GOOD NEWS! THE COLORFUL ADIRONDACK CHAIRS ARE ALL SET-UP AT THE FDR FOUR FREEDOMS PARK. THE CHAIRS ARE MOVABLE AND YOU CAN SIT UNDER THE SHADE OF THE LINDEN TREES. A WONDERFUL WAY TO RELAX IN THE PARK!
TUESDAY, JUNE 7, 2022
695th Issue
New York Drinks
Stephen Blank
We were a serious drinking nation from the start. In 1790, drinking-age Americans consumed an average of 5.8 gallons of pure alcohol each year. By 1830, consumption was up to 7.1 gallons. “By 1770, Americans consumed alcohol routinely with every meal. Many people began the day with an ‘eye opener’ and closed it with a nightcap. People of all ages drank, including toddlers, who finished off the heavily sugared portion at the bottom of a parent’s mug of rum toddy.” (W.J. Rorabaugh, “Alcohol in America”, The OAH Magazine of History) Lots of reasons: Alcohol was viewed as a digestive aid and a source of strength; with risky water in many areas, it was considered a safe alternative; and for many farmers, shipping higher value alcohol made more sense than moving corn or grain.
But Americans were soon deeply divided about drink. In the 1820s and ’30s, a wave of religious revivalism swept over the country, leading to increased calls for temperance. In 1838, Massachusetts passed a temperance law limiting the sale of spirits except for commercial use. The law was repealed two years later, but it set a precedent for such legislation. Temperance societies, typically religious groups, sponsored lectures and marches, sang songs, and published tracts that warned about the destructive consequences of alcohol. They promoted the virtues of abstinence and asked folks to sign pledges promising to abstain from all intoxicating beverages. Maine passed the first state prohibition laws in 1846, followed by a stricter law in 1851. Other states joined in. Even the Federal government responded: In 1862 the US Navy abolished the traditional half-pint daily rum ration for sailors, a ration George Washington had demanded for his troops.
New York City never followed along. Successive waves of immigrants – Irish, Germans, Eastern Europeans – enjoyed their drinks, opened saloons and built breweries. An 1883 map shows one 32-block section of the City bordered by The Bowery, Houston, Norfolk and Broome Streets packed with 242 “lager-beer saloons” and 61 “liquor saloons.”
This demands a bit more investigation. New York cocktail enthusiasts have found a mention of the booze-bitters-sugar “cock-tail” in 1806, in a newspaper from Hudson, New York. In Manhattan, famous bartenders embellished this morning pick-me-up, becoming well known across the country. New York City saloon owner “Professor” Jerry Thomas is considered “the father of American mixology”, because of his seminal work on cocktails, Bar-Tender’s Guide. Many content the City was the true home of the cocktail.
Still, I think the talk about early era cocktails in New York City is a bit high hatting. After all, the City was a beer (and lager) town. Much of this is due to the work of German immigrants, who arrived early in the century and brewed so much beer that it inspired a culture of bustling beer gardens and halls. The 1880s was a wonderful time to be a beer drinker in America. In New York City alone, some 8,000 saloons were open. Bear in mind, however, that while well off patrons could frequent more upscale cocktail bars, most saloons were grim sawdust and spit on the floor joints. And most drinkers, at least in public places, were men.
In New York City, the temperance movement failed to gain traction. In Albany, Republican reformers, speaking for rural and small-town churchgoers, had been trying for years to curb public drunkenness. They were also frustrated about New York City’s lax enforcement of so-called Sabbath laws, which included a ban on Sunday drinking. Finally, in 1896, Albany acted to control the sale of alcohol with the Raines Law. • The cost of an annual liquor license was raised to $800 — three times what it had cost before. • Saloons could not open within 200 feet of a church or school. • The New York drinking age was raised from 16 to 18. • Saloons could no longer serve free lunches. • The sale of alcoholic beverages was prohibited on Sundays except in hotels that served guests drinks as part of complimentary meals.
The Sunday drinking ban was widely loathed. Sunday was the only recreational day for many men who worked six-day weeks. But a loophole punctured the new law: Only lodging establishments that served complimentary meals could sell liquor on Sundays, so saloons obtained hotel licenses and rented out space above their taverns so they could serve alcohol with free sandwiches. Within a year, more than 1,500 new “hotels” had sprung up in New York. They served a cheap, inedible and often recycled creature called the “Raines sandwich.” To Eugene O’Neill it was “an old desiccated ruin of dust-laden bread and mummified ham or cheese” that was never consumed, but lived on, served to many tipplers over many months.
The Raines Act had intended to curb public alcohol consumption, but it unintentionally gave countless businesses more freedom to serve liquor, and this sandwich played a part. Ultimately, the loophole became part of a larger social push towards prohibition that led to the 18th Amendment in 1920.
In New York City, the ratification of the 18th Amendment set off a struggle between those determined to resist Prohibition and a dry movement determined to break that resistance. Dry leaders believed that if Prohibition could succeed in New York, it could succeed anywhere.
Many New Yorkers saw Prohibition as a culture war of two differing visions of America, one representing the Protestant values championed by the dry movement, and another that saw a more urban and more ethnically diverse society emerging in the United States. But Prohibition was now enshrined in a Constitutional amendment, and many doubted it could be overturned. By the mid-1920s, attempts to enforce Prohibition had flooded the courts with tens of thousands of liquor cases, and had filled the jails to capacity. Judges expressed frustration and demoralization, and the officers of the NYPD resented being dragged into federal Prohibition enforcement efforts. Bribery and graft inserted themselves into the routine of enforcement, as did outbursts of violence stemming from the illegal liquor trade. But the courts provided no way around the new regime.
Instead, New Yorkers began looking to look for a political path out of the dry experiment. By the mid-1920s, New York would become the headquarters of political resistance to Prohibition as a generation of political leaders took increasingly public positions against the dry amendment. Mayor James J. Walker embodied the cosmopolitan air of 1920s. Governor Alfred E. Smith became the most prominent national political figure to stake his position as an opponent of Prohibition. Smith sought to reign in Prohibition enforcement in New York, most notably repealing the Mullan-Gage Law which called for local law enforcement agencies in New York to work with federal officers to enforce Prohibition. Fiorello LaGuardia rallied the wet cause. Mayor LaGuardia embodied immigrant New York just as much as Walker or Smith. His political leanings differed, as he was a Republican who opposed the Tammany Hall machine with fervor, but like Walker and Smith, LaGuardia was vocal in his opposition to Prohibition.
New Yorkers also voted with their feet, and frequented the increasing number of illegal liquor joints, “speakeasies”. New York saloons and bars did not really close down with Prohibition. They went underground in basements, attics, upper floors, and disguised as other businesses, such as cafes, soda shops, and entertainment venues and many quickly became established institutions. Some said every legitimate saloon that closed was replaced by a half dozen illegal gin joints. Locked doors, passwords and hidden liquor supplies were one of the changes Prohibition brought. Another was the new role of women in this world. They were no longer just decoration – dancers, chorus girls or singers. Having been long banned from the saloons of the past, “regular” women found easy entrance into these new establishments.
Just six months after Prohibition became law in 1920, women won the right to vote, and coming into their own, they enjoyed their newfound freedoms. The Jazz Age marked a loosening up of morals, the exact opposite of what its Prohibition advocates had intended. With short skirts and bobbed hair, they flooded the speakeasies, daring to smoke cigarettes and drink cocktails. Dancing to the jazz tunes of such soon to be famous jazz greats as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bojangles Robinson, and Ethel Waters, their powdered faces, bright red lips, and bare arms and legs displayed an abandon never before seen by American women.
Quickly, both Prohibition and jazz music was blamed for the immorality of women, and young people were attracted to the glamour of speakeasies and began to drink in large numbers. The new era was described by Hoagy Carmichael: “It came in with a bang of bad booze, flappers with bare legs, jangled morals and wild weekends.”
New York City resisted temperance and fought against Prohibition. Eventually, under the leadership of President Franklin Roosevelt, another New Yorker, the 18th Amendment was overturned. And, perhaps, too, the sudsy City was the home of some of the most delicious cocktails and famous bartenders in they world.
