TIME OUT: I WILL BE WORKING EARLY VOTING THIS WEEK AT OUR ISLAND POLL SITE IN THE GALLERY RIVAA. STOP BY TO CAST YOUR BALLOT IN THE PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY AND SAY HELLO. BE BACK AFTER EASTER WITH MORE STORIES.
Manhattan’s MacDougal Street was named after merchant Alexander McDougall, a Scottish immigrant who hailed from the Isle of Islay. A rebellious character, he had been actively involved in the Revolutionary War.
In later years, McDougall represented New York in the Continental Congress and became the first President of the Bank of New York. Until their reckless destruction in 2008 to make space for New York University’s law school, the buildings from number 133 to 139 were landmark addresses in the history of Greenwich Village.
Manhattan’s MacDougal Street was named after merchant Alexander McDougall, a Scottish immigrant who hailed from the Isle of Islay. A rebellious character, he had been actively involved in the Revolutionary War.
In later years, McDougall represented New York in the Continental Congress and became the first President of the Bank of New York. Until their reckless destruction in 2008 to make space for New York University’s law school, the buildings from number 133 to 139 were landmark addresses in the history of Greenwich Village.
Village of Dreams
During the last decades of the nineteenth century, Europe’s major cities were in the grip of militant radicalism. Vienna experienced a number of uprisings. Rumors that the Emperor himself was a target abounded in and around the capital, especially since the assassination in 1898 of Empress Elisabeth of Austria by the Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni.
Born in 1869 in Bohemia (then part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire), Hippolyte Havel was educated in Vienna where he associated himself with radical circles. Anarchism in the late nineteenth century was literally a “movement on the move.”
Activists lived under constant threat of arrest and moved from country to country. Many would eventually end up in the United States. American anarchism was established by political refugees from Paris, London, Madrid, Rome, Berlin, Moscow or Vienna.
Havel had started his career as a journalist, but was arrested in 1893 after delivering a blazing May Day speech. Having served eighteen months in prison, he was deported from Vienna. Soon after he was re-arrested for taking part in an anarchist demonstration in Prague. Expelled from the country he traveled to Germany, spent time in Zurich and then moved on to Paris.
After a series of bomb attacks in the 1890s, the French authorities were not inclined to tolerate subversive activities and by 1899 Havel was living “down and out” in London. There he met the political activist Emma Goldman whose orthodox Jewish family had fled anti-Semitism in Lithuania and settled in the United States in 1885. The pair became lovers.
In September 1900 Havel accompanied Goldman to Paris where an attempt was made to stage an international anarchist congress (for which Peter Kropotkin wrote a contribution on Communism and Anarchy), but the police intervened and prevented the event from taking place.
Returning with Emma to the United States, Havel settled in Chicago. He was one of six anarchists arrested and briefly detained in the city on September 7, 1901, accused of plotting with Leon Czolgosz who had murdered President William McKinley on the grounds of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.
All over the nation anarchists were hunted down, but repression breeds resistance. Havel had no intention of being silenced.
In 1903 Emma Goldman had settled in an East Village tenement at 208 East 13th Street. When in 1906 she founded the journal Mother Earth (“A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature”), she ran her office from the neighboring tenement (No. 210). Arguably the most influential anarchist journal in America before the First World War, it was banned by the federal government in 1917. Havel became her associate and collaborator even though their love affair had ended.
Art & Anarchy
A flamboyant character, Havel spoke several languages and expressed himself in a fluent style of writing, but he was not academically minded and never produced a full-length book. A revolutionary with a fondness for drink, Havel’s heroes were activists who adhered to Johann Most’s “propaganda of the deed” and accepted violence as a legitimate means of achieving political ends.
Historically, creative milieus have clustered in urban areas where housing was relatively cheap, attracting a diverse group of migrants, artists and students. These densely populated and overcrowded sites were soon littered with small workshops, bakeries, cafés and eateries.
Their maze-like streets proved difficult to police and offered a perfect hiding place for controversial thinkers and activists. Interactions were intense, forging tight and often rebellious community bonds.
Although the image of Greenwich Village as a progressive “republic” of free spirits won popular acceptance during the mid-1910s, it reflected only a small part and brief period (between 1913 and 1918) of local life.
Most residents were not bohemians. Their lives were not shaped or determined by the influx of young artists and activists, but by continuous migration and changes in ethnic composition that affected local conditions.
