Neil Hamamoto — the founder of the arts nonprofit Worthless Studios — often drives his pickup around the city looking for discarded materials to use in his practice. Last summer, all the plywood that was boarding up Soho storefronts and the scraps left on the curb grabbed his attention. “It was dollar signs in my eyes,” Hamamoto says, pointing out that the cost of plywood has tripled since last year. “To see major stores, without blinking, purchase tons and tons of material just made me say wow. Artists don’t have that luxury.” It got him thinking: Eventually, all the plywood would have to come down, and it could have a second life as an artistic medium.
So last July, Worthless Studios posted hundreds of flyers in lower Manhattan neighborhoods that had lots of boarded-up storefronts; they asked businesses to call when they were ready to take down the wood and offered to pick it up. It was the start of the Plywood Protection Project, which invited five artists to make public art installations across the city with the donated and discarded boards.
Now, nearly a year after Hamamoto came up with the idea for the project, the sculptures are installed in five city parks, one in each borough. The artists — Behin Ha Design Studio, Tanda Francis, Tony DiBernardo, KaNSiteCurators and Caroline Mardok, and Michael Zelehoski — transformed the materials almost beyond recognition, but the themes of each piece reference the summer of reckoning and the protests that took over the city’s streets.
“The idea of recontextualizing the wood and installing it a year later is to try and sort of transport people to that time to think about the feelings they were feeling — if it was fear, sadness, anger, whatever it was — and how we can reevaluate those feelings in a different time,” Hamamoto says.
The boarded-up storefronts are mostly gone, and Soho is no longer a ghost town. But the social and economic dynamics that led to the stores putting up the plywood in the first place remain: Corporations still have lots of money to burn, policing is unchanged, and inequality is worsening. “I feel more joy as I walk around the city these days with things reopening. It feels like normal New York again,” Hamamoto says. “But on the other hand, I think metaphorically the [plywood] barrier gets taken down and the news dies down, and maybe people forget that there are some very large issues that continue to exist in our country.”
‘Be Heard,’ by Behin Ha Design Studio, in Thomas Paine Park, Manhattan
Photo: worthless studios/Brett Beyer
From the beginning of the project, Worthless knew the artists would want to choose specific plywood boards, so the studio meticulously catalogued each one. Behin Ha chose pieces with graffiti, artwork, and posters on them and collaged them into an octagonal cone that looks like a megaphone. “It’s a physical object to help amplify your voice and be heard, but the shape allows you to put your ear up to it and actually helps to listen as well,” Hamamoto says.
‘In Honor of Black Lives Matter,’ by KaNSiteCurators and Caroline Mardok, in Poe Park, the Bronx
Photo: worthless studios/Brett Beyer
This installation of life-size wood cutouts of protesters reconstructs the experience of last summer’s uprisings. It was developed with an art class for teens that Worthless Studios and KaNSiteCurators led at the Bronx River Arts Center. Caroline Mardok’s original proposal involved pasting photographs from her documentary project NY Strong onto the figures, but for the final installation, students in the class made their own cutouts and layered them with their own photographs and images of themselves.
‘Miguelito,’ by Michael Zelehoski, in McCarren Park, Brooklyn
Photo: worthless studios/Brett Beyer
In Ancient Egypt, obelisks were usually built in pairs, but in American monuments, they often exist on their own as symbols of power. Michael Zelehoski’s sculpture transforms them into symbols of protest by using their toppled forms to make a caltrop, a spike that protesters use to deter police cars. “Michael’s work is about reuniting the two obelisks together and sort of appropriating the appropriation,” Hamamoto says.
Set designer Tony DiBernardo’s installation references the loss that Broadway performers experienced during the shutdown. “Tell a writer to create without a page. Try and make a movie without a camera. Taking away our stages is taking away our art,” he says in his artist’s statement. His sculpture, shaped like a proscenium, is meant to be used as an actual stage for performers who need space. DiBernardo built spiraling, helix-shaped columns to flank the stage and used the original bright colors of the plywood boards, which had graffiti on them, as ornamentation.
‘RockIt Black,’ by Tanda Francis, in Queensbridge Park, Queens
Photo: worthless studios/Brett Beyer
Brooklyn-based sculptor Tanda Francis makes monumental African heads that have been installed in Fort Greene Park, Riverside Park, and Socrates Sculpture Park. Her contribution to the Plywood Protection Project references Oshun, a Yoruba river god. The sculpture, which uses plywood for the armature and body and has a sculpted face at the center, symbolizes healing energy. “She is a cleansing spirit for this world on fire,” Francis says in her artist’s statement.