Smiling bartenders and customers celebrate the return of legal beer, April 7, 1933.Credit The New York Times
PART OF EAST RIVER PROMENADE BEING RECONSTRUCTED TO BECOME ANDREW HASWELL GREEB PARK
ED LITCHER GOT IT!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
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To LaGuardia for less than $2.00? What a bargain (senior fare). I decided to check our the new Delta Terminal C at La Guardia. Today is day 1 for the terminal, the second one to be “completed” in this massive reconstruction.
At Roosevelt Avenue exit the subway station into the massive marketplace of shops from all over the world. A few steps from the station is the platform for the Q70 bus to the airport. No fare needed, just hop of the articulated vehicle and in a few minutes you are on the highway and almost at the airport. As you approach the terminals there is a labrynth of roads and intersections.
Soon we are on the lower arrivals lever, with no signs of what airlines are in the terminal above us. It is still a construction site in many ways. We drive right by the new Delta Terminal C and are dropped off about 1,000 feet farther down the road.
We are in front of the old Delta terminal that is now closed. An attendant is there and tells us to walk back to the new terminal C!! Why is the no stop closer to our destination? The answer is that this is a construction site or even better “they haven’t figured out that yet”. Only in New York.
I walk back to terminal.; with all those passengers hauling their luggage.
Inside the news is better…………sort of.
A vast check-In area, nice and quiet on a Saturday afternoon. Acres of empty kiosks. Not a seat to be found if you need to rest or wait for someone.
By the escalator leading up to the security area is a mural “The Travelers’ Broken Crowd” by Rashid Johnson. The work represent 60 agitated faces of travelers with wide eyes and clenched mouths done in mosaics.
The vast security area is broken by a series of screens with ever changing scenes and graphic above the entire length of the waiting area. Something to keep your mind occupied as you snake your way forward. to our friends at TSA.
MY FAVORITE IS THE LIGHTING SCULPTURES MADE FROM RECYCLES SKYLIGHTS
Virginia Overton, Skylight Gems at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. Photo courtesy of the Queens Museum.
From the NY Times:
Known for her sculptures made from recycled materials that respond directly to architectural spaces, Virginia Overton has installed a dozen large and glowing gem shapes crafted from New York City skylights that dangle at varying heights through a three-story atrium in the arrivals and departures hall.
“I wanted to make something that was indicatively New York,” she said. Overton, who grew up in Nashville, remembers her father’s stories of flying in low over New York on business trips and looking down on buildings with dramatic skylights. These days, in her Brooklyn studio, she often finds herself staring up at the skylights. “When you’re inside a building, that’s where you look up and move from ground to sky, which felt like the right gesture for the airport,” she said.Each of her 12 sculptures contains large panes of old-fashioned security glass set into geometrically faceted metal armatures, up to nine feet long, that Overton dragged from salvage shops and sometimes the garbage. She then replicated the mirror half of each skylight to create jewel-like forms that are lit from within. Floating sideways, these gritty and magical beacons come into focus as you approach. “Hopefully it will engage people who’ve just flown in to New York and recognize the skylights from some of the buildings around here,” said Overton, “and encourage people to look up and down.”
On a wall of Delta’s arrivals and departures hall, the artist Ronny Quevedo has mounted a full-scale wooden gym floor fabricated from scratch.Credit…Justin Kaneps for The New York Times
NOW TO CLAIM YOUR BAGGAGE
On the walls of the vast baggage claim area the wall is decorated by: “The Worlds We Speak” by Miriam Ghani has discs that represent the city’s linguistic communities. The small discs each state one language or greeting from the many parts of our city.
NO WHERE TO WAIT AND SIT, ALMOST
The only place to get a cup of coffee is a lone Starbucks in the far corner of baggage claim. There are about 8 seats around phone chargers in the arrivals area.
Got your luggage, exit and walk back to the old “Transportation Center” about 1,000 feet in front of the old terminal. Luckily, the Q70 bus is free and off to Roosevelt Avenue.
COMMENT
First, the artwork is great and the new open look with views out the window is a relief from the dreaded old La Guardia terminals.
I complain about things: one is attitude of architects, designers and airlines have removed many comforts for today’s travelers in the name of security.
To be in a terminal where there are thousands of square feet of vast open floors and not one chair to sit on. Disability access is more than providing a wheelchair, but making all customers comfortable.
There are bathrooms at the far end of each floor, luckily.
There is one Starbucks, no seats here.
I understand there is no money to be made in the arrivals area, no shops, no people waiting to depart.
Just get your bags and leave. It is apparent that customer service is only beyond TSA where people can spend before their flights.
FDR FOUR FREEDOMS STATE PARK READY FOR PRIDE MONTH!
ED LITCHER GOT IT!
Text by Judith Berdy 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)
JUDITH BERDY NEW YORK TIMES QUEENS MUSEUM
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A premier assemblagist who elevated the box to a major art form, Joseph Cornell also was an accomplished collagist and filmmaker, and one of America’s most innovative artists. When his sister and brother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. John A. Benton, donated a collection of his works and related documentary material in 1978, the NMAA [now the Smithsonian American Art Museum] established the Joseph Cornell Study Center.
Born on Christmas Eve, 1903, Joseph Cornell was raised in an affluent, closeknit family in Nyack, New York. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, as a science major between 1917 and 1921, but did not graduate. While working as a textile salesman in New York between 1921 and 1931, Cornell began exploring the city and its cultural resources, and converted to Christian Science, thereafter a major influence on his life and work. In 1929, his family moved to Flushing, New York, where he lived until his death on December 29, 1972.
His art has been described as romantic, poetic, lyrical and surrealistic. Self-taught but amazingly sophisticated, he created his first collages, box constructions and experimental films in the 1930s. By 1940, his boxes contained found materials artfully arranged, then collaged and painted to suggest poetic associations inspired by the arts, humanities and sciences.
He believed aesthetic theories were foreign to the origin of his art but said his works were based on everyday experiences, “the beauty of the commonplace.” An insatiable collector, he acquired thousands of examples of printed and three-dimensional ephemera — searching the libraries, museums, theaters, book shops and antique fairs in New York and relying on his contacts across the United States and in Europe. With these objects, he created magical relationships by seamlessly combining disparate images.
Cornell was an imaginative and private man who, mingling fantasy and reality, produced works outstanding not only for their originality and craftsmanship but for their complexity and diversity.
Joseph Cornell, Cockatoo: Keepsake Parakeet, 1949-1953, wooden cutout, paper, spring, and found objects in a glass-fronted wood box, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Donald Windham, 2003.69
In Cockatoo: Keepsake Parakeet, a bird is perched in its white-walled cage; a coiled spring from a watch is its lone companion. Mementos fill the drawer beneath the cage: a pink plastic charm of an Indian drawing a bow, a paper candy box, French music sheets, and other ephemera. Joseph Cornell gave this box to Donald Windham as a token of thanks for writing the forward in his 1949 exhibition catalogue The Aviaries. The show debuted Cornell’s new bird themed boxes, which were inspired by looking into the windows of a pet store.
Cornell’s extensive collection of contemporary periodicals and antique books served as source material for his artwork. The lesser lemon-crested cockatoo in the shadow box is from the nineteenth-century book Parrots in Captivity by W. T. Greene. Cornell had several copies of the book from which he cut out images of birds to glue to wooden supports, some of which were left waiting for future, unbuilt boxes. Although many feature the same bird, no two works are alike.
Americana: Natural Philosophy (What Makes the Weather?) is one variant in a series of collages featuring the young boy in John Singleton Copley’s 1771 painting, Daniel Crommelin Verplanck. Joseph Cornell takes the boy out of his home environment and transposes him into a Western landscape, with the natural wonders of the American frontier just over his shoulder. Cornell considered Copley to be one of the first “American artists who worked out their own style of seeing.” While paying homage to a great artist of the past, Cornell brings weight to the collage by juxtaposing Copley’s boy and the glowing landscape with cutouts from children’s books that illustrate scientific phenomena like rainbows and circumpolar constellations. The collage is a merger of Cornell’s fantasy and reality, and a contemporary response to the technological advancements and exciting discoveries of the Space Age.