The small Village community of radicals centered on Washington Square where Fifth Avenue ends at Stanford White’s triumphal arch. Inspired by his experiences in Vienna and Paris, Havel recognized the primacy of “creative spaces” such as cafes, salons and cabarets where anarchist ideas could be discussed away from the formality of political discourse.
Such gatherings cemented solidarity between anarchists and artists which he considered crucial for the movement’s expansion. They were natural allies who challenged the bounds of conventional thought in order to bring about renewal, be it artistic or social.
The association of anarchism with the arts had been stressed as early as 1857 by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. In his essay on the painter Gustave Courbet the philosopher stressed the social mission of the artist by giving visual form to the struggle of working classes in a bourgeois society.
Havel brought his European heritage to Greenwich Village. He argued that the cultural avant-garde had a vital role to play in the revolutionary struggle.
Playwright Eugene O’Neill served a brief apprenticeship as co-editor of Havel’s journal Revolt before it was closed down for its opposition to the nation’s involvement in World War One. This involvement sparked the writer’s interest in anarchist activity (he portrayed Havel as Hugo Kalmar in his play The Iceman Cometh).
Polly’s Restaurant & The Liberal Club
Havel claimed to have come up with the idea for a Village restaurant as a platform where radicals could eat and talk revolution. In 1913, his then lover Polly Holladay opened a modest bistro in the basement of a townhouse at 137 MacDougal Street located just below Washington Square Park. Originally named The Basement, it became known as Polly’s Restaurant.
Born in Evanston, Illinois, Polly immersed herself in the bohemian atmosphere. Havel served as cook and waiter, while she handled finances and engaged with customers. The bistro’s walls in yellow chalk paint were hung with local artists’ work.
With its wooden tables crammed together, Polly’s soon became an alternative eatery of choice for a set of patrons that included novelists Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson, playwright Eugene O’Neill, political activist Emma Goldman as well as the imposing figure of Max Eastman, editor of the magazine The Masses. It was a creative space where Village residents sat down to discuss art, politics and revolution.
Havel took center stage for his verbal power and “volcanic outbursts.” He gained notoriety for addressing patrons of the restaurant as “bourgeois pigs” (throwing insults at clients was a feature of the European cabaret culture). He always reserved a table and bench for Emma Goldman and her lover, fellow Lithuanian activist and editor of her journal, Alexander Berkman.
The bistro was home to the Heterodoxy Club, a woman’s forum founded in 1912 by the extraordinary Marie Jenney Howe (biographer of the French novelist George Sand) to lunch and discuss radical feminist strategies.
A “heterodite” defined herself as a woman “not orthodox in her opinion” which allowed for members of diverse political views and sexual orientations to exchange ideas and in doing so define American feminism (a new word at the time, borrowed from the French).
The upstairs space from Polly’s basement was occupied by the Liberal Club which, founded in 1912, billed itself as a social meeting place for “those interested in new ideas.” Henrietta Rodman was the most outspoken of its female members in their demands for “free love,” birth control and equal rights.
Several of them took part on March 3, 1913, in the eventful women’s suffrage procession along Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue (the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration).
The club also became notorious for its annual costume ball, a bacchanalian event known as the Pagan Rout, held at nearby Webster Hall at 125 East 11th Street. The location became even more popular when a passage was created into the neighboring building where the brothers Albert and Charles Boni ran their Washington Square Bookshop.
Books & Plays
Opened at 135 MacDougal Street in 1913, the Washington Square Bookshop gained a central place in the Village community. Members of the Liberal Club used the shop as a library, “borrowing” books to read in the comfort of the club and return them when finished.
The Boni brothers never made a profit out of the business. In 1915, they decided to give up bookselling and focus on publishing instead (their company would eventually become Random House). They sold the shop to Frank Shay.
Born Frank Xavier Shea in 1888 in East Orange, New Jersey, he changed the spelling of his name in order to associate himself with Shays’ Rebellion (an armed uprising led by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays against tax rises in Western Massachusetts). He would run the Washington Square Bookshop for about two years and became closely involved with the arrival of theater in the Village, both as an actor and a publisher.
In 1916, the Provincetown Players opened the Playwrights’ Theatre at 139 MacDougal Street, next to Polly’s Restaurant and the Liberal Club. This collective of artists, writers and theatre lovers produced plays for two seasons in Provincetown, Massachusetts (1915/6), and six seasons in New York City (1916 to 1922).