LET’S DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS EYESORE
This lopsided kiosk is an affront to the eye and it is on the West Promenade just north of the new Graduate Hotel and Cornell Tech Campus.
It seems to be well stuck in the ground, so please come up with a design to enhance it and make it an attraction.
The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch is a triumphal arch at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, New York City, just north of Prospect Park. Built from 1889 to 1892, the arch is dedicated “To the Defenders of the Union, 1861–1865” HARA REISER THOM HEYER MITCH HAMMER ARON EISENPREISS LAURA HUSSEY ED LITCHER JAY JACOBSON BILL SCHMOLER GLORIA HERMAN SUSAN RODETIS ANDY SPARBERG NINA LUBLIN ALL GOT IT RIGHT!!!!
Sources
CURBED NEW YORK (C)
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
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
THEY SIGNED UP TO SERVE AND DIED TOGETHER WEEKS LATER ON BLACKWELL”S ISLAND
THE STORY CONTINUES
After speaking to Richard Robbin, who had informed me of the Blackwell’s Island death and burial of Horace Wood, he told met that there were other deaths and burials listed on Blackwell’s Island.
We found them in the listing from the town of Dryden in Tompklins County. (17 miles from Ithaca, the home of Cornell)
Two young me signed up and joined the 32nd Infantry.
The town of Dryden
JAMES S. UNDERWOOD (STANLEY UNDERWOOD)
LISTING IN THE 32nd INFANTRY
There are no census records for Underwood. He lived in Dryden, Tompkins County.
ALONZO CLARK
The information derived from this document and from Robbins was that From the New York State 1855 US Census we learned that Alonzo was the youngest of two children living in Greenbush, Rensselaer County. We know little of these two young men who enlisted together and never left New York before being struck down by Smallpox and dying on Blackwells Island. They are just two of thousands who were treated, survived or perished here.
Had they survived their 32nd Regiment saw action at Fairfax County, Va., Blackburn Ford, Va., Bull Run, Va., Bailey;s Cross Roads, Va., and many other sites including Antietam and Fredericksburg in 1862.
Reading the Listing of Deaths brings the horrors of war front and center. It is sobering to read of the horrors that were rendered on these young souls.
BLUE DRAGON SCULPTURE BY GUSTAV KREIST SOUTHPOINT PARK ENTRY
VICKI FEINMEL, ALEXIS VILLEFANE, GLORIA HERMAN, VERN HARWOOD & CLARA BELLA 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
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
Today, Memorial Day I received an interesting series of e-mails:
I am looking for information on the Smallpox Hospital, and the possibility of graves around that ruin.
My 3rd Great Grandfather died in the Smallpox Hospital in 1864, and reportedly was also buried there.
Thanks in advance for any help you can give.
Richard Robbins
I responded that I knew of no burials on Blackwell’s Island/
This was the response I received:
I do have a record of where he was buried, states Blackwell Island as his burial spot. At the time that this happened, 1864, I would imagine that the disposal method was a mass grave. I would pick the Four Freedoms park as an option for burial, but I don’t think bodies would be removed to the usual spot on Hart Island at that time.
Richard Robbins sent me to the link for: “DEATHS OF OFFICERS AND ENLISTED MEN which have occurred while in the military or naval service of the United States or from wounds or disease acquired in said service since April 1, 1861, reported by the families to which the deceased belonged when at home”
The Place of Death is listed as Blackwell’s Island and the Place of Burial is also listed as Blackwell’s Island
14th Regiment Artillery Heavy, New York Volunteers 1863 1865
WHO WAS HORACE WOOD?
The information derived from this document and from Robbins was that Horace Wood was born about 1821 in Antwerp, Jefferson County , New York. His muster date was December 21, 1863 His rank was Private His regiment was the 14th Heavy Artillery He died of Typhoid at the Smallpox Hospital, Blackwell’s Island on March 20, 1864. Wood was housed at Park Barracks in NY proper before being sick. He AND his son both tried to join, son was too young, being 16. They were drawn in by the large bounties offered for volunteers. After he died, the farm was paid for, undoubtedly by the bounty. His widow remarried a few years later.
The NYS Battle Flag Collection includes two camp colors attributed to the 14th Regiment Artillery. The wool camp colors are printed in the US national pattern (34 stars in 7-7-6-7-7 pattern) as prescribed in General Order No. 4, Headquarters of the U.S. Army, dated 18 January 1862.
We do not know of any burials on Blackwell’s Island and that there was limited space for any interments. We note that the information provided on the DEATHS OF OFFICER AND ENLISTED MEN was provided by the families. Many errors could have occurred and further research would have to take place to find if another burial site is available.
We honor Pvt. Horace Wood and state that the Smallpox Hospital is a Memorial to him.
