If you are waking up in Murray Hill today, you will be delighted to find whimsical creatures along the Park Avenue median between 34th and 38th Streets. Patrons of Park Avenue (POPA) invited French artist Idriss B to create a one-of-a-kind urban jungle as an inaugural installation.
Meet Manny the Mammoth! He is located on 38th Street.The polygonal shaped animal sculptures will inhabit Park Avenue between 34th and 38th Streets through February 23, 2023.
Born and raised outside Paris, France, Idriss B. has shown an interest in art since childhood. With decades worth of experience helping to create retail and window displays for luxury brands such as Dior, Moncler, Coach, & Michael Kors, Idriss B. launched his unique artistic collection of origami-polygonal shaped animal sculptures in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and now, New York City
Mojo2 the Gorilla
“One of the most beautiful places in the world is New York and it is the perfect place for me to exhibit my work. It is a hardworking city with a warm family environment, so it is very fitting for people to see and feel the strength of my pieces while bringing the fun to everybody, especially the kids,” said Idriss B.
Baloo the Bear
In bringing his artwork to New York City, Idriss B. has collaborated with POPA, which supports the care, maintenance and planting of the malls of Park Avenue in the Murray Hill neighborhood. The works are exhibited through NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks program, which fosters the creation and installation of temporary public art in New York City.
Urus the Buffalo
“As Chairwoman of POPA, I’d like to thank Idriss B. for amplifying the beauty and culture of our iconic Park Avenue and installing the first ever art exhibit on the malls of our beloved Murray Hill,” said Victoria Spagnola.
“As CEO & Co-Founder of WindowsWear, I’ve always been impressed with Idriss B.’s work with major luxury brands worldwide, and as Co-Chairman of POPA, I’m thrilled to connect his work with New York City,” said Jon Harari.
Balo the Bear
We are happy to partner with Patrons of Park Avenue on their inaugural exhibition and welcome Idriss B.’s colorful, geometric sculptures to New York City through our Art in the Parks program,” said NYC Parks Senior Public Art Coordinator Elizabeth Masella.
Dundee the Crocodile
Idriss B.’s collection is made by molding his vision of contemporary art to create polygonal animal forms in different sizes, which can also be sold to collectors as limited edition pieces to provide as many opportunities for everyone to own their own unique piece of art.
Rexor The mission of The Murray Hill Neighborhood Association (“MHNA”) is to continue to make Murray Hill a highly desirable place to live, work and visit. MHNA does this through programs to preserve the neighborhood’s historic character, greening and beautification, liaising with local government officials about quality of life issues, providing information about the neighborhood to members, and social events.
Patrons of Park Avenue (“POPA”), a division of the Murray Hill Neighborhood Association, supports the care, maintenance and planting of the malls of Park Avenue in New York City. Funding for the seasonal planting and maintenance programs is provided by donations from building owners, co-op boards, condo buildings, private donations, grants, and the Murray Hill Neighborhood Association.
For over 50 years, NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks program has brought contemporary public artworks to the city’s parks, making New York City one of the world’s largest open-air galleries. The agency has consistently fostered the creation and installation of temporary public art in parks throughout the five boroughs. Since 1967, NYC Parks has collaborated with arts organizations and artists to produce over 2,000 public artworks by 1,300 notable and emerging artists in over 200 parks.
While you’re there, walk a few blocks east to 34th Street and First Avenue to see ‘Spot’sitting in front of Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital at NYU Langone.
GENERAL MOTORS FLINT ASSEMBLY PLANT NO ONE GOT THIS ONE!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
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Mott’s Apple Empire Began in Saratoga County in 1842
LYNDA BRYAN
You may have noticed that “Since 1842” appears on the label of all Mott’s apple products. That was the year Samuel Mott began selling apple cider and vinegar to his neighbors in Halfmoon, Saratoga County, NY. The Mott’s apple processing empire we know today grew from that humble beginning.
This fascinating story actually begins when Zebulon Mott moved his family after the American Revolution to a farm at what is now Market Road, and was then part of the Kayaderoasseras Patent. He and his wife Rebecca purchased the property in 1795. He had served in the Revolution and became a prominent man in Halfmoon’s early history. Zebulon was the Town Supervisor from 1801 to 1817, served in the New York State Legislature, was Deacon of the First Baptist Church that stood at the corner of Farm to Market and Pruyn Hill Roads and is buried in the Newtown Cemetery.
Zebulon’s brother Samuel, compiled and edited Mott’s Almanac. Zebulon’s son John Mott lived on the adjacent farm to the west of his parents Zebulon and Rebecca on the Kayaderoasseras Patent.
Samuel Roger Mott, John’s Son, was the last Mott to live on the farm in Halfmoon. Samuel spent many a day walking through the orchards with his grandfather Zebulon. There, he learned the tricks of the trade in processing the apples for cider and vinegar. Word got out and he started selling his product to his neighbors. The logo on every jar reads: SINCE 1842 and that was the year that Samuel, at 16 years old, began selling his product to his neighbors.
The cider was made by hitched horses that plodded in a circle, crushing apples between two large stones drums. This was a centuries old production process. As the demand grew so did the mill. The horses were replaced with a more modern method using waterpower and steam to operate the presses.
In 1868, at the age of 46, Samuel, his wife Ann Mary Coon, and 4 of their 5 children left Halfmoon and moved to Bouckville, in the Town of Madison, Madison County, NY, buying a 1/3 interest in a cider vinegar factory. On July 19th, 1870, Mott bought out his two partners Beach and Brown for $4,500. Samuel, like his grandfather Zebulon, served as town supervisor (for 17 years) and also as a member of the State Assembly.
Fourth generation John Coon Mott, Samuel and Ann Mary’s oldest son, and the last Mott to be born in Halfmoon, did not move with the family to Bouckville. He lived in the city of New York where he opened a cider mill of his own that was located where the Jacob Javits’s Convention Center is now, near Pier 76. Father and son merged their companies in 1879 forming the S.R. & J.C. Mott Company. In 1882 the mill in Bouckville was processing 14 carloads of apples converting them into 600 barrels of juice per day. A barrel contained 25 gallons, to give you an idea of their production. By that time there had expanded to distribution across the county and served international customers as well.
In 1900, the S.R. & J.C. Mott Company merged with the W.B. Duffy Cider Company of Rochester, NY, creating Duffy-Mott and was incorporated in New York in 1914. The newly formed company introduced many products that we are familiar with today and sold the company to Cadbury Schwepps in 1982.
Charles Stewart Mott, John’s son, studied the fermentation process in France and Germany. He began work in the family business, but at the turn of the century, he became the Superintendent of his uncle Frederick’s business, the Weston-Mott Wheel Works. They produced metal wheels for bicycles, carriages and rickshaw’s and later axles. They were offered a proposal to build a plant in Flint, Michigan and produce wheels for “Horseless Carriages.” Uncle Frederick, not wanting to move, turned the business over to his nephew Charles.
The success of the Wheel Works caught the eye of a new up and coming company. In 1913, Charles sold the business in exchange for stock in that new business – General Motors. For many decades he would remain the single largest individual shareholder in the firm, and accumulate wealth in excess of $800 million. He sat on the Board of Directors for 60 years until his death in 1973. It was Autos, not Apples that made him one of America’s first billionaires.
In 1926 he created the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation with a $320,000 endowment, explaining his reason in an often-quoted comment: “What I Am worth is what I do for other people.” The foundation celebrated its 95th anniversary this year. It now has more than $3 billion in assets and offices in three countries. His subsequent gifts of cash and stock made his foundation one of the largest in the country, and he donated more than $130 million dollars to organizations in his lifetime.
Photo: a horse-powered apple press.
Lynda Bryan, a life-long resident of the Town of Halfmoon, has also served as Town Clerk since 2010, and is Town Historian and President of the Halfmoon Historical Society.