Joseph Cornell, Soap Bubble Set, 1949-1950, glasses, pipes, printed paper, and other media in a glass-fronted wood box, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by the American Art Forum, 1999.91
Soap Bubble Set offers a theatrical glimpse into the cosmos. Situated on Earth, the viewer observes the mountains and valleys of the moon, first discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. The glasses, holding specimens of land and sea, embody the gravitational pull of the earth, perhaps in relation to the lunar influence on tides. The freely moving sphere rolls between the opposing forces while cutouts of shells, stars, and other references to the natural world float above. Following Edwin Hubble’s confirmation of the rapidly expanding universe in 1929, the metaphor of a swelling soap bubble proliferated in the popular press. For Cornell, who had a long-standing interest in astronomy and stayed abreast of breaking news, this metaphor would have resonated with his own memories of blowing bubbles with clay pipes as a child and the wonder of their creation. Cornell’s series of Soap Bubble Sets, sometimes called planetariums, is a decade-long rumination on the great astronomers of the past and the contemporary discoveries and innovations in space technology.
Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Oriental painting of bird with cherry blossoms), 1964, collage, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, 1991.155.49
Joseph Cornell, Untitled (unidentified 17th century Dutch portrait of a young blond girl in a green dress), n.d., collage, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, 1991.155.189
Joseph Cornell, Untitled, mixed media: wood: stained, paper, paint, decal…, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, 1985.64.51
Joseph Cornell, Untitled (astrological sign for Pisces), 1970, collage, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, 1991.155.282
Joseph Cornell, Untitled (female in three-quarter pose wearing beaded earrings), n.d., collage, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, 1991.155.131
FREEDOMLAND, FORMER AMUSEMENT PARK IN THE BRONX, NOW THE SITE OF CO-OP CITY. ED LITCHER GOT IT!!
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
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM
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Jackson Heights is an early-20th-century neighborhood in central Queens, composed of low-rise garden apartments and houses as well as institutional and commercial buildings. It was the first and remains the largest garden-apartment community in the United States— the product of both the early 20th-century model tenement and the Garden City movements. Starting in the late 19th century, poor living conditions in city slums resulted in reform efforts to improve urban housing. As a result, light, ventilation and open green space became key pieces in the design of new developments. This is particularly evident in Jackson Heights.
Queens grew rapidly in the early 20th century, beginning with the opening of the Queensboro Bridge in 1909 and accelerated by the arrival of the elevated subway in 1917. These transportation routes established fast, direct connections between Jackson Heights and Manhattan and the thriving industrial area of Long Island City. Beginning in 1910 the Queensboro Corporation started developing former farmland into an idyllic residential alternative to crowded Manhattan. Development continued until 1950, by which time all of the vacant land in the area was built up.
The Queensboro Corporation required that builders and developers not otherwise affiliated with the corporation adhere to strict design requirements. The picturesque residences were designed in Georgian, Tudor, Gothic, Italian Renaissance and Spanish Romanesque styles. Decorative brickwork, loggias and slate roofs are quintessential design elements found in the architecture. Institutional and commercial buildings were produced to match the residential. The continuity of design throughout Jackson Heights is its most defining feature, but the community is home to many other innovations, including some of the first purpose-built cooperatives in New York City for the middle class. The first passenger-operated elevator in the world debuted here in 1922. Most importantly, Jackson Heights was the first community in the United States where green space was provided as part of the architecture—a “garden city.”
The development of Jackson Heights reversed many of the traditional architectural and planning concepts of the time. Entire city blocks were designed as a whole, as opposed to developing lots individually. Additionally, only 40% of each block was built up, leaving the remaining 60% for open green space. By contrast, it was commonplace in Manhattan to build as densely as 90% on a block, to reap as much profit as possible. In Jackson Heights, structures were typically built around the perimeter of a city block, and they enclosed landscaped gardens at the center, giving the buildings the name of “garden apartments.” Apartments had views of both the street and the interior courtyard, allowing light and breezes in and creating a sense of openness.
Jackson Heights was designated as a New York City historic district in 1993, and an extension of those boundaries, which would meet those of the 1998 National Register Historic District, is currently being sought. This would include buildings that, due to the restrictions placed upon them by the Queensboro Corporation, possess the same quality design, materials and scale of the earliest buildings creating historic Jackson Heights.
ENGLISH GARDEN HOMES
33–18 to 33–44 83rd Street Alfred H. Eccles 1928
Along 83rd Street there are 13 English Garden homes, each three stories high. The houses in the middle have slate mansard roofs, while those on the ends have front facing gabled roofs with side-facing dormers. All of these structures have continuous brick band courses under the second-story windows and feature cast-stone window boxes with brick brackets under the first-floor windows.
HILLCREST COURT
70–35 Broadway S. L. Malkind 1926
This six story apartment building has its primary entrance on Broadway, making it the only structure in the historic area located on that thoroughfare. Hillcrest Court is on an unusual triangular lot and features five towers, each connected by a recessed wing located in the middle of the building. Highlights include brickwork that simulates quoins and colonnaded loggias that top the Broadway towers.
SPANISH TOWER HOMES
34–30 to 34–52 75th Street J. Case & Peter Schreiner 1927
The Spanish Tower Homes include 10 three- and four-story detached tan brick houses. The first floors of these dwellings have no windows and instead feature French doors that open on to wrought-iron balconettes. Some windows on upper floors have original wood shutters, and the corner houses feature fourth-floor loggias. These houses have shared driveways with detached garages in the rear.
THE TOWERS
33–15 to 33–51 80th Street and 33–16 to 33–52 81st Street Andrew J. Thomas 1924
The Towers are composed of eight freestanding U-shape buildings, four on 80th Street and four on 81st Street. The buildings are placed back-to-back and enclose an interior garden that is accessed by gated entrances located between the buildings. The yellow-brick apartment design is inspired by Italian Romanesque and Renaissance architecture; highlights include red-tile roofs, arcaded sixth-story loggias and tower belvederes.
WASHINGTON PLAZA
73–12 35th Avenue Sylvan Breine 1940
Washington Plaza consists of seven buildings: six, six story apartment buildings and a single-story gatehouse. These Art Deco buildings are red brick and feature decorative geometric banding and round-cornered fire escapes. The most intriguing part of this apartment complex is Washington Plaza Park, designed by the architect in 1941. The .54-acre park begins behind the gatehouse, where a path divides to surround a cascading pool before leading to a separate pool at the top of the complex. Stepped paths surround each pool and are accompanied by many gardens. Some of the plantings found in the park include silver birch, flowering crabapple and white dogwood trees, rhododendrons, red and pink azalea, roses, forsythia, pink mountain laurel and hydrangea. There is also an herb garden of basil, parsley, chive, dill and rosemary.
Built to house the 1939 New York City World’s Fair Pavilion by Aymar Embury III, one of Robert Moses’ favorite designers in a modern classical style. After the first fair, the building housed the General Assembly of the newly formed United Nations, from 1946 to 1950.The building was again used, during the 1964 World’s Fair, to house the New York City Pavilion, and finally in 1972 the building was given to the Queens Museum of Arts and Culture, which is currently called the Queens Museum. ED LITCHER
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Ella Fitzgerald, America’s “First Lady of Song” (born in 1917 in Newport News, Virginia), got her start as a teenager by winning an amateur singing contest at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. She made her first recording in 1936, and in 1938 found fame with a hit rendition of “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” recorded with the Chick Webb Orchestra. Fitzgerald was a tireless performer, beloved and admired by audiences for her remarkable vocal range and indelible personal style. Nevertheless, she kept her personal life quite private. After a brief first marriage that ended in annulment, Fitzgerald married renowned jazz double bassist Ray Brown in 1948. Their marriage lasted only four years, during which time they lived in this impressive Tudor Revival style house. Fitzgerald later resided in a home in the Addisleigh Park Historic District in eastern Queens until 1967, and died at her Beverly Hills home in 1996.
BILL KENNY HOME
109-04 31st Avenue c. 1925
This American Craftsman style residence was home to William Francis Kenny, Jr., known professionally as Bill Kenny, a pioneering tenor vocalist with the Ink Spots, a popular vocal group that prefigured doo-wop and rock and roll. Kenny, whose vocal range spanned four octaves, joined the Ink Spots in 1939 at the age of 17, and sang on the group’s first hit, “If I Didn’t Care,” with fellow East Elmhurst resident Orville “Hoppy” Jones. Kenny shared the home with his wife, Audrey, and their daughter. Kenny, as one of the Ink Spots, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989.
