Most people don’t properly understand the built environment of their childhood until they grow up, and even then maybe not until they’ve lived somewhere else and come home. Growing up in Queens, I didn’t question some of the styles around me that are not unique to the borough but are definitely concentrated there. One of my favorites, now, is the fake Tudor half-timber apartment house.
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In terms of architectural history, it’s gibberish. No Tudor building every looked like this, and the “timbers” on the facade are veneer a couple of inches thick, nailed to a brick wall built like every other apartment house constructed under the Multiple Dwelling Law. In other words, the appearance pretends to be historical but is not, and the appearance implies a form of construction that it is not.
But…
Many of the people who moved to these apartments – Harding Court, above, was constructed in 1923 – were moving from Old Law tenements, which often had fancy front facades but were terrible inside. The newer buildings had much better apartments but the architects wanted to keep them from being plain brick boxes, and so added ornament to the facades. For whatever reason, possibly because it was a style that had not been used in the older tenements, fake-Tudor was common in Queens in the 1920s and 30s. I’ve know plenty of people born between 1920 and 1940 for whom these buildings looked classier than other styles.
The timber veneer and projecting elements are hard to maintain, and this particular building has been stripped of much of the ornament. I think that’s simultaneously more honest, less ridiculous, and sadder. Exuberant gibberish is not so bad as an architectural statement.
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OLD STRUCTURES ENGINEERING DON FRIEDMAN
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In the history of public disturbances, food riots were a recurring form of collective action. Initially, most “bread riots” were non-violent demonstrations restricted to the marketplace as the production and supply of food were local matters. Participants argued with their bakers trying to force them to sell their products at a “just” price.
Harvest failures happened regularly and shortages were common, but sudden price rises that deprived people of basic provisions were blamed on authorities for failing to protect their constituents. A “moral economy” dictated that markets should be run for the benefit of people. To exploit customers was similar to looting. Profiteering by hiking prices in a period of dearth (greedflation) was considered a criminal act.
During World War I, hunger hit civilian populations worldwide as agriculture and food distribution were disrupted. Riots took place in Vienna, Amsterdam Petrograd, Melbourne, Tokyo and elsewhere.
The crisis also hit Rhode Island. To the anger of its large Italian population, pasta prices increased by sixty percent. The “Macaroni Riots” (also known as The Federal Hill Riots of 1914) started in August in Providence when raucous residents attacked the premises of wholesale trader Frank Ventrone, a fellow Italian immigrant.
From the outset, food disturbances wherever they took place have had one feature in common: women stood in the forefront of agitation.
Marching Women
Paris had set a precedent. For centuries, bread was a staple of French diet and a symbol of national pride. Feeding the fast growing capital became a challenge. The city’s insatiable demand for foodstuffs led to the exploitation and exhaustion of the agricultural hinterland. A series of poor harvests intensified food-insecurity. High bread prices and supply shortages in Paris during the 1770s sparked outrage.
In late April/May 1775, hunger set off an explosion of popular anger in the towns and villages of the Paris Basin. Over three hundred incidents of theft and violence were recorded. The uproar became known as the “Flour War.”
The tension simmered in subsequent years and boiled over again on the morning of October 5, 1789, when groups of women protested against soaring bread prices. They were joined by large numbers of hungry and disgruntled other protesters. Together they marched towards the Palace of Versailles.
The unrest quickly became intertwined with the activities of revolutionaries seeking political and constitutional reforms. Rioters ransacked the city armory for weapons, before the crowd besieged the palace. The Women’s March on Versailles was an early and significant event leading up to the French Revolution as armed Parisian women rallied together to demand the intervention of King Louis XVI himself.
This statement of female independence disrupted social conventions that confined women to their “duties” at home, whilst caring for husband (the “breadwinner”) and children. This realization sent shock-waves through the political establishment, fanning fears that food riots might ignite demands for social change. The threat of a hungry “mob” was to be met with force.
Flour Riot
Demands for fair prices tended to include accusations of hoarding and price-gouging by traders. Political authorities were attacked for being in cahoots with business elites. More often than not, food riots were fueled by the fury about economic mismanagement and political corruption. What may have started as a spontaneous protest would soon be marshaled by members of community groups or trade unions and others. That was the case in the city of New York’s Flour Riot of 1837.
The disastrous Great Fire in 1835 was followed by a period of economic hardship and food shortages. The city was starving. On February 13, 1837, a meeting was called to protest against the price of flour and grain which speculators had driven up to twice their normal price. A crowd of 6,000 people was stirred up by the eloquence of political agitators.
Rumors were circulating. Word was spreading that the firm of Eli Hart & Co., a large brick building in Lower Manhattan owned by a Troy firm, was hoarding barrels of flour in order to inflate its price. Rioters marched up to its premises between Dey Street and Cortlandt Street. They ransacked the store by dumping 500 barrels of flour and 1,000 bushels of wheat outside its doors. Standing knee-deep in spilled flour and wheat, women collected the priceless spoils from the pavement.
The rioters then took down a second flour warehouse, that of S.H. Herrick & Co at nearby Coenties Slip, before being brutally dispersed by members of the New York State Militia. The mayhem was quelled by blunt muscle power. The use of violence did not stop people from protesting in times of need. Bread and flour wars were followed by meat conflicts. (You can read a first hand account here.)