NEW ELEVATORS UNDER CONSTRUCTION AT MANHATTAN TRAM STATION THOM HEYER, ALEXIS VILLFANE, NINA LUBLIN GOT A LIFT FROM THE SITE THAT WE WILL “SOON” HAVE BETTER RIDES TO THE TRAM.
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
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
Hayoon Jay Lee is a New York-based visual artist who explores the fundamental tension between indulgence and abnegation as it exists in terms of mind and body as well as on the level of social and political dynamics. Lee makes use of rice as object, motif, and metaphor: as the building block for civilizations and also as the basis for social inequities, rice allows her to create a visual echo reflecting points of conflict, oscillating between attraction and repulsion, between Orient and Occident, with the aim of inspiring self-reflection and ultimately producing conditions for healing and harmony.
Lee’s paintings contain crowds of figures embedded in rice forms, emphasizing the symbiosis between rice and life, the countless, clearly defined grains suggesting infinite regeneration. In 3D works, rice is transformed into a pyramid or a grid of 3,000-handcrafted rice “bowls” that paradoxically speak of longing and fulfillment, not to mention Buddhist concepts of suffering and seeking Enlightenment. Her installations may also take the shape of mounds of rice occupying vast spaces underneath sacks of rice hanging in rows. These emotion-laden landscapes lay just beyond our reach; the extensive fields of rice seem to glow with their own inner light, yet each element of these fields is formed by a single grain tentatively holding onto its place in the larger macrocosmic setting. Through interactive performances, she hopes to open a dialog with audiences, to create a new community of strangers, with eyes open to a more textured, multi-layered reality.
Biography
Born in Daegu, South Korea, Hayoon Jay Lee obtained a BFA in sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2007, and an MFA degree from the Rinehart School of Sculpture at MICA in 2009.
Among her many honors and awards, Lee has received a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship award (2008) from the U.S. Department of Education, a Full Fellowship Artist in Residency Award (2012) from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, a best in show distinction award (2008) at the 14th International Exhibition at the SoHo 20 Gallery in Chelsea, New York City, and a Dapu International Art Award (2011) from the Northern Art Museum, Daqing China. Lee has participated in various artist residency programs: 99 Museum (Beijing, China: 2014), Gwangju Museum of Art (S. Korea: 2012), the Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA: 2009), the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson VT: 2009), Sculpture Space (Utica, NY: 2011), Art Farm (Marquette, NE: 2016), Byrdcliffe Artist in Residence Program (Woodstock, NY: 2012), and the Beijing Studio Center (2010) in Beijing, China. Her work may be found in the collections of the Gwangju Contemporary Museum of Art (Gwangju, Korea: 2017), the Henan Museum (Zhengzhou, China: 2010), the QCC Art Gallery (Queens, NY: 2015), the Community School of Maryland (Brookville, MD: 2004), Sculpture Space (Utica, NY: 2012), the Dapu International Art Center (Daqing, China: 2011), the FAWC (Provincetown, MA: 2009), and many private collections.
She has exhibited her work widely, both nationally and internationally. Lee is known for working with rice, rice-related motifs and biomorphic vital organ-like forms, and incorporating this imagery in paintings, sculptures, installations, performances, and videos. Her artwork appeals to individual sensibilities and susceptibilities, while also encouraging reflection upon human dilemmas and global issues. She currently lives and works in New York City.
Korean-American artist Hayoon Jay Lee presents ‘Bursting!’, a participatory and site-specific performance
ANDY SPARBERG, ED LITCHER, ARLENE BESSENOFF AND JAY JACOBSON GOT IT RIGHT.
WEEKEND PHOTO
It has been more than fifteen years since I’ve been to Washington D.C. but I think the photo is of the World War II Memorial there. A very appropriate photo for Memorial Day. I recall being present when a group of veterans who had fought in that War were present. As they walked or were wheeled through the Memorial, I recall two sentiments I heard. The first was veterans asking to get to the specific battle in which they personally had been involved. The second was “It’s about damn time we got one! Jay Jacobson
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)
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
William H. Johnson, Off to War, ca. 1942-1944, oil on plywood, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.59.605
In 1942, on National Negro Achievement Day, William H. Johnson received a certificate of honor for his “distinguished service to America in Art.” The award recognized his scenes of black soldiers, which Johnson began painting after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Off to War shows a young man leaving his family in the rural South. Just up the road, a figure on a bus sticks his head out to urge him on. The family forms a pattern of red, white and blue that contrasts with the menacing, bile-colored horizon. Three telephone poles like the crosses on Calvary march into the distance, conveying a blessing on the young soldier or suggesting perhaps the sacrifice that he might have to make.