Nine decades ago, Charles Stewart Mott established the Foundation that bears his name in response to his deep concern about the welfare of Flint, Michigan, and an abiding affection for his adopted community. Initially, the Foundation served as a vehicle for fulfilling the Mott family’s charitable interests. It began to evolve in 1935, when Mr. Mott teamed with local educator Frank Manley to create community schools in Flint. Their innovative approach to using schools to meet neighborhood needs would become a national model. That project also served as a platform for the Foundation to expand international grantmaking and become a global force for positive change in the areas of education, civil society and the environment.
Four members of the Mott family have directed Foundation operations over the past 90 years: C.S. Mott; his son C.S. Harding Mott; William S. White, Harding Mott’s son-in-law; and Ridgway H. White, great-grandson of C.S. Mott. The Foundation that Mr. Mott launched in 1926 with a $320,000 endowment now has more than $3 billion in assets, offices in three countries, and a legacy of working with local organizations to strengthen communities around the world. The Foundation has given away more than it is currently worth, awarding grants totaling more than $3.2 billion to organizations in 62 countries.
Our Founder Charles Stewart Mott (1875–1973) was an engineer, entrepreneur, public servant and philanthropist who dedicated much of his life, and wealth, to helping others. Born in Newark, New Jersey, he worked for his family’s Mott Beverage Co. after earning an engineering degree at the Stevens Institute of Technology. After his father died, he took control of the family’s wire-wheel company — located in Utica, New York — and made it profitable by manufacturing axles. He was invited in 1906 to move his Weston-Mott Company to Flint, Michigan, to produce wire wheels and axles for the emerging automobile industry. When W.C. “Billy” Durant organized the General Motors Corporation (GM) in Flint, in 1908, Mr. Mott sold 49 percent of his company to GM in exchange for stock. In 1913, he exchanged the remaining 51 percent of Weston-Mott stock for GM stock and became a company director. He served on GM’s board of directors from 1913 to 1973, a period in which the company became the world’s largest automaker.
Like other large cities, New York was devastated by fires in the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1776, in the midst of the American Revolutionary War, a great fire swept through the city, destroying 493 buildings. Two more great fires, in 1835 and 1845, together destroyed approximately 1000 buildings and killed 50 people, including a number of firefighters. Fire safety improved in the late 19th and early 20th century, but firefighting remained a dangerous task. Following the 1907 drowning death of Deputy Fire Chief Charles W. Kruger in a flooded Canal Street basement, Bishop Henry C. Potter proposed a memorial to firefighters who had died while performing their duties.[2]
Potter established a committee to build a monument, and was its first chairman, being succeeded by Isidor Straus, co-owner of Macy’s. The Board of Estimate and Apportionment granted $40,000 to the project on July 17, 1911, and an additional $50,500 was raised through a popular subscription.[1]
Although originally planned for Union Square, the memorial eventually ended up being built on the fashionable Riverside Drive, alongside which ran Frederick Law Olmsted‘s English-style rustic Riverside Park. The monument was designed by architect Harold Van Buren Magonigle and its sculptures are by Attilio Piccirilli. The site consists of a grand staircase leading up from the west, a balustraded plaza, and the Knoxville marble monument. Above the fountain, which extends from the box-like structure of the monument, is a large bas-relief scene of a horse drawn engine rushing to a fire. The monument is flanked to the north and south with groups of sculptures representing “Duty” and “Sacrifice”.[1]
ANDY SPARBERG AND JAY JACOBSON KNEW TODAY’S PHOTO!!!
SOURCES
NYC ALMANAC
Funding Provided by: Roosevelt Island Corporation Public Purpose Funds Council Member Ben Kallos City Council Discretionary Funds thru DYCD Text by Judith Berdy
Edited by Deborah Dorff ALL PHOTOS COPYRIGHT RIHS. 2022 (C) PHOTOS IN THIS ISSUE (C) JUDITH BERDY RIHS
Zaida Ben-Yusuf (1869-1933) was a leader in the art of photographic portraiture in turn-of-the-century New York. She operated – for ten years beginning in 1897 – arguably the most fashionable portrait studio on Fifth Avenue, while at the same time contributing work to numerous publications and the period’s most important photography exhibitions. As a testament to her renown, she served as a spokesperson for the Eastman Kodak Company and was regularly profiled in newspapers and magazines. Yet the memory of her achievement as a photographer has largely vanished.
Born in London, Ben-Yusuf settled in New York in 1895. There she took up photography, first as a hobby and then two years later as a profession. Rather than falling back on traditional portrait conventions – painted backdrops and contrived poses – she sought inspiration from the leading artists andpictorial photographers of the period. Despite her young age and her recent arrival in America, she attracted to her studio many of the era’s most prominent artistic, literary, theatrical, and political figures. Seen together, these individuals represent a remarkable cross-section of a place that was rapidly becoming America’s first modern city. Yet, like many professional women, she encountered personal and economic difficulties that ultimately compelled her to abandon photography. Although she later pursued with equal ambition a career in the fashion trade, it is her photographic work – and the men and women she portrayed – that we aim to recover in this exhibition.
Everett Shinn 1876-1953
Born Woodstown, New Jersey
Everett Shinn drew inspiration from the extraordinary energy and tensions of New York. In his paintings and pastels, the streets, city parks, and theaters of the bulging metropolis teem with activity. In these works the literal movement of people serves as a metaphor for the larger transformations occurring there. Ben-Yusuf’s portrait of Shinn pictures the artist in his mid-twenties, during the period when he was first emerging as an important figure in the art world. Having begun his career as a newspaper illustrator in Philadelphia, Shinn thrived in his new home. While he enjoyed a lengthy career, he is perhaps best remembered as one of “The Eight,” a group of artists who in 1908 united to stage an exhibition meant to protest the conservative policies of the National Academy of Design.
Platinum print, c. 1901 ARTnews Collection
The New Woman
Ben-Yusuf was the epitome of the “New Woman” – a class of predominantly younger women who at the century’s end sought to challenge prevailing gender norms. It was not simply her bohemian appearance; what differentiated Ben-Yusuf from the majority of women during this period was her desire for an independent life within the public arena. As a single woman who needed to earn an income, she embraced portrait photography as a career. This work opened up a host of opportunities – to write, to travel, to meet new people. Yet the growing
independence of women also elicited criticism at times and led figures like Ben-Yusuf to scrutinize their own sense of identity. The photographs in this first section are less representative of the commercial portraiture that sustained her financially. Instead, they speak to her artistic ambitions and her experiences as a “New Woman.”
Roosevelt Men
No other figure towered over American life at the turn-of-the-century as Theodore Roosevelt did. Even before he assumed the presidency following William McKinley’s assassination in 1901, Roosevelt was widely regarded as a national hero. Once in the White House, he proved exceptionally energetic, fighting to break up corporate trusts, leading the effort to build the Panama Canal, and pushing efforts to conserve America’s natural resources. Each of the figures in this section was a fervent supporter of Roosevelt. In addition to sharing his political vision, they also admired the public persona he projected, in particular his belief
in the so-called “strenuous life” and his assertion of American strength – a belief characterized by his favorite proverb, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Ben-Yusuf photographed Roosevelt during his tenure as governor, and many other figures whose careers intersected with America’s twenty-sixth president.
Daniel Chester French 1850-1931
Born Exeter, New Hampshire
Daniel Chester French’s career as a sculptor coincided with an unprecedented rise in the construction of public buildings and civic spaces in America. A demand for public art accompanied this boom, and French built a prestigious career fulfilling this need. His popularity stemmed in part from the fact that much of his work was a throwback to a familiar nineteenth-century decorative aesthetic. Yet, French can also be seen as a transitional figure between the beaux arts movement and modern sculpture’s increasing realism. Whereas he preferred idealized allegorical figures early in his career, his later work – most especially his moving statue of Abraham Lincoln for Washington’s Lincoln Memorial – gestures toward an emergent modernism. Taken alone, French’s Lincoln would secure his reputation as a great sculptor, but taken as the capstone of his prolific career, it illuminates French’s larger influence in shaping public space at the dawn of the new century.
