DIRECTLY ACROSS FROM CORNELL TECH A NEW WATERFRONT WALKWAY/PROMENADE IS TAKING SHAPE. ENJOY WATCHING THE GIANT CRANES AND BARGES WORKING IN THE RIVER.
A rendering of the East Midtown Greenway, as it will appear looking north near East 54th Street. (New York City Economic Development Corporation)
The creation of the East Midtown Greenway (EMG), a 1.5-acre public space stretching from East 53rd to 61st Streets along the waterfront, got underway Friday. The project, to be completed by 2022, is part of the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway initiative to wrap the entire perimeter of Manhattan with accessible public spaces and safe bicycle paths. The midtown space will close one of the largest remaining gaps in the $250 million city initiative, announced by Mayor de Blasio in 2018, to connect 32 miles of Manhattan waterfront esplanade.
The Manhattan Waterfront Greenaway project will close gaps in Inwood, Harlem, and East Harlem, as well as the East Midtown space. The goal is to connect neighborhoods to their waterfronts and add about 15 acres of open space. The planned esplanade will connect the bike paths that line the city’s perimeter so that cyclists can safely circle Manhattan without veering off into city streets.
After a six-month delay during the pandemic, construction has resumed on the long-awaited project adding a new eight-block stretch to the East River Esplanade.
The East Midtown Greenway will stretch between East 53rd and 61st streets, creating new waterfront access and public space and bringing the city closer to its long-held goal of creating a continuous, 32-mile loop around Manhattan.
The existing esplanade runs north above East 60th Street and into East Harlem. Construction started in November on the new $100 million greenway, which will be built directly above the East River, but came to a halt in the spring as the coronavirus took hold.
Now, even as the city faces a severe fiscal shortfall that has thrown a wrench into many capital projects, the greenway will be allowed to restart construction since work had already begun when the pandemic hit.
RENDERINGS FOR THE PROJECT
(FINAL PLANS MAY HAVE CHANGED)
Portion will be over the water. Remember when there was a temporary roadway in this area when the FR Drive was being renovated?
MARK YOUR CALENDARS FOR OUR EVENTS
UPCOMING PROGRAMS ON ZOOM Registration will be available before each event All events are at 7 p.m.
Tuesday, March 16 “Abandoned Queens” Author Richard Panchyk takes us on a journey through Queens’ past. Revealing haunting reminders of the way things used to be, he describes fascinating, abandoned places, including the chilling Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, the meandering remains of the country’s first modern highway, a defunct airport reclaimed by wilderness, an eerie old railroad line in Forest Hills, and a destroyed neighborhood in the Rockaways.
Tuesday, April 20 “Mansions and Munificence: the Gilded Age on Fifth Avenue” Guide, lecturer, author and teacher of art and architecture, Emma Guest-Consales leads a virtual tour of the great mansions of Fifth Avenue. Starting with the ex-home of Henry Clay Frick that now houses the Frick Collection, all the way up to the former home of Andrew Carnegie, now the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, she takes us through some of the most extravagant urban palaces the city has ever seen.
Tuesday, May 18 “Saving America’s Cities” Author and Harvard History Professor Lizabeth Cohen Provides an eye-opening look at her award-winning book’s subtitle: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age. Tracing Logue’s career from the development of Roosevelt Island in the ‘70s, to the redevelopment of New Haven in the ‘50s, Boston in the’60s and the South Bronx from 1978–85, she focuses on Logue’s vision to revitalize post-war cities, the rise of the Urban Development Corporation.
WEDNESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
Can you identify this photo from today’s edition? Send you submission to
PILOT HOUSE THAT WAS RESTORED AND IS NOW INFORMATION BOOTH AT SOUTH STREET SEAPORT MUSEUM HARA REISER 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 Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
UPPER EAST SIDE PATCH NYC/EDC 6SQ FT
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Like the fabled elephant graveyards, ships also have graveyards. Would you believe that there’s a ship graveyard on Staten Island? Read on.
Now let’s be clear. We’re not talking about ship breaking. Ship breaking is where large ocean going ships’ last voyage ends running up on a beach. The vessels are broken up for parts, which can be sold for re-use, or for raw materials, chiefly scrap. Most of this takes place today in India, Bangladesh, China and Pakistan, and much of the breaking up is done by hand –although in much of the 19th century, ship breaking took place mainly in the US and Great Britain.