William H. Johnson, Soldiers Training, ca. 1942, oil on plywood, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.59.582
Pearl Harbor inspired two government-sponsored art exhibitions in 1942, for which William H. Johnson painted scenes of African Americans involved in the war effort. Soldiers Training contrasts the patriotism of black enlistees with the military’s segregationist policies. Black soldiers served in their own units, “black” blood was kept separate from “white,” and recruits took on the most menial jobs at Army bases and aboard ships. Johnson may have painted this scene based on reports of the “Buffalo Soldiers” who were training at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Set in a desolate camp ringed by mountains, Soldiers Training suggests the isolation that black soldiers experienced among hundreds of thousands of men and women committed to winning the war.
William H. Johnson, Lessons in a Soldier’s Life, ca. 1942, tempera and pen and ink with pencil on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.59.171
William H. Johnson, Soldiers’ Morning Bath, ca. 1941-1942, tempera and pen and ink with pencil on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.59.1049
William H. Johnson, Lessons in a Soldier’s Life, ca. 1942, tempera and pen and ink with pencil on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.59.1050
William H. Johnson, War Scene–Three Soldiers with Bayonnets, ca. 1942, tempera and pen and ink with pencil on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.59.156
William H. Johnson (1901–1970), “Crute” Drill, about 1942–1944, oil on paperboard, 24 7/8 x 32 7/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.59.600
HARRIET TUBMAN
William H. Johnson, Harriet Tubman, ca. 1945, oil on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.59.1146
In 1938, William H. Johnson and his wife, Holcha Krake, arrived in New York after fleeing a tumultuous Europe on the brink of war. His homecoming sparked the need to “paint his own people”–a sentiment influenced by Holcha, who, as a textile artist, understood the importance of tradition in contemporary culture.
Harriet Tubman is part of Johnson’s 1945 series, Fighters for Freedom, which depicted the heroic figures who led the fight for racial and individual equality. Tubman’s likeness is taken from a popular woodcut first published in the 1922 book The Negro in Our Times by Carter G. Woodson. Standing at attention in Civil War-era dress and holding a shotgun at her side, Tubman appears stoic and resolute. Behind her, a path extends into the distance, interwoven with sketchily drawn railroad tracks that split the landscape in two. Beside the young, active Tubman is a bust-length portrait of the elderly woman draped in a lace shawl, perhaps the one given to her by Queen Victoria around 1897.
AN IDEA FOR A RAINY WEEKEND
This arrived from a visitor to Blackwell House:
I and a group of four adult students of English from the Rennert school in midtown Manhattan came to the Blackwell House today at about 3:30PM, and we were given a wonderfully informative tour by Andrew. He was extremely welcoming and knowledgeable and his energy was fantastic. I had been to the island many times before, but I had never been inside the Blackwell House, and I was thrilled that we were able to get such a friendly, enthusiastic, and information-packed tour from Andrew. Thank you! Best Regards,
HAVE YOU VISITED BLACKWELL HOUSE? OPEN WEDNESDAY-SUNDAY 11 A.M, TO 5 P.M. (CLOSED 2-3 P.M.)
Copies are available at the RiHS Visitor Center Kiosk, $35- (members get 10% discount). Kiosk open 12 noon to 5 p.m. Thursday thru Sundays
BROOKLYN CHILDREN’S MUSEUM GLORIA HERMAN GOT IT. THIS IS THE BUILDING ENTRANCE THAT REPLACED THE RIHS VISITOR CENTER WHICH WAS THE ORIGINAL ENTRY
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 Roosevelt Island Historical Society
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
Willie Birch is an American visual artist who works in a variety of mediums including drawing, painting, and sculpture. Birch was born in New Orleans, and currently lives and works in New Orleans. He completed his BA at Southern University in New Orleans, and received an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland.
Birch conceptualized the project as a protest against stereotypical images of African-Americans that he saw in the French Quarter: “Stores offered degrading posters, figurines and cards; and street performers used buffoonery to present stereotypical characters.”[Birch explained that the rest of the city was very different, concluding, “These two contradictory images of New Orleans offered me the opportunity to visualize a body of work that addressed the idea of perception and how we as human beings continue to create, perpetuate, and define peoples as the ‘other,’ and what that implies in a changing society.” The resulting monotypes were printed at the Tamarind Institute.