Platinum print, 1901 ARTnews Collection
Portrait of Miss S. Ben-Yusuf reveals neither the name of this young woman, nor the character she assumes, although her unusual outfit suggests that she possibly enacts the role of a character from a work of art, literature, or theater. Her provocative costume signals her association with New York’s bohemian set. Wearing a low-cut lace dress and a high-collared cloak, she stands apart for her choice in fashion. During this period there arose a small, yet increasingly visible set that preferred “artistic dress.” Equating restrictive clothing with limits on one’s freedom, these women embraced dress reform as one part of their larger campaign for equality. Self-consciously flamboyant, the outfit that Miss S. wears is in part an outgrowth of the changes in the world of women’s fashion and is symptomatic of the enhanced freedoms – professional, political, and sexual – that many women sought during this period.Platinum print, c. 1899 National Museum of American History, Behring Center, Smithsonian Institution
Augustin Daly 1838-1899Born Plymouth, North Carolina Having produced his first play when he was only seventeen, Daly spent his entire adult life in the world of the theater. While others preceded him in establishing New York as a venue for reputable drama, Daly was influential not only in elevating standards for theatrical production, but also in reshaping important elements associated with it. His innovative work as a director – in rethinking methods of acting and in reimagining stage scenery and lighting – helped make American theater modern. Daly’s commitment to more naturalistic performances amidst realistic settings represented a sea change in American drama. While Daly recruited theatrical stars to appear from time to time, he relied most often on his own stock company. Figures like John Drew and Ada Rehan became household names under his direction. Ben-Yusuf admired Daly, describing him in a later essay as “one of the most interesting men I have known.”Platinum print, 1898 Portrait Photograph Series, Harvard Theater Collection, Houghton Library
Elbert Hubbard 1856-1915
Born Bloomington, Illinois
Elbert Hubbard purchased the struggling Roycroft Printing Shop in East Aurora, New York, in 1895 and built it into one of the centers of the arts and crafts movement in America. Modeling his enterprise after William Morris’s Kelmscott Press in England, he attracted craftsmen by paying them well and leaving them alone to pursue their ideas. Workers were never admonished for wasting money. The Fra, as Hubbard was called by his followers, saw wasting time as the greater sin. Under his direction, the Roycroft Press became a leader in the publication of small designer books and specialty magazines. Hubbard was also an influential author, and his essays about art and labor made him a national celebrity. Ben-Yusuf photographed him in New York at the outset of a lecture tour being orchestrated by James Burton Pond.
Platinum print, c. 1900 Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
THE ALFRED STEIGLITZ CONNECTION
From the NPR : 1898-1900
On October 21, ZBY writes Alfred Stieglitz regarding his invitation to reproduce an example of her portraiture in Camera Notes. About her photography, she explains that she is “very much in earnest about it all.” Stieglitz publishes her work in Camera Notes the following April, and again in July.
The New York Daily Tribune publishes on November 7 an article about ZBY and mentions that her studio opened “only six months ago.” The article describes the elaborate decorations that adorn the space, as well as her work creating advertising posters. Leslie’s Weekly publishes a separate profile about her on December 30.
1901
ZBY exhibits four photographs from May 2 through November 9 in a display juried by Alfred Stieglitz at the Glasgow International Exhibition in Scotland.
ZBY photographs former President Grover Cleveland during a fishing excursion on Hop Brook, near Tyringham, Massachusetts.
ZBY publishes “Celebrities Under the Camera” in the June 1 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. In this essay ZBY describes many of her encounters with subjects she has photographed.
In the September issue of Metropolitan Magazine, ZBY publishes “The New Photography – What It Has Done and Is Doing for Modern Portraiture.” She discusses her commitment to “a middle way,” between the radicalism of certain fine art photographers and the prosaism of most commercial photographers.
ZBY is profiled as one of the “foremost women photographers in America” in the November issue of Ladies Home Journal.
At the Fourth Philadelphia Photographic Salon, held from November 18 through December 14 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, ZBY exhibits ten photographs. Alfred Stieglitz leads a boycott of this salon when he loses the authority to develop the exhibition to his liking.
Beginning on November 23, ZBY publishes the first of six illustrated articles for the Saturday Evening Post on the topic, “Advanced Photography for Amateurs.”
1902
Stieglitz organizes “American Pictorial Photography” at New York’s National Arts Club. The exhibition runs from March 5 through March 22. Considered the inaugural exhibition of the “Photo-Secession,” it includes the work of thirty-two photographers whom Stieglitz felt aspired to a higher purpose. ZBY does not participate.
The June 27 issue of the New York Times includes ZBY in a list of debtors. She owes $119 to Henrietta Prades, and is ordered by a local judge to make payment.
ZBY exhibits two photographs at the Tenth Photographic Salon of the Linked Ring in London between September 19 and November 1.
1903
Stieglitz publishes the first issue of his new journal Camera Work in January.
ZBY travels by steamship to Japan, arriving in Yokohama in April. She tours Kobe and Nagasaki before continuing on to Hong Kong for a brief sojourn. Returning to Japan, she rents a house for the summer in Kyoto, with the stated purpose of living “in native fashion.” She travels to Tokyo and Nikko during her stay, and returns to New York in the fall.
1904
ZBY publishes the first of four illustrated articles, “Japan Through My Camera,” in the April 23 issue of the Saturday Evening Post.
Sadakichi Hartmann mentions ZBY’s contributions to the newly formed Salon Club of America in the July issue of the American Amateur Photographer. Sponsored by the Salon Club of America, the First American Photographic Salon opens in New York in December. ZBY is listed in the catalogue as a member, though she does not submit any work.
1905
On January 12 the New York Times includes ZBY again in a list of debtors.
ZBY’s essay, “A Kyoto Memory,” is published in the February issue of the Booklovers Magazine. That same month, Leslie’s Monthly Magazine publishes ZBY’s illustrated article, “Women of Japan.”
In September Anna Ben-Yusuf begins teaching at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She is an instructor of millinery in the Department of Domestic Arts.
Beginning October 14 American Art News publishes a weekly profile of an American artist with an accompanying portrait by ZBY. This arrangement lasts seven weeks.
ZBY delivers on November 23 an illustrated lecture, “Japanese Homes,” at Pratt’s Assembly Hall.
Alfred Stieglitz’s inaugural exhibition at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue opens on November 24. One hundred photographs by thirty-nine photographers are featured. ZBY does not participate.
1906
ZBY publishes twenty architectural photographs to accompany Katharine Budd’s article, “Japanese Houses,” in the January issue of the Architectural Record. The February issue features ZBY’s article on Japanese architecture, “The Period of Daikan.”
In March ZBY serves as a member of the national preliminary jury for the Second American Photographic Salon held at the Art Institute of Chicago. However, she does not contribute work.
Photo Era publishes in September three photographs by ZBY from her visit to the Mediterranean island of Capri. The accompanying article suggests that she “passed considerable time there not long ago, exploring its mountains, rocks, and grottoes.”
In October ZBY exhibits one portrait at the Third Annual Exhibition of Photographs at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts.
Hotel Shelton Designed by Arthur Loomis Harmon, who would be involved in the design of the Empire State Building a few years later, the Hotel Shelton was an immediate sensation. In 1925, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, moved into the hotel and lived there for twelve years.Oct 28, 2020
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:
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
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
The steerage passengers immortalized in a 1907 landmark photo
February 14, 2022
In June 1907, photographer Alfred Stieglitz left New York for Europe with his wife and six-year-old daughter. His “small family,” as he wrote years later, had first-class accommodations on the liner Kaiser Wilhelm II and were headed toward Bremen, Germany.
