CAN YOU IDENTIFY THESE FAMOUS BALL PARKS? ANSWERS TOMORROW.
MONDAY, MAY 16, 2022
677th Issue
CAN YOU IDENTIFY
THESE BALLPARKS?
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
RIHS PROGRAMS AT THE NYPL
Enjoying Chandigarh
Ellen Jacoby, Gloria Herman, Wendy Erb, Sumit Kaur, Judy Berdy and Danielle Shur enjoyed Sumit’s presentation at our NYPL branch on Thursday.
FROM READERS
Coney Island was still connected to the rest of the city by trolley cars until the early 1950s, I can attest to, because that’s how we got to the Coney Island beach (I think for a nickel at that time, or possibly a dime). I learned from this article who our neighborhood movie theater, the Culver theater, was named after. I suppose no connection to Culver City, California. As for Kenneywood amusement park, in 1990, when our daughter, Amber, was in high school in Pittsburgh, that was the go-to amusement park for school trips in June. Our neighbor’s son was a life-guard at Kenneywood in the 1990s. Susan
Armani at 5th Ave and 56th Street Stephen Blank is so valuable to RIHS I’m rooting for the Pitt Penguins to beat the Rangers tomorrow M Frank
THE NOW LONG GONE STEUBEN SHOP AT 5TH AVENUE AND 56TH STREET
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Jaap Harskamp
Jaap Harskamp, PhD at Amsterdam University (Comparative Literature), Researcher at European University Institute (Florence), Curator Dutch & Flemish Collections at British Library (retired), Researcher at Cambridge UL. His work has been published by Wellcome Institute, British Library, and Brill. His current blog on migration can be viewed here. http://Illustrations, from above: The original St. James Hotel on Broadway & 26th Street (New York Public Library); A cartoon of Diamond Jim’s outfit; Diamond Jim’s gold pocket watch with a portrait of Napoleon produced circa 1910 in Geneva by Vacheron & Constantin; A 1890 Electric Broughham; A satirical postcard from 1908; The execution of William Kemmler (print published in August 17, 1890, in Le Petit Parisien); and Fire at the Windsor Hotel. (Photograph by H.N. Tiemann (active 1890s-1900s).
Edited by Deborah Dorff ALL PHOTOS COPYRIGHT RIHS. 2022 (C) PHOTOS IN THIS ISSUE (C) JUDITH BERDY RIHSf
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
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Rossana Ceruzzi, founder of the island’s Wildlife Freedom Foundation, describes our rich wildlife population and how the organization cares for these creatures, rescuing, healing and sheltering the injured and vulnerable.
When I was in grade school, back in Pittsburgh, we waited all spring for the Baldwin School System’s Annual Picnic at Kennywood Park. It was planned like D-Day. The first wave was made up of grandmothers who hauled masses of food on to the #68 trolley (by then, “streetcars”) that made its way finally to the Park. They staked out the best tables and waited for the second wave, families soon to arrive. (I recall a certain competition among the grandmothers over the size and variety of their picnic spreads.) The third wave, boys and girls perhaps in 7th and 8th grades, arrived more casually, boys and girls apart of course, but always looking out to see who was there. There were rides and arcades, food stands and of course the picnic area. At the end, we all piled back on the trolley car and made our way home. Over many years, I remember holding hands with Marianne Cunningham and kissing Judy Rubinstein in the dark tunnel on the Jack Rabbit Roller Coaster.
Kennywood was a classic “destination” trolley park, one of many that sprang up with the rise of the electric trolley. It was created in 1898, by the then Monongahela Street Railways Company (partially owned by Andrew Mellon) in an attempt to earn extra revenue by providing customers a destination at the end of the line. Trolley parks sparkled with picnic groves, parks, dance and concert halls, and areas for recreation and relaxation. As their popularity grew, trolley parks also introduced swimming pools, Ferris wheels, rides, roller coasters, penny arcades, balloon ascensions, merry-go-rounds and other early amusement attractions.
The most famous trolley, of course, was one the Judy Garland rode on the way to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair in the 1944 film M Meet Me in St Louis. Remember “Ding, ding, ding went the bell”?
But the most celebrated trolley park at the time, of course, and the prototype for all others was Coney Island. Between 1880 and World War II, Coney Island was the largest amusement area in the United States, attracting millions of visitors. At its height, Coney Island housed three competing amusement parks: Dreamland, Luna Park, and Steeplechase Park. Coney Island also saw a number of more obscure amusement parks like the short-lived Sea Lion Park.
Luna Park around the turn of the century. Wikimedia Commons
Coney’s beginnings date back at least to 1875 when Andrew Culver combined several rail lines into the Prospect Park and Coney Island Railroad, which drew huge weekend crowds. Culver’s 300-foot-tall Iron Tower, then the tallest structure in New York City, was an early amusement. The tower had a steam-powered elevator to whisk visitors up to a panoramic view. The first roller coaster at Coney Island was LaMarcus Adna Thompson’s Switchback Railway, constructed in 1884 that cost a nickel to ride.
Soon, Coney Island would be known “Sodom by the Sea” with freak shows, lurid dime museums, shooting galleries, burlesque and more. The best known strip was the Gut, and its icon was the Elephant Hotel, a 120-foot-tall elephant built in 1885 with blue tin skin and glass eyes that gleamed in the night and offered ocean views through its irises. The hind legs had spiral staircases up to the 31 rooms in the torso, and the front legs contained a cigar store and diorama. The phrase “seeing the elephant” meant you were up to no good in Coney Island.
The famed Elephant Hotel. Wikimedia Commons
Most trolley parks were more conservative and less risqué than Coney Island. Many of these parks were closed on Sundays in deference to the church-going culture of the era. By 1919, it is said there were 1,000 amusement parks around the country, and most were trolley parks. Others say there were as many as 2,000.
The reason for trolley parks’ success was not just that trolley lines were looking to increase their business by building something fun at the end of the line. There was a new, growing and ready market of masses of young immigrants, mostly workers without much money but eager to enjoy the pleasures of the parks. And you didn’t have to know much English either to spend a happy day there. That’s why so many trolley parks opened in industrial cities, like Pittsburgh. This is the reason, too, that the Nickelodeons were first successful in Pittsburgh, with so many young people with not much more than a nickel in their pockets.