Kosher Manhattan
Newcomers to the United States brought their own culinary practices with them, whilst acquiring the nutritional customs of their place of settlement. The migrant inhabits two worlds. Traditional “home” recipes are part of a heritage that will be nostalgically conserved, but modification to availability is always necessary and inevitable.
From the mid-nineteenth century onward, Manhattan’s Lower East Side was home to large numbers of German immigrants. Known as Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), its community was as diverse as the home nation itself before unification in 1871. By creating a social space in the process of adaptation, hundreds of local saloons and beer gardens played a formative role. Nostalgia was a good lunch, a reminder of home.
Erected in 1863, the brick tenement at 97 Orchard Street – which is today home to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum – had five stories and was designed (its architect is not known) to house twenty families in three-room apartments, four on each floor. The average household contained seven or more people.
On November 12, 1863, Bavarian-born Johann (John) Schneider and his Prussian wife started running a lager beer saloon from the basement of this building. The couple lived in a bedroom adjoining the beer hall’s kitchen. The Schneiders advertised the opening of their business with the promise of a buffet consisting of pretzels, sausages, pigs’ feet and sauerkraut.
Two decades later the ethnic composition of the district was changing rapidly. In 1881 the relatively liberal-minded Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in Russia. The ascendance to the throne of his reactionary son Alexander III initiated an era of relentless pogroms and persecutions that made living conditions for Russian Jews intolerable, leading to mass emigration between that year and 1914.
The Lower East Side became the destination for millions of Eastern European Jews, the crucible of a new life in New York City. It was the “goldene medinah” (promised land) for those fleeing oppression. Four out of five descendants trace their roots to this pivotal neighborhood.
By the turn of the twentieth century Schneider’s saloon had given way to Israel and Goldie Lustgarten’s butcher’s shop (one of 131 kosher butchers in the area at the time). The family hailed from town of Stanislau in Galician Poland (then under Austrian rule).
Sometime in the early 1880s, Israel, his wife and six children left the city and made the long journey to New York. His presence in Orchard Street was brief. During a local riot that took place in May 1902 the front window of his shop was smashed. Soon after he appears to have gone out of business.
Meat Boycott
At the beginning of 1902, wholesale meat prices began to climb. Jewish butchers were the first to feel the heat, because kosher meat was more expensive. Prices had to reflect not only the wages of slaughterers and religious supervisors, but also the cost of transporting live cattle to the city of New York in order to conform to Jewish dietary law (kashrut).
In May 1902, butchers had staged a shutdown to pressure slaughterhouses and wholesalers into lowering their rates, but they were unable to force price reductions. Their customers accused them of price gouging. The majority of Russian and Eastern European immigrant families in the Lower East Side (then the nation’s most densely populated neighborhood) could no longer afford to buy the staple.
On May 14, 1902, as the price of kosher meat had jumped from twelve to eighteen cents a pound, mother of four Sarah Edelson called a meeting of local housewives at the Monroe Saloon in Monroe Street to discuss the crisis. Some five hundred people showed up, a much bigger turn-out than expected and the mood was angry.
Fanny Levy, one of Sarah’s neighbors and co-organizer, called for action and take on the might of the Beef Trust. It was decided to boycott butchers until they would reduce the price of beef.
The next morning some 3,000 women had assembled. Calling themselves the Ladies Anti-Beef Trust Association, its ad hoc membership split up in groups and picketed the kosher butcher shops in the Lower East Side and parts of Harlem and the Bronx, handing out leaflets that bore the image of a skull and crossbones and carried the slogan: “Eat no meat while the [Beef] Trust is taking meat from the bones of your women and children.”
Although many of the women had been in the United States for only a relatively short time and may not have managed much English, they made their collective voices heard. They felt angry enough to assert what they considered their newly gained American rights: the right to speak freely, protest publicly and demand fair prices.
Inevitably, there were violent scenes. Customers who ignored the pickets were heckled, pushed and pummeled; their parcels seized and the meat hurled into the gutters. Butchers who refused to shut their premises were attacked; their tools destroyed; their windows and fixtures smashed.
In trying to break up the protest, the police used brute force. Many participants were hurt or wounded. Eighty-five people were arrested and fined, three quarters of them women.
Meat & Monopoly
Three weeks into the boycott, the Beef Trust (temporarily) lowered the price for a pound of kosher meat by four cents. Although the event made controversial headlines in the press, the action highlighted the ability of (Jewish) women to organize and coordinate a movement throughout the boroughs.
The boycott would become a model for future protests (such as the 1907/8 rent boycotts) and was in many ways a precursor to larger scale strikes.
The basic problem was to identify the culprits who were responsible for the food crisis. Trapped in a cycle of scarcity and price rises, protesters aimed their anger at local suppliers who were as helpless in the process as their customers. On their side, butchers blamed the high cost of meat on “greedy” slaughterhouses. The root of problems however lay many miles away from Manhattan.
In an era of emerging trusts (companies banding together to control markets and fix prices), Chicago’s Beef Trust was one of those mighty cartels that held a stranglehold on the American marketplace until they were ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in 1905. Dominating the nation’s supply of meat products, it imposed steep price rises that were passed on to hundreds of Manhattan’s retail kosher butchers.
With the proliferation and intensification of commercial activity, food had become part of a free market system in which individuals had no agency. The traditional chain of food supply had been broken and become “invisible.”