Birch started working exclusively in black and white after 2000. The resulting large-scale drawings were featured in Prospect.1 in 2008, the triennial exhibition of contemporary art in New Orleans organized by Prospect New Orleans. He typically works in charcoal and acrylic on paper and his images often feature aspects of daily life in New Orleans as well as elements of the city’s traditional culture, including brass bands, second lines, and musicians such as Trombone Shorty. Birch was one of six artists featured in “Ten Years Gone” at the New Orleans Museum of Art on the occasion of the ten-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in 2015. His work featured images of the plants that took over his yard while the city was closed down after the storm, as well as bronze casts of crawfish mounds, the mud dwellings built by crawfish that had been displaced to his yard by the storm.
CROSSING THE WILLIMSBURG BRIDGE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
Aquatic Center and Ice Rink at Flushing Meadow Park MITCH HAMMER GOT IT
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
A FEW YEARS AGO PHOTOGRAPHER CHARLES GIRAUDET AND I DISCOVERED THE BEAUTY OF TRIBORO HOSPITAL. TRIBORO OPENED IN THE LATE 1930’S AS A SPECIALIST IN TUBERCULOSIS. OVER THE YEARS THE BUILDING WAS RARELY USED AND DETERIORATED. BUILT IN THE SAME TIME AND OPEN, AIRY STYLE, THIS GEM HAS BEEN PRESERVED AND WILL BE THE NEW HOME FOR HUNDREDS OF NEW YORKERS.
Details
Welcome to the T Building, a newly converted 10-story architectural gem, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Built in 1938, the T Building was a cutting-edge hospital to treat, heal and restore ailing New Yorkers before this complete restoration and conversion into affordable apartments. The T Building residence will have many amenities for residents to enjoy including a 24-hour attended front desk, restored library and computer room, community room, tv room, restored auditorium community room, outdoor sun terraces, laundry room, gymnasium, playground, parking lot (fee will apply) and private balconies (for select units). 124 newly constructed apartments are available with preferences for municipal employees and Queens Community Board 8 members. Tenants are responsible for electricity while hot water and gas are included in the rent. To request an application by mail, please send a self-addressed stamped envelope to T Building c/o P.O. Box 1187 New York, NY 10039
Affordable Housing Program
This building is being constructed through the Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program and Supportive Housing Loan Program of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. On-site social services will be available to all tenants who choose to participate in them
The 1930’s tones of beiges and browns are still evident.
The original library, that we visited held thousands of books and periodicals on pulmonary diseases.
The open site and plenty of light will be a wonderful setting for residents as it was for those who recovered here.
Is there room without Foosball?
The original elevators lead to new homes.
Many odd shaped rooms were carved out of the buildings design.
Space for the family
Enjoy your terrace
A studio for one.
AS THE BUILDING WAS BEING GUTTED, INCLUDING THE MASSIVE KITCHEN (LOWER LEFT)
This is the Harlem River Lift Bridge. The Harlem River Lift Bridge (also known as the Park Avenue Bridge) is a vertical lift bridge carrying the Metro-North Railroad’s Hudson Line, Harlem Line, and New Haven Line across the Harlem River between the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx in New York City. Between 1954 and 1956, the New York Central Railroad built the current bridge, which was the forth rail bridge on this site, this time a vertical-lift bridge, to replace the 1897 bridge. The new bridge opened in 1956.
ED LITCHER, TOM VISEE, ANDY SPARBERG, JAY JACOBSON ALL GOT IT
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture 1915-1928 (1990) Richard Koszarski, The Astoria Studio and Its Fabulous Films (1983)
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
Best known as a pioneer in screenprints, Max Arthur Cohn was born to Russian immigrants in London, in 1903, and moved with his family to New York City in 1905. He got his first art-related job creating commercial silkscreens when he was seventeen. Cohn began to experiment with silkscreening on his own and later exhibited his prints in New York City and Washington, D.C., in the 1930s and ’40s. During the Great Depression, he also worked as an easel painter for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal program that supported artists by providing them with a small stipend. In the 1950s, Cohn owned a graphic arts business in Manhattan, and is credited with teaching silkscreen techniques to a young Andy Warhol. Cohn coauthored several books on silkscreening, including the influential 1958 book Silk Screen Techniques, written with J. I. Bielgeleisen.
Max Arthur Cohn, Coal Tower, ca. 1934, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the U.S. Department of Labor, 1964.1.4
The London-born artist Max Cohn often painted New York industrial scenes like this one, showing the men and machines that kept the great city working. In this painting the viewer looks up from a pier at the dark silhouette of a coal tower standing over a coal-laden barge. The windows of the tower glow golden, showing that men are inside running the giant scoop that unloads coal from the barge and drops it onto a conveyor belt within the tower. From there the coal that has just arrived by barge from Pennsylvania or New Jersey goes to power one of New York’s electrical generating stations or factories. Cohn spent time among the docks and coal towers where he learned how men worked to provide fuel for the city. With a striking combination of light and dark, lines and masses, the artist describes the grimy dockside world. Cohn’s paintings reveal his fascination with the rough, modern geometry of New York’s barges, tugboats, warehouses, and factories and the men who worked in them.