JOHN BIRKS “DIZZY” GILLESPIE HOME / LOUIS
ARMSTRONG HOUSE105-19 37th Avenue, 1921-22 34-55 107th Street, Robert W. Johnson, 1910
Located only a block apart are the residences of two jazz legends: great friends and nominal musical rivals John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie and Louis Armstrong. In the 1940s Gillespie (born in 1917 in South Carolina), made a name for himself as a trumpeter and bandleader in the New York City jazz scene, and is regarded today as one of the fathers of bebop. Gillespie owned and lived in this three-family Colonial Revival style building from 1952-66. Cornetist Louis Armstrong (born in 1901 in New Orleans) lived in this Renaissance Revival style rowhouse with his wife Lucille from 1943 until his death in 1971.
Over four decades the Armstrongs left their mark on the house, which remains virtually the same as they left it—from the flamboyant 1970s decor, to the musical memorabilia, to the outdoor bar they installed in the garden for entertaining. After Lucille passed away in 1983, the house was donated by the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation to the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. In 2003 the house opened to the public as a museum, still owned by the city but managed by Queens College.
The house next door at 34- 52 107th Street serves as the museum’s administrative building. It was bequeathed to the museum by Selma Heraldo, a good friend to the Armstrongs, after her death in 2011. Honoring Heraldo’s gift, the NYC Department of Design and Construction is restoring the house and renovating the interior to better serve the museum.
The Louis Armstrong House is an Individual Landmark and listed on the State and National Register of Historic Places.
LANGSTON HUGHES COMMUNITY LIBRARY AND CULTURAL CENTER
100-01 Northern Boulevard Davis Brody Bond 1999
Now part of Queens Library, the Langston Hughes Community Library and Cultural Center was established in 1969 in response to local efforts to create a library and community center focused on the history and needs of the area’s African-American community. Local residents, including former Queens Borough President Helen M. Marshall, who served as the library’s first executive director before entering the political sphere, formed the Library Action Committee of Corona- East Elmhurst, Inc., which staffed the library from its opening until 1987 and is still responsible for operating the library’s Homework Assistance and Cultural Arts Programs. This purpose-built structure is the institution’s second home; its first was located in a former Woolworth’s department store on Northern Boulevard—the site of a civil rights struggle to break the color barrier for hiring in Queens. The library opened two years after Hughes’ death and includes a large collection of materials by and about the poet. The new building includes gallery, auditorium, research, archival and children’s spaces to hold its many performances, lectures and events celebrating black history and culture. The library is home to the Black Heritage Reference Center of Queens County, housing New York State’s largest public circulating collection of materials on the black experience, estimated at roughly 45,000 titles and including approximately 1,000 theses and dissertations on black literature. The institution is a touchstone in the community and an important reminder of the importance of advocacy and activism.
MALCOLM X, EL-HAJJ MALIK EL- SHABAZZ HOME
23-11 97th Street, Malcolm X Place 1925
Malcolm X, civil rights leader and former figurehead of the Nation of Islam, lived in this bungalow with his family from 1959 to 1965. Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925, by the 1940s he was living in Boston, where he was arrested for robbery and sent to prison. During his incarceration, Little was introduced to the religious and political movement known as the Nation of Islam (NOI), and corresponded regularly with its leader Elijah Muhammad. Before his release in 1952, Malcolm joined the NOI and changed his name to “Malcolm X”. In 1960, Malcolm established Nation of Islam Temple 7B at 105-01 Northern Boulevard, just blocks from the original Langston Hughes Community Library and Cultural Center. It is now the Masjid Nuriddin & Clara Muhammad School. In March of 1964, Malcolm X publicly announced his break from the NOI, and in April, flew to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, at the start of his Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca). He thereafter became known as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz. Upon his return he expressed that seeing Muslims of all races and backgrounds interacting as equals led him to see Islam as a means by which racial problems could be overcome. After his break with the organization, the NOI began eviction proceedings to remove Malcolm X and his family from the house on 97th Street, although Malcolm Little was the signature on the deed. On February 14, 1965, the home was set ablaze by Molotov cocktails. The family escaped the fire and was given refuge by neighborhood residents. One week later, on February 21, 1965, Malcolm was assassinated while making a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. Malcolm X’s presence is still felt in the community and he is a revered local figure. In 2005, the street in front of the house was renamed Malcolm X Place.
CLARIFICATION THE NEUSTADT ARTICLE MENTIONS TOURS OF THE ARCHIVE. THE TOUR LISTED WAS FROM LAST YEAR, PLEASE CHECK THEIR WEBSITE FOR INFORMATION ON TOURS AND THE EXHIBIT AT THE QUEENS MUSEUM.
KEHINDE WILEY, GO 2020 IN MOYNIHAN TRAIN HALL LAURA HUSSEY, VICKI FEINMEL, ALEXIS VILLAFANE ALL GOT IT !!!
Text by Judith Berdy 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)
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Tucked inside an unmarked warehouse in Long Island City, there is a priceless assortment of Tiffany glass, a colorful assemblage of odds and ends that make up part of the largest Tiffany collection ever assembled. Brilliant pieces of flat glass in sheets and shards and beguiling glass “jewels,” more than a quarter of a million pieces in total, are stored in towering rows of shelves and drawers. These pieces were salvaged from the Tiffany Studios in Corona, Queens when it shut down in 1937, and were acquired by a Dr. Egon Neustadt in 1967. While pieces of Neustadt’s collection are on display in the Queens Museum, the New-York Historical Society and in travelling exhibitions, the Glass Archives have remained largely unseen by the public. Untapped New York recently got to explore inside the Archive, and a select, lucky few can do the same each month on one of the Archive’s new behind-the-scenes tours. These tours are only offered to six people at a time, but if you are an Untapped New York Insider, you can join us on one of two, free, members-only tours on November 8th. Not a member yet? Become an Insider today to gain access to free behind-the-scenes tours and special events all year long! Take a look inside the Archives to see what treasures you will discover.
Dr. Egon Neustadt and his wife Hildegard started their Tiffany collection in 1935 when they purchased a Tiffany lamp for their Flushing apartment at a second-hand shop in Greenwich Village for $12.50. As Dr. Neustadt’s professional career as an orthodontist and real estate developer flourished, they began to collect even more variations of Tiffany work, such as windows and bronze desk sets. When the Tiffany Studio in Queens shut down in 1937, its remaining stock was liquidated. In 1967, the Neustadts came into possession of these pieces.
The Neustadt’s collection provides an invaluable resource for the study of Tiffany’s legacy. The Glass Archive contains examples of nearly every color and technique employed in Tiffany designs. From the elegant and three-dimensional drapery glass that mimics the look of fabric, to the multi-colored “Foliage” glass or “confetti” glass used to depict dense vegetation, the Archive illustrates the mastery Tiffany achieved within the craft of glassmaking and the many creative ways he bent the medium to the artistic goals of his Studio.
Since the 1960s, The Neustadt has been incorporated as a non-profit organization. The museum works to preserve, study and share the collection’s history and beauty with the public. In addition to caring for the collection, The Neustadt is also gathering oral histories from the families of former Tiffany employees in order to record and preserve the names and stories of the people who played an important role in Louis C. Tiffany’s success. Over the years, The Neustadt collection has been expanded through purchases and gifts of artwork, archival materials and ephemera.
The Neustadt now offers monthly tours for small groups of just six visitors at a time. If you are an Untapped New York Insider, you can join us on one of two members-only tours on Friday, November 8th, for free! The tours will be led by Lindsy Parrott, the Executive Director and Curator of The Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass. On this tour, guests will see the collection come to life with dazzling lighting demonstrations and an up-close at the stunning glass pieces. Participants will learn the secrets behind Tiffany’s groundbreaking innovations in glassmaking and his revolutionary contributions to the art of stained glass.
