In 1756 the population of New York City numbered 10,530. There were about 2,000 buildings, nearly all of them below what is now City Hall Park. By now Native Americans were essentially gone (a letter from the city that year mentioned “There are very few Indians on this island, all being either cut off by intestine wars or diseases.”), and parts of the upper portions of Manhattan were becoming cultivated into farmland. Before long luxurious summer estates of the city’s wealthy merchants and British officers would begin dotting the upper reaches. Until now the growing city did not have, nor need, a dedicated jail building. Law breakers were housed in the old City Hall. But the arrangement was quickly growing insufficient. According to “The Old Martyrs’ Prison” written in 1902, “the City was growing in wickedness as it grew in population, and it was decided to erect a New Gaol on the northeastern corner of the Common (or ‘The Fields,’ as it was then called), adjoining the High Road to Boston.” The Fields was the center of public activity in mid-18th century New York. It remains today, somewhat altered, as City Hall Park. The new jail would be erected off the northeast corner of the common; a site north of the hubbub of business and residences, but prominent to assemblies in The Field. The jail was completed either in 1756 or 1758; a square stone building about 60 by 75 feet and three stories tall. The basement, which would be more appropriately termed a dungeon today, was a series of great brick arches, nine feet tall with walls two feet thick. Heavy doors connected the dungeon spaces.
The handsome Georgian structure above ground was built of rough-cut stone. A cupola surmounting the roof contained a bell used to give alarms of fire. The location of the fire would be indicated at night by a lantern suspended from a pole in the direction of the fire. Costing $12,000, it was New York City’s first jail built expressly for that purpose. “The Old Martyrs’ Prison” noted “It was an imposing edifice in its day, and, standing as it did the most conspicuous object to the traveler as he entered the town by the old Boston High Road, was a powerful admonition to all comers to lead a sober, righteous and upright life—and to pay their debts.” In 1759 an act was passed that removed all remaining prisoners from City Hall to the new jail. The Fields was soon a visible object lesson in righteous living. The Poor-House sat near the New Goal, approximately where City Hall now stands, had been erected in 1735 and in 1764 the whipping post, pillory, cage and stocks were transferred from Wall Street to an area in front of the jail. That year the jail received a surprising prisoner. Major Rogers of His Majesty’s Army was a prominent figure in town and lived far beyond his means. Finally, in January, his frustrated creditors had him arrested. Rogers’ companions demanded his release, feeling his imprisonment was an insult to the Royal Army and a threat to the military authority. The jailor rebuffed them. The soldiers descended on the jail, breaking into the doors with axes and muskets and releasing their Major. The other prisoners had the chance to escape; but decided it best to remain in their cells. The ensuing riot was finally squashed by the militia, but not before one of the British Sergeants was killed. Among the prisoners here were those who failed to made good on their debts. By the American colonial legal system, based on the British Statute of Merchants of 1285, creditors could simply report a debtor to the sheriff who would arrest the offender and toss him into the jail. Since the prisoners had no money, they were unable to pay their bail and relied on the charity of friends to bail them out. Prisoners with a view of the common watched the events of a growing revolution unfold. The Sons of Liberty erected, time and again, a Liberty Pole; only to have it pulled down by the British. King’s College student Alexander Hamilton began drilling his artillery company on the green.
The New-York Tribune would later describe conditions in the building. “There was no settled allowance in this jail for the prisoners, nor had they bedding. The Humane Society…and donations from friends and the public were all they could rely on.” Some diarists noted that inmates would dangle a bag or old shoe out the window from a pole hoping to a charitable passerby would drop a coin in.
By 1775 the New Goal was no longer sufficient for the rapidly growing city. That year the Bridewell was built—a prison that lined up with the jail and the Poor-House along the northern fringe of the common. Now the New Goal was used exclusively for debtors, earning its new name, The Debtors’ Prison.
Within the year the Debtors’ Prison would receive another, chilling, name: The Provost Prison. On August 27, 1776 the British took possession of the city. They found the Debtors’ Prison and the Bridewell sitting empty. Provost Marshall William Cunningham clearly remembered the humiliation he had received the year before at the foot of the Liberty Pole and he was out for revenge.
Cunningham took command of the Debtors’ Prison, reserving it for rebels and military personnel. “The Old Martyrs’ Prison” said “He was a corrupt, hard-hearted and cruel tyrant, who hesitated at nothing that would add to the miseries of his helpless victims or to his own wealth and comfort. His hatred for the Americans found vent in the application of torture with searing-irons and secret scourges to those of his charges who, for any reason, fell under the ban of his displeasure.”
A contemporary account added “The cruelty practiced toward the inmates of the Provost rivals all that may be found in the annals of Christendom. Not content with seeing them die a slow death from cold and starvation, he poisoned many by mingling a preparation of arsenic with their food, and is said to have boasted that he had thus killed more of the rebels with his own hand than had been slain by all the King’s forces in America.” Among those incarcerated here was Ethan Allen. In May, 1778 he was traded for Colonel Campbell of the British Army.
After the war the building returned to use as a debtors’ prison. But slowly reform tempered the practice of imprisoning debtors. The futility of the action was more and more obvious. The New-York Tribune pointed out that “The consequence was that the last condition of the man was far worse than the first. His family, unable to obtain money except by begging, which was also severely punished, were either driven to starvation or to greater depths of debt.” In 1817 a law was enacted that prohibited incarceration for anyone whose debts were less than $25. Finally in 1830 debtors’ prisons were essentially outlawed and a committee of the Common Council chose the old jail to house the public records. About $15,000 was spent in remodeling and refitting the structure, partly to make it look less jail-like. The floors and windows were changed, the cupola and Georgian roof were removed and the building was lengthened at each end about seventeen feet by the addition of a portico and steps. The handsome 18th century structure was now a Greek Revival temple—said to resemble the Doric Temple of Diana at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
Remodeling stopped in 1832 when the city was overtaken by the cholera epidemic. Residents fled northward to outlying villages and businesses were paralyzed. Work on the old jail was suspended and it was temporarily used as a hospital. In the second half of the century the Tweed administration spent another $140,000 to remodel the structure—now a century old. An architecturally-incongruous story was added above the entablature and pediments, and interior was enlarged by moving the front and back walls outward, so that the free-standing columns were now engaged, almost like pilasters.
As the turn of the century approached, pedestrians navigate around construction debris — photo NYPL Collection
As the 20th century crept closer, the New Gaol, turned Debtors’ Prison, turned Provost Prison, turned Hall of Records was endangered. In 1894 Thomas A. Janvier wrote in his “In Old New York,” “That the remaining tenant has made exceedingly bad use of his exclusive property is patent to the eyes and nose of whoever ventures within its dirty precincts; nor will such adventurer question the tradition of the office that within it are recorded all the bad smells which have been known on this island from the earliest Dutch times…Fortunately this defilement of the interior of the Hall of Records has not affected its exterior, which essentially is unchanged since Recorder Riker took possession of his new quarters sixty years ago.” Few, however, shared Janvier’s appreciation of vintage architecture. The new Hall of Records was in the course of construction in 1897 and the outdated building was termed by most an “eyesore.” The National Historical Museum lobbied Mayor Strong to preserve the structure. In December 1897 the Board of Aldermen voted to place it, when vacated, in the care of the Museum to be used as a public museum of historic relics.