Max Arthur Cohn, Bethlehem Steel Works, 1938, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. Max Arthur Cohn, 1978.41.1
Max Arthur Cohn painted Bethlehem Steel Works in 1938, during the Great Depression and a few short years before America’s entry into World War II. The artist depicted one of the massive steel factories owned by Bethlehem Steel in Pennsylvania. Bethlehem Steel, now defunct, was once one of the largest steel producers in the United States. It produced the steel used in numerous American structural icons, most notably San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. It also built 1,127 ships during World War II. In a letter about the painting, Cohn recalled being arrested in Bethlehem City, Pennsylvania, under suspicion of being a Nazi spy while painting a scene similar to this one in the summer of 1939 (The artist, to Harry Rand, February 20, 1978, The American Art Museum curatorial file).
Max Arthur Cohn, Easton Railroad Yards, watercolor, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist, 1984.63.2
Max Arthur Cohn, Harlem River, screenprint, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist, 1984.63.4
Max Arthur Cohn, Harlem River, 1934, watercolor, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist, 1984.63.1
Max Arthur Cohn, Railroad Bridge, opaque watercolor, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist, 1984.63.3
B. ALTMAN & COMPANY DEPARTMENT STORE FIFTH AVENUE AND 34TH STREET ARLENE BESSENOF, GLORIA HERMAN AND NINA LUBLIN GOT IT!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM ART-POST GALLERY
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
OK. I admit it. I like the Empire State more than the Chrysler Building. Always have. So sue me.
I particularly like the Empire State’s history, standing on the foundation of two grand hotels – the Waldorf and the Astoria – built by feuding members of the Astor family.
The Astors acquired the land in the 1820s and redivided it among relatives until in 1893 William Astor, motivated in part by a dispute with his aunt Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, built the Waldorf Hotel next door to her house, on the site of his father’s mansion at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 33rd Street.
Then the Astoria Hotel opened in 1897 next door to the Waldorf. A feud – throwing hotels at each other rather than bricks – but with shared tastes. Both hotels were designed by the same architect, Henry Janeway Hardenbergh (Hardenbergh also did the Plaza Hotel and the Dakota), both in the same “German Renaissance” style and both appealed to the same upper crust New York crowd. The hotels housed celebrated restaurants, huge ballrooms and glamorous suites. Famous dishes were invented in their kitchens (Waldorf salad, Eggs Benedict, Thousand Island dressing) and famous drinks (Rob Roy, Bobbie Burns) conceived in their bars.
Interesting and, we shall see, somewhat prescient, the Waldorf was initially a laughing stock with its large number of bathrooms, called “Astor’s Folly”, and appeared destined for failure.
Ultimately the two merged, creating the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel (the two parts connected by a long corridor, “Peacock Alley”). The combined hotel was the largest in the world and the second most valuable parcel of land on Fifth Avenue, after the B. Altman and Company Building site. Over the years, the grand hotel aged, competitors nipped at its heels, and its fame dwindled. In 1929, the site was sold to a property developer for approximately $16 million. The Waldorf-Astoria was by no means finished, however. It migrated to Park Avenue, with its own Peacock Alley (and the loveliest, most accessible restrooms in the City).
Meanwhile, in the late 1920s, a new passion swept the City. Who would build the world’s tallest building?
At the center of this storm was Walter Chrysler of the Chrysler Corporation. He wanted to build the world’s tallest building – not a monument to one of the largest auto firms in the world, but a monument to himself. Indeed, Chrysler paid for the building out of his own pocket, to provide a unique inheritance for his children, he said.
His rival was not the Empire State, which would come later, but rather the Bank of Manhattan Building at 40 Wall Street (now known as the Trump Building) whose architects intended to build up to 925 feet tall, 85 feet taller than the plan for the Chrysler Building. When Chrysler found out about 40 Wall’s plans he decided to add a surprise 186-foot spire to his building. 40 Wall finished construction first in April of 1930, celebrated for being the tallest building in the world, without knowing that they were about to be surpassed. Less than two months later, workers at the Chrysler Building hoisted 4 parts of the secret spire to the top and riveted them together in 90 minutes. At 1,046 feet high, the Chrysler Building became the world’s tallest building.
Not for long.
John J. Raskob of General Motors also aspired to build the world’s tallest building. A few months before the Chrysler Building was completed, Raskob purchased the Waldorf-Astoria site. Construction of the new building began in March of 1930 and moved quickly. The original drawings for the Empire State Building were finished in only two weeks. Starrett Brothers and Eken, the General Contractors, began excavation for the new building in January, even before the demolition of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel was complete. The company had pioneered the simultaneous work of demolition and foundation-laying a year earlier when building 40 Wall.