Shay played the role of Scotty in their production of Eugene O’Neill’s Bound East for Cardiff, the play that launched the dramatist’s career. From his bookshop he published three volumes of The Provincetown Plays (1916), landmark collections of the group’s earliest productions.
Shay’s activities were interrupted when conscripted in 1917. He fought the draft on the basis of his pacifist beliefs, but did not succeed. He served in the Headquarters Company of the 78th Division in France and saw action in the battles of Saint-Mihiel and the Forest of Argonne.
Demobilized in June 1919, Shay returned to New York and opened a tiny bookshop at 4 Christopher Street, West Village, and remained engaged in publishing volumes and anthologies of plays. He kept in touch with the latest literary developments.
When novelist and poet Christopher Morley visited the shop in April 1922, he reported his first sight of the blue-covered first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, recently published by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Company in Paris.
Deportations Delirium
Politically the Village was no longer the same as the First Red Scare took hold of its community. From April through June 1919 several bombings were carried out nationwide aimed at judges, politicians and law enforcement officials, including the Washington home of newly appointed Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer. The latter responded by creating a division of intelligence agents led by the young lawyer J. Edgar Hoover. The aim was to crush the “Reds.”
Tensions between activists and agencies increased sharply after the raid on the headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the East Village on November 11, 1919, leading to violent street clashes between opposing political camps. The 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Anarchist Exclusion Act were used to justify the onslaught. Temporarily, Village radicalism went underground.
On December 21, 1919, the Federal government assembled 249 “undesirable” left-leaning East European immigrants onto the US Army transport Buford (nicknamed the “Soviet Ark”) and expelled them to Russia.
It was reported in The New York Times as “A merry Christmas present to Lenin and Trotsky.” Or as the jubilant Saturday Evening Post put it: “The Mayflower brought the first builders to this country; the Buford has taken away the first destroyers.”
On January 16, 1920, the ship arrived in Finland and the deportees were transported by train to the Russian border. Amongst them were Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.
The impact of the intervention caused a persecution frenzy. Palmer and Hoover organized a massive roundup of radicals. By early January 1920, the Palmer Raids led to thousands of arrests and hundreds of deportations (described in 1923 by Louis F. Post as the “Deportations Delirium”).
The project turned into a festival of retribution based on dubious constitutional grounds and a disregard for civil rights. It should be a reminder to who partake in the present debate on democratic values.
An extremist is someone who engages in violence for political or religious ends. Any definition of radicalism must therefore be fit for purpose in a particular context. What matters is how people act, not what they think. Only those who resort to (or incite) extreme methods should be confronted.
Democracy encourages contrarian debate, even if an argument may offend the majority or unsettle the status quo. No nation can progress without heretics. Galileo was sentenced to life imprisonment for his perceived insult of the church while claiming the earth orbited the sun.
THURSDAY & FRIDAY PHOTO
LIST OF DAILY BAKED GOODS AT MEDITERRANEAN EATERY NINA LUBLIN., THOM HEYER, JOAN BROOKS, & GLORIA HERMAN GOT IT RIGHT
Text by Judith Berdy
Illustrations, from above: Demolition of historic McDougall Street buildings in 2009 (courtesy Village Preservation); Edwin Wright Woodman’s “Portrait of Havel,” published in September 1901 in The Minneapolis Journal (Library of Congress); cover of the inaugural issue of Emma Goldman’s anarchist magazine Mother Earth, March 1906; Polly’s Restaurant at 137 MacDougal Street, NYC circa 1915; poster of the Liberal Club’s annual ball, “Pagan Rout III,” 1917, signed by “Rienecke” (probably Rienecke Beckman); and the I.W.W.’s New York City headquarters after a Palmer Raid, 1919.
CREDITS
MAYA LEVANON-PHOTOS TIK TOK & INSTAGRAM
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
William Kentridge’s video animation of historical figures on view at Moynihan Train Hall
ISSUE # 1209
AARON GINSBURG
6SQFT
Images courtesy of Amtrak
A cast of historical figures is watching travelers as they bustle through the waiting area of Moynihan Train Hall. Created by South African artist William Kentridge, “We Will Make Shoes from the Sky” is a multi-panel video animation featuring characters based on famous people from history, including several Black leaders like James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, and Aimé and Suzanne Césaire. The installation is currently on view on the digital screens in the main waiting area of Moynihan Train Hall.
“We Will Make Shoes from the Sky” depicts characters who are based on real figures from eras in history, including people who fled Vichy France at the end of World War II and traveled to destinations in North and South America.
