Weekend, October 8-9, 2022 – THE LONG HISTORY OF THE BLACKWELLS ON AND OFF OUR ISLAND
https://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2022/10/18/rihs-lecture-queer-history-womens-house-detention
FROM THE ARCHIVES
WEEKEND, OCTOBER 7-8, 2022
THE 802nd EDITION
THE OTHER
BLACKWELL HOUSE
STEPHEN BLANK
| The Other Blackwell HouseMansion Stephen Blank We know about Blackwell’s Island and the Blackwell House, the family home on the island. But there was another Blackwell House, across the river in Queens – in what was known as Ravenswood. It was a large and important house, and one with a particular story. A door! Read on. First, about the Blackwell family and our island. Note, some of the material in the next paragraphs is lifted from earlier RIHS materials, a truly wonderful collection. Under Dutch rule, our island was known as Varckens Eylandt, or Hog Island. Amsterdam Governor Wouter van Twiller purchased it from two Indian chiefs in 1637. Just 2 years later, it was being farmed under land grants from the Amsterdam Chamber of the West India Company to Jan Alteras, Francois Fyn, Jonas Bronck and finally Laurens Duyts. The last in this line, Duyts, defaulted on his lease and, worse, was banished from the province for “selling his wife into immoral slavery and for gross immoralities committed by himself.” The British took over New Amsterdam and confiscated Hog Island in 1667. In 1668, a Captain John Manning was granted a “patent” on the island by the British. Five years later, after mismanaging his command of New York’s Fort James during a Dutch attack (I believe he surrendered it to the Dutch), he was tried by court martial and publicly disgraced. (His sword broken over his head?) Manning moved to his island retreat and evidently found solace there. Reverend Charles Wolley, writing in 1701, tells us that he had often gone to Manning’s Island to visit the Captain, “whose entertainment was commonly a bowl of rum-punch.” The ownership of our island passed to Robert Blackwell, who had come from England in 1661 and started a business in Elizabethtown, NJ. He married Robert Manning’s daughter Mary, moved to the island and renamed it Blackwell’s Island. Robert Blackwell owned a plantation on the mainland in Newtown (Ravenswood) in Queens, opposite the island. |
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| Robert’s youngest son, Jacob, one of 12 children, was the next owner. He lived in the family home in Ravenswood. He is remembered as a very large guy, six feet two in height and, so it is said, weighing over four hundred pounds. Getting his body out of the house required a good deal of doorway remodeling. His son, also Jacob, was born in 1717 in Ravenswood (and in 1780, died there as well). I assume, but don’t really know for sure, that this was the same property built by his grandfather. Jacob Blackwell was an enterprising businessman and active in the miliary. Prior to the French and Indian War, he held a Captaincy in the Newtown militia. When the Revolutionary War broke out, he was a member of the committee of correspondence in 1774-75, organized the Queens County militia and served in the 1st, 3rd and 4th provincial congresses. When Queens County was overrun by foreign troops, he returned to Ravenswood, trusting the British assurances but the privations and pecuniary losses which he continued to suffer from the enemy are believed to have hastened his death. A brief sidebar about the Revolution and Blackwell’s Island. In a History of Queens County with illustrations, Portraits & Sketches of Prominent Families and Individuals, published in 1882, we learn that during the exchange of canon fire across the East River between the British in Queens and the Americans in Manhattan, the British actually invaded Blackwell’s island. But they were forced to retreat: “This cannonading continued for several days, by which the enemy were so emboldened that on Tuesday they crossed in considerable numbers to Blackwell’s Island, but the shot from our batteries proving too warm for them they soon recrossed the river.” Jacob willed the island to his sons, James and Jacob. But it’s interesting to learn that the will also indicates that, like many New Yorkers of that time, Jacob Blackwell was a slave owner. He willed “a negro girl named Isabel to his daughter Mary” and stipulated “that a ”8-acre tract on York Island near Harleam with negroes not already devised to be sold, proceeds to payment of debts and legaices” The brothers fought their way through financial problems after the war. Their situation seems to have improved and by 1796 the Blackwell House was built on our island. The Blackwell family owned and farmed the island until 1828 when it was sold to the City of New York. Jacob Blackwell became the owner of the Ravenswood house – again, where he and his brother had been brought up, presumably the same Blackwell house built by Robert Blackwell a century earlier. |
| Ravenswood and the other Blackwell House Ravenswood runs along the East River, now part of Long Island City between Astoria and Hunter’s Point. European settlers drove away Native Americans who were there and farmed the area. A Colonel George Gibbs bought much of the land in Ravenswood in 1814. After his death in 1833, the land was divided into nine estates and by 1848 villas and mansions dotted the shore. By this time, this part of Long Island was connected by ferry to New York City, still perched at the southern tip of Manhattan island. (Astoria was also becoming a summer estate haven for wealthy New Yorkers.) The Roach Brothers also purchased land in Ravenswood a bit later, and commissioned Alexander Jackson Davis, widely considered America’s greatest architect of the mid-nineteenth century, to draw up schemes for a planned community that would attract wealthy Manhattanites. (We recall that Davis also designed the Blackwell Island Lunatic Asylum.) In a few years, Ravenswood became of the most exclusive neighborhoods on Long Island and even on the entire East River. New York merchants enriched with the city’s growing fortunes moved in, stimulated by the construction of the Erie Canal. Almost none of them came from old families (who had manors in other parts of the region). |