What was once arranged locally, was now determined centrally; the community transformed into an economy. The market decided. The word no longer referred to a fair of shopkeepers and stallholders, but was applied as a euphemism for the most ruthless forces in the economic system.
Market meant the power of money. The concept of morality was deleted from economic theory.
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NEW YORK ALMANACK “Illustrations, from above: Hungry people in Dungarvan, County Waterford, Ireland, attempt to break into a bakery during the Great Famine (The Pictorial Times, 1846); The “Ventrone Block” on Atwell’s Avenue, Providence, in 1910 (Providence Public Library); illustration of the Women’s March on Versailles, October 5, 1789; illustration of the Flour Riot 1837; Little Germany in Manhattan in the late 19th century; Jewish life in the Lower East Side; the 1902 Manhattan meat boycott covered in the national press; and “Tweedledee and Tweedledum” anti-Beef Trust cartoon (Udo J. Keepler, 1913). The text reads Before. The Meat Trust (to the small farmer): My friend, why don’t you raise a few cattle each year? The price of beef is high. You will make good money. After. The Meat Trust (to same small farmer): The price I offer for your cattle is low, is it? Well, you may take it or leave it, my friend. There is nobody else for you to sell to.”
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This story turns ugly rather quickly. From the New York Public Library scrapbook, The Hippotheatron and New York Cirque:
That’s 14th Street between Irving Place and Third Avenue, with an out-chapel of Grace Church next door.
As the name suggests, that weird building was a theater for horse shows, constructed in 1864. The NYPL has this flyer dated as 1864, but the name “Hippotheatron” was apparently not used until 1869, when it was already on its third owner. P. T. Barnum bought it in November 1872, and it burned down a month later. Four owners in eight years suggests that maybe making money from a building suitable for nothing but horse-shows wasn’t so easy. This is as good a place to warn about reading the newspaper accounts: the fire did not harm any people but killed a distressingly large number of animals, caged in the building for the shows. Given that the theater apparently had had well over 1000 people inside for some shows, this was the least-terrible bad outcome.
The structure of the building was interesting. The walls and roof were sheet iron; the roof was supported on a series of tension-rod girders supported at the perimeter and an intermediate ring of columns:
That engraving actually undersells the building’s size: the center performance ring was 43 feet, 6 inches in diameter; the building as a whole was 110 feet in diameter and the conical roof was 75 feet high. The way that the tension-rod girders run from the columns to the peak only would have worked if there was a compression ring there, but finding photographic proof of that is probably impossible. There was definitely some kind of ring beam there, as it was needed to support the peak cupola.
The biggest question in my mind is what, exactly, was burning? The newspaper accounts blame “gas” which probably means coal gas used for the lights, but that only provides the initial flame. The roof and exterior walls were iron and therefore not flammable. My guess is that the fuel for the fire was some combination of a wood floor, straw on that floor, and wood seating tiers.
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NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY OLD STRUCTURES ENGINEERING JOURNAL
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Is the Bronx the land of the forgotten amusement park? The borough’s death toll of defunct parks is impressive.
Starlight Park, which opened in 1920 beside the Bronx River and lasted into the 1930s, thrilled visitors with its roller coaster, bathing pavilions, and shooting gallery. Freedomland‘s attractions celebrated American history; this Disney-like park had a short run in the 1960s in Baychester. (Co-Op City took its place.)
And from the late 1890s to the 1940s, a spit of land jutting into the East River where it meets the Long Island Sound was once the site of a popular summertime resort district known as Clason Point. (Or Clason’s Point, as vintage maps have it.)
“Clason” came from Isaac Clason, a Scottish merchant and ship owner. In the early 18th century, Clason purchased one thousand acres of land in this corner of the southeastern Bronx, states Rob Stephenson in his Substack newsletter, The Neighborhoods.
Much of Clason’s land was devoted to farming through the 19th century. Then in 1892, a railroad builder named Clinton Stephens bought 25 acres near the waterfront and “began to develop the area as a recreation destination,” writes Stephenson.
“Stephens established ferry service from Manhattan and College Point in Queens, and soon weekend revelers were availing themselves of the casino, dancehalls, and drinking establishments that populated the point,” he adds.
Boats and steamers brought heat-addled city residents to Clason Point from Long Island, Mott Haven, and Manhattan, states the 2010 AIA Guide to New York City. A trolley arrived in 1910 for even greater access to this burgeoning seaside paradise.
Think of Clason Point as the Bronx’s answer to Coney Island. Bringing Coney-like attractions here was a canny move by developers like Stephens, since late 19th and early 20th century New Yorkers now had the leisure time to take day trips to seaside destinations in Brooklyn and Queens.
A ferry ride to Clason Point from the Lower East Side, Yorkville, and Bronx neighborhoods like Mott Haven was likely faster than a boat trip or railroad journey to Coney Island or Rockaway Beach.
The revelry sounds a lot like Coney Island, as well as “Little Coney Island,” a rollicking dance hall and pleasure garden district that popped up at the time on today’s West 110th Street.
“The attractions were dance halls and hotels, picnic grounds and a bathing pier, restaurants, a salt water pool, and places with names like Dietrich’s, Gilligan’s Pavilion and Killian’s Grove, Higg’s Camp Grounds, and Kane’s Casino,” wrote Philip Lopate in a New York Times article in 2000, quoting. from the 2010 AIA Guide to New York City.