Other figures were part of the Negritude movement, which was a “consciousness of pride in the cultural and physical aspects of African heritage,” according to a press release. The movement, which started in Paris, was led by the famous Martinique writer Aimé Césaire and his wife Suzanne Césaire, a teacher, scholar, anti-colonial, feminist activist, and surrealist.
The installation gives passengers traveling through the train hall a chance to stop and think about trailblazing figures who fought for freedom and individuality.
The characters featured in the animation are also the cast of “The Great Yes, The Great No,” Kentridge’s highly-anticipated theater production. Developed for the Luma Foundation, the show will debut in Arles, France in 2024 in partnership with the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence.
“We Will Make Shoes from the Sky” is part of the Art at Amtrak public art program, in its third year. Curated by Debra Simon Art Consulting, the program displays diverse art projects designed to enhance the travel experience at Amtrak stations. The program began at NYC’s Penn Station in June 2022 and expanded to Moynihan Train Hall last summer.
Art at Amtrak is currently presenting another art installation below Moynihan Train Hall in the Amtrak concourse at Penn Station. Created by NYC-based artist Rico Gatson, “Untitled (Collective Light Transfer)” covers the concourse with captivating geometric compositions that fill the otherwise bland space with a “pulsating energy.”
The installation is on view in the upper-level rotunda between the 8th Avenue Amtrak departure concourse and the 7th Avenue NJ transit concourse through the summer.
This letter arrived in my mailbox today and tells one more story of our island’s past. Thanks
The Sid Kaplan photo of the trolley station under the Queensboro Bridge brought back vivid memories of my youth in Manhattan and Queens. My father was an oral surgeon and his rounds took him to Welfare Island once a month from the end of his stint in the Army in 1955 through the mid-1960’s. While we never rode the trolley, we accessed the Island from Queens many times via what everyone called the “Upside Down” building. In that structure, elevators (for automobiles, trucks and people) connected the middle of the bridge with the land below. Several times, after coming up in the elevator in our automobile, we waited while the westbound trolley to the “city” stopped to pick up or drop off passengers. I was captivated by this little “train” which traversed the bridge and I begged to take a ride.
My request was not granted — I was probably four — but ever-after I watched for the orange and cream cars and was always delighted to see them.
Then, one day, they stopped. “The electric company”, my Dad explained, “made a deal with the city to run cables over the bridge – and under the road – where the trolley tracks used to be”. I was heartbroken. “Why? Why??”, I asked my parents. “Why couldn’t the trolley continue running above the electric cables like all the automobiles?” “Well,Luddy”, said my Mother, “the trolley is obsolete….”
Obsolete? How could something so wonderful to my innocent eyes go away? Alas, this was the first of so many things in my life to disappear “forever”. Penn Station and the Singer Building in Manhattan met a similar fate to my beloved trolley. Luckily, Grand Central remains and a lot of other trolleys in other cities have been saved, or rebuilt or expanded. How great would it be if those Queensboro Bridge streetcars – and a modernized “Upside Down” building – still connected our Island to Manhattan and Queens?
If there is a lesson in this, it is that something which today is “obsolete” may one day be quite valuable – and useful. But I can tell you – from personal experience – that this notion is of little comfort to a small boy riding over the bridge, looking in vain for the quaint trolleys of another time, never to run again. guy ludwig
Get this image on: Flickr ] Creator: hjw3001 Copyright: Henry Wagner
TREASURES REDISCOVERED
This is an original poster that publicized the exhibit “Welfare Island: An Interim Report” which was presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for two weeks October 6 through October 19, 1970
Did you know that there was a scale model of the future island exhibited at the Met in 1970?
This is just one historical item that is stored in our office/archive in the Octagon
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Just like the city itself, the New York City street map is always in flux.
Alleys and lanes that were well established in Gotham’s early years have disappeared without fanfare; roads that once had a solid presence in a neighborhood get chipped away until nothing remained thanks to the shifting contours of the cityscape. (RIP Thirteenth Avenue.)
But the ever-changing street grid has left something mysterious in a Lower Manhattan park: a ghost street sign, but no trace of the street it marks.
This ghost sign is for Temple Street. It’s mounted at the edge of Zuccotti Park, a small patch of green in the commercial canyons of Lower Manhattan. But there’s no road, no driveway, no asphalt at all pointing to remnants of the street—just concrete benches and neatly spaced trees.