Pittsburgh had nearly two-dozen trolley parks between the late 1800’s and mid 1950’s. And with business came innovation. The Pittsburgh area was home to some of the giants of the amusement park industry of the time: George Ferris (Ferris wheels), Harry Traver (coasters, Laff in the Dark, Tumble Bug, and many other rides), Fred Ingersoll (coasters, mill rides), and Zarro (early funhouse attractions).
By the 1930’s and 1940’s with the growing popularity of the automobile, the trolley parks largely disappeared. The trolley parks were replaced by a new amusement site – the roadside attraction. While the first amusement parks were built as destinations, the roadside attraction was designed to be a stop during the journey. A family outing in their automobile might end at a roadside amusement park, or it might be spotted as they drove along, and tempted to stop. (For me, in our yearly drive from Pittsburgh to Miami Beach, we stopped at Parrot Farm and Monkey Jungle – and many others along the way.)
In New York the trend began with amusement entrepreneur William Nunley who wanted to take advantage of the Sunrise Highway, a busy road used by thousands of motorists. He built a carousel adjoining a restaurant, hoping that families looking for a place to eat would chose the one with an attached ride for the kids. The building expanded to include an arcade, and more amusements were added to an adjoining lot which was dubbed Happyland. Nunley’s restaurant became a huge success, and he built more restaurants with attached amusement parks including one in Yonkers, and the Jolly Roger in Beth Page.
Nunley’s in Baldwin, Long Island. It was one of the first amusement parks combined with a restaurant.
One of the Nunley’s restaurants was built on Cross Bay Blvd in Broad Channel, just on the other side of the Cross Bay drawbridge from Rockaway Playland. The road was heavily traveled by motorists going to Playland, and Nunley gambled that he could convince a good number to stop on the way. Nunley’s Broad Channel soon expanded into the successful Broad Channel Amusement Park. The Nunley model drew others. Treasure Island Restaurant & Arcade and its adjoining amusement park Kiddy City was built on an undeveloped stretch of Northern Blvd, across the street from Alley Pond Park. Adventurer’s Inn was located in College Point on the edge of the now decommissioned Flushing Airport. All have perished.
There were other roadside attractions. I remember well the first drive in restaurant where we lived – called “Eat and Park”, I think. (No servers on roller skates, however.)
And, of course, drive-in movies. Drive-in movies first appeared in the 1930s, but they gained immense popularity during the 1950s and ‘60s with the Baby Boomer generation. Over 4,000 drive-ins throughout the U.S. attracted families and smoochers. And strip malls – another roadside attraction. By this point, we pretty much lived in our cars.
My Chevy 1956 Bel Air Convertible
All well and good, and by and large all gone. I didn’t go to Coney Island as a kid, but I have fond memories of our school picnics at Kennywood Park. Baldwin was pretty much a working class, ethnic community – and the school picnics were a wonderful opportunity to bring large families together. (As long as it didn’t rain.) Good Memories.
The escalators leading to the rink level at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
NINA LUBLIN N AND JAY JACOBSON GOT IT RIGHT
The entire floor is under construction and most of the shops are gone. The enormous post office has closed at the site. It is sad to see the place gutted and being “re-developed” with new shops. Hopefully some of the classic details are being preserved.
The glass mural by Noguchi (?) is gone “to storage” If you remember this mural just inside the skating rink, please contact me.
FROM READERS:
Great VW story by Jay ! My ownership of an orange bug was no way so colorful. Just odd breakdowns from piston rings that never sealed properly, and car would just STOP when they decided to overheat . . .after sitting a long time to cool . . would start up again. I gave up on it. Hugs to you, Susan Hi, Judy…
Thanks for Jay Jacobson’s delightful history of his VW Beetle. Likewise, my first car was a black 1957 VW Beetle. I bought it during my sophomore year at the University of Texas at Austin. I paid $800 for it. It had no gas gauge but a lever under the dash could be flipped to access another gallon of gas to get to the service station! Here’s the best part. I drove this car for my remaining years at the university. I joined the Peace Corps and my middle brother inherited the car. He drove it for four years and my youngest brother inherited it from him and drove it for another four years. Sadly, we sold it…for $800. Can you imagine what it would be worth today?Dave
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)
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
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THURSDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY LOTS OF GREAT MEMORIES OF THE VW BEETLE.
This Volkswagen sedan was the vehicle that Pat and I owned and drove during our years in Nyasaland as it became Malawi in the 1960s. It was beige. The license was FJ84. Although there were no seatbelts and the steering wheel was on the right, the woven reed baby basket fit well into the rear seat, so at least one passenger was carried safely. As our daughter passed her first birthday and outgrew her baby basket, her favorite spot in the car was behind the driver’s seat and the passenger seat where she could comment about what she saw for the edification of her adoring parents. At the time, Malawi had very little paved road outside of its very few major cities. The one lane paved road ran from Limbe (commercial Capitol) to Zomba (political and administrative Capitol where we lived). There was very little traffic, but when one did meet an on-coming vehicle, each driver moved half way off the paved stretch so that the vehicles could pass. The VW required little attention even though the vast preponderance of its kilometers were on dirt roads. While passable at slow speed during the dry season, once the rains began it was a different story. We put on tires with deep grooves for traction, but it was common to see cars that had slid off the road being pushed by a group of Malawians to get back on track. JAY JACOBSON
The Volkswagen 1302 Super Beetle (1968 to 1973). ED LITCHER
The Volkswagen beetle! NANCY BROWN PS. My brother-in-law had an orange convertible Volkswagen beetle in the early 60’s
The Volkswagen Beetle of course! This one from 1971-2. Also known as Type One or the “Bug”. LAURA HUSSEY
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Maybe it was not a Cadillac, but we all remember the cars our parents owned. Send us your recollection of the family car. ROOSEVELTISLANDHISTORY@GMAIL.COM Enjoy
HENRY, THE SMITHSONIAN ELEPHANT ED LITCHER, CLARA BELLA, JAY JACOBSON, GLORIA HERMAN, LAURA HUSSEY 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 Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
Sources
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
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Thomas Hart Benton, Wheat, 1967, oil on wood, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. James A. Mitchell and museum purchase, 1991.55
An American scene painter who, along with John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood, was a leading regionalist painter of the 1930s. Well known for his murals and portraits depicting everyday life, particularly in the Midwest, Benton authored two autobiographies, An Artist in America (1937) and An American in Art (1969).