But Stieglitz felt stifled by the atmosphere in first class. “One couldn’t escape the nouveaux riches,” he explained in his account, reproduced in the 2012 book, The Steerage and Alfred Stieglitz.
After three days he took a walk “as far forward on the deck as I could.” Looking down, he found a scene that left him spellbound: men, women, and children on the lower deck in steerage. These third-class passengers were biding their time by hanging laundry and playing on a staircase. Meanwhile, a man in a round straw hat watched the group amid the iron railings and machinery of the ship.
Stieglitz ran to get his camera. The resulting picture, “The Steerage,” wasn’t published until 1911. “I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life,” he said, per the Library of Congress (LOC) via Wikipedia.
Alfred Stieglitz – The Terminal – 2015.218 – Cleveland Museum of Art.jpg
Alfred Stieglitz Winter Fifth Avenue 1892.jpg
Snapshot – In the New York Central Yards MET DP281374.jpg
The Swimming Lesson MET DP277997.jpg
Old and New New York MET DP257104.jpg
The City across the River MET DP372411.jpg
Photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz in 1918.
Georgia O’Keeffe MET DT227433.jpg
Georgia O’Keeffe — Hand and Breasts MET DP232920.jpg
Kitty Stieglitz, Central Park, New York MET DP343197.jpg
Biography from the NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
Few individuals have exerted as strong an influence on 20th-century American art and culture as the photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1864 during the Civil War, Stieglitz lived until 1946. He began to photograph while a student in Berlin in the 1880s and studied with the renowned photochemist Hermann Wilhelm Vogel. On his return to the United States in 1890, he began to advocate that photography should be treated as an art. He wrote many articles arguing his cause, edited the periodicals Camera Notes (1897–1902) and Camera Work (1903–1917), and in 1902 formed the Photo-Secession, an organization of photographers committed to establishing the artistic merit of photography.
Stieglitz photographed New York for more than 25 years, portraying its streets, parks, and newly emerging skyscrapers; its horse-drawn carriages, trolleys, trains, and ferry boats; as well as some of its people. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, he also focused his camera on the landscape around his summer home in Lake George, New York. In 1918 Stieglitz became consumed with photographing his future wife, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe. For many years he had wanted to make an extended photographic portrait—he called it a composite portrait—in which he would study one person over a long period. Over the next 19 years he made more than 330 finished portraits of her. Beginning in 1922 and continuing throughout the 1920s, he also became preoccupied with another subject, clouds, making more than 300 finished studies of them.
Stieglitz witnessed some of the most profound changes this country has ever experienced: two world wars, the Great Depression, and the growth of America from a rural, agricultural nation to an industrialized and cultural superpower. But, more significantly, he also helped to effect some of these transformations. Through his New York galleries—the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue, which he directed from 1905 to 1917; The Intimate Gallery, 1925–1929; and An American Place, 1929–1946—he introduced modern European art to this country, organizing the first exhibitions in America of work by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Paul Cézanne, among others. In addition, he was one of the first to champion and support American modernist artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Charles Demuth.
Photography was always of central importance to Stieglitz: not only was it the medium he employed to express himself, but, more fundamentally, it was the touchstone he used to evaluate all art. Just as it is apparent today that computers and digital technology will dominate not only our lives but also our thinking in this century, so too did Stieglitz realize, long before many of his contemporaries, that photography would be a major cultural force in the 20th century. Fascinated with what he called “the idea of photography,” Stieglitz foresaw that it would revolutionize all aspects of the way we learn and communicate and that it would profoundly alter all of the arts.
Stieglitz’s own photographs were central to his understanding of the medium: they were the instruments he used to plumb both its expressive potential and its relationship to the other arts. When he began to photograph in the early 1880s, the medium was barely 40 years old. Complicated and cumbersome and employed primarily by professionals, photography was seen by most as an objective tool and utilized for its descriptive and recording capabilities. By the time ill health forced Stieglitz to stop photographing in 1937, photography and the public’s perception of it had changed dramatically, thanks in large part to his efforts. Through the publications he edited, including Camera Notes, Camera Work, and 291; through the exhibitions he organized; and through his own lucid and insightful photographs, Stieglitz had conclusively demonstrated the expressive power of the medium.
CAPE CANAVERAL , FLORIDA GLORIA HERMAN, ALEXIS VILLAFANE, HARA REISER, & LAURA HUSSEY GOT IT RIGHT
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
Sources
EPHEMERAL NEW YORK WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
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Long ago, in the early 1950s, my mom loaded me and my sister into our stick shift, non-airconditioned Chevy and headed south on pre-Interstate highways from Pittsburgh to Miami Beach. I handled our AAA Triptic maps and she drove, 4 or 5 days. We spent summers in the ‘50s there, visiting her family, watching Miami Beach grow and change. Now with friends fleeing south to warmer climes, I thought it would be fun to think again about Florida.
Of course, some history. Florida was contested by the Spanish, French and British from earliest colonial times. West Florida (the Panhandle) was a distinct region (important because it bordered on the Mississippi); the east and west coasts of the peninsula developed separately, and the south was an impossible, disease-ridden swamp. And, also, Key West (important because it overlooked Caribbean trade routes).
Florida was ceded by Spain to the US in 1819 and became a territory in 1821, sparsely settled by Seminole Native Americans, escaped African American slaves (many lived with the Seminoles), Spaniards and folks from older Southern plantation regions. With territorial status, the pieces were merged into a single entity with a new capital city in Tallahassee, chosen because it lay halfway between the St. Augustine and Pensacola, the old governmental centers.
The US fought 3 bloody wars with Seminoles – who were finally forcibly removed from the territory (think Andrew Jackson). Florida became our twenty-seventh state in 1845; by 1850 the population had grown to some 87,000 (New York City’s population in 1850 was 590,000), including about 39,000 African American slaves and 1,000 free Blacks. Before the Civil War, Florida was becoming another southern cotton state.
After the War, Florida took a different route. Jacksonville and Pensacola flourished because of the demand for lumber and forest products in the nation’s growing economy. During the final quarter of the nineteenth century, large-scale commercial agriculture, especially cattle, grew in importance. Industries such as cigar manufacturing took root in the immigrant communities of the state.
And tourism: By the late 1880s, Naples and Marco Island were viewed as winter resorts for wealthy Northerners and sportsmen. Steamboat tours on Florida’s winding rivers were a popular attraction for these visitors. Travelers praised Florida’s climate and its reported ability to ease various ailments. Florida was even said to be an aphrodisiac, for “heat stimulates powerfully the faculty of reproduction,” as Daniel Garrison Brinton, medical doctor turned anthropologist, wrote in an 1869 guidebook.
Travelers could make their way to Florida by steamboat and the great private yachts of the age, built for blue sea travel, could have made the trip. But the number of visitors arriving this way could not have been very great. Rail transformed Florida from a backward agricultural state with poor transportation connections to the North and Midwest. By 1900, the foundation of the state’s growth had laid down with the construction of railroad systems along both coasts. Henry Morrison Flagler and Henry Plant are the two figures most associated with Florida railroads.
Henry Morrison Flagler was one of John D. Rockefeller’s partners in creating Standard Oil. Flagler came to St. Augustine in 1883 on his honeymoon and found the city lacking in luxurious accommodations that would attract wealthy families. He realized that paradise could be marketed and sold, and he launched a new career. In 1885 Flagler started developing the area around the old city of St. Augustine, building a grand hotel, the Hotel Ponce de Leon in 1888. (The hotel is now Flagler College.)