Clason Point actually had two separate parks. One was the privately owned Clason Point Park, which appears to be the original resort opened by Stephens. Another, the delightfully named Fairyland, operated on leased land, according to a 2014 writeup on hubpages.com.
Despite Clason Point’s popularity and accessibility, there were a few drawbacks. The saltwater pool earned the nickname “the Inkwell” because it was filled with unfiltered polluted East River water. “One hates to speculate exactly what was in that ink,” comments the hubpages.com post.
Also, some of the rides malfunctioned—in one case with tragic results. In 1910, two of the cars on the roller coaster collided high in the air. Rescue workers had to retrieve stuck passengers with rope and a 75-foot ladder, according to a 2012 article by Bill Twomey in the Bronx Times.
Then, in June 1922, with approximately 80 passengers riding the 100-foot-high ferris wheel, a sudden storm toppled the ride.
“The wind appeared to lift the upper half of the wheel and toss it with its merrymakers into Long Island Sound,” reported The Evening World. “The collapse of the lower half followed, burying those in it under the wreckage.” Seven passengers were killed, and scores sustained injuries.
The ferris wheel disaster and filthy salt water pool didn’t spell the end of Clason Point (below, an abandoned dance hall) so much as Prohibition and the impending Great Depression did.
“Fairyland went out of business in 1935, as did some of the other independent amusements,” states the hubpages.com post. “In 1949 the entire property was sold to developers who removed all the remaining amusements and converted the area into a private country club.”
Today Clason Point lives on as a New York City Park—the appropriately named Clason Point Park.
Visiting amusement parks was just one way city residents cooled off during the sweltering summer seasons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Click here and listen to Ephemeral New York and Carl Raymond, aka The Gilded Gentleman, on August 20 in a podcast episode titled “In the Good Old Summertime: Where the Gilded Age Played.”
We’ll delve into all the ways city residents found relief from summer heat in the Gilded Age, from the tenement districts to upper class townhouses. You’ll be glad we live in the age of air conditioning!
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Painter George Benjamin Luks was born in August 1867 in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. According to the 1880 census, his father was Polish and his mother born in Bavaria. The family then moved to the coal mining borough of Pottstown, Montgomery County, PA, where his father worked as a physician.
Living in the midst of a community of struggling Eastern European families, Luks was directly confronted with the toughness of the immigrant experience. It would determine his career as an artist.
In the Steerage
Luks began his studies at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Dissatisfied with the conservative standard of teaching, he left for Europe and spent time in Düsseldorf (a number of American painters had received their training at the city’s Art Academy). He visited London and Paris.
On his return in 1893 he became an illustrator for the Philadelphia Press. Meeting at John Henri’s studio, Luks was a member of the “Philadelphia Five” (with John Sloan, William Glackens and Everett Shinn). These painters rejected the “genteel” approach of contemporary artists and turned to the harsh depiction of ordinary life.
In 1896, Luks moved to New York City where he was employed as an illustrator by the New York World. A tough character, he embraced the gritty side of the metropolis in art and life.
His former Philadelphian associates had also settled in the metropolis and encouraged him to further explore his painted themes of “New York Street Life.” He joined a group of artists (later referred to as the Ashcanners) who rebelled against conventional academicism and “pleasing” impressionism.
These painters believed in the worthiness of working-class life as artistic subject matter. An urban realist, Luks focused on cityscapes and street scenes. In a series of paintings he captured the energy and hardship of the tenement districts and their occupants.
In 1900, in the middle of a period of mass movement from Europe to the United States (the Great Atlantic Migration) Luks created “In the Steerage,” a painting in which he depicted a group of migrants lined up against the rail of an ocean liner arriving in New York Harbor after an arduous voyage across the Atlantic. Migrants tended to crowd on deck once the Statue of Liberty was sighted.
Steamships made their first stop at a pier on the mainland. There, First and Second Class passengers were free to disembark without medical checks or personal questioning. Afterward, steerage passengers were crowded onto a barge or ferry and taken to Ellis Island (the “Island of Tears”) for inspection and examination.
In bold colors and brushwork George Luks communicates an emphatic image that reflects both the exhaustion of a long stay in steerage and the anxiety about what the future may hold.
Precarious Passages
The steerage was located immediately below the main deck of a sailing ship where the control strings of the rudder ran. In the early days of migration passengers were placed in the cargo hold where temporary partitions were erected to accommodate people and livestock. As soon as a ship had set its passengers on land, the furnishings were removed and preparations made for a return cargo of cotton or tobacco to Europe.
Early steamships of the 1830s and 1840s were expensive to run and only attracted those travelers who could afford the fare. The Irish Potato Famine and the repression that followed the failed 1848 uprisings in Europe, forced many families to flee in search of a new beginning. Within a decade, a huge migrant market was created. Fledgling ocean liner companies competed to exploit the opportunities offered by this desperate mass of humanity.
The transport of boat people (“self-loading cargo”) became a money-spinner as some steamers could hold over 2,000 passengers in steerage. Carrying them in the cheapest manner was enormously profitable. The word steerage now began to refer to the lowest category of long-distance travel. Destitute migrants needed to make the transatlantic crossing at minimum cost.
Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson had sailed in 1879 from Glasgow to New York to research “Steerage Types” and give his travelogue The Amateur Emigrant a sense of authenticity (the book was not published until 1895).
He described a very uncomfortable journey in company of the poor and sick, supplying an abundance of details about bedding arrangements, food rations, etc. In 1906, American investigative reporter Kellogg Durland sailed as a steerage passenger and delivered a blistering attack on the miserable state of affairs on board.
In a cut-throat market, the price of transatlantic travel was made affordable to even the poorest travelers, but conditions were atrocious. Crammed in cargo holds, migrants were treated as cattle. They slept in rows of shared bunks on mattresses filled with straw or seaweed. On stormy days, all hatches were sealed to prevent water from getting in, making the already stuffy air below unendurable. For millions of migrants, steerage conjured up images of squalor, abuse and disease.
Passengers had to bring their own food for the duration of the voyage, which could last as long as three weeks. Many starved to death during the voyage, their corpses flung over the side. Infectious disease (cholera and typhus; measles among children) was another cause of high mortality.
Early ocean liners were a new generation of slave ships. British and American governments introduced (advisory) legislation in the 1850s to prevent overcrowding, provide toilet facilities and guarantee rations of food and water, but ship owners responded slowly and reluctantly.
The migration statistics in the period between 1860 and 1914 are staggering; some fifty-two million people left different parts of Europe for America. It was the intensity of competition for a share of the lucrative market and not government intervention that forced upgrades.
Liners became bigger, faster and more refined. Because of negative connotations, companies re-marketed steerage as Third Class, but the journey remained a testing experience.
SS Kaiser Wilhelm II
With the rise of a global travel industry, rival companies started competing with each other to make fast and luxurious crossings. Oceanic transportation boomed. To reach New York in record tempo was a race for glory and customers. Bremen-based Norddeutscher Lloyd (NDL) became one of the largest shipping companies in the world.
Its liner Kaiser Wilhelm II was launched at Stettin in August 1902 in the presence of the German Emperor and joined her sister ships on a scheduled service between Bremen and New York City. In 1904 she won the “Blue Riband” for the fastest eastbound crossing of the North Atlantic.
Offering berths to 1,888 passengers, the ship’s interior was designed by Bremen’s most prominent architect Johann Poppe. He turned the liner into a floating Grand Hotel with a range of stylish amenities for affluent passengers. The First Class dining saloon was three decks high and decorated in German (Bremen) Baroque revival style. Displaying a life-size portrait of the Kaiser, it could seat 554 diners.
The golden age of ocean travel in the early twentieth century coincided with the emergence of the illustrated poster. Advertisers were driven to outdo their competitors with ever more appealing imagery. Shipping companies employed graphic artists to visualize leisure and modernity. Promotional posters transformed long distance travel into an alluring experience in the public imagination.
Glamour would remain central to promoting the image of ocean liners throughout the 1920s, although in reality these ship served the needs of a diverse public. NDL’s flagship Kaiser Wilhelm II mirrored society’s inequalities by offering extremes of luxury and comfort to a minority of wealthy travelers, whilst transporting large numbers of poor emigrants under the most basic of circumstances.
Edward Alfred Steiner was a Professor of Theology in Grinnell College, Iowa. Born into a Jewish Slovak-Hungarian family and educated in Vienna and Heidelberg, he had settled in the United States in 1886. He penned a number of books in which he detailed the experiences of immigrant Jews (although he had converted to Christianity himself).
In 1906, Steiner published On the Trail of the Immigrant in which he described the conditions in the steerage aboard SS Kaiser Wilhelm II where nine hundred passengers were packed like cattle. The flow of air was blocked, creating an unbearable stench.
A division between sexes was ignored, which meant that young women quartered among married passengers lacked privacy and protection. The food was miserable. Steerage on the world’s most prestigious ocean liner had barely improved.
Slumming at Sea
According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word “slumming” was first used in 1884 to refer to an increasing number of people who visited London’s poorest areas for either social observation or out of curiosity. By the 1890s the idea of “slumming it” in the East End had become a pastime for wealthy youngsters. The sight-seeing mania soon reached New York City. It was taken to sea as well.
First Class passengers would lean over their promenade deck railing and throw candy and pennies to children on the deck below. Slumming from above meant mixing with steerage passengers.
One of these slummers was photographer Alfred Stieglitz. In the spring of 1907, he and his family boarded the Kaiser Wilhelm II to visit relatives and friends in Europe. His wife Emmeline demanded luxury and Alfred purchased First Class tickets for their week-long passage on her account.
Once at sea, Stieglitz hated the stifling snobbishness of the quarters. He preferred to spend time at the end of his deck from where he could observe the crowd confined below. To his photographer’s eye, the ship’s steerage provided a framework for recording a moment of human drama. Using a hand-held Auto-Graflex camera with glass plate negatives, he captured the scene in a single picture.
Alfred was not able to develop the plate until he arrived in Paris and kept the photograph in its original plate holder until he returned to New York several weeks later – and put it aside.
Four years later “The Steerage” was first presented to the public when Stieglitz published the image in a 1911 issue of Camera Work devoted exclusively to his “new” style photographs, together with a Cubist drawing by Pablo Picasso. It then appeared on the cover of the magazine section of New York’s Saturday Evening Mail (April 20, 1912).