Joan Stahl American Artists in Photographic Portraits from the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection (Washington, D.C. and Mineola, New York: National Museum of American Art and Dover Publications, Inc., 1995)
Benton’s idiom was essentially political and rhetorical, the painterly equivalent of the country stump speeches that were a Benton family tradition. The artist vividly recalled accompanying his father, Maecenas E. Benton — a four-term U.S. congressman, on campaigns through rural Missouri. Young Tom Benton grew up with an instinct for constituencies that led him to assess art on the basis of its audience appeal. His own art, after the experiments with abstraction, was high-spirited entertainment designed to catch and hold an audience with a political message neatly bracketed between humor and local color.
Elizabeth Broun “Thomas Hart Benton: A Politician in Art,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art Spring 1987, p. 61
Thomas Hart Benton, Achelous and Hercules, 1947, tempera and oil on canvas mounted on plywood, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Allied Stores Corporation, and museum purchase through the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program, 1985.2
Thomas Hart Benton, Ten Pound Hammer, 1967, lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Frank McClure, 1970.87
Thomas Hart Benton, The Poet, 1938, lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Frank McClure, 1970.88
Thomas Hart Benton, The Race, 1942, lithograph on paper mounted on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Morris Abrams, 2007.12
When newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer died in 1911, he bequeathed funds for the design and construction of a Beaux-Arts style fountain in his memory.
The Pulitzer Fountain has five basins in a stepped formation topped with the bronze figure of Pomona, the Roman goddess of abundance, sculpted by Karl Bitter. In her arm she holds a basket of harvested fruits. The water emerges from spouts at the base of the figure and cascades downs the basins. The fountain’s allegorical theme of abundance is completed by two large horns of plenty.
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
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM
WIKIPEDIA COMMONS
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Until the mid-1860s the Fifth Avenue area around Madison Square was Manhattan’s “aristocratic” heart. Its brownstone mansions were occupied by the city’s elite. The gradual incursion of commerce into this residential haven started with high-class hotels.
In 1864 Hoffmann House was one of the first to open its doors. Owned by Cassius H. Read, it was located on the corner of 25th Street & Broadway and contained tree hundred rooms with all the latest conveniences. The establishment proudly advertised its lavish furnishings, carefully chosen artworks, and refined French (Parisian) cuisine. At a time that hotel living was becoming a fashionable alternative to owning a family mansion for wealthy New Yorkers, Hoffmann House was recommended as the most comfortable and homelike residence in the metropolis.
During the 1880s the hotel’s “grand salon” became one of New York’s “secretive” attractions for a very specific reason.
Feud & Friendship
Since 1865, entrepreneur Edward Stiles (Ned) Stokes had been running an oil refinery at Hunters Point, Brooklyn. His “silent partner” was James Fisk, a wealthy businessman who co-operated the Erie Railroad. The working relationship turned sour as the two men shared the affections of the same woman named Helen Josephine (Josie) Mansfield. Her presence caused intense animosity between them. They accused each other of embezzlement, blackmail, and foul play in business. The controversy was fought out in court.
On January 6th, 1872, Fisk was visiting the Grand Central Hotel on Broadway when Stokes met him on the stairs and shot him twice. James died the next day. Although the jury sentenced Stokes to hang, he obtained a second trial. Convicted again of first degree murder, he was granted a third trial. This time he was found guilty of murder in the second degree and spent four years inside Sing Sing prison.
Since 1865, entrepreneur Edward Stiles (Ned) Stokes had been running an oil refinery at Hunters Point, Brooklyn. His “silent partner” was James Fisk, a wealthy businessman who co-operated the Erie Railroad. The working relationship turned sour as the two men shared the affections of the same woman named Helen Josephine (Josie) Mansfield. Her presence caused intense animosity between them. They accused each other of embezzlement, blackmail, and foul play in business. The controversy was fought out in court.
On January 6th, 1872, Fisk was visiting the Grand Central Hotel on Broadway when Stokes met him on the stairs and shot him twice. James died the next day. Although the jury sentenced Stokes to hang, he obtained a second trial. Convicted again of first degree murder, he was granted a third trial. This time he was found guilty of murder in the second degree and spent four years inside Sing Sing prison.
Before his incarceration, Stokes and his family had lived in Hoffman House. He asked Cassius Read to take care of his business affairs. Although the Stokes name would forever be linked to the infamous murder, Read stood by him after his release in October 1876. The pair were involved with several business ventures until, in 1883, Read offered Stokes a one-third partnership in the hotel. It was a move he would come to regret.
When Stokes arrived, the hotel became a joint-stock company. Read made a series of poor business decisions which put him into financial trouble. Stokes did not support him. Instead, he pushed his partner out by getting hold of the majority of shares. By 1895 Reid was forced out altogether and fell into poverty. Three years later Stokes sold his stake in the business, leaving him a rich man.
Neoclassicism & Nudity
In French academic art, female nudity was only permissible within the context of a recognizable narrative in a mythological, biblical, or imagined Oriental setting. Academies directed young artists to develop their skills by drawing the naked form of ancient sculpture as well as live models. In spite of self-imposed constraints, eroticism became increasingly prominent when the cultural supremacy of classical tradition started to wane.
In 1873 neoclassical artist Guillaume [William]-Adolphe Bouguereau created what he considered to be one of his most important paintings. His twelve-foot “Nymphes et un satyre” (Nymphs and Satyr) depicts a scene of four naked nymphs teasing a satyr (half goat, half man) by dragging him into a woodland pond. It was displayed along with a verse from the ancient Roman poet Publius Statius: “Conscious of his shaggy hide and from childhood untaught to swim, he dares not trust himself to deep waters.”
The “classical” context seems virtually irrelevant, the painting is a festival of the flesh, celebrating nudity for nudity’s sake. The lush image seems to suggest female domination and sexual power. The subject provided the artist with an ideal opportunity to demonstrate his skill in painting female nudity from multiple angles.
The painting was exhibited at the 1873 Salon in Paris, a year before the first Impressionist Exhibition of work by thirty young artists was organized (April/May 1874) in a gallery on Rue des Capucines. His following of traditionalist critics praised the new canvas, but it was rejected as “trash” by the up and coming generation of young artists.
For some considerable time, Bouguereau had been one of the most successful French artists who was hugely popular with the art-buying bourgeoisie. He was also an outspoken critic of the emerging avant-garde. He scorned modernist artists for a lack of technical precision, while they ridiculed his reactionary neoclassical approach and subject matter.
Édouard Manet’s “Le bon bock” (The Good Pint) was also exhibited at the 1873 Salon. This painting, inspired by Frans Hals after the artist’s return from a visit to the Netherlands, created a stir amongst critics and the public. Although Bouguereau still had its admirers, it was clear that French taste was changing – neoclassicism was on its way out. Significantly, his contribution to the Salon did not remain in France. Instead, it was bought by an American collector and would make a significant impact in Manhattan.