Subway construction threatens the old building. — from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York
The American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society disagreed, protesting “The old revolutionary prison is a unique landmark. There is not another building with a like history in the United States. It is a monument to the patriotism and devotion of a generation of heroes, the benefits of whose sufferings and sacrifices we enjoy; and gratitude and pride alike dictate that in some form and in some place these historic stones should be preserved.”
The preservation of the “historic stones,” however, was not to be. Instead what The Sun called a “hideous example of the brown stone age, the old Hall of Records,” was demolished in 1903. The newspaper reported that “the axe and crowbar laid bare the cells in its cellar where Ethan Allen and other leaders of the Revolutionary forces were held in durance vile.”
Old City Hall (far left) sat across from the Debtors’ Prison — photo by Alice Lum
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CHAPEL OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD STAINED GLASS WINDOW ED LITCHER, NINA LUBLIN, ALEXIS VILLEFANE GOT IT
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
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It was lunch hour for the staff at Goldwater Hospital. In 1963 there was no employees cafeteria, so the staff would take a quick bus ride to he dining room in the Central Nurses Residence for their meals. On this day, the story is that the bus driver suffered an attack and the bus went off the road down the 25 foot embankment into the the east channel of the East River.
As you study the photos, note there were no guard rails and the roadway was just feet from the embankment.
Of the 11 persons on board, 7 were killed. The victims were said to have been employees of the physical therapy department.
APWIRE PHOTO
RIHS Archives
Staff of Goldwater watch scene from terraces.
Mayor Robert Wagner visiting the scene.
Scuba divers on the scene
The bus lowered onto an Army Corps of Engineers tug.
THURSDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY NEW YORK AQUARIUM AT CONEY ISLAND
ALEXIS VILLEFANE, VERN HARWOOD, ARLENE BESSENOFF, GLORIA HERMAN, ARON EISENPREISS, JAY JACOBSON, NINA LUBLIN, LISA FERNANDEZ ALL GOT IT RIGHT
EDITORIAL
I do not remember the bus tragedy at Goldwater. It was three years later that I set foot on the island. There were no amenities here in the 1960’s, just Goldwater, Coler, the nurses residence and lots of abandoned buildings.
Many people came and photographed the isolated Welfare Island and its emptiness.
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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In 2011, the nonprofit Gotham Whale recorded just five humpbacks spotted off New York City. Since then, the number has soared. By 2018, sightings had jumped to 272. Less than a year later, 377 whales of different species were observed. Whale watching was a growing business in waters around NYC “B.C.” and hopefully will be soon again soon.
A recent Discover Magazine article cites two main factors that drive the increasing presence of whales. First, the water conditions in the NYC bay area are improving. Twenty years ago, the waters around New York City were some of the most polluted in the world—a toxic stew of chemicals and garbage. Thanks to successful environmental policies, whales are back in the Big Apple. According to NYC’s “State of the Harbor” 2012 report, the water is the cleanest it has been in over a decade. Secondly, there’s a lot more food for humpback whales around. Menhaden, tiny silver fish consumed by humans mostly as fish oil pills, are a primary food source for humpback whales. When the allowed Atlantic catch was drastically cut back in 2012, their number increased quickly. Since then, researchers say, 300 million more of these fish are inhabiting the Atlantic Coast. Yum.
This isn’t the first time whales enjoyed our waters.
When first settlers arrived, they found a garden of delights. Mark Kurlansky, in The Big Oyster, writes “The harbor was crowded with bass, cod, weakfish, herring, mackerel, blackfish, as well as frolicking, diving mammals – whales, porpoises, and seals.” And, similarly, the authors of Mannahatta tell us that New York “was acclaimed by early settlers for its biological diversity and fertility: home to bears, wolves, songbirds, and salamanders, with clear, clean waters jumping with fish, and porpoises and whales in the harbor.”
It was said that in early colonial times, there were so many large critters in the harbor that you could walk from Manhattan to New Jersey on their backs, without wetting your feet.
Whaling was not unknown. Basques from France and Spain had captured whales at sea for centuries – even, it seems, off the coast of Newfoundland long before Europeans created colonies in North America. Native Americans caught whales as well but in shallow waters off the coast. They were known as “drift whales” and European new-comers joined with Native Americans in this practice.
Hudson NY, Whale Oil Industry https://hvmag.com/life-style/history/hudson-valley-whaling-industry-a-history-of-claverack-landing-hudson-ny/
When we think of whaling in American history, we think of New England’s ports, whalers on Cape Cod Bay established a thriving shore fishery in Wellfleet – and this industry would grow to be world famous. But the first organized effort by colonists to hunt drift whales actually took place in Southampton, Long Island, in March 1644. Over the next 30 years this developed into shore-whaling operations, where small boats were launched when whales were sighted offshore. By 1672 the colonists and their Native American neighbors were working together to hunt whales along the coast from small sailing vessels.
By the early 18th century, this phase of the whaling industry had passed. Fewer whales were found close to shore, so whalers turned to larger boats to take them farther off the coast for the hunt. This meant When we think of whaling in American history, we think of New England’s ports. Whalers on Cape Cod much more capital was required to build and man larger ships, taking a much long time at sea. Whaling became a much more specialized industry. Nantucket flourished, but in the early 19th century, several communities on the south shore of Long Island and, perhaps more surprising, along the Hudson River also became major whaling ports. The most famous were Sag Harbor and Hudson.
Sag Harbor became one of the largest whaling ports in the country. Its whaling industry built on the Southampton drift-whale and shore-whaling trades. In 1785 business partners Benjamin Huntting and Stephen Howell sent two ships down to the coast of Brazil that returned with about 350 barrels of oil each. It wasn’t much – just a few years later ships would be coming home with 2,000 or even 2,500 barrels – but it was enough. Sag Harbor was on her way and for the next 50 years, enjoyed good times, or “greasy luck” as the whalemen would say. Whales were plentiful and there was no reason to even leave the Atlantic.
The official seal of Hudson, New York, featured here on a silver half dollar commemorating the city’s sesquicentennial. Credit: The Red Book, whitman.com.
Hudson became an important whaling center because several Nantucketers searched for a harbor that would be safe from British intrusions. Two prosperous Nantucket-born Quaker brothers named Seth and Thomas Jenkins, decided to seek promising dockage farther west, off the coast, and began exploring likely sites along the Hudson River: first in Manhattan, then in Poughkeepsie. In 1783, they found the site of present-day Hudson, then known as Claverack Landing and, incorporating as the Nantucket Navigators, created a deep water port, too far inland for hit-and-run tactics by British gunboats. Thirty whaling families from Nantucket, Providence, Martha’s Vineyard and Newport soon joined the Jenkinses, calling themselves the Proprietors.
Within two years there were enough settlers from the seacoast to incorporate as a city, only the third within New York State, and rename it after the river’s Dutch discoverer. Their early experiment in urban planning succeeded so well that the Proprietors proceeded to lay out all the land between the bays in an even, logical grid of streets, with forethought as to where all the trades ancillary to shipping would best be located.