In 1913 “The Steerage” had its gallery debut, coinciding with the momentous Armory Show which introduced international avant-garde art to New York (George Luks was also well represented at the exhibition). Stieglitz intended to demonstrate that his photographs could rival the European vanguard.
Widely praised as a modernist masterpiece (Picasso was an admirer), “The Steerage” emboldened him to put his photography on a par with Cubist painting.
Golden Door & Returned Cargo
Stieglitz’s photograph captured the so-called steerage promenade. Every day at the same time passengers were herded on deck for their quarters to be cleaned. First Class travelers gathered on the upper decks to observe the spectacle. Looking at “The Steerage,” the photographer invites us to peek at the mass of migrants below. We are all invited to turn into slummers.
Stieglitz was aware of the fierce debates about immigration at the time and the ghastly treatment to which steerage passengers were subjected. His own Jewish father had joined the mass exodus from Germany, arriving in America in 1849 and making a fortune in the wool trade, but the photographer had mixed feelings about immigration.
Sympathetic to the plight of new arrivals, he objected to admitting the uneducated and marginal to the United States. Stieglitz may have felt for his subjects, but he denied that his work contained a statement. He was not promoting a social cause. He claimed that his only concern was to advance photography as a fine art.
At the time, the immigration service channeled millions of arrivals through the “Golden Door” of Ellis Island’s main inspection building, but some twenty percent of incomers were detained for health or legal reasons. Some recuperated sufficiently to enter America, but others were returned to their homelands.
When Stieglitz took his famous shot, the Kaiser Wilhelm II was sailing on its return journey from New York to Europe. It is a visual record of people who had been turned away by officials for reasons of ill-health, “moral disease” (that is: politically suspect), old age or excessive poverty and forced to go back home (the criteria for refusal were summarized in the 1907 Immigration Act, signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt).
How can one interpret this photograph other than as a critique of migration policies? Stylistic mastery reinforced the message, but questions remain. Were all passengers in this photograph to be considered “returned cargo”?
Being sent back from Ellis Island even more destitute than they were on the day of departure, what happened to these lost souls once they had disembarked in their countries of origin? Information is scarce, history has kept silent.
IN THE RIVERCROSS DISPLAY WINDOW
CHECK OUT THE SIX PAINTINGS BY YVONNE SMITH SMITH WAS A RESIDENT OF GOLDWATER HOSPITAL, A SELF-TAUGHT ARTIST. THESE ARE SOME OF HER DOZENS OF PAINTING
CREDITS
Illustrations, from above: Robert Henri’s “Portrait of George Luks,” 1904; George Luks’ “In the Steerage,” 1900 (North Carolina Museum of Art); Fritz Rehm, poster for the Norddeutscher Lloyd (NDL), 1903; Alfred Stieglitz’s “The Steerage,” 1907; and Lewis Hine’s “Climbing into America, immigrants at Ellis Island, 1905” (The New York Public Library).
JUDITH BERDY NEW YORK ALMANACK
WE WILL BE TAKING SOME TIME OFF AND WILL RE-APPEAR OCCASIONALLY THIS MONTH. SEE YOU IN SEPTEMBER…
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Blackwell’s Almanac: Anatomy of an Artwork: How Diana Cooper’s “Double Take” Came to Be Lady Day Sang the Blues and Lived Them Too – Billie Holiday The New York City Chewing Gum War of 1939
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) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Chelsea Green, opened in 2019, was the first new park built in Chelsea in 40 years. The park features an engaging play area with shaded seating, along with a lawn area made from synthetic turf. In keeping with the artistic feel of the neighborhood, an area of the park is home to performances and displays of public art.
Walking west on 20th Street yesterday, I spotted a lovely park mid-block, just big enough for neighborhood families.
The playground is visible thru a fenced in garden of sunflowers.
Tucked in between the city scene the park fits perfectly.
The innovative playground serves all ages
Down the slide!!
The blue sky shines down.
CREDITS
JUDITH BERDY NYC PARKS DEPARTMENT
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
DETENTION CENTER MURALS REIMAGINED AS BUILDING IS DEMOLISHED. BY ARTIST RICHARD HAAS “IMMIGRATION ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE OF NEW YORK”,1989
WE WILL BE TAKING SOME TIME OFF AND WILL RE-APPEAR OCCASIONALLY THIS MONTH. SEE YOU IN SEPTEMBER…
CREDITS
JUDITH BERDY PHOTOS WERE TAKE FROM UNDER THE CONSTRUCTION SHED, WHERE MURAL REPRODUCTIONS BLOCK THE DEMOLTION SITE,
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
An automaton is a machine designed to operate on its own by responding to predetermined instructions. By the mid-eighteenth century, a number of talented craftsmen operated in Paris from where they exported clockwork automata and mechanical singing birds around Europe and beyond.
The undisputed master in this domain was Jacques de Vaucanson. In 1735, he constructed a life-sized flautist that produced twelve melodies. His masterpiece was unveiled in May 1764 when he presented a “Canard Digérateur” (Digesting Duck) to the public.
The bird consisted of a copper exterior with more than a thousand moving parts. As well as flapping its wings and quacking, it appeared (by a design trick) to have the ability to eat kernels of grain, then digest and defecate them.
De Vaucanson was a man of the Enlightenment. He combined his studies in anatomy at the Paris medical school with an interest in mechanical inventions. Like the philosophers of his day, he was intrigued by the “man and machine” issue.