The Wolfe Collection
New York-born John David Wolfe was co-owner of the hardware trading house of Wolfe, Dash & Fisher that occupied seven floors of a marble structure at 38 Warren Street, Manhattan. He was also involved in the establishment of the Chemical Bank and a Director of the Hudson River Railroad. Co-founder in 1869 and first President of the American Museum of Natural History, he was married to Dorothea Ann Lorillard who had inherited part of the Lorillard tobacco fortune.
On his travels for the firm, Wolfe also dabbled in the art trade and built a private collection. He purchased Bouguereau’s painting for the princely sum of 35,000 francs on June 26th, 1873. It was displayed in his mansion at 744 Broadway (the family later moved to 13 Madison Avenue) for many years alongside other high-style French academic paintings he had acquired.
He left his collection to his daughter Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, herself a prominent art collector. Rumored to be the richest unmarried woman in the United States, she was the only female among the one hundred and six founders of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and left her large collection of contemporary paintings to the museum, together with a generous financial gift.
The opening of the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Wing displaying these paintings created wide interest amongst the public and brought large numbers of people from beyond the elite circles that traditionally constituted the museum’s audience.
Bouguereau’s Nymphs and Satyr was not part of Catharine’s substantial donation. She too may have felt awkward in the presence of nude nymphs frolicking with an equally-naked satyr. In April 1882, she had put the painting on for auction with Leavitt & Co at 817 Broadway. It was snapped up by Edward Stokes for $10,000.
Hoffmann’s ‘Grand Salon’
From its beginning in 1864 Hoffmann House attracted celebrities, socialites, and stage performers. Its clientele also included politicians from Tammany Hall who considered the hotel as their unofficial headquarters (the Fifth Avenue Hotel was popular among Republicans). Members included Stephen Grover Cleveland, who was living at the Hoffman on the day he was elected to his second non-consecutive term as President.
The hotel welcomed extended stays from notable figures such as newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, actress Sarah Bernhardt, showman William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, and General Winfield Scott, the “Grand Old Man of the Army.” Patrons gathered in the splendid “grand saloon” where they sipped on Wilson Pure Rye Whiskey, the leading house drink of choice (the Wilson Distilling Company in Highspire, rural Pennsylvania, was founded in 1823 by Irish immigrant Robert Wilson).
The bar room was richly decorated with art works. It was here that Stokes tickled curiosity by putting the “Nymphs and Satyr” on display for all to see. The French may have been bored with a multitude of naked bodies against an imaginative or fake classical background, but American eyes were not accustomed to see much nudity. It was the best place to attract attention to such a sensual creation.
A red velvet, gold-fringed drape sheltered the painting from the glare of gas lights. It was positioned directly across a large glass mirror behind the bar, allowing patrons to discreetly inspect the image. Stokes’s trick worked well. The painting became a tourist attraction. People lined up to catch a glimpse of the “titillating” image. Magazines covered the story. The bar room painting set a trend, as hotels and bars elsewhere followed suit, exhibiting their own classical nudes.
Ladies’ Mile
The Ladies’ Mile emerged in the course of the 1860s when retailers started to relocate from Lower Manhattan to Flatiron’s Madison Square district. The traditional brownstone townhouse were replaced by extravagant cast iron department stores in a variety of architectural styles. By 1880 access was greatly improved with the installation of the Sixth Avenue elevated train (popularly known as El). It became New York’s most popular shopping area.The Ladies’ Mile also boasted upscale restaurants, booksellers and publishers, and performance venues such as the Academy of Music, Steinway Hall, and the first location of the Met. All of these attractions brought the rich and celebrities to the area, especially since the safety of the district allowed women to shop without male companions to accompany them. Hence the name – women were target clients and consumers.Many of them would spent time in Hoffmann’s “grand salon” to enjoy the ambience and have a peak at Stokes’s naughty canvas. Such freedoms would have been impermissible in previous decades when Victorian norms considered female nudity to be respectable only in spaces reserved for men who supposedly “understood” classical art. This painting and this particular location challenged that assumption. The reception of Bouguereau’s canvas in that sense signified a new configuration of attitudes towards gender relations, sexual display, and public culture.Vice crusaders fought back. United States Postal Inspector and anti-vice activist Anthony Comstock started action against smut in art, abortion, contraception, and prostitution. He used his official position (in cahoots with the police) and his role as Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (SSV) to make numerous arrests for obscenity. He convinced fellow moralists of his belief that where “the nude in art is most lavishly displayed society has been most degraded.”In 1887 he began arresting print sellers in the city of New York for offering photographs of French paintings of nudes which, in his view, depraved and corrupted young minds. In an address before the Convention of Baptists Ministers in New York City on December 12th, 1887, he produced his rallying cry: “Morals, not art or literature.” Comstock dearly wished to remove the “Nymphs and Satyr” from sight, but he was blocked from taking action by powerful opponents. He allowed the painting to remain at Hoffmann House, even though he considered the “grand salon” an obnoxious public mixing place of classes and genders.Stokes died in November 1901. One of his executors was James Leary, a major stockholder in the Hoffman House Hotel Company. What happened to the painting in the aftermath remains unclear. It eventually came into possession of his son Daniel J. Leary who put the canvas into storage for reasons unknown.It may have languished in a warehouse for four decades because of ongoing legal complications. Others have argued that the “scandalous” painting was kept hidden deliberately in order to shield the public from such an offensive image. It was finally sold in June 1942 out of the Leary estate to Herbert H. Elfers who acted on behalf of Robert Sterling Clark. Bouguereau’s picture was put on permanent display at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where it remains.It was not until May 2012 that the painting returned (on loan) to New York where is was exhibited at the Met for two years. Few visitors realized what all the fuss had been about.Illustrations, from above: Portrait of John David Wolfe, 1871 by Daniel Huntington (MET, New York); Life, Trial and Conviction of Edward Stokes [published after the second trial, 1873]; an 1870 brochure depicting the original Hoffmann House; Bouguereau’s Nymphs and Satyr as displayed at Hoffmann House; and Nymphs and Satyr, 1873 by Adolph William Bouguereau (Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts).