Zuccotti Park forms a rectangle between Broadway, Liberty Street, Trinity Place, and Cedar Street. These streets were all on the map by New York’s post-colonial era. So what happened to Temple Street, and where did it lead to in pre-20th century Manhattan?
The story begins more than 300 years ago, when New York City was a colonial outpost under British rule. Temple Street was on the map by 1695, according to the map reproduced in this 1901 book about the city’s origins. Just two blocks long, it ran parallel to Broadway and a now-vanished Lombard Street from Cedar Street.
Why is the street named for a temple? The origin isn’t clear. But Sanna Feirstein, author of Naming New York, suggests it stems from the street’s proximity to Trinity Church. (The first Trinity Church was in the works in the late 1690s, so perhaps the street name reflected the plans for a house of worship a block over on Broadway.)
The name might also be derived from Sir John Temple, the first British consulate-general to the United States, adds Feirstein.
Whatever its origin, two-block Temple Street continued to exist on street maps in the early and mid-19th century, still running alongside Broadway but now between Liberty Street and Cedar Street and ending at Thames Street. Based on advertisements for a “fire-proof ware-room” and shops, this was likely a commercial stretch of the bustling city.
Temple Street at this time would have been hemmed in behind the City Hotel on Broadway (above in 1831), one of New York’s first luxury hotels and bounded by Cedar, Temple, and Thames Streets. Later in the 19th century, the street was home to taverns, like “Old Tom’s” and “Old Reynold’s Beer House” (below), according to a 1902 New York Times article.
In the early 1900s, with lower Broadway becoming a mini-city of bank and insurance towers, Temple Street was reduced to one block, “the southernly half was wiped out by consent of the city when the United States Realty Building was erected,” wrote the New York Times in 1912.
The little one-block road held out until the early 1970s, when Liberty Plaza (later renamed Zuccotti) Park got the green light. “When developers demolished the buildings in 1972 to make way for the park, they demolished the street as well,” stated the Times in a 1995 F.Y.I. column. “The sign was remounted after the development was complete.”
Okay, but why remount a street sign for a street that no longer exists? I like to think someone at the DOT decided that a little road which served no major purpose yet hung on for 300 years should be properly memorialized with a sign.
Thanks to Justine V. for letting me know about this sign!
TUESDAY, MARCH 19TH AT THE NYPL BRANCH
… WITHOUT YOUR VOICE, WE WILL LOSE THE Q102 — WHICH PROVIDES DIRECT, DAILY SERVICE BETWEEN ROOSEVELT ISLAND & QUEENS PLAZA, CONNECTING TO MANY BUSES & SUBWAYS BEWTEEN MANHATTAN, BROOKLYN & QUEENS — SERVING ROOSEVELT ISLAND FOR OVER 50 YEARS …
You have probably walked on this mid-block street, halfway between 6th and 7th Avenues from 51st to 57th Streets
THE AVENUES OF MANHATTAN ARE some of the most famous thoroughfares in the world, counting 5th Avenue, Madison, Park, and The Avenue of the Americas among their ranks. But hidden between 6th and 7th Ave and running between West 57th St and West 51st St is a secret street rarely visited or recorded in tourists guidebooks: 6 1/2 Avenue.
Currently the only street with a fractioned number in New York City, 6 1/2 Avenue was given its official signposts in July 2012 by the Department of Transportation. The secret street was already well known to midtown workers who had long used the public spaces between 57th and 51st to cut through the city, avoiding having to walk around to 6th or 7th Avenue.
The thoroughfare is part of the over 500 areas in the city that are known as Privately Owned Public Spaces. These POPs originated in the 1960s when the city gave property developers incentives for creating public spaces as part of their new buildings. These privately owned public spaces usually took the shape of plazas, atriums, walk through arcades.
The 500 city POPs have received mixed receptions. Often the spaces are abandoned and make passersby feel as they were trespassing on private property and so the Friends of Privately Owned Public Spaces started an initiative to raise awareness, starting with 6 1/2 Avenue in Midtown. The Department of Transportation even created crosswalks and installed street signs to make it official. So next time you are strolling down one of Manhattan’s grand avenues, why not take a detour to visit one of its secret ones, just a literal half a block out of the way.
51st Street on 6 1/2 Avenue
Walking thru at night
TUESDAY, MARCH 19TH AT THE NYPL BRANCH
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Over the last 40 years we have collected all sorts of island artifacts Luckily we have storage unit in the Octagon as well as our office. We have hundreds of photos and paper documents that can be used for research. Here a some of our unique collection.