But even the grandest hotels would be empty unless guests could get there. Flagler realized that the key to developing Florida was transportation. In the next two decades, he bought smaller railroads, put them all on the same standard gauge track, and opened Florida to wider tourism. Flagler also built schools, a hospital and churches in St. Augustine, “transforming St. Augustine from a seedy southern Saratoga into a glamorous winter Newport.”
By 1912, Flagler’s trains traveled the length of the state to Key West, constructing a string of luxury hotels from St. Augustine to Miami.
In 1893, he selected a small, sandy island called Palm City and built a huge hotel called “The Breakers” to promote his railroad growth. Even before the railroad reached Palm Beach, affluent Northerners were already planning their winter mansions. Flagler built his new wife a massive marble winter mansion called Whitehall and Palm Beach soon became the winter watering hole of America’s industrial elite.
On the West Coast, a Connecticut businessman, Henry Bradley Plant, started another railroad boom when he obtained a charter for a South Florida Railroad on the St. Johns River to Tampa Bay. Plant’s railroad turned Tampa into a deep-water center for freighters and steamers from Cuba and South America. The rail line opened the region to citrus and vegetable growers – a vast improvement over the twenty days to reach Northern markets by boat.
Plant’s railroad quickly attracted the Key West cigar industry and Northern manufacturers to Tampa, as well as investors who started trolley lines and electric companies. Nothing was as spectacular as Henry Plant’s largest hotel, the Tampa Bay Hotel. At one hundred dollars per day, Plant hoped to attract the Northern rich to his empire. (The hotel is now part of the University of Tampa.)
With railroads now stretching the length of the state, the Everglades being drained and then World War I, which cut off richer Americans from traditional European beach resorts, Florida boomed. Developers pushed Florida real estate – Carl Fisher who backed Miami Beach development, purchased a huge billboard in Times Square proclaiming “It’s June In Miami”. Brokers and dealers speculated wildly, selling underwater properties to clueless northerners. In 1925, some 7,000 people seeking a new life and perhaps a new fortune entered Florida each day. In Massachusetts alone, owners of more than 100,000 bank accounts used their savings to invest in Florida land. Deposits in Florida banks increased 400 percent in three years.
In the increasing frenzy of Florida real estate speculation in the 1920s, lots were bought and sold for double their prices in a matter of weeks. Then options on lots were traded, and options on options were sold. Fabulous stories abounded, like the one of a cabby who took a couple the thirteen hundred miles from Manhattan to Palm Beach and, with his fare and tip, invested in real estate and made a million dollars. Check out the Marx Brothers’ film “The Coconuts” for a hilarious but all too accurate picture of the boom.
Even in January 1925, investors began to read negative press about Florida investments. Forbes magazine warned that Florida land prices were based solely upon the expectation of finding a customer, not upon any reality of land value. The Internal Revenue Service began to scrutinize the Florida real estate boom as a giant scam. Speculators intent on flipping properties at huge profits found new buyers increasingly scarce. And then bust.
Before the bust, one day’s Miami Daily News ran to 504 pages and weighed as much as a healthy baby; just two years later, in 1927, a single edition of another Florida daily carried 41 pages of tax delinquency notices. In time, nearly 90 % of Florida’s municipalities defaulted on their bonds. Overleveraged banks collapsed. Empty lots stretched across mile after mile of unbuildable land. The developer Walter P. Fuller offered the not-quite-last word in a memoir published three decades later: “We just ran out of suckers.” Florida’s property bubble burst did not set off the Great Depression, but the Depression rolled over and exacerbated Florida’s situation.
World War II was a powerful accelerator in Florida’s recovery with military bases sprouting in all directions. After the war, many who had been stationed in Florida returned to live there. Florida remained a winter resort largely for the well-off until the earthquake change produced by air conditioning and economy non-stop flights. Summer tourism boomed. Middle class New Yorkers could pay in advance with one check for transportation, accommodation and meals (the “American Plan, two meals a day), and Florida – particularly the billowing Miami Beach – stole the clientele from the upstate borscht belt resorts in the Catskills. Retirement communities and long-term care facilities expanded across the state and, finally, new forms of destination resorts drew in floods of tourists. And my mother and me.
The story of Miami Beach, dear to me (and to my dermatologist) is worth a story of its own. In any case, keep warm. Spring is coming
MODEL OF FLUSHING MEADOW PARK FROM THE\PANORAMA OF NEW YORK CITY AT QUEENS MUSEUM, .ED LITCHER 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
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A tough, feisty photographer who began freelancing for the Associated Press in 1935, Wolcott hasonly recently received the attention she deserves. Most of her fairly short career was spent working under Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration, following the Stryker formula for “documenting” working-class life across the country during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Her New England pictures are eloquent examples of that formula, merging old and new New Englands into an (almost) comfortable relationship with each other. Her own inclination, after studies at the New School for Social Research in New York and the University of Vienna (she heard Hitler speak in Berlin), was to be more of a social activist, an inclination that occasionally surfaces in her “off duty” pictures. In 1941, with husband Lee Wolcott, she moved to a farm in Virginia. For the next three decades she raised a family, taught school, and traveled with her husband, who joined the Foreign Service after a farming accident. In 1975, she returned to photography, this time specializing in color. She and her husband settled in San Francisco in 1978.
Marion Post Wolcott, Miner’s wife on porch of their home, an abandoned company store. Pursglove, West Virginia, ca. 1938, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.15
Marion Post Wolcott, Dancing during the Cotton Carnival. Memphis, Tennessee, May 1940, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.43
Marion Post Wolcott, The Piney Hotel, ca. 1938, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.35
Marion Post Wolcott, White man on wagon, ca. 1938, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.30
Marion Post Wolcott, Gathering of black men, ca. 1938, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.26 Title
Marion Post Wolcott, Work horses on a Farm Security Administration project. Scott’s Bluff, Nebraska, 1941, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.53
Marion Post Wolcott, Hanging bands of tobacco in barn to dry, Russell Spear’s farm. Near Lexington, Kentucky, 1940, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.21
Marion Post Wolcott, Workers and truck, ca. 1938, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.8
Marion Post Wolcott, Coney Island Lunch, ca. 1938, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.34
GREYHOUND BUS TERMINAL ON 38TH STREET NEXT TO OLD PENN STATION GUY LUDWIG, ANDY SPARBERG, GLORIA HERMAN, GLORIA HERMAN AND CLARA BELLA GOT IT RIGHT!
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Sources
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Macy’s Bldg. & Herald Square, New York City, 1907.
Irving Underhill
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Irving Underhill (1872–1960) was one of the most notable commercial photographers in New York City during the first half of the 20th century. He produced work that was featured in postcards and numerous publications while he was still alive, and that continues to be exhibited and receive recognition long after his death.
Wall Street, New York City
Glossy color postcard of Wall Street, New York, New York. Back is divided. Published by The American Art Publishing Co., New York City, #R-34320. It reads “Wall Street Canyon, the financial heart of America, is occupied entirely by banks, trust companies and financial interests. The Stock Exchange on left, the U. S. Sub-Treasury and Bankers Trust Building 39 stories high on right.”
Underhill took a particular interest in capturing the cityscape, landmarks, tall buildings, and nautical scenes. In 1911 Woolworth hired Underhill – whose studio directly fronted the building site – to document the construction of the Woolworth Building at regularly timed intervals. The photographs were then mailed to store managers throughout the country and abroad, with the recommendation that they be distributed and published as “widely as possible.”[6][7] Another self-published work that was a promotional piece in collaboration with the Hudson River Day Line was entitled The Hudson River: photo-gravures.[8]
He was enlisted in the Prohibition with photographs from a Federal Prohibition Laboratory that accompanied a 1926 New York Times article, showing shelves and shelves of liquor.[9]
Irving Underhill was particularly adept at showing the juxtaposition of old pedestrian-scaled buildings and newer skyscrapers that seemed to dominate the older city. Such was the case with one photo of the Trinity Church Spire, shown against the new fifty-story 1 Wall Street at Broadway and Wall, which in 1931 was said to be the most costly plot of real estate in the entire world.[10] Underhill also photographed the rise of the Empire State Building.