VICKI FEINMEL, GLORIA HERMAN, ED LITCHER, JAY JACOBSON ALL GOT IT RIGHT!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated:
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As the Fifth Avenue blocks just north of Washington Square developed, wealthy attorney and property owner George Wood joined the trend. Henry Brevoort, Jr. had built his grand, free-standing Greek Revival mansion at the corner of 9th Street in 1834. The avenue at the time was desolate, but the presence of the powerful and wealthy Breevorts would soon change that. Within a decade the lower blocks of Fifth Avenue filled with the homes and churches of New York’s richest citizens. George Wood built his mansion, No. 45, at the corner of East 11th Street. The attorney held vast amounts of real estate—including no fewer than 39 houses in Brooklyn, most along Sidney Place, State Street and Joralemon Street; vacant building lots and docks in Brooklyn; 340 acres in Minnesota; a 30-acre farm in Rye, New York; and land in Walde, Texas. To accommodate his carriages and horses, Wood acquired the building lots stretching through the block from 11th to 12th Streets behind his mansion. His “carriage house and stable” was set far back from East 11th Street, possibly to relieve his fashionable neighbors of the unpleasant odors. The Wood family included five daughters—Catharine, Anna, Mary, Julia, Louisa—and two sons Frederick and George. As the threat of civil war rumbled, George Wood would make his opinions on slavery vividly apparent. W. M. Evarts diplomatically called him “a man who loved the Union and the whole Union.” However his comments that the slaves were of an “inferior” race would bristle the ire of many. In 1858, at the age of 69, Wood was afflicted with paralysis. Two years later, at round 1:00 in the morning on Saturday March 17, 1860, he woke with a pain in his arm. Mrs. Wood attempted to help by rubbing his arm; but he broke out in a cold sweat on his forehead and soon after died. A century and a half later, the symptoms point to a heart attack. Wood’s vast estate was divided among his children, now grown and married, and his wife. She kept the Fifth Avenue mansion, “his plate and household furniture,” along with other property in Brooklyn. Apparently well aware of the plights of many Victorian heiresses, the skilled attorney added in his will “The devises to his daughters are to be free from the control of their husbands.” Wood’s funeral was held in the Fifth Avenue mansion, attended by the members of the bar who announced the “by the death of George Wood, the New-York Bar has been deprived of one of its most distinguished ornaments.” When Wood’s widow left No. 45 Fifth Avenue is unclear; however the carriage house somehow became part of an shockingly unexpected scandal within seven years of Wood’s passing. At 11:00 on the night of July 20, 1867 “Sergeant Haggerty, Roundsman Rae, and Officers Barker and Inman, of the Fifteenth Precinct, made a descent upon the disorderly house No. 11 East Eleventh-street,” according to The New York Times the following morning. Somehow George Wood’s carriage house had been transformed into a brothel, squarely in the center of Manhattan’s most exclusive residential neighborhood. Five women, aged 18 to 28, and two men, Marshall Allan, 21 and Robert Baer, 18, were arrested. “The prisoners were all marched off to the Mercer-street Station-house and locked up for examination,” said the article. Respectability came back to the little building when H. Van Rensselaer Kennedy moved into No. 45 Fifth Avenue. His purchase of the house increased the Kennedy presence in the neighborhood, which was already substantial. Robert L. Kennedy lived at No. 99, Rachel L. Kennedy at No. 41 and Mary L. Kennedy lived around the corner at No. 10 East 11th Street. Change comes quickly to New York City neighborhoods and by World War I most of the lower Fifth Avenue mansions, including No. 45, were mere memories. Around the corner on East 11th Street was the Hotel Van Rensselaer and on the corner of Fifth Avenue No. 43 was now an 11-story apartment building. But sitting smugly between the two towering buildings George Wood’s carriage house with its deep grassy approach still clung on. With the disappearance of horses as motorcars took over, the little two-story building had been converted to a garage. David H. Nott who owned the hotel was rightfully concerned about the future of the little garage. Were it to be leveled and a tall building erected, his hotel would lose air and light. And so he bought it. In July 1921 he hired architect C. F. Winkelman to convert the garage into a one-family dwelling, “forming an annex to the Hotel Van Rensselaer,” reported the New-York Tribune on July 28. The architect estimated the renovations would cost about $10,000.
photo NYPL Collection
A year later, in its February 1922 issue, Popular Mechanics marveled at the concept. “A novel extension of the Hotel Van Rensselaer, in New York City, is just being completed,” it announced. “In order to protect the hotel’s light, the company decided to take over and improve this property by building a two-story seven-room house. This house, of distinctive Moorish architecture, is set back 50 ft. from the sidewalk, with a picturesque formal garden, laid out with a flagstone walk and low brick walls in front of it. Tucked away between its tall neighbors, it is almost lost to the view of the casual passer-by.” Because Knott Realty Company owned both the “apartment hotel” at No. 43 Fifth Avenue and the Hotel Van Rensselaer, it had a vested interest In keeping the little house intact. The New York Times made special note of the charming condition of the house on April 16, 1930.
Winkleman deftly transformed the carriage entrance and the hay loft opening into expansive windows — photo by Alice Lum
The newspaper said it “has been famous for many years in the lower Fifth Avenue area as the only house in that locality with an ample front yard…The front yard is laid out with paths and a wide garden plot which is now being prepared for Summer flowers. The yard is protected by a low wooden fence with a neat gate typically suggestive of a well-kept place in the country. It is one of the very few small houses on Manhattan Island with a front garden plot.” That same month William Simmons, “a steamship man,” leased the house; but it appears the deal fell through. A month later stock broker Arthur L. Selig and his family were living here. Selig was a member of the firm Perez F. Huff & Co., Inc. at No. 75 Maiden Lane. Selig, his wife and daughter, settled in to the comfortable home. “Mr. Selig was a familiar figure in the neighborhood,” noted The Times. “His constant companion was an Irish terrier, which he took out for a walk on Fifth Avenue every evening.” But the Great Depression, with its haunting images of stock brokers flinging themselves from office windows, visited the little house on East 11th Street. Family friends reported that Selig “worried over losses in the stock market” and only weeks after moving in, Selig committed suicide by shooting himself with a pistol. The Times reported that “His body, clad in pajamas and a bathrobe, was found in his library…Mrs. Selig and her daughter discovered the body soon after they awakened yesterday morning. It was slumped in an arm chair, the pistol grasped in his right hand. The bullet had entered the right temple, passed through the head, and embedded itself in the library wall.” The broker carefully planned his death, leaving a note for his wife containing information regarding his insurance and other pertinent details, ending with the words “My thoughts are all for you.” The tragedy of Selig’s violent death shared the newspaper’s spotlight with its unusual setting. The Times could not resist mentioning the quaint little residence. “The house has been something of a curiosity to passers-by, for it is one of the few with a front garden in downtown Manhattan. It was well kept, and during the Summer months, was always blooming with flowers.
The original gates and posts (left) survive. The low brick garden wall has been replaced with a more secure fence –photo by Alice Lum
In 1951 the Hotel Van Rensselaer, the apartment building at No. 43 Fifth Avenue, and the house at No. 11 East 11th Street were sold to Samuel D. Bierman as a package
. As the trio of buildings continued to survive with little change, a small Jewish congregation was formed in 1959, Congregation Etz Chaim, the “Tree of Life.” As it gained its bearings, the fledgling congregation held services in the Fifth Avenue Hotel.
A year later Bierman was ready to dispose of his buildings “as part of a plan to reduce his holdings,” said The Times. On October 30, 1960 Freedman & Melcer, Inc. purchased No. 43 Fifth Avenue for about $1 million. Parenthetically, The Times noted “The purchases included a one-story dwelling on a lot 25 by 100 feet at 11 East Eleventh Street. The house, now vacant, adjoins the apartment house.
” The house would not remain vacant for long. Congregation Etz Chaim found a permanent home and renamed itself The Conservative Synagogue of Fifth Avenue. Half a century later little has changed to C. F. Winkleman’s Mediterranean remake. And, as was true in 1922, “tucked away between its tall neighbors, it is almost lost to the view of the casual passer-by.”
Abstraction by Ilya Bolotowsky – A Work by one of four artists who created murals in the Goldwater Hospital Solariums, for the Federal Art Project (FAP), a subdivision of President Roosevelt’s 1935 Work Progress Administration (WPA). The Bolotowsky had been uncovered and cleaned in 2001 under the Municipal Art Society’s Adopt-a-Mural program. The Swinden and Rugolo were ultimately uncovered from the multiple layers of white hospital paint that hid them from the world, but unfortunately, the Chanase mural was never found. Over the past several years, the three murals have been cleaned and restored, the Bolotowsky by Fine Art Conservation Group and the Swinden and Rugolo by EverGreene Architectural Arts. These murals had their first post restoration exhibition in 2016 before they were returned to new homes on the Cornell Tech Roosevelt Island campus. Ed Litcher
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
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VISIT LIGHTHOUSE PARK TONIGHT TO SEE THE LIGHTHOUSE IN RED, WHTE AND BLUE!