Soon, European visitors described Hudson as a cosmopolitan, thriving commercial city. It had 2,500 residents by 1790, 4,000 by 1800. And whaling was definitely the driving force. In 1797, a ship called the American Hero brought back the largest cargo of sperm whale oil in American history. The British again blockaded US shipping traffic during the War of 1812, causing a downturn in the American whaling industry that put the Proprietors’ pioneering firm out of business. But the City of Hudson had developed its own economic momentum by then, no longer dependent upon a single industry. And whaling was revived by a newly formed Hudson Whaling Company beginning in 1829.
Other Hudson River ports followed. The price of oil soared in 1830, and the Newburgh Whaling Company and the Poughkeepsie Whaling Company were established in 1832. The Cape Cod whaling industry continued to thrive, but the Hudson River industry collapsed in the next decade. The Poughkeepsie, Dutchess and Hudson Whaling Companies all sent their last ships to sea in the 1840s. But the Great Seal of the City of Hudson sports an image of a whale to this very day..
Sag Harbor’s last whaler, the brig Myra, sailed in 1871. She would never return, being condemned in Barbados in 1874, too leaky and worn to safely to return. With her demise, Sag Harbor’s whaling industry came to an end. Her wharves slowly went to rot. The boat shops and cooperages and oil yards closed. Her streets grew quiet, no longer teeming with hardy, boisterous sailors. It was, as one local resident wrote in 1872, “Dozeville.” One last factoid: A former whaler, Captain William Freeman, bought a dumpy building in 1876, built a porch, installed a bar and dining room, and named it The American Hotel or “The American House.”
We hope the return of the whales to New York will not be just a spring break visit, and that they will remain our neighbors. Of course there are issues. For one, whales have some competition for their favorite food: Commercial fishing operations along the eastern seaboard are targeting menhaden on an industrial scale, turning the fish into animal feed and human supplements. In addition, New York City is the busiest port on the eastern seaboard, with as many as 20 or more ships lining up to drop anchor and unload their cargo at any given time. This means collisions with whales—sometimes fatal—do happen. Twenty-eight fatal collisions have occurred in New York and New Jersey since 2016. Still, so far, so good. Whales are back!
Your grandmother’s kitchenware on exhibit at Bloomingdale’s Housewares Department
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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Reclining Liberty by Zaq Landsberg, Marcus Garvey Park
Spring is a great time to be out and about in New York City seeing public art. It’s not too cold, it’s not too hot, it’s usually just right. There is an abundance of new public art on display this month, from up in the Bronx, where an eagerly awaited exhibition by Yayoi Kusama will be featured at New York Botanical Garden, to Prospect Heights, Brooklyn where a meditative sound installation bellows among blossoming cherry trees. You could promenade through the city taking in culture and art without ever being inside. Check out the new and ongoing public art on display and plan to make a day of fresh air art experiences.
Reclining Liberty by artist Zaq Landsberg is set to premiere, after much delay, in Morningside Park on April 26. The slightly weary-looking Lady Liberty, posed on her side, head propped up by her hand seems to be waiting, like most of us, for better days that surely are coming.
The sculpture is composed mostly of plaster resin and coated with oxidized copper paint to mimic the copper patina of the real Statue of Liberty. The artist, in explaining his draw to monuments states, “They are literally where the political and the aesthetic meet.” You can visit the public art statue at the base of the stairs at 120th Street and Manhattan Avenue in Harlem.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg statue at City Point in downtown Brooklyn. Photo by Bob Krasner
Artists Gillie and Marc created this bronze statue of late U.S. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to commemorate her in the struggle for gender equality and human rights. The statue, located in downtown Brooklyn is one of ten statues of notable women installed in NYC by the artists to increase the representation of women in public sculpture from 3 to 10% . The double-step base represents the Supreme Court and the climb she made to get there.
Narcissus Garden by Yayoi Kusama Photo Courtesy of New York Botanical Garden
The long-delayed garden exhibition KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature will open at New York Botanical Garden on April 10th. The exhibition will be a comprehensive survey of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama lifelong obsession with the natural world. KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature will include programs, a publication, and exhibits both in the gardens and within the surrounding buildings of the 250-acre landscape.
Giant Pin Cushion art installation incorporated into the Garment District Alliance kiosk district created with colorful botanical materials by Floratorium artists. Photo courtesy of Garment District Alliance
The enormous bronze needle and button public art sculpture you may have seen on 7th Ave next to the garment district info kiosk has a companion for the summer titled Pin Cushion. The giant floral arrangement has transformed the Garment District Alliance kiosk into a delightful place to stop, look and get information about the district.
Pin Cushion was created by Patricia Gonzalez and Carlos Franqui of Floratorium and is made up of 50+ bales of curly willow, nine wisteria bales, and hundreds of faux hydrangeas, poppies, greenery, and butterflies. New Yorkers are encouraged to stop by and visit the exhibit through the summer.
The Flag Project at Rockefeller Center features 83 winning photographs produced as flags. Photo courtesy of courtesy of Tishman Speyer
The Flag Project 2021 is a public art installation celebrating the medium of photography with 83 winning submissions produced as flags flown on the iconic flagpoles of Rockefeller Center. The public art installation also features guest photographers, invited by Aperture, who have helped define New York in photographs, including Kwame Brathwaite, Renee Cox, Elliott Erwitt, Duane Michals, Ryan McGinley, Susan Meiselas, Nan Goldin, and Tyler Mitchell.
The 2021 Flag Project installation will showcase the diversity, energy, endurance and imagination of NYC with photographs of, for or inspired by the city’s faces, objects and textures. The Flag Project is on display through April 30.
Jamal Shabazz with his photograph in the Aperture Lightbox installation in Rockefeller Center. photo courtesy courtesy of Tishman Speyer.
Aperture and Rockefeller Center present an outdoor exhibition of New York City street and subway photographs by Jamel Shabazz, who is known for his authentic and spontaneous depictions of NYC life. Jamel’s career began in 1980 and spans forty years. Fourteen of Shabazz’s portraits will be displayed in the heart of the city, installed on seven-foot-tall lightboxes across Rockefeller Center’s public plazas. From youth culture to a wide range of social conditions, Shabazz’s street photographs are an endearing and truthful depiction of his subjects from the 1980s to the present. You can see them in the Rockefeller public plazas alongside the Flag Project installation.
A sweeping survey of KAW’S career from his roots as a graffiti artist to a dominating force in contemporary art, KAWS: WHAT PARTYhighlights five overarching tenets in the artist’s practice. You will be immersed in the art of KAWS through the various sections of the exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.
Renowned for his pop culture-inspired characters in paintings and sculpture and playful use of abstraction with meticulous execution, the show covers drawings, paintings, bronze sculptures, objects and monumental wooden sculptures of his well known COMPANION character. Museum visitors can digitally interact with the art through AR (augmented reality) app on their smartphones. The exhibition is on view through September 5, 2021.
HALL OF FAME OF GREAT AMERICANS BRONX COMMUNITY COLLEGE, FORMERLY NYU UPTOWN JAY JACOBSON, M. FRANK, ANDY SPARBERG, T. VISEE, WILLA KLEIN ALL GOT IT RGHT!!
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:
UNTAPPED NEW YORK
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He started as an architect and was caught in political corruption scandal, then was introduced to new artistic interpretations
Oscar Bluemner, Evening Tones, 1911-1917, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of James F. Dicke II and museum purchase made possible by the American Art Forum, the Julia D. Strong Endowment and the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2002.24
Former Bronx Borough Courthouse
Between E. 161st St., Brook Ave., and Third Ave.