In 1747, Julien Offray de La Mettrie published L’homme machine (Man: A Machine) in which argued that all living beings are machines fueled by food. The human body is the “living image of perpetual movement.” He proposed the slogan: “You are what you eat.” Linking mechanical technology with food consumption would later acquire a specific relevance.
Are You Being Served?
The Enlightenment marked a turning point in the history of cookery. As gluttony gave way to refinement, settings were improved. Tables were laid with crockery; cutlery and (crystal) glasses became part of the ritual. Round tables inspired convivial interaction. Consumption was associated with well-being.
Throughout his work, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (a vegetarian) discussed food, suggesting that a nutritious “natural” diet would boost the formation of a wholesome character. The word restaurant itself was derived from the verb restaurer (to reconstitute). Early Parisian restaurants reflected the health awareness of the era. These establishments focused on selling a slow cooked bone broth (bouillon) as their main dish.
One of the first restaurant proprietors was A. Boulanger, a “bouillon seller,” who opened his business near the Louvre in 1765. In his establishment, soups were served that had the reputation of restoring strength to those who suffered poor health. Its sign bore the motto: “Venite ad me omnes qui stomacho laboratis et ego restaurabo vos” (Come to me, all of you whose stomachs hurt and I will restore you). The proprietor called himself a healer or “restaurateur.”
Boulanger was not content to serve just bouillon. He also offered leg of lamb in white sauce to his clients. As his action infringed on the monopoly of the powerful caterers’ guild, he was taken to court. The case ended in a judgment favoring Boulanger, thus lifting all restrictions on eating establishments.
Bouillon restaurants started to expand their offering and the popularity of eating out began to spread. In 1782 chef and culinary writer Antoine Beauvilliers opened La Grande Taverne de Londres on the Rue de Richelieu in Paris. It was dubbed Europe’s first luxury restaurant.
The French Revolution accelerated the development towards the democratization of dining. The political events of the 1790s released kitchen staff from aristocratic patronage. As the nobles fled or faced the guillotine, their private chefs found themselves unemployed. They had to offer their skills to the public at large, setting up as independent restaurateurs catering to a new bourgeois clientele. By 1804 Paris had more than five hundred restaurants.
The word waiter in the sense of a “servant who waits at household tables” dates from late fifteenth century. In reference to inns and taverns it dates from 1660s, predominantly referring to someone who serves drinks. The proliferation of hotels and restaurants caused a transfer of workers in domestic service to the hospitality sector and contributed to the emergence of serving staff as a distinctive (hierarchical) occupational group.
Automat
From the outset, there has been an uneasy relationship between restaurateurs, waiters and clients. For owners, waiters were an expensive and often troublesome addition to the cost of running a business. For clients, their intrusive hovering around the dinner table was a source of continuous irritation.
Tipping was another disturbing issue. As small acts of generosity, tips had their origins in domestic service. Ever since the Tudor era, visitors to private homes would give sums of money (known as “vails”) at the end of their stay for service rendered by the host’s staff. Tips supplemented the wages of domestic servants.
The giving of vails was probably a uniquely British phenomenon and it is not known how the habit spread to restaurants and hotels. In hospitality, the expectation grew that the customer would subsidize the worker’s income (allowing employers to refrain from paying serving staff a fixed wage).
Towards the end of the nineteenth century the idea of the automaton re-emerged and was given a new direction. Researchers began to explore ways of developing a “waiter-less” system of service in order to improve efficiency, raise client satisfaction and reduce staff numbers.
The concept of an automatic restaurant was proposed in Germany. The word “automat” was introduced to describe any type of coin-operated dispensing apparatus.
The world’s first such restaurant was established in June 1895 on the grounds of Berlin’s zoological garden by a company named Quisisana that manufactured automat machines and equipment. On the first Sunday of operation it sold 5,400 sandwiches, 22,000 cups of coffee and 9,000 glasses of wine and cordials.
The firm’s name maintained the “healing” connotation of the term restaurant as it is derived from the Italian phrase “qui si sana” (here you become healthy).
In 1896 a new firm named “Automat” was founded as a joint venture between the Berlin engineer Max Sielaff, an inventor of different types of slot machines, and the Cologne-based chocolate maker Stollwerck. The company presented itself to the public at the Berlin Industrial Exposition that same year and was an instant hit.
Its “waiter-less” restaurant was designed by Sielaff and provided hot meals, sandwiches and drinks in a lavish dining room with stylish stained glass windows.
How did the Automat function? The walls of the establishment were lined with small windows, each of which contained edibles or drinkables. Customers inserted a coin to unlock the window, allowing them to pull out a meal or drink. The food came ready-made. No waiters. No tips.
The fame of automatic restaurants spread rapidly after one such premises won a gold medal at the Brussels World Fair of 1897. The German prototype was sold all over Europe and would soon reach the United States.
A Toxic Profession
Delmonico’s opened its doors in 1837, comprising lavish private dining suites and an enormous wine cellar. The restaurant, which still remains housed at its original Manhattan location, is said to be the first in America to use tablecloths. Delmonico’s employed an army of waiters.