In an article celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Architectural League of New York, in 1931, an article in The New York Times entitled “From Roofs to Towers and Slats”, prominently featured a photograph Irving Underhill.[11] This photograph showed the skyline below City Hall Park at the beginning of the century, to symbolize the passing of an era before tall buildings began to dominate the cityscape.
In 1982, a book entitled New York, photographs, 1850-1950 featured some of Underhill’s work, particular his photo of Columbus Circle between 58th and 60th Streets.[12]
A photo of the Woolworth Building in 1913 made shortly after construction was completed was highlighted in a 1993 New York Times article. Charles Hagen compared this photo with an etching from John Marin about the same time, and wrote “Irving Underhill’s photo, made the same year, offers a more sober depiction of the building’s Gothic forms than Marin’s giddy impression, but records it with a mixture of down-to-earth factuality and pride.”[13]
Irving Underhill’s work was displayed along with Berenice Abbott‘s in 1993 exhibition by the Museum of the City of New York entitled “New York Saved: 30 Years of Landmarks Preservation.” The exhibition displayed Underhill’s photo of the exterior of Grand Central Terminal in 1919.[14] Still later, a photograph showing the West Street Building and the Singer Tower from the Hudson River, taken by Underhill ca. 1908, was included in a book on Cass Gilbert.[1]
The work of Irving Underhill continues to resonate today. A colored postcard of Columbus Circle from 1925, was used in a 2005 New York Times article.[15] His picture of the Manhattan Bridge from a New York Times article in 1909, was highlighted in a 2009 article talking about the same bridge and how it has struggled to earn recognition and respect. Underhill’s photo shows the beginning of decking being hung tenuously from the thick and heavy cables overhead.[16]
Digitization efforts have brought Underhill’s work into the public spotlight once again. The New York Public Library Digital Gallery, includes 249 Items under the name “Underhill, Irving” in their digital collection available via their website. Likewise, the Museum of the City of New York has 142 results of digitized images available to view in their online collection. The Brooklyn Museum now has 119 Underhill images in their online digital collection.
Title: Hydro-aeroplane – Wright model at Battery, N.Y. Abstract/medium: 1 photographic print.
Miscellaneous Items in High Demand, PPOC, Library of Congress Public domain
Hydro-aeroplane – Wright model at Battery, N.Y. LCCN2002718324.ti 1912
New York City- Century Opera House, Central Park west & 62nd St. LCCN2003678134.jpg Title: New York City: Century Opera House, Central Park west & 62nd St. Abstract/medium: 1 photographic print.
Title: Arsenal Central Park Abstract/medium: 1 photographic print.Date1914
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As the 1920s roared on in New York City, Irving Chanin was busy building. The developer was responsible for several Garment Center buildings, as well as the famous Roxy Theatre, the Majestic Apartments and the Century Apartments on Central Park West, and the Royale and Majestic Theatres.
His signature building would rise at 122 E. 42nd Street at Lexington Avenue, The Chanin Building. Chanin commissioned architects Sloan & Robertson to design his 56-story tower. It would be the first major Art Deco office building in the city and, according to The City Review, “the finest expression of Art Deco in the city.”
Mayor James Walker was on hand for the dedication of the building in January 1929. It heralded the beginning of an age of iconic Art Deco buildings in Manhattan: Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building would all rise in a matter of years.
Although the bulk of the structure, complying with the city’s demand for set-backs, has been declared somewhat unexciting; the crown of the building with its buttresses and piers has been called the finest in the city. What no one complains of, however, is the exuberant Art Deco decoration.
In “New York 1930, Architecture And Urbanism Between the Two World Wars,” authors Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins write “Above shop fronts sheathed in bronze and black Belgian marble, a bronze frieze narrated the story of evolution, beginning with the lower marine forms and then bursting forth with fish and birds. This formed a plinth for a two-story colonnade of massive Norman piers whose squashed cushion capitals were carved with writhing sea monsters. The fourth story was sheathed in terra-cotta panels rendered with a bold overall pattern of abstract floral patterns”
The frieze depicting evolution stopped at geese; the designers no doubt feeling that including man in the process, only four years after the Scopes Trial, might be too controversial.
Chanin used his own architectural department head, Jacques I. Delamarre and Rene Chambellan, an architectural sculptor, to decorate the interiors. Fantastic Art Deco grills, elevator doors, mailboxes and sculptures greeted the visitor. Two bronze-painted plaster reliefs by Chambellan represent Achievement and Success. The means to gain these are represented in six matching reliefs: three are physical, Effort, Activity and Endurance; and three are mental, Enlightenment, Vision, and Courage.
On the 54th Floor was an roof top observatory and on the 50th and 51st floor was a 200-seat theatre decorated in silver and black for the tenants’ sole use. Later the space was converted to offices.
Chanin installed his own offices on the 52nd floor, lavishing it with Art Deco ornamentation, including bronze gates. Below ground the Baltimore Ohio Railroad Company leased space for ticket offices, waiting rooms and a bus terminal – complete with an immense turntable to turn the busses around.
The Chanin Building was perhaps solely responsible for making 42nd Street the premier commercial address of the time. The imposing structure became the subject of one of Hugh Ferriss’s architectural paintings.
Throughout the 20th Century to the present it remains a striking presence in midtown — an Art Deco masterpiece.
ANDY SPARBERG, LAURA HUSSEY AND MITCHELL ELINSON KNOW THEIR TRAIN STATIONS!
SOURCES
DAYTONIAN IN MANHATTAN
Funding Provided by: Roosevelt Island Corporation Public Purpose Funds Council Member Ben Kallos City Council Discretionary Funds thru DYCD Text by Judith Berdy
Edited by Deborah Dorff ALL PHOTOS COPYRIGHT RIHS. 2022 (C) PHOTOS IN THIS ISSUE (C) JUDITH BERDY RIHS
Born in 2020 as a way to celebrate the strength and resiliency of New Yorkers during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Flag Project at Rockefeller Center replaced the flags surrounding the plaza with crowd-sourced art for the first time in the Center’s history. The 193 flagpoles normally fly the flags of the countries recognized by the United Nations. Now, Rockefeller Center is putting out an open call for artists to submit artwork that reflects this year’s theme “Only One Earth.”
The wildly popular first edition of the Flag Project received over a thousand submissions for the 193 spots available. The two past editions featured flags designed by famous artists and designers like Jeff Koons, Marina Abromovich, KAWS, Christian Siriano, Elliott Erwitt, Tyler Mitchell, and Ryan McGinley, though the project is certainly not limited to renowned artists. Indeed, artists from all walks of life are invited to submit their work for consideration via Rockefeller Center’s website.
The Flag Project returned in 2021 and celebrated New York City through photography. It was presented in partnership with the non-profit Aperture Foundation and featured a lightbox exhibition with works by esteemed street photographer Jamel Shabazz in addition to the flags.
This year’s Flag Project will be presented by Tishman Speyer, the developer behind Rockefeller Center, in partnership with the Climate Museum and the United Nations Environment Programme. “Submit an original piece of art that shows us what the environment means to you, how you live sustainably and in harmony with nature, and the daily steps you take towards positive climate action,” the submission page states.
The winning designs will be created as eco-friendly, biodegradable flags that will fly from April 1st until May 6th and on June 5th in honor of World Environment Day. The flags will be a focal point of Rockefeller Center’s free public programming for Earth Day on April 22nd. Submissions are open until February 24th.
“We’re delighted to be partnering with UNEP and the Climate Museum to address the global threat of climate change this year with inspirational art by artists from around the world. The Flag Project has quickly become one of Rockefeller Center’s most beloved events. It’s an opportunity for artists of all ages, near and far, to share their visions for our one earth,” EB Kelly, Managing Director and Head of Rockefeller Center, said in a statement.