FROM THE ARCHIVES
MONDAY, MAY 30, 2022
THE 688th EDITION
RIKER’S ISLAND
STEPHEN BLANK
The Story of Rikers Island Stephen Blank
Many Roosevelt Islanders know that the first major construction on our island (then Blackwell’s) was the Penitentiary, that it was closed, and that the facility was moved to Rikers Island. Like other New Yorkers, we know that Rikers Island is a grim and dangerous place and that conversations have been long underway about closing it down. Those of us who watch Law and Order know that everyone just calls it “Rikers.”
Rikers island is home to one of the world’s largest correctional and mental institutions, with 10 of the NYC Department of Correction’s 15 facilities that can accommodate 15,000 detainees. The complex has an annual budget of $860 million, a staff of 9,000 officers and 1,500 civilians managing 100,000 admissions per year and an average daily population of 10,000 inmates. Most detainees are pretrial defendants, either held on bail or remanded in custody. Rikers Island is therefore not a prison by US terminology, which typically holds offenders serving longer-term sentences. According to a 2021 analysis, it costs the city approximately $556,539 to detain one person for one year at Rikers Island.
But, beyond these basic data, we probably don’t know much about it. Turns out, Rikers island has a very interesting history.
It’s named for Abraham Rycken, who took possession of the island in 1664. The Rycken family was a wealthy Dutch clan. Through Richard Riker (the name was Anglicized), it became deeply linked to our City’s slave legacy. Intermittently, from 1815 to 1838, Riker was the recorder of New York City, a municipal officer who oversaw the city’s criminal court. Accounts tell that he was responsible for judging that many free black men, women, and children were “fugitive slaves”— thereby enabling their kidnapping and sale in the South without trial.
Riker received a kickback from kidnappers and was apparently so renowned for these actions that he and two policemen, whose primary goal then was catching slaves, were labeled the “Kidnapping Club” by local abolitionists. “In accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act, members of the club would bring a Black person before Riker, who would quickly issue a certificate of removal before the accused had a chance to bring witnesses to testify that he was actually free.” (Elizur Wright Jr.’s 19th-century newsletter “Chronicles of Kidnapping.”)
Detail from 1852 map on Page 48 of The Rikers.
During the Civil War, the island was used for military training. The first regiment to use the Island was the 9th New York Infantry, which arrived there on May 15, 1861. The Anderson Zouaves followed on July 15, 1861, commanded by John Lafayette Riker who was related to the island’s owners. Their camp was named Camp Astor after John Jacob Astor Jr. who provided funds for the army and the raising of the Anderson Zouaves.
More interesting (and with some poetic justice), on March 5, 1864, a crowd of over 10,000 New Yorkers watched as 1,000 well-disciplined Union army troops left Rikers Island and marched west to the Hudson River, their dark blue uniforms and crisp white gloves and white leggings glistening in the sunlight. What made this event so unusual was that the soldiers were black. The 20th Colored Regiment was formed by the New York Union League, who hoped to present the black troops as part of the New Society that would take place once the South was defeated and the country united.
The troops received their training at Rikers Island before being sent to Louisiana. The 20th and the 26th Regiments were part of the 180,000 black soldiers and sailors who served the Union cause. These troops were paid less than half of their white counterparts’ salaries, received inferior equipment, and lived in poor conditions.
Near the end of 1864, Rikers Island became a prisoner of war facility for Confederate soldiers.
In 1884, New York City’s Commission of Charities and Corrections purchased the island for $180,000 from John T. Wilson, a Riker family descendant, for use as a workhouse. It became the City’s Municipal Farm where drug addicts were treated, both under sentence and self-committed. Not much information exists about the Farm, but a 1922 report by the Municipal Farm’s resident physician notes: “The drug addict hospital located at the Municipal Farm received and treated 1,898 inmates. Approximately 30%, or 500 inmates were repeaters and about 10% of the 500 repeaters returned for a third treatment…. The daily average number of patients in the hospital was 50 patients, treated at the clinic were 2,000.”
Rikers Island Municipal Farm dorms circa 1910s/1920s.
The same report describes “special work of more than ordinary importance”: • “Installation of complete moving picture equipment, also telephones between the doctor’s residence and main office. • “Erection of new piggery building under construction. • “Addition and alternation to shop building nearing completion. • “Erection of new steel smokestack for steam boiler under main kitchen. • “Installation of new plumbing fixtures and water supply pipes and cement flooring in toilet rooms of dormitory Nos. 5 and 6; also new tubes in steam boilers. • “Renovating and painting main office, mess hall, dormitories Nos. 1, 2, 3 and 4, exterior of doctor’s residence and employees’ cottage. • “Installation of new feeders supplying electric current to dormitory No. 5.”
The Bureau of Education and Recreation reports: “In summer, inmates play baseball on Sunday afternoons. Motion Pictures are shown twice a week during summer and on Sunday afternoons and holidays during winter. On Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day entertainments were given by inmates.”
The City had other plans for the island. As early as 1925, discussions went on about opening a jail for men on Rikers Island to replace the overburdened Blackwell’s Island facility. It would be the very model of a modern institution, “the highest type of prison that the science of criminology has developed” based on a year-long study of the best prisons in America and Europe. In 1928, Times reporter Virginia Pope described how its construction “would relieve congestion and correct evils of present penitentiary” on Blackwell’s. Rikers was celebrated for its modern architectural design. And with the appointment leaders who were well-known and highly respected for their work on prison reform and commitment to rehabilitation, especially educational initiatives, it was to be the embodiment of a “rehabilitative ideal.”
The transfer of inmates to Rikers was to be gradual and partial. But when a major corruption scandal was uncovered on Blackwell’s and it was closed permanently in 1935, inmates were moved faster than had been planned and shambles began at the very beginning. It would be a history littered with good intentions.
Rikers Island grew over the next years. The first stages of expansion were accomplished largely by convict labor hauling in ashes for landfill. After ocean dumping of garbage was banned in 1922, much of the city’s waste ended up on Rikers Island. Unlike other city landfills, which were filled to a height that usually did not exceed 10 feet above sea level, Rikers Island Landfill was mounted as high as 125 in the eastern fill area. Landfill continued to be added to the island until 1943, eventually enlarging the original 90-acre island to 415 acres.
Problems mounted quickly. In a January 18, 1934 report to Mayor La Guardia, the city’s Commission of Accounts found “many irregularities and abuses in the construction of Rikers Island Penitentiary,” largely due to “Tammany Hall Corruption.” The report noted that the architects had been awarded a no-bid contract and that multi-million-dollar construction contracts have “clearly been violated in a number of particulars with a probable loss to taxpayers of more than $100,000,” or nearly $2 million in today’s dollars. The report found “serious cracks” in some of the newly constructed buildings and violations in plumbing and roofing contracts, all of which “constitutes an illustration of the reckless way in which the city’s money has been spent with the approval of the Finance Department of the prior administration.” In 1939, a Bronx court found Rikers to be nearly unlivable. Quarters were cramped, conditions were declared unhygienic.
But one problem was resolved. Robert Moses sorted the garbage mess. He didn’t want the unsightly island to be the backdrop for his carefully landscaped 1939 World’s Fair and pushed to get the island cleaned up and have the city’s garbage sent elsewhere—ultimately to the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
MAC_1935: Aerial view of unfinished Rikers Island penitentiary buildings, ca. 1936. Department of Corrections, NYC Municipal Archives Collection.
A Little Something Extra
A drawing by artist Salvador Dalí, done as an apology because he was unable to attend a talk about art for the prisoners at Rikers Island, hung in the inmate dining room in J.A.T.C. (HDM) from 1965 to 1981, when it was moved to the prison lobby in E.M.T.C. (C76) for safekeeping. The drawing was stolen in March 2003 and replaced with a fake. Three correctional officers and an assistant deputy warden were arrested and charged, and though the three later pleaded guilty and one was acquitted, the drawing has not been recovered. Alas, time and space force an ending here. But, as you know, the story doesn’t get better. Stephen Blank RIHS May 27, 2022
Text by Judith Berdy 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)
In observance of Memorial Day, the newly renovated Lighthouse Tower will be illuminated red, white and blue from Saturday May 28th through Monday, May 30th.