Oscar Bluemner (with Michael Garvin and Max Hausel)
1905-1914
The courthouse, a compact four-story mass of smooth granite, is divided almost evenly between a deeply rusticated two-story base and an upper portion where piers, pilasters and tall windows rise to a cornice and attic story. A preliminary sketch shows a high dome and cupola, never built, which would have visually absorbed the upthrust and perhaps more satisfyingly resolved the relation of vertical and horizontal. To fit its site, the building is trapezoidal in plan, narrowing toward the side facing down Third Avenue. This façade is penetrated at ground level by a great arched portal scooped out of the heavy stonework. Above it, the façade retreats into a deep bay flanked by two colossal cylindrical columns, between which is poised Jules Eduard Roiné’s larger-than-life-sized marble statue of Justice. Behind her, on the rear wall of the recess, the arch of the lower portal is repeated as a window frame, surmounted by a lion’s-head keystone.
In this Third Avenue front, and its variations on the other sides of the courthouse, very familiar elements of Beaux-Arts classicism have been used with restraint to construct a powerful architectural emblem—the force and threat of the Law represented below, its rationality and self-control above. In compensation for its structural austerity, the Third Avenue façade is enlivened by sharply chiseled geometrical inventions. Intricate frames, stylized swags, and complicated broken pediments surround the windows, some of which puncture the wall with unusually deep, shadowy apertures. Thick bullet-headed finials top the attic. There is even a motif—a set of three classical guttae (or “drops”)—which appears with witty persistence in all sorts of unexpected positions. The total effect is strikingly modern, in the manner of Viennese and Parisian buildings of the period, and very unlike New York’s turn-of-the-century architectural ornament.
How did the Bronx come by this remarkable Beaux-Arts building? By accident.
In 1903, the first President of the borough, Louis Haffen, passed on the contract for a courthouse design, worth $40,000, to his political right-hand-man, Michael Garvin. (“If you have the pull,” Garvin acknowledged later, “you get the work.”) Haffen was only following the Tammany tradition of rewarding loyalty with fat public works assignments. But his friend (despite serving as Building Commissioner) proved to have such limited architectural skills that his plans were rejected by the New York Art Commission, which derided them as “egregious” and “despicable.” The unfortunate Garvin was forced to seek out an underemployed architect, offering to share fees and credit in return for an acceptable building.
That he turned to Oscar Bluemner, a German émigré who had been a prize student at Berlin’s Royal Academy, was a stroke of fortune for Bronx architecture. But not for Bluemner: when the drawings had been prepared, Garvin submitted them as his own work, and ignored both promised credit and payment. The outraged Bluemner sued and won, his testimony leading to an investigation, which eventually resulted in Haffen’s dismissal. Bluemner, however, was awarded only about one-quarter of the amount he felt he was owed, and forced to allow Garvin main credit for the building; in disappointment, he gave up his profession a short while later, and turned to painting. Official records—even those of the Landmarks Commission—continued to attribute the courthouse to Garvin.
Like its designer, the building itself suffered from the political environment. Construction, begun in 1905, was drawn out until 1914, and cost two million dollars, more than twice the original estimate. (Not coincidentally, Garvin remained as supervising architect through the project.) By 1934 the county had found reasons to build a new courthouse, eventually leaving only a police court at the Third Avenue site. When the building was officially closed by the city in 1977, vandals undertook the stripping of its metalwork until all doorways and windows were sealed with concrete blocks (leveling off Bluemner’s deep embrasures). Although a 1981 designation as a landmark helped protect the courthouse from threatened razing, serious repairs have never been undertaken: the building is currently on the Landmarks Conservancy’s most endangered list. And lively plans for occupancy by community design and museum groups were thwarted when the courthouse was sold to a private developer for a derisory $130,000.
But things may be looking up. The new owner has performed a much-needed exterior cleaning—the Tammany-purchased granite having begun to yellow even before the building was completed—and found a tenant. Meanwhile, after revival of critical interest in his paintings led to a 2005 show at the Whitney Museum, the imaginative Oscar Bluemner is at last being acknowledged as author of this sophisticated public building.
David Bady
Photographs: Lehman College Art Gallery and David Bady
AFTER ARCHITECTURE, A CAREER IN ART
Oscar Bluemner, Self-Portrait, 1933, oil on panel, 19 3/4 x 14 3/4 in. Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
Sunset
Early life
Bluemner was born as Friedrich Julius Oskar Blümner in Prenzlau, Germany, on June 21, 1867. He studied painting and architecture at the Royal Academy of Design in Berlin.
Old Canal Port
Painting
In 1908 Bluemner met Alfred Stieglitz, who introduced him to the artistic innovations of the European and American avant-garde. By 1910, Bluemner had decided to pursue painting full-time rather than architecture.
He exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show. He said that the Americans’ contribution failed to match that of the Europeans because the American selection process reflected rivalries and compromises rather than curatorial judgment, resulting in a “melée of antagonistic examples”. Then in 1915 Stieglitz gave him a solo exhibition at his gallery, 291. Despite participating in several exhibitions, including solo shows, for the next ten years Bluemner failed to sell many paintings and lived with his family in near poverty. He created paintings for the Federal Arts Project in the 1930s.
Morning Light
Fourth, not so much Counterintuitive, but rather not noticed – the lack of freight railways in the City.
Later life
After his wife’s death in 1926, Bluemner moved to South Braintree, Massachusetts. From there in 1932 he contributed a letter to an ongoing debate in the New York Times on the question “What is American Art?”. He wrote:
America sells its shoes, machines, canned beef and so forth in Europe and all over the world not because they have an American style or are wrapped in the American flag, but simply because they are best. Thus also, the French export their paintings and birth-control, and the Germans export sauerkraut and prima donnas, because those things, each, are best. Today, for quality, nationalism, as a race-attribute, means nothing; chemistry, astronomy, or engineering admit, nowhere, of any national flavoring, nor do higher things like religion or philosophy.
Let us, here, make progressive and best painting, each one as he is fit to do, and merely ask: What and when is painting, in a critical sense? … How can the people agree on what is American style, if the painters themselves, and by their work, disagree profoundly as to what real painting itself is! And there is, and always was, nothing more contemptible, ridiculous and, to art, disastrous, than patrioteering, which thinly veils profiteering.
Ideally, art, pure, is of a sphere and of no country; the first real artists, always and everywhere, have either been importers or immigrants bringing the light with them. El Greco, an immigrant … defied the Spanish professors … ; we, now, call his work more truly Spanish than that of his local contemporaries. And in the same sense, the future will not fail to stamp that of our own work as peculiarly American in which the living painter, here, has injected no conscious thought of his hailing from Hoboken or Kankakee, and every consideration of pure and modern painting and of the supreme quality he maybe capable of.
He had a successful one-man show in 1935 at the Marie Harriman Gallery in New York City. In the New York Times, Edward Alden Jewell called it Bluemner’s “apotheosis”. He wrote:
He is very much alive and has been working of late … with robustious [sic] results. These twenty-eight canvases bear the generic title , “New Landscape Paintings.” That is because Mr. Blkuemner feels that some degree of “representation” is essential if abstract ideas are to be put over with entire success. However, the artist more fully and more exactly classifies them as “compositions for color themes.” He might, if he chose, even call them “color music” without risking the opprobrium that usually attends excursions into so hazardous a field. … These startling pictures build harmonies and rhythms that depend as a rule on simple statement. Here we find none of the overtones and undertones that some other artists have employed in projecting visual music. Bluemner relies for his effect upon plain, resonant chords. Though modulations of tone occur, these seem of secondary importance in his scheme. There is decidedly something in this new, bold, exclamatory style.