Jaap Harskamp Jaap Harskamp, PhD at Amsterdam University (Comparative Literature), Researcher at European University Institute (Florence), Curator Dutch & Flemish Collections at British Library (retired), Researcher at Cambridge UL. His work has been published by Wellcome Institute, British Library, and Brill. His current blog on migration can be viewed here.
THURSDAY, MAY12 AT 6:30 PM.
LIVE AT THE NYPL ROOSEVELT ISLAND BRANCH OR ON ZOOM
NEW YORK TIMES TOWER CLARA BELLA, ARON EISENPREISS, ANDY SPARBERG, ED LITCHER, HARA REISER 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
Sources
JAAP HARSKAMP NEW YORK ALMANACK
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On November 21st, 1899, Vice-President Garret Hobart died and was succeeded by Theodore Roosevelt. On August 31st, 1901, Polish-American anarchist Leon Czolgosz booked a room in Nowak’s Hotel at 1078 Broadway.Six days later he made a trip to Buffalo, site of the Pan-American Exposition where President William McKinley was due to speak. He shot him from close range.The victim survived and his apparent recovery reassured Roosevelt to depart on a camping trip to the Adirondacks. McKinley died on September 14th. That day Roosevelt gave his inauguration speech as America’s 26th President in Ansley Wilcox House at 61 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo. Edwin Davis, New York’s first State Electrician, was in charge of the murderer’s execution on October 29th.Roosevelt turned the presidency into an effective executive. A “charismatic” leader, he insisted that government should serve as an agent of reform. The ambition to make society more equitable motivated his policy making. In doing so, he forged a national sense of unity and participation. Patriotism became part of politics.On the cusp of the twentieth century, the year 1899 did not signify the nostalgic closure of a century, but rather a momentous “preview” of the often chaotic and conflicting tendencies that came to characterize the metropolis in the modern era in which triumph and tragedy went side by side.
Entertainment DistrictOscar Hammerstein was born in Prussia into a Jewish family. His wish to study music was blocked by his father who forced him to pursue a business career. After the death of his mother, Oscar ran away, pawned the family violin, and sailed from Liverpool to the city of New York, arriving in in the city in 1864. He was eighteen years old.Having made a fortune in tobacco production, he returned to his first passion – music and the stage. In 1895, he opened the spectacular Olympia Theatre at Longacre Square (later renamed Times Square). The limestone building was inaugurated on November 25th with the colorful appearance of over thirty European performers, including acrobats, high-wire walkers, clowns, and puppeteers. Many thousands of onlookers watched the spectacle.As urban pleasure moved outdoors, people gathered in ever larger numbers at parades, public concerts, sporting events, or the Bronx Zoo (opened in 1899). Hammerstein put New York’s entertainment district on the map. Within a ten year period, he built three more theaters of which The Victoria, at the corner of 42nd Street & 7th Avenue, was the most successful. Opened in 1899 and shrewdly managed by his son Willie, it made Charlie Chaplin, W. C. Fields, Al Jolson, Buster Keaton, and Mae West household names. Under Oscar’s ambitious expansion policy, Times Square became an immense construction site. The future of showbiz was being built.
Stage & StardomIn May 1884 Martin Beck arrived from his native Hungary in Chicago and started work as a waiter in a beer garden that catered for the city’s large community of German immigrants. His application was noticed by impresario Morris Meyerfeld who, through his Orpheum Circuit of theaters, dominated the vaudeville market west of the Mississippi. Beck soon acted as his right hand man.In July 1878, the Hungarian Weisz family settled in Appleton, Wisconsin, where Mayer Weisz served as rabbi of the Zion Reform Jewish Congregation. His son Ehrich made his debut as a trapeze artist at a young age. By 1887 he had moved to New York, finding lodgings in a boarding house on East 79th Street. Having adopted the stage name Harry Houdini (after the French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin), he struggled to make a living as a touring showman.In the spring of 1899 Beck watched his countryman display his act in front of a sparse audience. He liked the performance and booked Harry to join the company. It was Houdini’s big break as a professional stunt performer. He soon dominated American vaudeville and for many years he was the highest-paid performer on stage.While Houdini started out on his dazzling career, New York gave birth to future stars. Jimmy Cagney was born on July 17th, 1899, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Although there is disagreement about the exact location, the address given on his birth certificate is 391 East 8th Street. His father, a bartender and amateur boxer, was of Irish descent. On December 25th, 1899, Humphrey Bogart was born into a prosperous family of Dutch descent at 245 West 103rd Street. His ancestral grandparents were rooted in seventeenth century New Amsterdam and New Netherland.
Revolving Doors at Rector’sA parallel development in the area was the opening of restaurants. Charles Rector began his career as a dining car superintendent on the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1884 he opened the Oyster House in Chicago. By 1899 he had moved to New York to launch the city’s first “Lobster Palace” on Broadway.Lobster Palaces were luxurious dining establishments in the theater district, popular with an affluent clientele in the years preceding the First World War. Due to their palatial interiors and opulent lobster parties, the establishments acquired their name. As their owners possessed all-night liquor licenses, food and alcohol consumption continued until the early morning hours.Although competition was fierce, Rector’s was the place to be noticed. A lively clique of singers, dancers, and actors was seen in company of entrepreneurs who spent money like water, tipped generously, and put up an extravagant show. Noisy and ostentatious, they filled the premises night after night whilst the champagne flowed. The 1913 Ziegfeld Follies hit song “If a Table at Rector’s Could Talk” captured the spirit of the era.The entrance to Rector’s was of particular interest to the public. Patented (no. 641,563) in 1888 by Theophilus Van Kannel, the palace was New York’s first building with a revolving door. The invention helped alleviate problems associated with conventional doors. It kept out fumes and served as an airlock preventing the influx of cold air on windy days. The door revolutionized the design of twentieth century skyscrapers.
With the growth of Broadway’s fame as a place of flamboyant characters, James Buchanan Brady stood out. A man with a legendary appetite, he was a regular and respected guest at Rector’s. Better known as Diamond Jim, Brady was born to a family of Irish immigrants on August 12th, 1856, above the saloon which his father ran in Cedar Street, Lower Manhattan.
James was still young when his father died. His mother remarried, but he hated his stepfather. Aged eleven, he left home to be employed as a bellboy at the stylish 200-room St James Hotel on Broadway & 26th Street. One of the regulars there was John M. Toucey, an executive with the New York Central Railroad. The latter took a liking to the youngster and offered him the opportunity to start work on the railways. Jim accepted and quickly made his way up in the business.