Despite the colossal size of the project, the design, planning and construction of the Empire State Building took just 20 months from start to finish. The contractors used an assembly line process to erect the new skyscraper in a 410 days. Using as many as 3,400 men each day, they assembled its skeleton at a record pace of four and a half stories per week—so fast that the first 30 stories were completed before certain details of the ground floor were finalized.
Construction of the Empire State Building (Credit: Daniel Ahmad/Wikimedia Commons)*
The Empire State Building was the first commercial construction project to employ the technique of fast-track construction, a common approach today but very new in the early 20th Century. This means starting the construction process before the designs are fully completed in order to reduce delays and inflation costs.
Less than six months after construction began the Empire State Building is 3/4 complete. NYPL Digital Gallery.
But would it be high enough to make it the tallest in the world? Not to be outdone by Chrysler, Raskob put a hat at the top of his building – a spire, making the Empire State Building a soaring 102 stories and 1,250 feet high. The tower was viewed as an image of the future, a mast as a docking port for ocean crossing dirigibles. Passengers would exit via an open-air gangplank, check in at a customs office and make their way to the streets of Manhattan in a mere seven minutes. It didn’t work. Winds near the mast rooftop prevented dirigible pilots from connecting to the mast. The airship plan was abandoned.
A postcard of the Empire State’s mooring mast and how it would work.
Notwithstanding this disappointment, the building was completed in May 1931 and became the world’s tallest building, a title it would hold for nearly 40 years until the World Trade Center was completed in 1970.
The Empire State and the Chrysler buildings differed in another critical way. The Chrysler Building was built privately by Walter Chrysler who wanted to boast a headquarters building in New York City despite the fact that his corporation was mainly based in and around Detroit. The Empire State Building, on the other hand, was built as a consortium between the New York State Government and private industry in an attempt to economically rejuvenate a part of midtown Manhattan that had never really taken off, and was an attempt to attract private industry to build more buildings in and around the new record-breaking tower. Raskob rounded up a group of well-known investors that included Coleman and Pierre S. duPont, Louis G. Kaufman and Ellis P. Earl to form Empire State, Inc. He appointed former Governor of New York and Presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith to head the group But the Empire State Building was essentially a flop. Just a year after it opened to commercial office tenants, the New York Times named the Empire State Building the “Empty State Building” – echoing the earlier “Astor’s folly” on the same site. Little research had been done in advance to determine whether New York City needed another giant office tower at a time when the Great Depression was deepening, not to mention that at the time, the 34th Street location was a kind of no-man’s land – too far north of the Financial District downtown and too far south of the new heart of midtown which was quickly becoming the area between 42nd St and 50th Streets. Few tenants signed leases. Building management told employees to ride up and down the elevators during evenings and at night to turn lights on and off in empty offices to convince the public that the building had tenants throughout.
So the Chrysler Building was the more successful enterprise. Even in 1935, the midst of the Depression, tenants occupied 70% of the Chrysler, while the Empire State struggled with an occupancy rate of only 23% and only became profitable until after World War II when companies flooded Manhattan and space became scarce.
FYI: The Empire State Building will host its annual Run-Up this fall. This is the world’s first and most famous tower race, challenging runners from near and far to race up its famed 86 flights, 1,576 stairs. The fastest runners have covered the 86 floors in about 10 minutes. See you there?
NEW VIEWING PIER OVERLOOKING THE WEST CHANNEL IN SOUTHPOINT PARK (WE ARE SURE THE BENCH PLACEMENT IS NOT PERMANENT) ALEXIS VILLEFANE AND JAY JACOBSON 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
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
Welcome to the official website of Irene Rice Pereira (1902-1971). I. Rice Pereira, as she was known, was one of the foremost modernist artists of the 20th Century. Her paintings can be found in museums around the world. The purpose of this website is to direct inquirers to her paintings, publications about her, museums and galleries exhibiting her work, archives and relevant websites. Correspondence and original appreciations of Irene Rice Pereira’s work and life are invited. Images of Pereira works in museums are now on the Gallery page.
Courtesy Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Born Irene Rice, she took the name of her first husband, the commercial artist Umberto Pereira. She adopted the name I. Rice Pereira because then as now discrimination beset women in the arts. By the time war broke out Irene had divorced Pereira and married George Wellington Brown, a marine engineer from a prominent Boston family. Brown was an ingenious experimenter with materials, and he encouraged his petite new wife in their mutual passion for experimentation. Pereira in the 1930s was drawn to ships, not only because of George Brown, but because of their intricate machinery, their functional beauty. The inside-out infrastructure of the Pompidou museum in Paris amused Pereira, although she thought it art-historically tardy.