Bluemner committed suicide on January 12, 1938
Oscar Bluemner’s “Abruzzi Mountains,” is a 1922 watercolor. (Stetson University)
Legacy
Stetson University holds more than 1,000 pieces of Oscar Bluemner’s work bequeathed in 1997 by his daughter, Vera Bluemner Kouba. In 2009 the Homer and Dolly Hand Art Center at Stetson opened with a primary mission of housing a providing exhibition space for the Kouba Collection.[11] Often overlooked in his lifetime, Bluemner now is widely acknowledged as a key player in the creation of American artistic Modernism, with better-known colleagues such as Georgia O’Keeffe and John Marin.[
LEFT: STETSON UNIVERSITY RIGHT: Oscar Bluemner, Last Evening of the Year, c. 1929. Oil on board mounted on wood, 13 3/4 × 9 3/4 in. (34.9 × 24.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art; gift of Juliana Force 31.115
Painting of factories at Paterson by overlooked Armory Show artist Oscar Bluemner.
FROM ANDY SPARBERG, OUR RAIL PROFESSIONAL:
I would like to take the liberty of adding some information about the Penn Station project. Besides establishing a New York City station, the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) also wanted to create through train operation between Boston and Washington, today’s Amtrak Northeast Corridor service. The Hell Gate Bridge, which connected the PRR to the New Haven Railroad, was part of the overall Penn Station grand scheme and made this route possible, unchanged today.
Another piece of overall project was Sunnyside Yard, which allowed long distance PRR trains terminating in New York to simply continue east, enter the yard for servicing and cleaning, and then return to Penn Station for southward or western trip. That practice continues today. The overall track layout reduced the number of stub-end tracks in Penn to four (today’s tracks 1-4). Tracks 5 through 21 are all through-running tracks. That’s why Penn is not called a “terminal”, but a “station.”
Prior to the Hell Gate Bridge, Washington-Boston through train cars were floated around Manhattan, on barges between Jersey City and The Bronx, which was expensive and time-consuming
CHAPEL OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD WITH THE GOOD SAMARITAN GERMAN LUTHERAN CHURCH IN 1969
GLORIA HERMAN, MITCH HAMMER, NINA LUBLIN, JAY JACOBSON AND ED LITCHER MADE GREAT EFFORTS TO GET IT RIGHT. JOYOUS EASTER GREETINGS!
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 SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM WIKIPEDIA STETSON UNIVERSITY
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Railroads in New York City: Counterintuitive truths We New Yorkers deal a lot with steel rails. After all, many of us ride subways or trains every day (or we did “B.C.”). And we were blessed with two of the greatest rail stations in the world, stations which were star performers in many New York novels and films (think of “Twentieth Century Limited”). But our relationships with rails – at least, trains – has been different than one might expect. So sit back, get comfortable and come with me on a tour of counterintuitive New York railroad stories.
Original Grand Central Terminal, NY Times
First counterintuitive truth. Most railroad passengers didn’t arrive in NYC by rail.
All of the trains arriving from the west – even the mighty Pennsylvania – ended at the Hudson River in New Jersey. There, passengers transferred from one of six terminals – Exchange Place (Pennsylvania), Weehawken, Hoboken, Pavonia, and Communipaw – to ferries for the final lap to Manhattan. Trains didn’t come to Manhattan.
Except one. Passengers on the New York Central didn’t have to make the ferry connection. This was Vanderbilt’s great advantage. The Commodore patched together a slew of railroads beginning with what became the Hudson River Railroad (in part surveyed by the renowned civil engineer John Jervis. Yes, the very Jervis we read about who was central in building the Croton Aqueduct and Erie Canal). Vanderbilt also built a connection from Spuyten Duyvil to Mott Haven to connect with another railroad he owned, the New York & Harlem, to get to 42nd Street in Manhattan. In 1869, Vanderbilt changed the name to the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad as he expanded his railroad empire to Chicago. No ferry.
The NY Central enjoyed one of the most beautiful rail passages in the world, along the east shore of the Hudson River (Remember the Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint seduction scene in the dining car in “North by Northwest”?).
OK. That explains Grand Central. What about Penn Station? The existing situation was horrible. As Diehl writes in The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station, The Pennsylvania trains “came from Philadelphia, Washington, and as far west as Chicago. Together with other roads, they brought passengers from as far south as Florida. Vacationers, tanned and rested wintering in Palm Beach, would leave their well-appointed Pullman cars and stand alongside office clerks commuting to the city as they all waited for ferries to dock.” The other side was worse. No pedestrian bridges crossed West Street and everyone, of every rank, jostled for cabs. And, at times, the Hudson was so enraged that a 15 minute crossing took an hour!
Pennsy’s head, Alexander Cassatt (brother of the impressionist painter, Mary Cassatt) wanted his line to get to Manhattan without ferries. And he wanted a station in New York City that would be truly breath-taking. Long story – which involves relations with Andrew Carnegie, rail rebates, lots of money and so on – relatively short. Cassatt wanted a tunnel but was stymied because steam driven trains in a long tunnel would suffocate everyone, so he opted for a bridge that would be twice as long as the Brooklyn Bridge, across a much more difficult river. He finally found the answer in electrifying the railroad and building a tunnel. And, of course, Penn Station modeled on the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. Even more, Cassatt’s plan was to link the LIEE and Pennsy at the new station, to provide non-stop service from the west to Long Island.
(There’s another railroad story here, too, about the change in 4th Avenue from the worst, dirty, smelly and dangerous avenue in the City to beautiful Park Avenue – which involves the electrification of the railway line up the Avenue. But for another time.)
Jersey City’s Central Railroad of New Jersey Terminal Wikipedia
All right, second Counterintuitive truth. Most immigrants who arrived in New York harbor didn’t come to New York City.
About 70 percent of the 12 million immigrants processed at Ellis Island between 1892 and 1924 were headed to destinations outside New York.
Immigrants were taken by ferry to all of the New Jersey shoreline stations to board trains heading west. Many passed through Jersey City’s Central Railroad of New Jersey Terminal, one of the largest, busiest stations in the region, serving nearly 300 trains a day, whether for passengers or freight. New York-bound commuters from Hudson, Union, Middlesex, Somerset, Warren, Monmouth and Hunterdon counties would pass through the terminal to transfer between the train that brought them from home and the ferry that connected to lower Manhattan.
In a separate waiting room sat a contingent of new arrivals, making a much less routine transfer. The Terminal was the first place they landed after they were approved on Ellis Island to enter the country. Many had purchased their train tickets before leaving home, in a package deal with their ship’s passage, but a ticket office at the Immigration Station was also available for those who still had to plot their course to their new homes. Ferries shuttled them from Ellis Island to the station, where the Baltimore and Ohio offered direct passage to points as far west as St. Louis and Chicago. The Reading Railroad also supplemented the Central Jersey with service to western Pennsylvania and Philadelphia. During the heaviest migration years, entire cars of trains would often be designated solely for immigrants.