(This is an image from a test lighting a few weeks ago.) Enjoy a happy and safe holiday weekend!
FROM THE ARCHIVES
WEEKEND, MAY 28-29, 2022
THE 687th EDITION
SCOTT JOPLIN
AND
NEW YORK
STEPHEN BLANK
Scott Joplin and NYC
Stephen Blank
Scott Joplin? Of course. You remember the music in The Sting. And maybe you’ve heard the Maple Leaf Rag. And ragtime? Ragtime is a form of music that emerged in the African American community, a precursor of jazz, that was very popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Scott Joplin was at the center, the King of Ragtime. But Scott Joplin and New York City? Well, dance on.
Britannica Image
Many famous musicians lived here. Everyone knows that John Lennon, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington were (or became) New Yorkers. But also, Miles Davis, Richie Havens, Woody Guthrie, Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, and Woody Guthrie all had apartments in the City. And no shortage of famous classic composers. Not just Lenny Bernstein – Sergei Rachmaninov, Gustav Mahler, Igor Stravinsky, Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Benjamin Britten, Astor Piazzolla and John Cage all lived and worked here.
Many musical artists stayed in the same hotel – the Hotel Earle (later Washington Square Hotel) on Waverly Place. Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, John and Michelle Phillips, Joni Mitchell, Barbra Streisand, and Dee Dee Ramone all stayed there.
Scott Joplin lived in New York, too, and composed many works here.
But a modest detour, just for a moment, to talk about ragtime. (I rely heavily in the next paragraphs on several Wikipedia articles.)
It’s “rag” time because it of its syncopated or “ragged” rhythm. Historians see several roots. Ragtime originated in African American music “descended from the jigs and march music played by African American bands.” But some see a much wider history: “A distinctly American musical style, ragtime may be considered a synthesis of African syncopation and European classical music, especially the marches made popular by John Philip Sousa.”
Scott Joplin brought these various streams together and was centrally identified with ragtime during the early 20th century. Indeed, the Joplin’s style of composition is considered “classic rag” to distinguish his works from other “common” rags. The emergence of mature ragtime is usually dated to 1897, the year in which several important early rags were published. Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag, more sophisticated than earlier ragtime, was published in 1899, and was widely popular.
Second edition cover of Maple Leaf Rag with Joplin photo Wikipedia
Published is a key word. Ragtime was popular before sound recording was widely available. Like classical music, but unlike jazz, classical ragtime has a written tradition, being distributed in sheet music rather than through recordings or by imitation of live performances. Joplin was trained in musical notation, and his works were carefully prepared for publication. He was able to copyright his works. This is a clue to helping understand Joplin’s self-image and aspirations.
Ragtime quickly established itself as a distinctly American form of popular music. It was the first African American music to have an impact on mainstream popular culture. (Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag was famous enough for the John Wanamaker department store to include it in a 1904 ad for piano rolls in The New York Times.) Piano “professors” such as Jelly Roll Morton played ragtime in the “sporting houses” of New Orleans. Polite society embraced ragtime played by brass bands and society dance bands. The new rhythms of ragtime changed the world of dance bands and led to new dance steps, popularized by the show-dancers Vernon and Irene Castle during the 1910s. The growth of dance orchestras in popular entertainment was an outgrowth of ragtime and continued into the 1920s. Irving Berlin was the most commercially successful composer of ragtime songs, and his Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1911) was the single most widely performed and recorded piece of this sort, even though it contains virtually no ragtime syncopation.
European classical composers were also influenced by ragtime. The first notable classical composer to take a serious interest in ragtime was Antonín Dvořák. French composer Claude Debussy emulated ragtime in three pieces for piano. Erik Satie, Arthur Honegger, and Darius Milhaud never made any secret of their sympathy for ragtime, which is sometimes evident in their works. Igor Stravinsky wrote a solo piano work called Piano-Rag-Music in 1919 and also included a rag in his theater piece L’Histoire du soldat (1918).
Scott Joplin was born around 1867 and lived in Texarkana. The Joplins were a musical family and Scott studied piano with local teachers. Joplin traveled through the Midwest from the mid-1880s, performing at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Settling in Sedalia, Missouri, in 1895, he studied music at the George R. Smith College for Negroes and hoped for a career as a concert pianist and classical composer. He taught and performed in Sedalia and wrote some of his most famous rags there.
The Maple Leaf Rag made Joplin framous and he was again on tour, only this time with much more celebrity and revenue. During the succeeding years, Joplin was a prolific composer with rags spilling from his pen with a pace that even astounded his publisher and the various orchestras clamoring for his latest production. In 1900, Joplin moved to St. Louis.
Joplin wanted to extend his ragtime work beyond popular songs, seeking to combine the ragtime syncopation with the structures and forms of art music genres such as ballet and opera. In 1902, he published his first extended work, Rag Time Dance, a ballet suite using ragtime rhythms, with his own chorographical directions. For much of his life, Joplin soughtto synthesize the worlds of ragtime and opera and in 1903 wrote his first opera, A Guest of Honor, which has, alas, been lost.
In 1907, he moved to New York City, where he first lived in an old brownstone converted to a rooming house at 128 West 29th Street, in the heart of Tin Pan Alley. He published 25 of his 53 works while here, including three significant rags: “Wall Street,” “Pineapple” and “Magnetic.”
The first edition cover of “Pine Apple Rag”, composed and released by Scott Joplin in 1908. Wikipedia
He also wrote an instruction book, The School of Ragtime, outlining his complex bass patterns, sporadic syncopation, stop-time breaks, and harmonic ideas, which were widely imitated. Written in the style of an art music treatise, The School of Ragtime demonstrates how serious Joplin was about ragtime. He warned that not all syncopated music “that masqueraded under the name of ragtime” was genuine. Only by giving each note its proper value and by “scrupulously observing” the music’s markings could a pianist achieve the correct effect. Above all, he cautioned, “never play ragtime fast at any time.” “Joplin ragtime,” as he termed his style, would be destroyed by careless interpretation.
In New York, Joplin spent much of his time looking for funding for another opera he had created, Treemonisha, a multi-genre three-act opera which told the story of a rural African American community near Texarkana. No one was interested – even Irving Berlin, it is said, turned him down. The Opera’s first performance, poorly staged with Joplin accompanying on the piano, was “disastrous” and was never performed again in Joplin’s lifetime. The score was lost for decades, then rediscovered in 1970, and a fully orchestrated and staged performance took place in 1972.
Joplin continued to work on various musical forms and formed his own publishing company with his third wife, Lottie Stokes, in 1913. His final address in New York was in Harlem, at 163 W. 131st St., just west of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard (a plaque there says that this was the last residence of the great ragtime pioneer Scott Joplin). He lived there with Lottie when he died on April 1, 1917. By this time, he had already established his place in the pantheon of American music, but he never had enough money and struggled with health and financial issues.
Treemonisha (1911) Wikipedia
By 1916, he had started to succumb to the ravages of syphilis, which he was thought to have contracted years earlier, and was later hospitalized and institutionalized. Joplin died on April 1, 1917. He was buried in an unmarked community grave at St. Michael’s Cemetery in East Elmhurst, Queens. In 1974, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers placed a plaque at the grave site.
Joplin and his fellow ragtime composers rejuvenated American popular music, fostering an appreciation for African American music among European-Americans by creating exhilarating and liberating dance tunes. “Its syncopation and rhythmic drive gave it a vitality and freshness attractive to young urban audiences indifferent to Victorian proprieties…Joplin’s ragtime expressed the intensity and energy of a modern urban America.”
Ragtime would enjoy a resurgence during the 1940s, and then in the ’70s became a hugely popular genre that also entered the US consciousness via film—The Entertainer became the theme song for The Sting, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Joplin’s Treemonisha was also fully staged in 1975 on Broadway. The following year, Joplin received a special posthumous Pulitzer Prize, honoring the man who shaped a genre that influenced decades of music.
NEW YORK LIFE BUILDING ON MADISON SQUARE ARON EISENPREISS, ANDY SPARBERG, ED LITCHER, LAURA HUSSEY, GLORIA HERMAN ALL GOT IT RIGHT!