This year’s edition of the Flag Project coincides with Stockholm+50, an international environmental meeting that will be held in Stockholm on June 5th to discuss the UN’s Sustainable Development goals, including the Paris Agreement, the 2030 Agenda, and the post-2020 global Biodiversity Framework.
Day Into Night Into Day in the 138 St-Grand Concourse Subway Station Stairwell. Photo by Argenis Apolinario.
Inside the downtown stairwell between the mezzanine entrance and southbound platform at the 138th St-Grand Concourse Subway Station in the Bronx is Amy Pryor’s mosaic artwork Day Into Night Into Day. Presented by MTA Arts & Design, the four-part mosaic depicts the shifting hours of daylight and darkness over four seasons using a spectrum of colors. Its structure is uniquely based around a twenty-four-hour clock and pie charts. Overlapping the seasonal sunrises and sunsets are charts of stars rarely seen from the Bronx at night. The mosaic’s top left square depicts the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, while the top right represents the vernal equinox, the first day of spring. In the lower-left is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and in the lower right is the autumnal equinox, the first day of fall.
As Sandra Bloodworth, Director of MTA Arts & Design stated: “In many ways, Day Into Night Into Day parallels the daily journeys taken by travelers through the station to and from the Mott Haven neighborhood. Amy’s rendering of the rising and setting of the sun highlights the cosmic energy involved in determining the length of our days and nights. The sparkling surfaces of the mosaics bring a contemplative spirit into the station, reminding us that while the evening brings our day to a close, every morning provides us with a fresh start. The artwork captures our imagination and adds a burst of energy and a wave of tranquility to the beginning and conclusion of our travels.”
No Less Than Everything Came Together by Marcel Dzama at the Bedford Avenue Station. Photo by Kris Graves.
As an additional pop of color, the MTA has unveiled Queens of the Night and No Less Than Everything Comes Together, two permanent mosaic series inside the 1st Avenue and Bedford Avenue L train stations. Created by artist Katherine Bradford, Queens of the Night serves as a tribute to the creatives and essential workers who ride the L train daily. Located in the East Village at the 1st Avenue station, the ethereal figures in Bradford’s work come together to inspire viewers to consider the outward expression of their own interior vivacity. One of the most striking panels from Queens of the Night is “Superhero Responds,” portraying New York’s essential workers in the style of Superman.Situated in Williamsburg at Bedford Avenue, No Less Than Everything Comes Together features theatrical fairy-like figures under the sun and moon. Created by Marcel Dzama, scenes depicted in No Less Than Everything Comes Together are populated with elegant ballet performers, many of whom are adorned with the black-and-white costumes typically worn by NYC Ballet dancers. Scattered throughout the mosaic series are numerous characters representing infamous Brooklynites including Bugsy Siegel and Captain Jonathan Williams — the founder of Williamsburg.
Every One by Nick Cave at Transit Times Sq 42 St Station. Courtesy of MTA Arts & Design.
Inside the new 42nd Street Connector between Times Square and Grand Central is Every One, the first of a three-piece installation by artist Nick Cave. Commissioned by MTA Arts & Design, the installation was created as part of the 42nd Street Shuttle reconstruction and reconfiguration project, costing the city more than $250 million. The figures were made from recomposed source photos of soundsuits taken by James Prinz, which were then interpreted in glass for display on the subway station’s walls.
Every One’s design features a series of figures wearing colorful soundsuits — costumes that camouflage the shape of the wearer. Taking inspiration from African art traditions, ceremonial dresses, and haute-couture fashion, soundsuits are unique in that through covering the entire body, they conceal the wearer’s gender, race, and class, which eliminates audience judgment throughout the performance. Throughout the installation, the figures can be seen jumping and twirling along the wall, with their suits swaying as if moved by the wind. The other two parts of Cave’s installations, Each One and Equal All, will be installed next year at the new shuttle entrance and on the center island platform wall at Grand Central Terminal respectively.
A soaring Art Deco masterpiece and a National Historic Landmark, Cincinnati Union Terminal is also a museum and cultural center where discoveries await. Following a complete renovation, the building reopened to the public in late 2018. ANDY SPARBERG, LAURA HUSEY AND M. FRANK GOT IT!
FROM A READER
From Jay Jacobson But my folks left NYC in the middle 1960s to live in Rome. A few years later (about 1972, i think) my mother returned to New York. She moved into a room in our Mitchell Lama coop on the West Side until she could find a place to live with my dad when he finished up in Rome and came back to NYC. Somehow, my mother was able to rent a one bedroom apartment in the Century. It had the sunken living room, a fake fireplace, and no view at all of Central Park West. The interior garden of building was an unattractive sight of building materials, so looking out the apartment windows offered no views of anything.
When my dad returned, he joined my mother in the Century. She died in 1979, just before our son Dan’s birthday. My dad stayed on as widower, buying the apartment when the condo plan was offered. It was the last home he had, as he died in 2010, shortly after Pat and I brought him to an assisted living facility in Massachusetts to be nearer to us. We celebrated his 100th birthday with family coming from many parts of the United States with a huge dinner from The Great Wall, a local Northampton Chinese restaurant set out in the nursing home main activity room.
When it was clear that my dad would not return to the Century, it became my job to empty his apartment, to have it painted and to arrange for the sale. My dad had delayed selling for as long as he could. He had an idea of the value of the place well beyond reality. He had made friends with many of his neighbors, including one broker, who he trusted to do a good job for him. When I reported the results of the sale, he was disappointed. “How much did the lawyers get for a fee?” he asked. When I told him there was no fee he paid, he was mollified but still grumpy.
About a week later, visiting him in the nursing home, he asked “Who was the lawyer?” When I told him I handled the transaction, he looked at me and said, “Thanks”.
Sent recently from an iPhone transmitting near my home planet
JJJ
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The massive 1909 Century Theatre (originally the New Theatre) was sold by the Shubert Brothers in 1929 to the Chanin Construction Co., headed by architect/developer Irwin Salmon Chanin. In fact, on May 28 the Chanin firm announced its intentions to purchase the entire block from 62nd to 63rd, and from Central Park West to Broadway.
Originally, Irwin Chanin announced that his Palais de France would occupy the site–a multi-use building that would include exhibition space, French-based stores, offices of the French consulate, a hotel, and additional office space for French firms. Chanin traveled to France to negotiate the sale of the site to the Government, but things fizzled. Instead of the ambitious Palaise de France, Chanin’s focus turned to a modern high-rise apartment building. At the time, Chanin’s Art Deco style Hotel Majestic was rising ten blocks north on Central Park West. Like that building, the Century Apartments (named in honor of the theater), would mark the Central Park West skyline with twin towers. The 30-story structure brought welcomed jobs to the Depression-crippled construction industry. On June 21, 1931 The New York Times reported, “At one stage in the steel construction thirty trades were employed simultaneously. The number of men at work has been 1,050, and at one time there were 1,400 workers.”
Chanin stressed vertical and horizonal planes in his Art Deco, or “modern American,” design. The completed building held 417 apartments, many with Hollywood-set-ready sunken living rooms and fireplaces. Residents had views of Central Park or the landscaped private garden within the U-shaped building.
Irwin S. Chanin was undoubtedly pleased with his latest project, since he and his family were among the initial residents.
An advertisement in The Princeton Alumni Weekly was entitled, “The Century Has Everything and Central Park.” It touted that the apartments included “such ‘Century Specialties’ as 3-room duplexes, 2-room and 4-room tower units with 3 exposures, 6-room tower suites with 4 exposures and 7-room corner solarium units facing the Park.” (Those “solarium units” featured imported glass from England that permitted ultra-violet rays to penetrate the interiors.)