Third Counterintuitive truth, the Port of NYC & NJ, the third biggest container port in the country, is basically truck served rather than rail.
The images we have of great container ports are huge ships, enormous cranes, and vast spaces. What’s distinctive about the Port of NY-NJ is the tighter quarters and the dominant role of trucks. Trucks account for moving 85 percent of the containers on and off NY-NJ port terminals. At the first and second largest container ports in the US, Los Angeles and Long Beach (NY-NJ is third), 35 percent of containers are taken by rail directly on the loading dock.
Because a much larger share of goods from the port stay in the New York region than in other major ports, we see more trucks on NYC streets than in most major American cities. About 90 percent of freight is delivered by truck in the City. By contrast, the city’s rail lines transport just 2 percent of New York’s cargo. (Another story – the growing role of trucks in New York freight was one reason for the building of the High Line railroad on the West Side.)
Plans are (were? Before-Covid) underway to reduce the port’s historical heavy reliance on trucks to transport cargo that arrives via ship. This is the ExpressRail system, and culminates a $600 million Port Authority capital investment program dating back to the 1990s that established direct rail access to on-dock and near-dock intermodal rail services at all of its major marine terminals.
One reason is simple. Most goods arriving by rail from the west have to be transferred to truck in New Jersey. That’s part of the reason why we have so many more trucks in the City. Some railroad cars do cross the Hudson, but not by bridge or tunnel. Rather, by barge – or “car float”. Car floats operated between the major railroad terminals on the west bank of Hudson and numerous terminals located in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx, and Manhattan. Before the rise of safe, large and inexpensive trucks, this was how New York got its stuff. Today, the New York New Jersey Rail, LLC is a switching and terminal railroad operates the only car float operation across Upper New York Bay between Jersey City and Brooklyn. This operation has been owned by the Port Authority since November 2008, as a step in what was hoped might lead to the creation of a Cross-Harbor Rail Tunnel. Fat chance.
Freight rail does exist in City, but is largely unseen. For example, the New York & Atlantic Railway, a freight train that chugs through Queens and Brooklyn neighborhoods, hauling cars loaded with food, scrap metal, construction materials and even beer. The short-line railroad picks up loads from major freight lines that run down through the Bronx and over the Hell Gate Bridge into Queens, to New York & Atlantic’s cramped rail yard in Glendale. New York & Atlantic then takes the cars and distributes them to businesses along its lines where they are often taken onto tracks leading to a customer’s property. Some trains end up at rail-to-truck hubs, where goods are transferred to trucks for local deliveries. About 15 percent of New York & Atlantic’s rail cars are floated over from New Jersey, but that would grow if the car float system expanded. I hope this essay didn’t run you off the rails. Thanks for reading. Stephen Blank RIHS March 24, 2021
THURSDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY MAGNOLIA TREES IN COLER GARDEN
THOM HEYER, CLARA BELLA, ALEXIS VILLEFANE, RITA MEED, ED LITCHER, JAY JACOBSON, GLORIA HERMAN, & NINA LUBLI GOT IT.
EDITORIAL
TAKE A WALK TO THE GARDEN JUST NORTH OF THE COLER MAIN ENTRANCE AND ENJOY THE MAGNOLIAS IN FULL BLOOM!
JOYOUS EAST GREETINGS
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
STEPHEN BLANK RIHS ARCHIVES
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IN 2007, ARTIST THOM SOLOLOSI BROUGHT A UNIQUE ART AND HISTORY PROJECT COMPOSED OF 100 TENTS CONTAINING STORIES OF THOSE LOST IN THE WORLD OF MENTAL ILLNESS, PRISONS AND ASYLUMS.
THE SITE WAS SOUTHPOINT PARK, WHICH WAS ONLY A HILL OF GRASSY AND DUSTY LAND. THE FDR AND SOUTHPOINT PARKS WERE NOT BUILT AND THIS VAST OPEN SPACE LED TO A GRAND VISUAL SITE.
THE PROJECT TOOK MONTHS TO PLAN. THE EXECUTION TOOK PLACE IN A FEW DAYS AND THE ENCAMPMENT WAS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC FOR JUST A LONG WEEKEND.
2007 WAS A DIFFERENT TIME AND THE ISLAND FLOURISHED WITH MANY ART PROJECTS AND LESS CONSTRAINTS OF THESE LATTER YEARS.
Artwork, Assembled at the Last Minute, Explores the Long Ago
The New York Times (c)
Thom Sokoloski’s installation artwork, “The Encampment,” has been assembled on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island.Credit…Robert Bennett for The New York Times
At about 7 last night, “The Encampment,” an installation of 100 19th-century-style tents by the Canadian artist Thom Sokoloski, was to open in an empty field at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island.
A year in the making, the tents represent the patients who once lived in the island’s smallpox hospital, the remains of which loom nearby. Inside each, volunteers would arrange artifacts to memorialize patients and other island residents. As a final touch, the tents were to be illuminated from within, so “The Encampment” would be visible from both sides of the East River, a glowing link to the area’s history.
But first, it had to be finished.
In the 80-degree weather of yesterday morning, a dozen volunteers showed up to help; most encountered a locked gate. Though Mr. Sokoloski spent months assembling the proper permits, security had been a constant issue: the site, part of what will become Southpoint Park, is usually closed to the public. Homeland Security officials were on high alert because of the United Nations General Assembly meeting just across the East River, and the police threatened to shut things down because of a miscommunication.
By noon only a dozen tents had been set up, and few were filled. Mr. Sokoloski’s partners, Jenny-Anne McCowan, a choreographer and outreach coordinator, and John McDowell, a composer, busied themselves marshaling the volunteers.
Even the construction supervisors — four Canadian military re-enactors, with extensive experience in putting up tents — were sweating. The exhibition, part of the annual Openhousenewyork weekend, was several hours behind schedule.
But Mr. Sokoloski, a Toronto-based artist who seems younger than his 57 years, remained calm. A former theater director (he worked at La MaMa in the 1980s) and location scout for movies, he is adept at making big projects work, like an opera he staged in Toronto’s main train station in 1992.
“It’s one thing after another, but you get used to it,” Mr. Sokoloski said. “You just keep going till the last moment, because who knows what will happen tomorrow?”
“The Encampment” is the second in a series of tent-based installations Mr. Sokoloski has planned. A smaller-scale version was erected in Toronto last year for Nuit Blanche, an arts festival, and he hopes to create a larger version elsewhere in Canada next year. Each project is devoted to exposing an urban past that’s usually kept hidden: the history of mental health and addiction treatment in Toronto, the confinement and isolation of the many sanitariums that once dotted Roosevelt Island.
The idea, Mr. Sokoloski said, was to create “an archaeological dig into the collective memory of a space.” To enhance that collective spirit, he enlisted about 70 “creative collaborators” — artists, students and patients from the island’s Coler-Goldwater Memorial Hospital — to research and compile art for the tents.
The tents ready to be filled with memories.
Below: Sketches of asylum inmates from “Ten Days in a Madhouse” Doll and piano represent musical memories Small images on the fabric of the tent with piles of money on the ground Oysters, commonly found in the East River
Some people took on more than one tent. The interior objects — drawings, dioramas, mannequin heads, flowers — had to be small enough to be boxed up, though Mr. Sokoloski was not to know what they were.