Spidel from original Octagon staircase
Hardware from Central Nurses Residence
Tefillen case from Goldwater Jewish Chapel
Strap from original tram cabin and wheel from same
Signs from original tram cabins
Part of the roof beans from Blackwell House (circa 1789?)
Piece of cable, hook and pulley from storehouse elevator building. These were found when the site was being excavated for the Trolley Kiosk building.
Coin counter from Tram Token Booth, when tokens were the the fare. We also have a collection of slugs that were used at the turnstiles.
RIGI toy cable car toy set from the 1950’s
LEGO tram and Spideman set from 1990’s.
Parts of Welfare Island Bridge control panel that was replaced and this one was mounted and donated to the RIHS
TUESDAY, MARCH 19TH AT THE NYPL BRANCH
… WITHOUT YOUR VOICE, WE WILL LOSE THE Q102 — WHICH PROVIDES DIRECT, DAILY SERVICE BETWEEN ROOSEVELT ISLAND & QUEENS PLAZA, CONNECTING TO MANY BUSES & SUBWAYS BEWTEEN MANHATTAN, BROOKLYN & QUEENS — SERVING ROOSEVELT ISLAND FOR OVER 50 YEARS …
AGATHA CHRISTIE’S “WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION” AT THE MSTDA
ALL KINDS OF NEWS IN THE “RIOC NEWS”
“REDEVELOPING ROOSEVELT ISLAND” AT THE NYPL
THE PROPOSED CHANGE OF THE Q102 BUS ROUTE
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RIOC NEWS TAKE A LOOK AT THE LATEST EDITION. CLICK BELOW TO SEE IT: THIS MONTH IS THE CELEBRATION OF OUR ISLAND AND COMMUNITY THE MARCH EDITION OF THE RIOC RECORD IS OUT.
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WE CAN DO BETTER. THIS FRUIT STAND HAS BEEN HERE FOR YEARS AND IS AN EYE-SORE. IT IS TIME TO IMPROVE IT TO BETTER SERVE OUR COMMUNITY. THERE ARE MANY CREATIVE WAYS TO SELL FRUITS BY THE SUBWAY.
Text by Judith Berdy
MAIN STREET THEATER AND DANCE ALLIANCE
ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION METROPOLITAN TRANSPORTION AUTHORITY
MAYA LEVANON-PHOTOS TIK TOK & INSTAGRAM
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
New York State history is full of exciting characters who made a real difference in our historical development.
One of the most colorful is Fiorello La Guardia (1882-1947) who served in the Army air corps in the First World War, and later as a member of Congress (1923-1933) and Mayor of New York City (1933-1946).
LaGuardia transformed that city, sidestepping or overcoming political opposition and using city resources and federal assistance to tear down slums and replace them with good housing.
Golway’s narrative is flowing and lively, engaging readers while putting La Guardia into the historical context of his times. The book presents a good deal of history in a very interesting way but also a good deal about a key history-maker.
The book includes three little-known episodes in La Guardia’s career that capture the spirit of the man in the context of the tenor of the times.
Congressman La Guardia opposed Prohibition on the grounds that it cut into personal liberties and that the Volsted Act, passed to implement it, was practically impossible to enforce in a city like New York. He sometimes resorted to drama and grandstanding to get his point across.
In Golway’s masterful narrative, La Guardia, in 1926, invited reporters to his Capitol Hill office to witness an act of defiance. He produced bottles of malt liquor (considered medicinal and legal under the Volsted Act) and “near-beer” (a beverage with an alcohol content just below the legal level), skillfully combined the two, and produced something approaching pre-Prohibition beer.
He offered the reporters glasses; they loved it. And it was all legal, the congressman explained, just blending legal substances, and an illustration of how people were skirting the law.
A few days later, he repeated the stunt on a sidewalk in front of a drug store in New York City. A local police officer witnessed the show and just shrugged his shoulders and walked away. La Guardia continued to mock Prohibition until it was repealed in 1933.
A pilot himself, La Guardia was determined to build a major airport in his city. In 1934, returning from a conference in Chicago, the plane he was on landed at Newark Municipal Airport, which then served as a de facto commercial airport for the city. The aircraft’s pilot announced they had landed in New York.
All the passengers deplaned except the mayor. He refused to leave, saying his ticket read “Chicago to New York” and Newark was not New York.
