
Founded by Samuel Sidney McClure in 1893, McClure’s Magazine was a favorite in American households. It was noted for serializing works by respected authors like Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Willa Cather, Jack London and many others.
McClure partnered with Frank Nelson Double to form the publishing firm Doubleday & McClure, which also took space in the Lexington Building.
New-York Tribune, September 30, 1898 (copyright expired)
The tenants were not all from the publishing field. The Hygiene Manufacturing Company made caps. An advertisement in The World on May 23, 1897 touted the waterproof “Common-Sense” wool cap.
Wheelmen [i.e., bicyclists], equestrians, lovers of outdoor sports, the tens of thousands who prefer to wear a cap all or a part of the time, and who have suffered from headaches, profuse perspiration and the debilitating effects of exercise under a torrid sun, will welcome with joy the announcement that inventive skill has at last come to their relief.
And in the first months of 1897 The Sterling Supply & Manufacturing Company moved its factory onto the third floor of the Lexington Building. The firm manufactured street railway supplies like insulators, brakes, indicators and such.
By 1908 The Magazine of History was published in the building. Its editor, William Abbott, made the newspapers in July that year when he caused an uproar on the uptown Madison Avenue street car line. The New York Times described the elderly, bearded man as “wearing a linen jacket and carrying a Bible” when a young stock broker named John E. Irwin got on board smoking a cigarette.
Abbott commanded the conductor to expel him from the car and when he did not, the two men got into “a heated argument.” The Times said that “the whole car soon joined.” Before it was over the offending smoker had spent fifteen minutes in a patrol wagon with other prisoners, two hours in a jail cell, and another hour in the West Side Court.
The Literary Collector, October 1901 (copyright expired)
In January 1906 the New York Interborough Railway and the Metropolitan Street Railway consolidated to form the Interborough-Metropolitan Company. A few days before, on December 30, 1905, the Record & Guide shrugged “The incident affords one more illustration of the often-repeated statement that this kind of service is a natural monopoly.”
The Financial Panic of 1907 devastated the public transportation system and the company and its subsidiaries went into receivership until 1912 when they were turned over to the control of the Interborough Consolidated Corporation.
The changes were being seen within the Lexington Building. On April 21, 1909 The Horseless Age reported on the establishment of The Lexington Garage which “occupies part of the ground floor of the Lexington Building…The balance of the building is used for lofts and as an electric power station, which formerly occupied the entire ground floor.” The Lexington Garage was used “only for the storage of electric commercial vehicles, and is operated by the New York Transportation Company in connection with its taxicab garage.”
In the meantime, printing and related firms continued to operate from the upper floors. Lithographers Seiter & Kappes were in the building by 1900 and The Schweinler Press was here by 1904. Pfister Book Binding Co. was listed in the Lexington Building as early as 1912.
Giant terra cotta roundels fill the spandrels between the ground floor arches.
The year 1913 saw major tenants move in, including The Publishers’ Weekly and printing firm Andrew H. Kellogg Company. The Publishers’ Weekly had been at the same location downtown for around 40 years. Now an agreement between the two firms meant that Kellogg would be doing the printing of Publishers’ Weekly. The two firms shared the sixth floor of the Lexington Building.
Also moving in that year was the embossing firm Walcutt Brothers, which took the third floor, and Stuart Specialty Co., which took the fourth. Another large publishing and printing house to take space was Frank A. Munsey, publisher of the New York Press, Argosy Magazine and inexpensive novels.
At the time New York City, along with nearby areas like Brooklyn and northern New Jersey, was the center of the silent film industry. In August 1918 the Famous Players-Lasky Corp. leased the fifth floor of the Lexington Building. The Record & Guide noted it “will use the premises as headquarters for the distribution of advertising matter.”
The New York Herald, January 8, 1922 (copyright expired)
In 1925 Charles Schweisler Press purchased the building. Among the tenants it inherited was the Walker Engraving Company which had occupied the seventh floor for years. In 1915 Walker Engraving Company had employed a staff of 85 men. The shop was the scene of a terrifying accident on April 13, 1926.