Text by STEPHEN BLANK
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)
In observance of Memorial Day, the newly renovated Lighthouse Tower will be illuminated red, white and blue from Saturday May 28th through Monday, May 30th. Enjoy a happy and safe holiday weekend!
FRIDAY, MAY 27, 2022
The 686th Edition
The Eternal Light
Flagstaff
Madison Square
from DAYTONIAN IN MANHATTAN
Nearly two years after the end of World War I, New York Legislative Documents noted, “No progress has been made during the past year toward a conclusion as to the form of New York City’s great war memorial.” The two favored ideas being considered were a “Liberty Bridge” over the Hudson River, and the conversion of Madison Square Garden into Liberty Hall, proposed “to become the largest convention hall in the world, with a seating capacity of 20,000 people, containing a sacred Gothic Chapel and an organ that should be the greatest yet built.” The document added, “As a third alternative they recommended a Liberty Arch in the heart of the city.”
As it turned out, none of those ideas would earn the approval of millionaire department store mogul Rodman Wanamaker, Chairman of the Mayor John Francis Hyland’s Committee on Permanent Memorial. (Wanamaker almost undoubtedly achieved the position through his former employee, Grover Whalen, who had been appointed Commissioner of Plants and Structures in 1918.)
Wanamaker felt strongly that the monument “should stand out by its simplicity”–the very antithesis of the three popular ideas. It may have been that conflict that resulted in his personally footing the $25,000 bill for the project–more than $360,000 today.
Wanamaker’s committee eventually approved the design submitted by Thomas Hastings, of the esteemed architectural firm Carrere and Hastings. The Eternal Light Monument would take the form of a 125-foot tall wooden flagstaff formed from a century-old tree cut in “the virgin forests of Oregon and transported over the Rocky Mountains,” according to The NYC Department of Parks. Hastings designed a monumental pink granite pedestal that upheld the grand bronze pole base. Paul Wayland Bartlett, who had studied under Auguste Rodin, executed the sculptural elements.
Atop the flagpole was a seven-pointed electrified star. It was first illuminated on Armistice Day, November 11, 1923, and the m0nument was formally dedicated on June 7, 1924. The names of significant French battles were engraved on the east and west faces. On the north was carved, “In memory of those who have made the supreme sacrifice for the triumph of the free peoples of the world,” and on the south, in part, “Erected to commemorate the first homecoming of the victorious Army and Navy of these United States.”
The Eternal Light Monument was the terminus of the annual Armistice Day parades, when tens of thousands of veterans marched from City Hall to the Madison Square. (Armistice Day marked the day and hour World War I ended–the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11 months in 1918.)
photo via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services
The monument was also used by the city to honor distinguished guests. In June 1927 the Broadway motorcade of Charles Lindbergh stopped so the famous flier could lay a wreath at its base. And a month later, on July 18, The Daily Worker reported, “Clarence Chamberlin, Richard E. Byrd and the three men who flew with Byrd to Paris came back to New York yesterday…The fliers were met at the City Hall by Mayor Walker and received the city’s medals of valor. At the eternal light in Madison Square, William H. Woodin welcomed them to the state in the absence of Governor Smith.”
The Eternal Light Monument turned political around 1930, when socialists adopted it as their own symbol. It may have started with the May Day observations in Union Square that year. Army veterans planned a counter-protest. The Socialist newspaper The Daily Worker wrote, “If the Veterans of Foreign Wars can scrape together enough sluggers, boss-bellycrawlers and thugs they will start their march from the Eternal Light in Madison Square.”
Members of the Women’s Overseas Service League pose before the monument around 1924. from the collection of the New-York Historical Society
In 1932 veterans marched on Washington D.C. to demand government promised pension money. Two of them, Eric Carlson and William Hushka were shot dead by D.C. police. The deaths enraged Socialists, who organized “Huska-Carlson Day” the following year. On July 27, 1933 protestors assembled at Rutgers Square. The Daily Worker advised, “From there, a parade will leave for Madison Square (23rd St.) at the Eternal Light.”
Every year the antithetical groups would use the monument for their widely disparate purposes. The annual Armistice Day parades and subsequent ceremonies went on in November, while the Socialists embraced the memorial in the spring months. On March 6, 1934 The Daily Worker announced, “The youth section of the American League Against War and Fascism will hold an anti-war parade starting at the Eternal Light in Madison Square, where a wreath will be laid.” The banner on that wreath read, “We Will Not Support the Government In Any War It May Undertake.”
Ernst Thaelmann, the leader of the Communist Party of Germany, was arrested by the German Government in 1933. Reaction in the form of rallies and protests among the Socialist and Communist communities in America was swift. On the night of June 13, 1934 Jack Corrigan shimmied to the top of the Eternal Light flagpole and hung a massive red banner demanding “FREE ERNST THAELMANN.” He and his comrades assured that it would remain there as long as possible by greasing the pole upon his descent and cutting the pole ropes. On June 15 The Daily Worker reported, “While crowds gathered to watch the sight, police squads desperately tried to get up the pole, but it was greased too well for them.”
In 1965 the participants in the annual ceremonies–originally composed of thousands–had greatly diminished. photo via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services
In 1954 Armistice Day was changed by Congress to Veterans Day, in order to honor the deceased veterans of all wars.
In 1976 the wooden flagpole was replaced with a metal version. By then the once massive Veterans Day ceremonies had greatly diminished. On November 13, 1979 Judith Cummings, writing in The New York Times, said “Few New Yorkers marched in the annual Veterans Day parade yesterday on Fifth Avenue and almost as few bothered to watch it, deciding instead to take advantage of department store sales.” She went on, “Ceremonies at the parade’s terminus at Madison Square Park drew several dozen onlookers, who stood quietly in chill wind to hear the speakers in front of the graffiti-scarred Eternal Light monument near 24th Street.”
Part of the meager turnout was blamed on anti-Vietnam War sentiments. But numbers grew in 1981 when national patriotism swelled with the return of American hostages from Iran. Mayor Edward Koch announced, “Now we must not rest until they [the Vietnam MIA’s] are likewise returned.”
The Veterans Day ceremonies saw another increase of numbers in 1983. Gannett Westchester Newspapers wrote on November 12, “About 2,000 present and former servicemen marched under cloudy skies in New York City’s Veterans Day parade to pay tribute to America’s fallen heroes, especially those killed recently in Lebanon and Grenada. They stepped smartly down Fifth Avenue to the Eternal Light Monument in Madison Square where 32 wreaths were placed in memory of the fighting men and women of the United States.”
But the numbers had waned again in 1986, when The New York Times reported “The sparse crowds at recent Veterans Day parades in Manhattan were generous compared with the smattering that turned out yesterday.” It was, nevertheless, a groundbreaking event. The article noted, “for the first time, homosexual veterans joined the march under their own banner.” It was not entirely a welcomed change. The article noted, “As the Gay Veterans entered the parade from 39th Street, a man slashed the banner with a knife and fled.”
The luminaire, or lighted star, at the top of the flagstaff was refurbished in 2017. Thomas Hastings’s magnificent base, described in 1979 as “graffiti-scarred,” has been restored. And the Eternal Light monument continues to be the site of the annual Veterans Day ceremonies after nearly a century.
HOW TO FIND THE NEW 42 STREET/BRYANT PARK – TIMES SQUARE PASSAGE.
IT SEEMS A LITTLE COMPLICATED TO FIND THE PASSAGE AT TIMES SQUARE.
FOLLOW THE SIGNS TO THE SHUTTLE TO GRAND CENTRAL.
ONCE YOU ARE ON THE SHUTTLE PLATFORM WALK TO THE END AND GO THRU THE DOORS INTO THE PASSAGE.
IN ABOUT 5 MIUTES YOU WILL BE AT THE PLATFORMS FOR THE B D M & F TRAINS.
THE PLATFORMS AT BRYANT PARK/42 ST. ARE NOT DISABLED ACCESSIBLE.
THE PASSAGE IS GREAT AND WORTH THE WALK OR JUST TAKE IT TO THE THE GREAT MOSAICS.
Base of flagpole at Madison Square. ED LTICHER, HARA REISER AND LAURA HUSSEY GOT IT RIGHT
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated:
Sources
DAYTONIAN IN MANHATTAN TOM MILLER, AUTHOR AND PHOTOGRAPHER
RIHS (C) FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
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