The mayor stayed seated and demanded to be flown to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, a small airport that commercial airliners shunned. The pilot finally gave in. Tipped off, reporters were present in Brooklyn when the mayor landed.
As Golway notes, “it was an amusing stunt, all right, but there was a larger purpose at work.” It was part of La Guardia’s campaign for an airport suited to his city. He achieved that goal in 1939 when the new airport, named in his honor, opened for the first time.
Golway also includes another (slightly better known) episode, in July 1945, as La Guardia’s time as mayor was drawing to a close. Delivery workers for the city’s newspapers went on strike.
La Guardia, who regularly read the “funnies” (as the comics were called in those days) as well as the news, found a copy of the Sunday, July 1 issue of the New York Daily News.
Announcing that the city’s children needed their Sunday funnies, he went on the city’s radio station, WNYC, and read the installments of Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie and other comics and also vividly described the action in the strips.
He repeated the performance for two additional Sundays. He also urged that the workers should go back to work and the union should return to the bargaining table. Golway describes the mayor’s gestures and enthusiasm as he read the comics (this book is extensively researched, and here the author uses the New York Public Radio Archives, among other sources).
The strike soon ended. It was another memorable La Guardia performance.
As Golway notes at the end of the book, “this remarkable, irascible, and tireless man made it his life’s mission to replace despair with patience, hopelessness with fortitude.”
Editor’s Note: Bob Cudmore’s The Historians Podcast recently featured an interview about La Guardia. You can listen to that here.
Photo: Mayor La Guardia reads the comics to New York’s children over WNYC during the newspaper delivermen’s strike of July 1945 (New York Public Radio Archives).
Moving is stressful: the expenses, the packing, the unpacking. If you had to do this with thousands of other people on the same day, would you? If you want to keep your sanity, probably not. But this wasn’t an option 200 years ago. In the mid-18th century, mayhem filled the streets of New York City every May 1st when every lease—residential and commercial—expired simultaneously. This was an annual event called Moving Day.
This tradition caused the city’s renters to scatter like frantic ants on an ant hill. It was linked with Rent Day, which occurred on February 1st. On that day, landlords informed tenants of the rental price for the following year. The prices went into effect in May. Moving was not mandatory, but with few rent regulations in place, landlords could increase rent steeply. In the end, most tenants had no choice but to move.
Just imagine this: no bubble wrap or moving boxes, just valuable possessions stuffed into horse-drawn carriages. Between the jerky movements of the carts from the bumpy roads and the occasional spring rain, Moving Day was a stressful day for everyone involved.
Day of trouble—day of chaos/Day of toil for man and “dray-hoss;”/What confusion! Wha a rumpus!/On the sidewalk bedpost bump us/All are moving, helter skelter/Women scold and fume and swelter
Diarist George Templeton Strong wrote about what he saw on Moving Day in 1844, “Every other house seems to be disgorging itself into the street; all the sidewalks are lumbered with bureaus and bedspreads to the utter destruction of their character as thoroughfares, and all the space between the sidewalks is occupied by long processions of carts and wagons and vehicles omnigenous laden with perilous piles of moveables.”
You’d be right to think that people might turn to alcohol to escape the stress. Everyone was on edge about possible accidents, street fights, and damage to their personal possessions during the moving process. So, liquor stores were open by early morning, inviting everyone to drink their worries away.
The tradition of Moving Day started during the colonial period and ended after the Second World War. But why May 1st? The roots of Moving Day can be traced back to the Dutch colony of New Netherlands. The first day of May held special significance for Dutch settlers. It marked the day when the Dutch departed from the Netherlands to settle in the wilderness of North America. In Dutch New Amsterdam, May 1st became a pivotal day for social and business activities. It was the start of the trading season known as Handelstijd.
“May Day” – Cartoon depicting Moving Day (May 1) in New York City in 1831
Moving Day began to fade away in the 1920s as tenants gained new protections under the law and residents began to spread to the outer boroughs. By World War II, there was a second moving day, October 1st, as many families spent their summers outside the city. Since most men were off fighting overseas during the war, moving companies experienced worker shortages. In 1945, the post-war housing shortage and rent control laws finally ended Moving Day.
Thankfully today, there are no laws that hold us down with a strict deadline, (though as a remnant of the practice, there are still commercial leases that expire on May 1). So next time you move, be grateful you’re not part of a frantic city-wide exodus.