The New York Sun reported “One workman was slightly injured and some 500 employees of various firms in the building were sent scurrying to the street to-day when acid exploded in the chemical room of the Walker Engraving Company.” Luckily David Levin only suffered burns on his left hand and the fire which resulted from the explosion was quickly put out.
The former loading dock on East 25th Street still bears the name The Lexington Building. photograph by Tdorante10
The Walker Engraving Company would remain in the building into the 1940’s. Another firm occupying space in the building in the Depression years was the Ever Ready Label Corporation. Its president, Sidney Hollander, made a kind gesture to the employees in December 1936 when, according to the New York Post, he announced “that the company would make each employee a Christmas gift of his share of the society security tax for the coming year.”
Telecom Plus operated from the Lexington Building following its formation in 1983. Its tenancy would be short-lived, however. On September 12, 1986 The New York Times announced that Baruch College would acquire “the historic Lexington Building” among other property purchases. Baruch’s director of campus planning and facilities said that $50 million would be spent “to renovate the Lexington Building, which is to house the college’s library, computer center and administrative offices for student groups.”
The initial report developed by architects Davis Brody & Associates alarmed some because of its mention of possible “additional stories.” Jack Taylor, in a letter to the editor of The New York Times on May 14, 1989 warned that adding additional stories would “rob the building of its architectural and historic significance.” If that part of the report was ever seriously considered, it was soon dropped.
The 26th Street elevation is essentially a duplicate of the 25th.
William Schickel & Co.’s handsome 1894 power plant is today home to the Baruch’s William and Anita Newman Library. Its facade has been gently restored and the conversion from commercial to educational use sympathetically executed.
Presenting: Conversations in City History
Monday, April 13, 2026, 6:30 pm “Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen” Author Bonnie Yochelson will discuss with moderator Judith Berdy about how a woman who grew up in the Gilded Age, when the term “lesbian” did not yet exist, challenged the conservative ideals of Staten Island high society. She will explain, as does her book, the role of photography in Alice Austen’s journey of self discovery, embrace of feminism and involvement in a loving lesbian partnership.
Monday, May 11, 2026, 6:30 pm “Rural County, Urban Borough: A History of Queens” When preservationist and author Jeffrey A. Kroessler passed away in 2023, his wife, architect Laura Heim, selected the images for his book and saw it through publication. She has generously agreed to be interviewed on this seminal historical work that charts how politics, industry, transportation, government and real estate interests all shaped New York’s borough of extraordinary ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity.
Monday, June 8, 2026, 6:30 pm “The Killing Fields of East New York” Author Stacy Horn (also writer of “Damnation Island,” about 19th-century Blackwell’s Island) has chronicled how the subprime mortgage scandal of the 1970s and a long history of white-collar crime slowly destroyed the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. She will share her compelling investigative journalism in a conversation about the area’s fair housing, race, violence and misplaced city priorities.
JUST ADDED: Monday, September 14, 2026, 6:30 pm “Louis I. Kahn The Last Notebook Edited By Sue Ann Kahn An intimate record of Kahn’s musings on design, coupled with preparatory drawings of his monumental last project
Published in honor of the 50th anniversary of his death in March 1974, this two-volume set contains a facsimile of the notebook in which Louis Kahn drew and wrote during his last year of life, alongside a second volume of scholarly commentary and transliterations of his musings. Anchored by a magnificent set of preparatory drawings for his monument to Franklin Roosevelt in New York City, the notebook provides an intimate glimpse into private sketches of Kahn’s final projects and his poetic reflections on thematic preoccupations, such as “Silence to Light,” “Form and Design,” “Society of Rooms” and “Desire to Express.” Each volume is in a vellum sleeve and both are housed together in a transparent slipcase. Born in Estonia, Louis Kahn (1901-74) immigrated with his family to Philadelphia when he was four years old. Kahn received Beaux-Arts training at the University of Pennsylvania, under the French-educated Paul Philippe Cret, and then adopted his own idiosyncratic modernism, which would engender the heterogeneous “Philadelphia school.” His architectural career did not take off until later in life; he attained his first major commission to design Yale University’s Art Gallery in 1951. Upon its completion, Kahn received many international commissions, and he developed a signature style that was monumental, monolithic and transparent in its functionality. He was awarded the AIA Gold Medal and the RIBA Gold Medal.