The volunteers had only two hours to install their work. Ronit Muszkatblit, 32, a theater director from the East Village, was inspired by the story of Ernest Otto, an asylum patient who died in 1894 after choking on rice and bread. Her installation included a human silhouette buried in rice. “I love site-specific work,” Ms. Muszkatblit said before dragging a cart laden with props to her tent.
“The energy, the adrenaline, the rush of the last moment, the not sleeping and carrying everything back and forth.” Mr. Sokoloski knows all about it. On Wednesday the tents — seven-foot-long canvas A-frames — were still at the manufacturer, the Fall Creek Suttlery, of Lebanon, Ind., which usually supplies tents for military re-enactments, because Mr. Sokoloski didn’t have the money to pay for shipping
By the time the funds materialized, he needed the tents shipped overnight— at a cost of about $4,000. “I said, ‘I can’t pay that much,’” Mr. Sokoloski recalled. (“The Encampment” cost about $150,000, financed mostly by him, Ms. McCowan and donations.) He asked Andy Fulks, the company’s owner, for a cheaper alternative.
Mr. Fulks came up with one: a guy named Wayne. So Wayne, a local resident, packed the 100 tents into his pickup and drove straight through from Indiana to New York, delivering the tents at 2:30 on Thursday afternoon. Then he turned and drove home.
The construction cavalry — Canadian re-enactors who specialize in the War of 1812 — arrived early Friday morning, hauling a trailer filled with 100 pounds of 10-inch nails and 300 beams to erect the tents. But the beams were the wrong size. So hours before opening, volunteers had to cut them to fit, using the trailer’s fender as a sawhorse.
Mr. Sokoloski savored the momentum. “I find there’s a kind of excitement when you do it this way,” he said of his last-minute art. “It’s not a Cartesian way to achieve results. But there’s this other level of energy, of spontaneity.”
In the end they were able to erect only 90 of the tents on Friday. (Ten more will follow today.) But the lights went on just after 7.
Temple Emanu-El One East 65th Street Gloria Herman, Aron Eisenpreiss, Jay Jacobson, Vicki Feinmel and Arlene Bessenoff 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)
RIHS ARCHIVES JUDITH BERDY NEW YORK TIMES (C)
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The Women’s Service Group Who Made a Better Life National Council of Jewish Women
Thursday, April 9, 2020 WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31, 2021
21st in our FROM THE ARCHIVES series.
325th ISSUE
A LITTLE JEWISH HISTORY
& PASSOVER AT GOLDWATER
THE COUNCIL SYNAGOGUE, WELFARE ISLAND SOLICITATION GREETING CARD OF NATIONAL COUNCIL OF JEWISH WOMEN ROSELLE HELLENBERG OAK (1884-1954) MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK (C)
The Council Synagogue opened in 1927 to serve the Jewish population of Welfare Island. It was funded by the NCJW. Brown Brothers (c)
Photo of Central Synagogue Shaton Stern (c)Rabbi’s Residence adjoining synagogue. RIHS Archive (c)
Rabbi Jacob Grossman, the Rabbi at Council Synagogue, Goldwater Hospital and Metropolitan Hospital served the island for 17 years. Chapin Collection RIHS Archives (c)
Rabbi Abraham M. Moseson presiding at Passover Seder at Goldwater Hospital in the 1960’s. Goldwater Collection RIHS Archives (c)Goldwater Collection RiHS Archives (c)
In 1907 a small group of women from the NCJW came to the island to serve the Jewish residents. They have served the island for decades as volunteers providing kosher food, ritual symbols and even built a synagogue. Photo shows ceremonial opening of new Jewish Chapel at Goldwater in 1971. RIHS Archives (c)
EDITORIAL
This afternoon I received and e-mail from a neighbor. He had looked thru the April 9th, 2020 issue of FROM THE ARCHIVES. One of the women in a photo may be his grandmother. I will research more historical photos to find out the information.
This week we are celebrating Passover with (a few) friends and family. No one last year would have believed that 51 weeks later we would still be quarantining and socially distancing.
I was at the Visitor Center Kiosk today and hundreds of families are visiting the Island from the Orthodox communities. The tram is at capacity of 55 riders per trip and there are long lines waiting to ride.
Perhaps, it will be possible to have NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM!
Judith Berdy
These are lost family and friends that we celebrated Passover with in 2011. Mike Schwartzberg, Ruth Berdy, Fay Vass, Howie Leifer May we remember the good times with them.
Jay Jacobson, Aron Eisenpreiss and Andy Sparberg 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
RIHS ARCHIVES GOLDWATER HOSPITAL ARCHIVES NATIONAL COUNCIL OF JEWISH WOMEN
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The East River, Maurice Prendergast. c.1901, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, NY, US
Maurice Prendergast 86th Street and East River
Maurice Prendergast, Park Scene, ca. 1915-1918, watercolor on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Charles Prendergast, 1968.122
Maurice Prendergast was born in St. Johns, Newfoundland, but with the failure of his father’s subarctic trading post the family moved to Boston. There young Maurice was apprenticed to a commercial artist and at the outset was conditioned to the brightly colored, flat patterning effects that characterized his mature work. For many years thereafter loosely handled watercolor remained his favored medium and gave his work vibrant spontaneity.
A shy and retiring individual, he remained a bachelor throughout his life, closely attached to his artist brother Charles, who was also a successful frame maker. For three years Maurice studied in Paris at the Atelier Colarossi and the Académie Julian. During one of his early stays in Paris he met the Canadian painter James Morrice, who introduced him to English avant-garde artists Walter Sickert and Aubrey Beardsley, all ardent admirers of James McNeill Whistler. Prendergast’s aesthetic course was set. A further acquaintance with Vuillard and Bonnard placed him firmly in the postimpressionist camp. He developed and continued to elaborate a highly personal style, with boldly contrasting, jewel-like colors, and flattened, patternlike forms rhythmically arranged on a canvas. Forms were radically simplified and presented in flat areas of bright, unmodulated color. His paintings have been aptly described as tapestry-like or resembling mosaics. A trip to Venice in 1898 exposed him to the delightful genre scenes of Vittore Carpaccio and encouraged him toward even more complex and rhythmic arrangements. He also became one of the first Americans to espouse the work of Cézanne and to understand and utilize his expressive use of form and color.
In 1907, Prendergast was invited to exhibit with the Eight, colleagues of Robert Henri and exponents of the Ashcan school. Prendergast and the romantic symbolist Arthur B. Davies seem oddly mismatched to these urban realists, but all were united in an effort to stir the American art scene out of its conservative lethargy.
In 1913 he was invited to participate in the famed Armory Show, which was largely arranged by his friend Davies. Not surprisingly, Prendergast’s brilliantly unorthodox offerings were decried as resembling “an explosion in a paint factory.” On the same occasion Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) was similarly deplored as “an explosion in a shingle factory,” suggesting either a failure of critical imagination or a case of collegial plagiarism. But of the Americans represented there, Prendergast’s works were the most thoroughly modern and postimpressionist.