New York City buildings boast over 1.6 billion square feet of rooftop space, an amount of space that is roughly the size of Boston. Buildings account for over two-thirds of the city’s total emissions. More and more, developers and owners are looking to the sky for solutions to counter emissions and are converting rooftop spaces into green havens.
Green roofs have multiple benefits. Not only do they leverage lower energy bills, but they also help to cut carbon emissions, create habitats for local wildlife species, and manage stormwater. The proliferation of green roofs and increased green spaces in urban settings help curb the urban heat island effect. The urban heat island effect occurs when an urban area has a higher temperature than the surrounding areas. This is due to the heat re-emitted into the atmosphere by all of the buildings, roads, and infrastructure. Green rooftops make the city’s infrastructure more sustainable, strengthen urban agriculture, and empowering the process of carbon capture from the concrete jungle below. Here are five rooftops that are recoloring the city’s skyline green.
Produce grown atop Rosemary’s rooftop garden in the West Village. Photo courtesy of Rosemary’s.
Homemade pasta dishes feature ingredients grown just steps from patron’s plates at Rosemary’s, an Italian restaurant tucked away in the West Village. A lush 1,000-square-foot rooftop garden flourishes here, despite constraints on space in the densest metropolis. At this establishment founded in 2012 by Carlos Suarez, the seasonal menu reflects a rotating selection of produce that can survive life in the city. This ever-changing supply of ingredients encourages Executive Chef Wade Moises and Rosemary’s staff to experiment constantly in the garden. Restaurant guests are welcome to roam the sprouting beds of fresh herbs and vegetables and enjoy the greenery that animates their gastronomic experience.
One of the most extensive green rooftops in the United States rests next to Hudson Yards and within earshot of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. With 8-acres of rooftop, the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center successfully repurposed an otherwise inhospitable environment to create a 6.75-acre wildlife sanctuary, a 1-acre farm managed by the Brooklyn Grange, and a home for nine honeybee hives. The center engages with NYC Audubon, a grassroots community that works to conserve and protect birds and their habitats in New York City. The group studies the diverse populations of birds, bats, and insects that benefit from the green roof’s food supply. The farm grows up to 50 crops each season which are used at the center’s farm-to-table events. This space is a true example of the positive environmental trade-offs that green rooftops offer. The green roof mitigates around 7 million gallons of stormwater runoff annually and cools the area by about 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit, reducing the urban heat island effect.
This West Village hidden gem operates similliarly to neighboring farm-to-table concepts but trades soil for air. Bell Book & Candles’ sophisticated menu complements the revolutionary vertical rooftop garden that grows up into the air using aeroponics-plant cultivation. This model is very efficient in terms of energy consumption and nutrient usage. This vertical vegetable growth concept supports the resturant’s commitment to sustainability and responsible procurement.
Gotham Greens rooftop greenhouses in Jamaica, Queens. Photo courtesy of Gotham Greens.
Gotham Green is a pioneer in reimagining where and how food can be grown. Their largest New York City facility in Jaimaica, Queens is located atop the historic Ideal Toy Company factory. This site was renowned for producing the iconic Teddy Bear and Rubik’s Cube. The rooftop of Gotham Green spans 60,000 square feet. Greenhouses that cover the space yield leafy, fresh greens, numbered in the millions. Gotham Greens delivers nutritious, sustainably grown greens year-round to the New York Tri-State area. They are revolutionizing the market and practices for urban-grown food that minimizes our overall environmental footprint. Gotham Greens has locations in Queens, Greenpoint and Gowanus, Brooklyn, and more cities across the United States.
The city’s oldest agribusiness sits three stories above the concrete jungle in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Eagle Street Farm is a 6,000-square-foot organic farm winking at the Manhattan skyline. A variety of seasonal produce grows here depending on the weather and time of year. The farm is open to the public and many local chefs bring the rooftops’ greenery to your plate. Ealge Street Farm’s mission calls for sustainable and resilient growing processes, like the farm’s stormwater runoff storge practices. This alternative process cools the warehouse below. Furthermore, Eagle Street Farm uses environmentally conscious design practices that repurpose materials, like old rafters used as edging.
New York City rooftops transform the city’s palette, cultivate urban ecosystems that feed New Yorkers and support local wildlife species. More and more buildings are looking up, integrating sustainable building designs with alternate rooftop functions. Where there could be gray, green rooftops are repainting the New York City metropolis skyline