THE ROOSEVELT ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY
6:30 p.m. 504 Main Street
We had a tech error yesterdayAbove are the two volumes of “The Last Notebook”.
CREDITS
DAYTONIAN IN MANHATTAN
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.
When constructed in 1927, the Barclay-Vesey Building at 140 West Street was one of the first examples of a new form of architecture that would soon define the next quarter-century of high-rise development in New York City and around the world. Shaped by the 1916 zoning law, which required setbacks to allow light and air to reach the street, this new style created by municipal regulation soon became an aesthetic, often accompanied by Art Deco ornamentation.
FORMER AT&T BUILDING
NOW PARTIALLY A CONDO
THURSDAY, APRIL 9TH
NYCURBANISM
ISSUE #1659
When constructed in 1927, the Barclay-Vesey Building at 140 West Street was one of the first examples of a new form of architecture that would soon define the next quarter-century of high-rise development in New York City and around the world. Shaped by the 1916 zoning law, which required setbacks to allow light and air to reach the street, this new style created by municipal regulation soon became an aesthetic, often accompanied by Art Deco ornamentation.
Designed in 1923 by Ralph Walker for the offices of the New York Telephone Company, the skyscraper was referred to the Barclay-Vesey Building due to its proximity between Barclay and Vesey Streets on the Lower West Side of Manhattan. At 498 feet, the skyscraper totaled over 1.2 million square feet of office space with five sub levels of telephone switching centers. When it opened in 1926 the structure was defined by its overwhelming monumentality, which was balanced through its ornamentation and form, giving the building individuality and human scale while also appearing solid and powerful.
The base of the building, shaped by the irregular block rises straight up from the sidewalk to the tenth floor, where dramatic setbacks reveal a square tower that continues before topping out at 32 floors. The cornice of each setback is adorned with ornament; elephant heads with their trunks dangling down the facade, foliage, and cherubs. As The Skyscraper Museum explains, the bulky base, rising directly up from the lot lines, “was only possible because of the switching machinery it contained; windows were unnecessary, so the entire internal core could be utilized. Ralph Walker used the mandated set-backs to create a well-lit office tower above the switching floors, beautifully matching form to function.”
On the building’s south side, a Guastovino-tiled vaulted arcade enclosed Vesey Street, blending public and private space and offering protection and grandeur to passing pedestrians. Inside, a grand lobby forms a corridor the length of the building, with marble walls, travertine floors, and bronze medallions, topped with exquisite murals illustrating advances in communications. Walker’s design was massively influential, pushing other architects to adopt the form in their work. Walker would go on to design other iconic New York City skyscrapers including One Wall Street, the Western Union Building (60 Hudson) and the AT&T Long Lines Building (32 Sixth Ave). In 1957 The New York Times would name Walker “Architect of the Century.”
Alice Austen House or Clear Comfort in 2002
The skyscraper was in the path of destruction on 9/11, bordering the northern edge of the World Trade Center campus with close proximity to the Twin Towers, and next door to the collapsed 7 World Trade. Luckily, the building’s thick masonry exterior helped to shield it from much of the falling debris and absorb the energy from the collapsed towers with no interior fires. Still, the building experienced extensive damage with entire portions of the facade ripped off its steel skeleton. The underground Verizon cable conduits and infrastructure were also flooded and heavily damaged. In 2002, the New York Times detailed the damages to the building: “It took hits on two sides. First, the steel hurled from the collapsing towers smashed into the building’s south face, penetrating an underground vault containing thousands of telephone cables. Later that day, 7 World Trade Center, a 47-story skyscraper just to the east, came tumbling down, its ruins slumping like a slain giant against the Verizon Building’s east facade.The remains of the collapsed trade center buildings have been picked away, but the wounds they created are still visible. Two-foot-wide steel support columns at the east facade of the Verizon Building are bent inward like crumpled car fenders. A hole in this face of the building reaches as high as eight stories from the ground, and is covered by nothing more than white sheeting.”