He then joined the railway supply company of Manning, Maxwell & Moore in Connecticut, and developed into an accomplished salesman. Through shrewd and shady dealings in the stock market, Brady accumulated a vast wealth, becoming a prominent member of the Gilded Age oligarchy.
Living the good life, Jim owned a mansion on 86th Street. Ever a bachelor, he was always accompanied by Broadway actress Lillian Russell when entertaining at New York’s finest venues. The self-styled King of Bling, Brady wore diamonds on his buttons, watch, belt buckle, scarf pin, rings, tie pins, and cuff links. The head of his walking cane contained a three carat diamond.
When Jim succumbed to a heart attack in 1917, he bequeathed a collection of thirty diamond-encrusted watches to his childhood friend Jules Weiss. One of those, a gold pocket watch produced circa 1910 in Geneva by Vacheron & Constantin, was auctioned in New York on March 10th, 2010 (the Swiss firm had been present in Manhattan since 1832).
The watch carried a relief portrait of Napoleon in a case set with thirty-six diamonds. It symbolized the cult of the ‘Colossus of the Nineteenth Century’ amongst the power brokers of the Gilded Age.
Brady was the first person in New York City to own an automobile. It was a custom built electric “brougham” manufactured for him by the Woods Motor Vehicle Company of Chicago in 1895. On delivery, the car was accompanied by the firm’s mechanic. Named William Johnson, Brady hired the services of the African-American technician, dressed him in a bottle-green uniform, and gave him the official title of “chauffeur.”
Brady had Johnson drive him around the city on five consecutive mornings between three and four o’clock, when no one was watching, to make sure that the car was reliable. He then alerted the press, before debuting his ‘horseless carriage’ on a spring afternoon. With William Johnson in uniform and Diamond Jim Brady with top hat, they drove down Fifth Avenue to Madison Square.
Crowds gathered along the way to view the spectacle. The new machine delighted the spectators, but horses on the road panicked. When the brougham reached the thoroughfare of 42nd Street at least five teams of horses bolted in terror, causing Manhattan’s first auto-related traffic jam.
The trip caused so much disruption that the New York City Police Department ordered Brady not to bring his machine out again during the day. This prohibition was short lived. Within a year cars were a common sight in the metropolis.
Fatal Accident
By 1899 the Automobile Club of America (ACA) was founded with its headquarters at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. In November that year the Club organized it first annual parade in downtown Manhattan which displayed at least ten different makes of electric or steam powered models.Two months earlier, on September 13th, the city’s first recorded fatal car accident occurred. Sixty-nine year old real estate dealer Henry Hale Bliss met his fate when he stepped off a south bound 8th Avenue trolley on the “Dangerous Stretch” at Central Park West & West 74th Street. Whilst turning to help his female companion step down, he was struck by an electric-powered taxicab. Bliss hit the pavement, crushing his skull and chest.The cab’s passenger was physician David Orr Edson, son of former Mayor Franklin Edson. He tried to assist Henry Bliss while waiting for the ambulance, but to no avail. Bliss died from his injuries the next morning at Roosevelt Hospital. Arthur Smith, the driver of the cab, was charged with manslaughter. But as Bliss’s death was later deemed an accident, he was acquitted.At the dawn of the twentieth century, automobiles brought the promise of expanded mobility. But cars created new hazards. An alarming increase in deaths resulting from accidents raised social concern. Speed undermined safety. Unless measures were taken to improve driver behavior and regulate the flow of traffic, the car would prove to be a menace rather than a boon.
Electric ChairIn a city split by excessive wealth and dire poverty, crime was a stark reality. Twentieth century gangland war was prepared on January 17th, 1899, when Alphonse Capone was born into an immigrant family from Angri, near Salerno. His parents had settled at 95 Navy Street, Brooklyn, in 1893. Young Al Capone became involved with groups that included the Bowery Boys and the Brooklyn Rippers, before joining the notorious Five Points Gang of Italian-Americans in Lower Manhattan.Britain had introduced the death penalty in the American colonies. The first recorded instance took place in 1608 when George Kendall of Virginia was executed for allegedly plotting to betray the British to the Spanish. Over time, public executions became a rowdy spectacle. In 1824, the hanging in East Village of John Johnson, a boarding house keeper who had robbed and murdered one of his guests, drew a massive turnout of unruly spectators.Such spectacles achieved the opposite of their intended effect. Instead of grave events that would deter people from crime, executions became drunken parties of debauchery. The regularity of hangings led to a hardening of the public’s moral senses. Rhode Island (1833), Pennsylvania (1834), New York (1835), Massachusetts (1835), and New Jersey (1835) all abolished public executions. By 1849, fifteen states were holding private hangings.
n 1887, New York State established a committee to determine a more ‘humane’ system of execution. Alfred P. Southwick launched the idea of putting electric current through a device similar to his dental chair. Built in 1888, William Kemmler was the first person to be executed at New York’s Auburn Prison on August 6th, 1890. An alcoholic of German ancestry, he had murdered his wife with a hatchet. With seventeen witnesses in attendance, the execution proved difficult and took some eight minutes. Those present described the event as an awful spectacle, one worse than hanging.
On March 20th, 1899, Martha M. Place was the first woman to die in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison, Ossining, for the murder her stepdaughter Ida Place. Her husband William was a key witness against her. Theodore Roosevelt, then Governor of New York State, was asked to commute Place’s death sentence, but he refused. Use of the electric chair has been a controversial topic ever since.
Windsor Hotel Tragedy
When the 500-room, seven-story Windsor Hotel opened in 1873 at 575 Fifth Avenue, it was one of the new buildings that transformed what had been up till then a sleepy area. At a time that hotel living was becoming a fashionable alternative to owning a family mansion for wealthy New Yorkers, the hotel was promoted as the most homelike residence in the metropolis.
In the afternoon of March 17th, 1899, a guest reportedly lit his cigarette or cigar with a match in the second-floor parlor, then tossed the match out of the window. But instead of falling to the street, it was blown into a curtain, starting a fire that spread quickly.
Crowds lining Fifth Avenue had gathered to watch St Patrick’s Day parade. Suddenly they found themselves witnessing guests jumping to their deaths to escape the flames. Their mass presence prevented the fire brigade from approaching the hotel. The death toll was estimated at ninety. Thirty-one unidentified bodies were buried in an unmarked grave in Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla.
Hugh Bonner, New York’s 6th Fire Commissioner, blamed poor construction for the rapid spread of the fire as the building did not have the cross walls which, by 1899, were a legal requirement. There were no fire proof steps in the draughty corridors. According to some reports fire escapes were too hot to use; other accounts state that there were none. The Windsor Hotel was a fire trap and tinder box.