Who can now pass a playground teeming with brightly dressed children or wander through a public park where the varicolored garb of its occupants does not call to mind the stirring images Maurice Prendergast has left us? As Oscar Wilde once ventured, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”
Maurice Prendergast, New England Coastal Village, ca. 1915-1918, watercolor and pencil on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Charles Prendergast, 1985.83
Maurice Prendergast, Summer, New England, 1912, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Charles Prendergast, 1976.124
Maurice Prendergast, Outdoor Cafe, ca. 1892, watercolor and pencil on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. R.A. Kling, 1965.43
Maurice Prendergast, Inlet with Sailboat, Maine, ca. 1913-1915, watercolor and pencil on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Robert Brady, 1981.171A
EDITORIAL, UPDATE
Yesterday, RIOC announced that the Comfort Station at Southpoint Park was closed for an unknown time period. No explanation!!
We get requests for all kinds of visitor information the FDR FFP, Cornell, Blackwell House, the Asylum, where to eat, etc.
Unfortunately one common request is WHERE IS THERE BATHROOM?
RIOC HAS PUBLIC BATHROOMS JUST INSIDE THE ENTRANCE TO SPORTSPARK. IT IS TIME THAT THESE WERE OPENED TO THE PUBLIC.
The lack of public restrooms here is disgraceful. Why should Cornell be the easiest to reach toilet. Under Susan Rosenthal, Related agreed to build a comfort station at Firefighters Field. This was recently canceled or delayed.
Spring and Passover are coming with thousands of visitors arriving on the island and no public bathrooms. RIOC is responsible to have pubic bathrooms.
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
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The Ansonia is a building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, located at 2109 Broadway, between West 73rd and West 74th Streets. It was originally built as a residential hotel by William Earle Dodge Stokes, the Phelps-Dodge copper heir and shareholder in the Ansonia Clock Company, and it was named for his grandfather, the industrialist Anson Greene Phelps. In 1897, Stokes commissioned French architect Paul Emile Duboy to design the grandest hotel in Manhattan.[2]
Stokes listed himself as “architect-in-chief” for the project and hired Duboy, a sculptor who designed and made the ornamental sculptures on the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, to draw up the plans. New Orleans architect Martin Shepard served as draftsman and assistant superintendent of construction on the project. The assignee of the contractor proceed against Stokes in 1907, suing for $90,000. But Stokes defended himself, explaining that Duboy was in an insane asylum in Paris, and it was his belief that he was insane when, in 1903, he signed the final certificate on the plans, and should not have been making commitments in Stokes’s name concerning the hotel.
In what might be the earliest harbinger of the current developments in urban farming, Stokes established a small farm on the roof of the hotel, where he kept farm animals next to his personal apartment. There was a cattle elevator, which enabled dairy cows to be stabled on the roof.
Stokes had a Utopian vision for the Ansonia—that it could be self-sufficient, or at least contribute to its own support—which led to perhaps the strangest New York apartment amenity ever. “The farm on the roof,” Weddie Stokes wrote years later, “included about 500 chickens, many ducks, about six goats and a small bear.” Every day, a bellhop delivered free fresh eggs to all the tenants, and any surplus was sold cheaply to the public in the basement arcade. Not much about this feature charmed the city fathers, however, and in 1907, the Department of Health shut down the farm in the sky.
The Ansonia was a residential hotel. The residents lived in “luxurious” apartments with multiple bedrooms, parlors, libraries, and formal dining rooms that were often round or oval. Apartments featured views north and south along Broadway, high ceilings, “elegant” moldings, and bay windows. There were three thousand rooms. Arrangements could be made to rent a suite varying in size from a room and a bath to thirty rooms. Some of these suites were rented for $14,000 a year,[9] the equivalent of more than $400,000 in 2018. The smaller units, with one bedroom, parlor, and bath, lacked kitchens. There was a central kitchen and serving kitchens on every floor, so that the residents could enjoy the services of professional chefs while dining in their own apartments. Besides the usual array of tearooms, restaurants, and a grand ballroom, the Ansonia had Turkish baths and a lobby fountain with live seals.
Erected between 1899 and 1904, it was the largest residential hotel of its day and the first air-conditioned hotel in New York. The building has an eighteen-story steel-frame structure. The exterior is decorated in the Beaux-Art style with a Parisian style mansard roof. The Ansonia features round corner-towers or turrets and an open stairwell that sweeps up to a domed skylight.
Ansonia Hotel The building’s copper cornices were removed during World War II and melted down for the war effort.
The Ansonia has had many celebrated residents, including baseball player Babe Ruth; writer Theodore Dreiser, in 1912; the leader of the Bahá’í Faith `Abdu’l-Bahá; Nobel prize winner in literature Isaac Bashevitz Singer; conductor Arturo Toscanini; composer Igor Stravinsky; fashion designer Koos van den Akker; and Italian tenor Enrico Caruso.
By the mid-twentieth-century, the grand apartments had mostly been divided into studios and one-bedroom units, almost all of which retained their original architectural detail. After a short debate in the 1960s, a proposal to demolish the building was fought off by its many musical and artistic residents.
From 1977 until 1980, The Ansonia Hotel’s basement was home to Plato’s Retreat, an open door swinger sex club. Prior to Plato’s Retreat, the building housed the Continental Baths, operated by Steve Ostrow, a gay bathhouse where Bette Midler provided musical entertainment early in her career, with Barry Manilow as her accompanist.
In 1980, the building was inducted to the National Register of Historic Places.
In 1992, the Ansonia was converted to a condominium apartment building with 430 apartments. By 2007, most of the rent-controlled apartment tenants had moved out, and the small apartments were sold to buyers who purchased clusters of small apartments and threw them together to recreate grand apartments.
The Ansonia is home to part of the New York campus of the American Musical and Dramatic Academy.
The unique round design makes many interesting layouts for the apartments.
Helen Godman (1919) calling herself “Alice” In 1916, the Ansonia was the scene of a blackmail plot. Edward R. West, Vice President of the C. D. Gregg Tea and Coffee Company of Chicago, had checked into the hotel with a woman known to him as Alice Williams. Alice Williams was an alias of Helen Godman, also known as “Buda” Godman, who acted as the “lure” for a blackmail gang based in Chicago. West and Godman were together in their room at The Ansonia when two male members of the gang, impersonating Federal law enforcement agents, entered the room and “arrested” West for violation of the Mann Act.[14] After transporting West and Godman back to Chicago, West was coerced into paying the two “agents” $15,000 in order to avoid prosecution, and avoid embarrassment or soiling the reputation of “Alice.” West reported the incident after becoming suspicious that not everything was as it seemed. Several of the male blackmailers earned prison terms, but “Buda” Godman was released on $10,000 bail. Skipping bail, she disappeared for many years, but was eventually caught and charged for trying to fence the Glemby Jewels taken in a 1932 robbery.[
A key player in the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, the Chicago White Sox first baseman Chick Gandil had an apartment at the Ansonia. According to Eliot Asinof, in his book Eight Men Out, Gandil held a meeting in the Ansonia apartment with his White Sox teammates to recruit them for the scheme to intentionally lose the 1919 World Series.
Willie Sutton, the bank robber, was arrested for the sixth time (of eight) two days before Thanksgiving, 1930, while having breakfast at Childs Restaurant in the Ansonia.
TODAY’S PHOTO IS A PREVIEW OF AN UPCOMING ISSUE ON THE ANSONIA APARTMENTS. STAY TUNED
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
Sources
WIKIPEDIA
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