The Times noted the repair bill would cost “three-quarters of the Chrysler Building’s estimated total value.”
Restoration following 9/11 was done by Tish.
In 2013 Verizon – New York Telephone’s successor – sold the top 22 floors to Magnum Real Estate Group, who converted the floors into loft residences under the name 100 Barclay. During the conversion, the lobby was completely restored with a new entrance on the Barclay Street side of the building.
For those who may not make it up to see the residences, the breathtaking lobby is an interior landmark, which means it is open to the public. Covered in bronze, marble and travertine, with murals depicting communication through the ages, it is one of the most incredible interiors in the entire city – and in it’s original state. Peek inside to get an idea of how it looked when the Art Deco jewel first opened in 1927!
Presenting: Conversations in City History
Monday, April 13, 2026, 6:30 pm “Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen” Author Bonnie Yochelson will discuss with moderator Judith Berdy about how a woman who grew up in the Gilded Age, when the term “lesbian” did not yet exist, challenged the conservative ideals of Staten Island high society. She will explain, as does her book, the role of photography in Alice Austen’s journey of self discovery, embrace of feminism and involvement in a loving lesbian partnership.
Monday, May 11, 2026, 6:30 pm “Rural County, Urban Borough: A History of Queens” When preservationist and author Jeffrey A. Kroessler passed away in 2023, his wife, architect Laura Heim, selected the images for his book and saw it through publication. She has generously agreed to be interviewed on this seminal historical work that charts how politics, industry, transportation, government and real estate interests all shaped New York’s borough of extraordinary ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity.
Monday, June 8, 2026, 6:30 pm “The Killing Fields of East New York” Author Stacy Horn (also writer of “Damnation Island,” about 19th-century Blackwell’s Island) has chronicled how the subprime mortgage scandal of the 1970s and a long history of white-collar crime slowly destroyed the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. She will share her compelling investigative journalism in a conversation about the area’s fair housing, race, violence and misplaced city priorities.
JUST ADDED: Monday, September 14, 2026, 6:30 pm “Louis I. Kahn The Last Notebook Edited By Sue Ann Kahn An intimate record of Kahn’s musings on design, coupled with preparatory drawings of his monumental last project
Published in honor of the 50th anniversary of his death in March 1974, this two-volume set contains a facsimile of the notebook in which Louis Kahn drew and wrote during his last year of life, alongside a second volume of scholarly commentary and transliterations of his musings. Anchored by a magnificent set of preparatory drawings for his monument to Franklin Roosevelt in New York City, the notebook provides an intimate glimpse into private sketches of Kahn’s final projects and his poetic reflections on thematic preoccupations, such as “Silence to Light,” “Form and Design,” “Society of Rooms” and “Desire to Express.” Each volume is in a vellum sleeve and both are housed together in a transparent slipcase. Born in Estonia, Louis Kahn (1901-74) immigrated with his family to Philadelphia when he was four years old. Kahn received Beaux-Arts training at the University of Pennsylvania, under the French-educated Paul Philippe Cret, and then adopted his own idiosyncratic modernism, which would engender the heterogeneous “Philadelphia school.” His architectural career did not take off until later in life; he attained his first major commission to design Yale University’s Art Gallery in 1951. Upon its completion, Kahn received many international commissions, and he developed a signature style that was monumental, monolithic and transparent in its functionality. He was awarded the AIA Gold Medal and the RIBA Gold Medal.
THE ROOSEVELT ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY
6:30 p.m. 504 Main Street
We had a tech error yesterdayAbove are the two volumes of “The Last Notebook”.
Great Volunteers Vicki Feinmel, Gloria Herman and Verna Firtzpatrick at the Good Shepherd Parish food distribution twice a month on the first Sundays,. Meals and bread are distributed at 10:30 a.m. first come, first served
Photo Judith Berdy
CREDITS
Wikipedia 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.