An era of grandiosity had created an atmosphere in which hasty construction, cost cutting, and short cuts led to disastrous failures. Calls rang out for stricter safety regulations and increased protection of the public. John Kenlon, one of the firefighters in the 1899 tragedy, became a forceful advocate of a high-pressure hydrant system in New York which was finally installed in 1907.
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Jaap Harskamp
Jaap Harskamp, PhD at Amsterdam University (Comparative Literature), Researcher at European University Institute (Florence), Curator Dutch & Flemish Collections at British Library (retired), Researcher at Cambridge UL. His work has been published by Wellcome Institute, British Library, and Brill. His current blog on migration can be viewed here.
http://Illustrations, from above: The original St. James Hotel on Broadway & 26th Street (New York Public Library); A cartoon of Diamond Jim’s outfit; Diamond Jim’s gold pocket watch with a portrait of Napoleon produced circa 1910 in Geneva by Vacheron & Constantin; A 1890 Electric Broughham; A satirical postcard from 1908; The execution of William Kemmler (print published in August 17, 1890, in Le Petit Parisien); and Fire at the Windsor Hotel. (Photograph by H.N. Tiemann (active 1890s-1900s).
Edited by Deborah Dorff ALL PHOTOS COPYRIGHT RIHS. 2022 (C) PHOTOS IN THIS ISSUE (C) JUDITH BERDY RIHS
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
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Have you ever wondered how parks are made? In the Olmsted Firm, the process of designing a landscape was often long and involved many people. Typically, the design process included the following steps:
The Design Process: Fort Tryon Park Fort Tryon Park: The Client’s Inquiry
Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. was the senior partner in the Olmsted Firm during the Fort Tryon project.
Olmsted Archives
A new landscape design job at the Olmsted firm always began with a letter from a potential client. Clients wrote to the firm with a particular project in mind. The firm answered inquiries with a cost estimate for a preliminary visit. The firm also typically requested that clients conduct topographical surveys of the site to send to the firm. After a client contacted the firm, the firm assigned them a folder and job number.
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. contacted the Olmsted Brothers firm in 1927 to develop a park on his property at Fort Tryon. The property, a Revolutionary War battle site, had been previously owned by Cornelius K.G. Billings. Rockefeller purchased the property and the Billings Mansion in 1917. Overlooking the Hudson River, the property featured scenic views and historic structures.
Oftentimes clients would independently conduct surveys of a site. Clients sent topographical maps to the firm which aided the landscape architects in the design process. Nevertheless, a preliminary visit would be made to the site, usually by a senior partner. The client paid the cost of the preliminary visit. The partner or an assistant would take notes on the site, and general design ideas would begin to be developed. Photography also became an important means of documenting details of the site. Preliminary visits were non-binding, taking place early on in the design process.
Fort Tryon Park: Preliminary Plans
The landscape architect used notes from site visits and topographical surveys to draft a preliminary plan. Certain projects, depending on scale, required several early plans and sketches before the landscape architect and client settled on a design.
The boardwalk has been replaced by a paved surface that will tolerate the storm conditions
Fort Tryon Park: General Plan
The general plan for Fort Tryon Park.
Olmsted Archives, Job #00529
Frederick Law Olmsted and the firm’s later senior partners often did not draft final plans. Rather, they generated broad concepts for landscape designs. General plans were drawn by the firm’s draftsmen.
The Olmsted firm valued accuracy. All plans would be checked twice, by two different employees, before being mailed to a client. Oftentimes, an explanatory report would be sent to clients along with the general plan. This report would explain, in writing, the principles, ideas, and objectives behind the design.
Fort Tryon’s general plan illustrated the general locations of trees and plants, lawns, structures, terraces, promenades, roads, and paths.
Fort Tryon: Architectural and Engineering Plans
The firm’s department of engineering and architecture would draft plans for bridges, fences, and structures to supplement the general plan. These plans were more precise and detailed than general plans.
Plan showing a planting study for Fort Tryon Park.
Olmsted Archives Job #00529
After both the landscape architect and the client had approved a general plan, planting plans were prepared. Where general plans showed the main features of a landscape design and the general arrangement of vegetation, planting plans would show a detailed layout of plantings, and included species names of trees and shrubs and quantities of each. After the approval of the planting plan, the firm would place an order for trees and shrubs. The firm did not directly supply plants or building materials.
The planting plan for Fort Tryon shows a variety of plants and trees including ash, willow, hickory, and peach trees. A note on one section of the planting plan reads, “If interesting vegetation exists[,] take it into account when carrying out this plan. That is[,] leave some of it.” A central component of Frederick Law Olmsted’s design principles was the idea that the natural features and conditions of the land should be preserved where possible. Later partners in the firm adhered to this principle.
The Olmsted firm did not have an in-house nursery. In fact, the firm intentionally did not form partnerships with particular nurseries in order to ensure that the client always got the highest quality and most suitable plants for the project at a fair price
Fort Tryon Park: Construction
The construction of a landscape was carried out by an outside contractor, selected through a bidding process. Because well-executed designs generated business and new clients for the firm, a member of the Olmsted firm would typically oversee construction of large projects to ensure designs were properly implemented. For the construction of Fort Tryon Park, the firm set up a nearby temporary field office.
Fort Tryon Park: Follow-Up Visits
The Olmsted firm often arranged to make follow-up visits to landscapes to ensure that designs had been properly carried out. Where landscapes needed to be altered, expanded, or redesigned, clients often re-hired the Olmsted firm. Some of the firm’s later partners worked on improvements for projects that they had worked on in the early years of their careers. The Olmsted firm’s involvement with some projects spanned many decades.
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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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Whales are here and whale watching is a new addition to New York’s list of wonders. Another visitor has shown up, too – seals. We’re likely to see a lot more of them in the near future.
Two types of seals now hang out around here: Harbor Seals and Gray Seals. The Harbor Seal is a small seal, but with a distinctive rounded, short-muzzled head and spotted coat. Its eyes are very large and front flippers short. Nostrils form a wide “V” and ear openings are inconspicuous. The Gray Seal is bigger, and sometimes called “horseheads” because adult males have large, horse-like heads and large, curved noses.
They are both members of the “true” seal family. All true seals have short flippers, which they use to move in a “caterpillar”-like motion on land. They have no external ear flaps.