In previous times, other uses were found for no longer useful ships. In South Street Sea Port in colonial times, old ships were used as fill to extend the shoreline. And Vikings and Egyptians, whose great leaders were entombed with boats. And less glam: Ships (and subway cars, too) have been deliberately sunk off shore to create new reefs.
A ‘graveyard’ for ships is an official dumping site for obsolete watercraft. The ‘graveyard’ is the location where the vessels, or their remains, have been deliberately abandoned. The Staten Island boat graveyard is a marine scrapyard located in the Arthur Kill in Rossville, near the Fresh Kills Landfill, on the West Shore of Staten Island.
When a ship reached the end of its operational life, it could be brought here to the highly industrialized Arthur Kill, sunk in shallow water of the Rossville Boatyard and left to rust away. The Rossville Boatyard is a graveyard of decommissioned, scrapped, and abandoned ships of various sizes, ages, and states of decay and has been recognized as an official dumping ground for old wrecked tugboats, barges and decommissioned ferries.
The Boatyard is known by other names including the Witte Marine Scrap Yard, the Arthur Kill Boat Yard, and the Tugboat Graveyard.
NOAA Nautical Chart 12331: Raritan Bay and Southern Part of Arthur Kill
A word about the Arthur Kill
The Arthur Kill (also known as the Staten Island Sound) is a tidal strait (like the East River) between Staten Island and Union and Middlesex counties in New Jersey and a major navigational channel of the Port of New York and New Jersey. The name is an anglicization of the Dutch achter kill meaning back channel, which refers to its location “behind” Staten Island and takes us back to the early 17th century when the region was part of New Netherland.
During the Revolutionary War, the Kill was the border between British occupied (and fiercely loyalist) Staten Island and New Jersey, held by Washington’s revolutionary troops. Skirmishing and larger battles took place across the Kill. A paragraph from Abandoned New York: Staten Island “was a loyalist stronghold, warmly greeting British troops upon their arrival. Hundreds of islanders enlisted in the British army as the conflict escalated. George Washington himself called the Staten Islanders “our most inveterate enemies.” John Adams was less generous, labeling them “an ignorant, cowardly pack of scoundrels, whose numbers are small, and their spirit less.”
BLAZING STAR TAVERN
BLAZING STAR CEMETERY
AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL ZION CHURCH
OYSTER SHUCKERS AT WORK
An early settlement on Arthur Kill was named Blazing Star, after a local tavern. Ferries, and later steamships whose wrecks are still sinking in the Arthur Kill, connected it with New Jersey. The Blazing Star Burial Ground, a cemetery dating from the mid-1750, is found just off Arthur Kill Road. In the early days farming flourished and travelers came to take the ferry and stay at a few local hotels, creating a bit of a resort community. The Old Bermuda Inn, built in 1814, still survives.
During the early 1800s, Blazing Star’s name was changed to Rossville, in honor of landowner Col. William E. Ross. He famously built a replica of England’s Windsor Castle on the coast. It was first known as the Ross Mansion or Castle, then became the Lyon Mansion or Castle, when the home was sold to Gov. Caleb Lyon, a poet, author, and member of the New York State Senate and House of Representatives. The building was demolished 45 years after his death in 1875.
In 1827, slavery in New York was abolished. Soon after, freed black slaves began to arrive in Rossville from Virginia and Maryland. They started an oystering village on the Arthur Kill and named their community Sandy Ground, because of the soil found there, leading to strawberry crops. By 1850, the freed men founded the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, which is known to have been an essential stop on the Underground Railroad. (It became a New York City landmark on Feb. 1, 2011.)
Beside Blazing Star Burial Ground is our boatyard burial ground, filled with deteriorating ships from the past.
An article in Forgotten New York notes, “Vessels from all decades of the 20th Century lie, not exactly in state, but in a state of decomposition and rust at this former boatyard at Arthur Kill Road and Rossville Avenue….The former piers have collapsed and are for the most part impassible, which makes them a magnet for daredevil urban explorers.”
The Boatyard was founded in the 1930s by John J. Witte and managed by him until his death in 1980. It was then taken over by his son-in-law, Joe Coyne, who described it as similar to an automobile salvage yard, with the boats serving as a source of parts to sell. As of 2014, its official name is the Donjon Iron and Metal Scrap Processing Facility.