With the rapid expansion of the hospitality sector, resentment against waiters increased. An 1885 editorial in The New York Times condemned servers as one of the “necessary evils of an advanced civilization.” Waiters were accused of rude mannerisms. A particular driver of anti-waiter sentiments was the expectation of tipping. The practice was despised as a European import and maligned as “offensively un-American.” Waiters were a strain, the prospect of having to tip them was an insult.
Affluent citizens were accused of having initiated the custom at resorts such as Saratoga Springs or Newport, guaranteeing good treatment for the stay. The word “tip” was British English (many critics blamed England for the practice), Americans tended to use the term “fee” which inspired a popular quip in the 1870s, “When you have feed the waiter of the summer resort, then he will feed you.” Attempts to eradicate tipping failed. Instead, entrepreneurs took an interest in European experiments with waiter- less restaurants.
Frank Hardart was an immigrant from Sondenheim, Bavaria, who had settled in Philadelphia working in hospitality. In 1888 he responded to an advertisement placed by Joseph Horn who was seeking a business partner. Horn & Hardart (H & H) founded a chain of establishments that catered to urban workers with a reputation for fast food and fresh coffee. Public esteem encouraged their willingness to experiment.
In 1901, Hardart traveled to Berlin and having seen the Automat technology in operation, the entrepreneurs shipped the machinery to America and opened a restaurant on June 12, 1902, at 818 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia. The first H & H Automat Lunch Room in New York City was established a decade later (July 1912) on Times Square to feed Broadway’s theatre crowd. A second Manhattan location opened its doors shortly after on Broadway and East 14th Street.
Those who entered the premises were stunned by an impressive vending machine with rows of windowed compartments containing different menu items, including sandwiches, macaroni cheese, chicken pot pie, baked beans or coconut cream pie. Having made a choice, the customer dropped a nickel into a coin slot, turned a knob, lifted up the door and removed the food.
Unlike Manhattan’s sophisticated dining rooms, Automats were simple and democratic. But they were not without decorum. Many H & H premises were Art Deco designs with elegant marble counters and floors, stained glass, chrome fixtures and carved ceilings. Food was served on china plates and consumed with proper cutlery. French-drip style coffee was always hot and freshly brewed.
Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, at the height of the Automat’s popularity, the company had over eighty locations in Philadelphia and New York City, serving some 350,000 customers per day. In the second half of the twentieth century, Automats began to lose their prominent position with the emergence of more convenient fast-food restaurants. The last H & H Automat closed in 1991.
Depression Cocktail
H & H restaurants were integral to Manhattan’s cityscape. The Automat was an institution, a metaphor for a lifestyle in the spirit of the Ford assembly line. The “nickel-in-the-slot eating place” became an American icon (in spite of its European roots), celebrated on stage and screen. Movie stars like Audrey Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, Gene Kelly and Gregory Peck all dined there. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Marilyn Monroe in the role of Lorelei Lee sang “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” (Verse 1):
A kiss may be grand but it won’t pay the rental On your humble flat or help you at the automat.
Although Automats originated as a high-tech form of food service, they reflected New York City’s fast-paced and multi-national society where people from all walks of life gathered briefly to eat without being bothered by waiters before hurrying on with their day to day business. Smart but impersonal, H&H was a place of autonomy and instant gratification.
During the Great Depression, Automats offered cheap sustenance or a warm coffee to many impoverished people. They also offered shelter. The absence of waiters meant that homeless or unemployed New Yorkers could come in from the cold (or heat) without being requested to leave the premises. Some of them consumed a “Depression Cocktail” consisting of free ketchup mixed into a glass of water. The Automat could be a place of loneliness and lingering.
In 1927, there were fifteen Automats in New York City. On Valentine’s Day that year Edward Hopper opened his second solo show at the Rehn Galleries on Fifth Avenue. It was here that he first displayed his painting “Automat.” Like in other works, forlornness is the central subject of this painting.
In an evocative scene of introspection, it depicts a woman at a restaurant table staring downward over a cup of coffee on a seemingly cold night. The reflection of artificial light in the window glass highlights her melancholic solitude.
The sparsely furnished interior is reminiscent of the Automat at Times Square. An establishment associated with vending machines and crowds is reduced to a sober scene without any others. Her self-conscious presence in an empty public space, puts the onlooker in the uncomfortable position of being an intruder.
Hopper’s painting communicates a narrative about modern life. Alienation (the state of being withdrawn from the urban world) was a theme that preoccupied sociologists of the 1920s and 30s.
Many Americans felt disconnected from traditional values and their sense of uncertainty is reflected in literature. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and other novelists created disillusioned characters who felt lost in society. Hopper’s work linked with perceptions of alienation and disaffection. In “Automat” he captured the psychological make-up of the American social landscape of his age.
CREDITS
NEW YORK ALMANACK Illustrations, from above: Edward Hopper’s “Automat,” 1927 (Des Moines Art Center, Iowa); Jacques de Vaucanson’s ‘Canard Digérateur’ (Digesting Duck), 1764; Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau in Paris, 1766; Horn & Hardart’s Automat on Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, 1904 postcard; Mark Twain dining at Delmonico’s, 1905 (Museum of the City of New York); and a typical Automat on 8th Avenue, 1937.
SALVAGED REMNANTS OF GOLDWATER LAMP PLACED IN RIOC STORAGE UNTIL PIECES CAN BE MADE INTO AN ARTWORK. STAY TUNED……& SUGGESTIONS WELCOME.
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