Harbor and Gray Seals visit New York. Photo by Celia Ackerman/Gotham Whale
Both like cold water, and they are typically found in large numbers in the coastal waters of Canada and south to Nantucket. In Canada, Gray Seals are typically seen in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, the Maritimes, and Quebec. The largest colony in the world is at Sable Island, Nova Scotia. Harbor Seals are found year-round off the coast of New England, in particular Maine and Massachusetts.
Photo courtesy of the Marine Mammal Center – Two Harbor Seals (Phoca vitulina) resting on a beach
These are not Sea Lions which are not seals – and that’s very important. California Sea Lions range up to 800 pounds, much bigger than the 300-pound Harbor Seal – although Gray Seals are a good deal larger than Harbor Seals. Sea Lions bark and use their front-body (head, neck, shoulders, chest, and front flippers) to swim, and can “walk” on land with their flippers (and clap). Harbor and Gray Seals are relatively quiet and spend more of their time out at sea. They swim primarily with their back-body (lower back, hips, and rear flippers). Though graceful in the water, they move clumsily on land because they can’t rotate their flippers like Sea Lions. Instead, they must flop or wiggle along on their bellies.
Because of their ability to use their flippers on land, Sea Lions often haul themselves out of the water and onto buoys, docks/piers, and sometimes even up onto fishing boats. They become territorial in some ports, taking over piers and docks. Their “seizure” of certain piers in San Francisco has become infamous.
Seals don’t form large groups like Sea Lions. Sometimes, a group will gather at a haul-out site (a haul out site is a waterside spot where seals come ashore to rest or where food can be found). Even when they haul out together, Harbor Seals are wary onshore, and don’t touch each other, unlike Sea Lions who are much more sociable and generally hang out in large groups. Harbor Seals are sensitive and don’t like people getting close.
Seasonally monogamous, Harbor Seals are mostly solitary and don’t form harems. They begin to gather in small, mixed groups in late summer. The loose groups show no hierarchy. Mature seals (about 5 years old) pair up and, in September, swim off to secluded areas where they generally breed in the water. The marginally larger males are opportunistically promiscuous but defend no territory or harem group. Gray seals gather in large groups during the mating/pupping and molting seasons. Outside of this, they often share their habitat with Harbor Seals.
Seals were long residents of our region. In colonial times, there were huge populations of seals. They were driven out by excessive hunting for their oil, meat and skins. Because they ate fish, they were seen as competitors and bounties were paid on all kinds of seals up until 1945 in Maine and 1962 in Massachusetts. One could go into the town hall in Chatham and collect a $5 bounty per seal nose. They were called “seal buttons.” And increasingly polluted waters either drove them away or killed them. From the oil industry in the late 1800s to chemicals like PCBs and dioxins in the 1950s, the filthy waters could not sustain much life. So remaining seals cleared out.
After a century long absence, seals have begun to return in winter to New York City for a little rest and relaxation. They are returning because what drove them away have been sorted. The 1972 Clean Water Act was pivotal: a federal law designed to limit the discharge of pollutants into the nation’s waters and improve the quality of water for fishing and swimming, and our waters are much cleaner. Around the same time, seals’ lives were improved by the Marine Mammals Protection Act of 1972, which made it illegal to harass, feed, capture, collect, kill, import or export any marine mammal. Their traditional environment here is cleaner and safer.
At first seal populations increased slowly (a year after Congress passed the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, a survey of the entire Maine coast found only 30 Grey Seals) but then rebounded from islands off Maine to Monomoy Island and Nantucket Island off of southern Cape Cod. The southernmost breeding colony was established on Muskeget Island with five pups born in 1988 and over 2,000 counted in 2008. According to a genetics study, the United States population has formed by recolonization by Canadian seals. By 2009, thousands of Grey Seals had taken up residence on or near popular swimming beaches on outer Cape Cod, A count of 15,756 grey seals in southeastern Massachusetts coastal waters was made in 2011 by the National Marine Fisheries Service. Grey and Harbor Seals are being seen increasingly in New York and New Jersey waters, and it is expected that they will establish colonies further south.
Gray seals on Cape Cod beach. Photo Credit: Wayne Davis, oceanaerials.com
In New York, we see Harbor Seals that migrate south from arctic waters in Nova Scotia, Maine, and Cape Cod to the warmer waters surrounding our city. They vacation here from about October through April before heading north to breed. Our winter is their summer. As one urban park ranger put it: “New York is like their Miami resort.”
A small pod of Harbor seals spotted resting on a remote sandy island in New York Harbor before Thanksgiving Day
Our Harbor Seal population is now stable at around 600, most near Orchard Beach in the Bronx and on Swinburne Island. The return of the seal is a “bioindicator of ecosystem health,” experts recent wrote. The seals are here in part, they wrote, because there are fish to eat and the quality of food can support them year after year, which represents “a clear example of local fauna reclaiming previous habitat.” Although the seals must watch out for boat traffic and can be stressed by motorized noise, their stability tells us that they and our water are doing better, but it also helps us prepare for more human interactions with seals, which are inevitable.
They’re not Sea Lions. But there are still problems. Anglers claim that seals steal their catch, right off their lines. “Ten years ago, we never saw seals, but now they’re everywhere,” said Willy Hatch, who’s been fishing the Cape and Islands for over 25 years. “They’re at Squibnocket Beach, Vineyard Sound, the Elizabeth Islands, Woods Hole, the Muskeget Channel. Often, the seals hear me anchor up and set up behind my boat. If I manage to hook a fish, a seal takes it right off my line. It gets worse every year as their population increases and their range expands.” As the seal population has increased. Cape Cod and the Islands are ground zero for a growing conflict between striper fishermen and seals. Since stripers are the great goal in New York waters, this conflict may spread here.
A gray seal snatches a striped bass off a fisherman’s line in the Cape Cod Canal. Encounters with seals shadowing anglers have become more common in recent years.
And great white sharks. There’s been a direct correlation between the increasing abundance of seals on the Cape and Islands and the growing presence of great white sharks. But it’s not because there are more sharks. More simply, as the seal population has increased, more great whites are hanging out where the seals are.
A great white shark hunts for gray seals in waters off the coast of Cape Cod. National Geographic/Alamy
And they stink. They eat fish and their plentiful poop is fishy and smelly.
That’s what happens when new folks arrive in the neighborhood. New folks, new adventures, new problems. Isn’t Nature grand?
LAURA HUSSEY, ED LITCHER, ANDY SPARBRG, GLORIA HERMAN 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 Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
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