Over the last century, Witte Marine dismantled hundreds of ships that once crowded the bustling piers of New York’s coastline. Business seems to have boomed after World War II as many old and battered ships were purchased for deconstruction. But even with a steady stream of salvage work, many old tugboats and smaller harbor ships accumulated on the shores of Arthur Kill and rotted in shallow water.
Some of the vessels here were historic, and the boatyard has been called an “accidental marine museum.” These included the American submarine chaser USS PC-1264, the first World War II US Navy ship to have a predominantly African-American crew; and the New York City Fire Department fireboat Abram S. Hewitt, which served as the floating command post at the 1904 sinking of the passenger ferry P S General Slocum, a disaster that killed more than a thousand people.
A 1990 New York Times story reported that 200 ships were sharing space in the Tugboat Graveyard. Today, there are fewer, each a jumble of broken beams and rusted metal. Over time, all the useful parts have been stripped or stolen.
Apparently, less can be seen today. But photographer Shaun O’Boyle, known for his work on Antarctica, produced a wonderful set of photos of the Ship Graveyard. See his “Modern Ruins: Portraits of place in the Mid-Atlantic Region” (2010), and online at https://www.oboylephoto.com/portfolio/G0000nvLhs57vUko
(1913-1983), Self Portrait, Lithograph, Edition 20, 1951 The Noble Maritime Collection, Gift of the Noble Family
John Alexander Noble (1913–1983) was an artist known for creating drawings, paintings, and lithographs of ships and harbors around New York City.
Noble was born in Paris, France, in 1913. The son of painter John Noble, he moved to the United States with his family in 1919. About 1929, he started drawing and painting. While in school he was a “permanent fixture” on the McCarren line tugs, which towed schooners in New York Harbor. In the summer, he would go to sea. In 1931, he graduated from Friends Seminary and returned to France, where he studied for a year at the University of Grenoble and met his wife, Susan Ames. When he returned to New York, he studied for a year at the National Academy of Design.
Career From 1928 to 1945, Noble worked as a seaman on schooners and in marine salvage in New York Harbor. When he saw the Port Johnston Coal Docks on the Kill van Kull, which had become a “great boneyard” of wooden sailing vessels, the sight of it “affected him for life”. In 1941, he began to build a floating, “houseboat” studio there, made out of salvaged ship parts. From 1946, he worked as an artist full-time, voyaging through New York Harbor in a rowboat and creating—in oil paintings, charcoal drawings, sketches and lithographs—a “unique and exacting record” of the “characters, industries, and vessels” of the harbor.
Houseboat Studio Permanent exhibition in the John A. Noble Maritime Collection at Sailors Snug Harbor
The centerpiece of the museum is Noble’s Houseboat Studio. The studio had been restored to its appearance in 1954, the year Noble and the studio were featured in the December issue of National Geographic. Noble created paintings, drawings, and lithographs there for over 40 years.
Of his “little leaking Monticello,” Noble wrote in 1977, “Strange cabin! and odd its beginnings—and lonely its long and precarious career. Through it all, our tenuous careers, its and mine, have been intimately and inexorably linked, for within its teak walls most of my pictures have been clumsily breech birthed for nigh unto forty years with great effort and small grace….
“After the Civil War, Newark Bay was bridged by the New Jersey Central Railroad. One of the results of this engineering was that anthracite coal came to the banks of the Kill van Kull; and … the world’s greatest hard coal complex—Port Johnston….Well, after a fire sometime in the early twenties…its docks became…a great boneyard.
“I first laid eyes on these acres of new, old, and dead vessels as a boy in 1928 from the deck of a stone schooner….I must say the sight affected me for life—and shortly thereafter I was drawing them….Well, it was but a few years more, and I was making my living there, keeping the vessels which had not yet sunk pumped out and watching their lines….
“Now this great length of pier was punctuated by odd cabins that had been thrown aside in wrecking operations. One of these was the teak saloon of a European yacht. One summer day when things were slack I had a sudden impulse. I cut a hole in its roof and fashioned a makeshift skylight. Through the years I rebuilt and collected teak fittings—adding, changing. Unknown to me was how much I was becoming wedded to my cabin studio. The shock to me was deep when the dock, already badly collapsing, was abandoned, and in panic I built the wooden barge which enabled me to escape from the boneyard. For years now I have been plagued with ‘Oh! the artist with the floating studio, etc. etc.’ There is no cuteness nor color in all this for me—the only small romance is that I did escape.