An example of a Ravenswood property, from an engraving by Alexander Jackson Davis (ca. 1836) https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2017/09/fall-ravenswood-old-aristocratic-queens.html
A unique feature was the public promenade. While lots were granted to the edge of the East River, a public walkway was carved into the properties so that neighbors could enjoy the impressive views
Ravenswood and its promenade, from an engraving by Alexander Jackson Davis (1850) Courtesy Museum of the City of New York https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2017/09/fall-ravenswood-old-aristocratic-queens.html
| Blackwell House as it was in the 1920s, 27th Avenue and 8th Street, 1923. Courtesy of the Queens Borough Public Library, Archives, Eugne L. Armbruster Photographs Ravenswood as a Neo-Classical bucolic Arcadia had a short lifespan. An 1894 New York Times article notes, “Not more than 20 years ago famous families of that period filled these great houses with life and fashion. Black clouds of smoke now hang over these once beautiful homes, which are streaked and seamed… Manufactories and other industries gradually drove nearly all the old-time residents out of their great houses.” The wealthy moved eastwards on Long Island. Their mansions were left behind and by the late 1870s many ended up as orphanages and asylums. As the LIRR moved in along Newtown Creek, hundreds of small factories sprang up in Ravenswood which prospered along the busy East River. Finally, during the 1930s and 40s, vast tracts of public housing (and Queensbridge Park) were erected, and the recognizable shape of modern Ravenswood was formed. |
| The Blackwell door on exhibit at the Greater Astoria Historical Society So, what about the Door?? After the Battle of Brooklyn (aka the battle of Long Island) in August 1776, British and Hessians swept into Queens from the south and east. Colonel Jacob Blackwell had to flee. The British hacked a mark on his front door – the “Arrow of Confiscation” – announcing that it had been appropriated by the crown. This arrow marking still exists in the door’s exterior. The story continues: Jacob Blackwell returned to the house and lived there through the worst of the British occupation, and died there in October 1780, still a British subject in a land not yet the independent United States. In the 1820s, our old friend George Gibbs owned the Ravenwood Blackwell house and property. James Fenimore Cooper, the famous American novelist and a friend of Col. Gibbs, spent time at the old stone house in 1825. (Is this, “the old stone house”, the Blackwell house in Ravenwood?) Cooper worked on the outlines of his novel, “The Water Witch” or “Skimmer of the Seas” during his stay. This is significant in that Cooper wrote about dueling ships racing up the East River and through the treacherous Hell Gate. Over time, the Blackwell House became a boys’ boarding school from 1845-46, a picnic grove/park in 1882 and was occupied until its demolition in 1901. National Grid’s Big Allis power plant now occupies its site. Back to the Door. The door was part of the house from about 1765 to its demolition in 1901. (So presumably, it was always the same structure.) The door was rescued by the prominent Tisdale family of Astoria, who may have displayed it or stored it at their lumber yard on the Astoria peninsula from 1901 to 1951. James Tisdale donated the door to the Brooklyn Museum in 1951 which possessed the door until December 3, 2007, when the Museum donated it to the Greater Astoria Historical Society. There’s more! More was learned about the door after its “rediscovery”. It sports two porthole-like windows, which experts say the colonists created from melted-down bottles to avoid a glass tax levied via the British Townshend Acts. “The colonists clearly were thumbing their nose at the British authorities,” said Bob Singleton, a past president of the Greater Astoria Historical Society. “For the British, it would’ve been like a pebble in their shoes.” Finally, it was learned that the original doorknocker was among a collection of artifacts held by the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Residence in Hyde Park, NY. The historical society is hoping to acquire the doorknocker and reunite it with the door. A good story, I think, with a door at the end. Stephen Blank RIHS October 4, 2022 |
WEEKEND PHOTO
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rooseveltislandhistory@gmail.com
FRIDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
PORT AUTHORITY BUS TERMINAL , 1941
HARA REISER, ARON EISEPREISS, ALEXIS VILLAFANE, ED LITCHER, ANDY SPARBERG , NINA LUBLIN, GLORIA HERMAN ALL GOT IT RIGHT.
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c)
SOURCES
Walter Barrett, The Old Merchants of New York City, Second Series 1883
https://sites.google.com/site/brooklynqueenswaterfront/neighborhood-histories/ravenswood
https://househistree.com/houses/sunswick
http://sackett-tree.org/getperson.php?personID=I6076&tree=1
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Blackwell-649#_note-0
https://junipercivic.com/juniper-berry/article/behind-the-gray-door
https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2017/09/fall-ravenswood-old-aristocratic-queens.html
GRANTS
CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE JULIE MENIN DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD,
ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS
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rooseveltislandhistory@gmail.com
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