Pereira visited Morocco briefly in the mid-1930s. The desert changed her life, filling her mind with pure light and purer forms, and had a crucial impact on her work when she returned to the United States to help found the Works Progress Administration Design Laboratory. The interactions of light and shadow among the dunes, playing in and around the intrinsically Cubist architecture of the Magreb, instilled in her a lifelong concern with optics, the way the mind perceives light and interacts with paintings.
Irene Rice Pereira was a lovely, fragile being. Her presence was hushed. She spoke almost in a whisper and listened far more than she spoke. She was a prodigious autodidact and a spellbinding lecturer. The main body of her metaphysical library today resides in the Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. Her papers and the manuscript for her still unpublished book, Eastward Journey, are available to scholars in the Schlesinger Library at Harvard.
Pereira won recognition for her abstract geometric work, particularly her jewel-like works on fluted and coruscated layers of glass, throughout the 1940s and early 1950s. In 1953 the Whitney Museum, then in Greenwich Village, gave her a retrospective exhibition with Loren MacIver, and that same year Life magazine published a centerfold photo examination of her work.
By the late 1950s Abstract Expressionism had swept Manhattan, flattening such nascent movements as Geometric Abstraction. Such artists as Stuart Davis, Stanton MacDonald Wright, George L.K. Morris, George Ault, Jan Matulka, Richard Leahy, Philip Guston and many others were eclipsed. Pereira believed that a European angst, brought to our shores in the wake of the Holocaust, had introduced a cynicism and a profoundly anti-female sensibility that boded ill for art in America. Rightly she pointed out that even when the works of women were acquired by museums they were rarely shown, a disgrace that persists to this day. The women who did achieve success, she said, were often collaborators with more famous male artists and tastemakers.
Pereira died in 1971 in Marbella, Spain, ill and broken-hearted. She had been evicted from the Fifteenth Street studio in Chelsea where she had painted for more than thirty years. Suffering from severe emphysema, she could barely negotiate a few stairs.
But by the 1980s a new generation of women scholars and curators had begun to resurrect her stature. A considerable following has formed to honor a pioneer artist who cared about other artists and willingly paid the price to denounce what others feared in silence. Indeed when Pereira sold a painting she had two immediate impulses: buy a new hat, and give the money to an artist friend in trouble. She loved hats but loved to help fellow artists even more.
I. Rice Pereira, Untitled (Boats at Cape Cod), 1932, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Djelloul Marbrook, 1988.80
I. Rice Pereira, Sketch for Machine Composition #2, ca. 1936, pencil and crayon on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia and Phillip Frost, 1986.92.73
Sketch for Machine Composition #2 was inspired by the view from the artist’s studio window. “I used to look in at a power house on 16th Street where I was living, to get the feeling of power house; and then made my own.” Fascinated by their functional beauty, Pereira made machines the central focus of her work in the 1930s. In this study for a painting, she presents devices that appear to have been taken apart and reassembled into a fantastic, abstract creation. Although she appreciated the potential of mechanization to transform society, this drawing has menacing overtones that suggest ambivalence.
I. Rice Pereira, Machine Composition #2, 1937, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia and Phillip Frost, 1986.92.72
I. Rice Pereira, Heart of Flame, n.d., oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Max Robinson, 1981.184
Boat Composite, 1932, Oil on Linen, Whitney Museum of American Art
Seven Red Squares, 1951, Oil on Canvas, 40×50 inches, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Deborah and Ed Shein
Light is Gold, 1951, Glass, Acrylic, Laquer, Casein, and Gold Leaf, 30 1/8 x 23 1/4 inches, Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy
Long Island Buddha, 2010-2011 Zhang Huan (Location: Joseph Lau & Josephine Lau Roof Garden)
Zhang Huan is internationally recognized for his visceral and confrontational endurance performances in the 1990s and later sculptures and paintings that explore themes of memory and spirituality in relation to Buddhism. This sculpture was inspired by Zhang’s trip to Tibet in 2005, where he discovered fragments of Buddhist sculptures damaged during the Cultural Revolution. Rather than a religious image, this monumental Buddha head reflects on the history of human conflict and the preservation of culture. Included as part of ASHK’s inaugural exhibition Transforming Minds: Buddhism in Art in 2012, this sculpture now sits at the Center as a permanent installation.
ED LITCHER GOT IT, AFTER MUCH RESEARCH!!
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)
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM IRENERICEPEREIRA.COM
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