“The sources of the myriad parts that such a structure must have may seem peculiar now, for they came from that dim region where nothing is ever bought or stolen. The spikes in my bottom were pulled from the deck of the steam schooner Robert Dollar….Most of the planks in the bottom came from the wings of an old Bethlehem Steel Brooklyn dry-dock….The Romanesque windows are black walnut and came from the old Carteret Ferry….The main skylight windows (on the opposite side) are from the classroom built aboard the four-masted schooner Guillford Pendleton….The intriguing little fiddle block and the small davit are from the Kaiser’s sailing yacht Meteor….here also are parts from the steam lighter McKeever Bros.—that carried New York’s dead horses to the rendering plant—the Hart’s Island, that bore the poor and unknown dead to Potter’s Field—and the William C. Moore, the immigrant barge from Ellis Island….
“Time naturally flowed on as did the tides around me. To my port arose the largest oil still in the world, making Getty the richest man in the world, yet in time it rusted and was torn down. To my starboard…a great rack for car tows slowly went into obsolescence…. Dockbuilders, a dredging company, a shipyard came and went,…the nickering vandalism of Sailors’ Snug Harbor trustees never ceased as architectural gems and noble trees came down…until even the seamen were gone. It strikes me as weird that this stone was no sooner finished than the last of the great hulks of the boneyard burned to the water’s edge.
“Thus it came about that now my own little leaking Monticello pitches and survives in the wake of the passing tugs.” John A. Noble Essays, 1977
HUDSON YARD “&” TRAIN ENTRANCE LAURA HUSSEY, GLORIA HERMAN & VERN HARWOOD & ANDY SPARBERG GOT IT!
From our transit expert Andy Sparberg, some clarifications of Monday’s issue:
In 1945 the Transit Authority NYC Board of Transportation shut down the City Hall Station, demolishing the ornamental kiosks and sealing the entrances under concrete slabs. The tiled arches and brass chandeliers were thrust into tomb-like darkness and the station was essentially forgotten. However, Lexington Ave. Local (#6 today) trains continued to use the station’s loop tracks to change direction at Brooklyn Bridge, and do so to this day, as noted in the last sentence.
Any hope that the City Hall stop would be resurrected was smashed when modern train cars became too long , the R17s, introduced on the IRT in 1954, had door positions that could not safely open on the sharp curve of the platform. The wide gaps created between the platform and cars would be unsafe and logistically unreasonable to attempt to correct.
Explanations: The Transit Authority was not created until 1953. The older model cars had doors at the extreme car ends, whereas the R17 cars were the same length, 51 feet, but had a different door arrangement that created dangerous gaps on curved platforms.
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
SAILORS SNUG HARBOR JOHN NOBLE MARITIME COLLECTION (C)
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated PHOTOS BY JUDITH BERDY / RIHS (C) FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
First, y’all are getting a special edition from Texas since I (Deborah Dorff) make the daily posts to this site and I’ve been unavailable due to this very unusual storm in Texas. Here’s a mostly day by day account of what we experienced.
View out our front window. 2/14/21
Temperatures had been steadily dropping for several days. The forecast was for more cold and maybe some snow. Sunday night, we had a bit more than a dusting of snow, which was pleasant, mostly because this is a rare occurrence in Central Texas. This was actually our second snow of the season.
Monday morning, we woke to a chilly house, more snow, and no power. No worries, we have battery back-ups and had already been dripping our faucets to prevent freezing pipes. We collected our drippings and filled a stock pot, in case we lost water. Road conditions were reported as snow-packed and icy, so we chose to stay put. We were hopeful the power would return soon.
View our front 2/15/21
Back patio view 2/15/21
We quickly realized that we were not only without power, but we were also almost completely without cell service. We had a very limited ability to text. We started checking in with friends and neighbors and the news was not good. Broken pipes, no power, no water, and treacherous roads.
Photos of the Neighborhood
Fallen trees and other vegetation throughout the state contributed to power outages.
Native plants were impacted by snow and ice.
Rosemary popsicles
Birds finding food in our holly tree
How many birds can you find?Bird watching was a good way to pass time
A Heritage Oak weighed down with ice.
Tuesday we had a heat source to melt snow and to cook .
The Daily Podcast by the New York Times featured the power failure in Texas.
Tuesday night by candle light and Wednesday morning trying to stay warm.