Along with the expected bankers and businessmen, the Century Apartments quickly attracted residents from the entertainment industry. On March 9, 1934 The Sun reported that actress Sally O’Neill had leased a duplex suite. Largely forgotten today, she was a film headliner, appearing in more than 40 films with co-stars like Constance Bennett and Joan Crawford.
Another entertainer in the building was Ethel Merman, whose career was skyrocketing. When she opened in Girl Crazy at the Alvin Theatre in 1930, The New Yorker deemed her “imitative of no one.” Sharing her apartment were her parents, Edward and Agnes Zimmerman. (Ethel explained to The New York Sun, “Some people think I’m Jewish. I’m not. I’m Scotch-German. Mother is Scotch; father is German. And Merman was better for the stage than Zimmerman. So I dropped the Zim.”)
Ward Morehouse, The New York Sun‘s drama critic interviewed Ethel in her apartment shortly after midnight on November 6, 1936, following the opening of performance in Red, Hot and Blue. Agnes stayed up while he was there, possibly for propriety’s sake. He wrote, “The living room was a flower shop; it had taken three cabs to haul her first-night tributes homeward.”
The 28-year-old singer and actress had come a long way in a few years. Morehouse said, “It’s my impression that when Mr. [Vinton] Freedley hired you for your first show, he paid you $350 weekly, but that you now get $3,500 a week.”
In typical Merman fashion, she responded, “Something around that. It’s a percentage arrangement. So far it’s worked out all right. When Vinton told me he wanted me for Red, Hot and Blue I said sure, I’d like to work for him, but he’d have to pay me. Well, he did…We’re giving a swell show right now.” (Merman’s Depression Era pay for Red, Hot and Blue would equal nearly $64,500 per week today.)
In 1937 Rose Gershwin, mother of George and Ira Gershwin, moved in. George had purchased a house on West 103rd Street for the family, but following his death that year the house was sold. Rose was the sold beneficiary of his estate. (She died at the age of 71 in her apartment on December 16, 1948.)
Other entertainment figures followed. On August 30, 1938 The New York Times announced, “Among those reported as having taken space in the thirty-story Century Apartments, 25 Central Park West, were Graham McNamee, radio announcer, and Al Goodman, orchestra leader. The former leased a terrace suite on the twelfth floor; the latter a seven-room solarium, facing Central Park.” Al Goodman was one of the most sought-after conductors on Broadway, eventually directing over 150 first-night performances.
Film star Carmen Miranda took a duplex apartment in June 1939. And on the same day producer and stage manager Bernard Hart signed a lease for a duplex. Although Hart was overshadowed by his famous playwright brother, Moss Hart, he more than made a name for himself. Among the hit plays he would manage were My Fair Lady and Camelot.
Film sensation Carmen Miranda leased an apartment in 1939 after the filming of Banana da Terra. from the collection of the New York Public Library
Not everyone in the Century Apartments, of course, came from the entertainment field. In 1940 residents included F. Tirade, president of the Gulf Shipping Company of Mexico; Chester Gash, president of the A. Gash Olive Oil Company; and at least eight physicians.
That year author William March moved in. The former highly-decorated U.S. Marine was well-known for his parties. According to biographer Roy S. Simmonds in his 1984 The Two Worlds of William March:
It was here, in Apartment 30-K…that March gave the more flamboyant of his legendary cocktail parties. Findley McRae, one one occasion arriving early for a party, found in the refrigerator jugs of cocktails which had been mixed the previous day for the large influx of guests…Clay Shaw has also recalled those parties in the “tremendous living room” with its “marvelous view over the Park,” and the seemingly inexhaustible jugs of prepared cocktails.
Motion picture actress Elaine Ellis did some entertaining of her own. On May 13, 1941 Ward Morehouse reported that she “entertained at the Century Apartments for [film director] Jus Addiss and Hayden Rorke. Guests included Ruth Chatterton, Constance Collier, Shirley Booth, Whitford Kane, Ann Corio, Anthony Brown, John Colton, Alexander Kirkland, Tonio Selwart, Thelma Schnee and Barry Thomson.”
Surrounded by high profile residents, the Irwin Chanins led comparatively subdued lives. Their names appeared in the society columns, however, on June 3, 1951, following the wedding of daughter Doris Joy to Alan Joseph Freeman. The ceremony took place in the garden of the Chanin country home in New Rochelle, New York.
Abraham “Abe” Bennett Minsky and his brothers were famous for their risque burlesque shows. The city outlawed burlesque in 1939, essentially putting an end to their careers. Following Abe’s death in 1949, his widow Mollie Minsky moved into the Century Apartments. Active in Jewish charities and the treasurer of the Burley Amusement Corp., she was unapologetic about her husband’s shows. “Burlesque never hurt anybody,” she told a reporter, “Anyone who objects to burlesque, authorities or no authorities, doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Irwin S. Chanin was not the only architect in the Century Apartments. In 1966 architect Robert A. M. Stern and his wife, Lynn, moved in. In his Between Memory and Invention, My Journey in Architecture, he noted:
In a rental unit I could not make changes to structural walls, but I daringly did as much as possible to express my point of view, commissioning stage carpenters to build a platform over much of the “sunken” living room without damaging the underlying floor. The platform had the effect of transforming our Central Park-facing casement windows into “French windows” (without any safety rails!) and forming a conversation pit a la Paul Rudolph, focused on the fake fireplace that was building standard.
The renovated Stern apartment. photo by Hans Namuth via Between Memory and Invention.
Stern’s alterations earned a two-page spread by Barbara Plumb in The New York Times on January 29, 1967.
Theater architect Herbert Knapp lived here at the time. The chief architect for the Shuberts, he was responsible for the Hammerstein Theatre (now the Ed Sullivan) in 1925, and the 1928 Ethel Barrymore Theatre. He suffered a fatal heart attack in his apartment here on February 16, 1973 at the age of 86.
photo by David Shankbone
In 1976, Sylvia Schofler Chanin died. Twelve years later, on February 25, 1988, after having lived in his Century Apartments for more than half a century, Irwin Chanin died in his apartment at the age of 96. Astoundingly, he had gone to his office in the Chanin Building every day until suffering an injury a month earlier. Chanin had lived to see several of his buildings, including the Century, the Beacon Theater and the Chanin Building designated as individual New York City landmarks.
At the time of Chanin’s death, the residents and owners of the Century Apartments had been locked in a heated conflict for about five years regarding conversion to cooperatives. Then, on February 19, 1989 The New York Times headlined an article “At Last, The Battle of the Century Ends.” Journalist Richard D. Lyons began the article saying, “One of the longest, bitterest conversion fights in Manhattan apartment house history has ended with the imposing Century Apartments…becoming a condominium.” Of the now 410 apartments, 229 had been sold to their occupants at from one-half to one-third the market rate.
The landmarked building continued to attract celebrity residents. Over the years professional boxer Jack Dempsey, theater mogul Lee Shubert, actors Nanette Fabray, Joey Heatherton, Carol Lawrence and Robert Goulet, and television personage Bill Cullin lived here.
Classical clarinetist David Glazer and his wife, Mia, were residents in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, as were actor Kevin Conway and television soap opera star Eileen Fulton. And in 2010 Dorothy Lichtenstein, widow of the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein purchased a two-bedroom apartment here. The sale prompted a headline in The New York Times on February 11, “No Need to Buy Artwork.”
photo via realtor.com
Irwin S. Chanin’s sleek and imperious Art Deco structure is an integral part of Central Park West’s skyline–the backdrop for so many tourist photographs and motion picture scenes throughout the decades.
STRAUSS MEMORIAL ON BROADWAY AND 103 STREET. THE STRAUSS’ PERISHED ON THE TITANIC
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
Sources
DAYTONIAN IN MANHATTAN
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