Deborah Tuesday night and Kevin Wednesday morning
Wednesday things began to thaw…
Thursday we lost water
Melting snow for toilets only
Friday we ventured out for more water from a friend who still had running water and heat.
Friday afternoon, four and a half days later, we had power again and began the process of heating our home. By Saturday afternoon, we felt it was safe to turn on our water. The city of Austin is still requiring that we boil our water before consuming it. Throughout the week very few stores were open and there were long lines and limited items for purchase.
Most counties in Texas have hit the threshold for disaster relief and FEMA is on the ground trying to process claims. Throughout the week there were warming locations, but people were asked to bring their own food and blankets. By Saturday, multiple locations had been set up for water distribution using supplies sent in from neighboring states.
This ordeal will quickly be a memory for most even though full restoration, for many, will take months.
Deborah Dorff
Text by Judith Berdy & Deborah Dorff 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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PLEASE SEE OUR SPECIAL EDITION ON RIHS.US. FROM DEBORAH DORFF WHO JUST SPENT HER WEEK IN HER COLD, DARK AND SNOWED IN HOME IN AUSTIN, TEXAS.
293rd Edition
Monday,
February 22, 2021
The Abandoned 1904
City Hall Subway Station
FROM A DAYTONIAN IN MANHATTAN
Rafael Guastavino’s tiled arch construction was not a new idea in 1900; actually it had been used in Europe since ancient times. He simply rediscovered and improved it, yet earning himself a powerful reputation in doing so.
Guastavino, born in Valencia, Spain and trained as an architect in Barcelona, immigrated to the U.S. after he earned a medal of merit at the Philadephila Centennial Exposition in 1876. He founded the Guastavino Fireproof Construction Company and marketed his tiled arch construction as the “Guastavino Tile Arch System.”
His construction designs fit well with the popular Arts and Crafts movement of the period. Interlocking terra cotta tiles were installed in layers of mortar which enabled him to create strong arches with no visible means of support. Although the clay tiles were, individually, fragile; together they were incredibly strong — often compared to the inherent strength of an eggshell.
While Guastavino was perfecting his tile construction, New York City was planning a subway system. Not only could the 19th Century elevated trains no longer efficiently move the multitudes of New Yorkers, they spewed ashes and soot and were noisy. Through the Rapid Transit Act of 1894 the State had authorized the city to build and run a subway. Six years later things got underway with the formation of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company.
At what would become the City Hall Station, Mayor Robert Van Wyck put foot to silver shovel and formally initiated construction on the subway system. Architects George Lewis Heins and Christopher Grant LaFarge were commissioned to design the stations which were functional, white-tiled, nearly-claustrophibic spaces with individual mosaic themes or, in some cases, ornate tiles proclaiming the stations.
Except for City Hall Station.
The new mayor, George B. McCllellon, was explicit. He wanted it to be a showplace. “My station under City Hall,” he insisted, “will be more beautiful than the rest.” Calling on Rafael Guastavino, Heins and LaFarge incorporated his graceful soaring tiled arches, creating a vast, elegant station. Twelve brass chandeliers illuminated the earthy ochre, green and black Arts and Crafts tiles. Nine stunningly ornate leaded glass skylights pierced the ceiling of every fourth bay. On the opposite wall from the platform large bronze plaques honored the architects, the engineers and the politicians responsible.
As the system was being readied for opening, the Interborough Rapid Transit described the station. “It might readily have been supposed that the limited space and comparative uniformity of the underground stations would afford but little opportunity for architectural and decorative effects. The result has shown the fallacy of such a supposition.
” At 1:00 on October 27, 1904 ceremonies marked the opening of the New York City Subway at the City Hall Station. After customary speeches, Mayor McClellan personally turned the silver key and acted as motorman, transporting the dignitaries far uptown to the 137th Street Station. At 7:00 that evening, paying passengers (admission was by five-cent ticket) were admitted.
According to The New York Times that day, “The rush for tickets to the opening continued unabated yesterday, and scores of demands had to be refused, with the result that the applicants went away declaring they had been slighted.” More than 7,100 paying passengers entered the City Hall Station that evening; a fraction of the system-wide horde of New Yorkers eager to ride the new system.
The City Hall Station was unusual in that, because it was situated at the beginning of the loop where trains would swing around to head back north, its platform was tightly curved. Eventually lack of use and this design element would doom the station.
During World War II the beautiful skylights were blacked out for security purposes, eventually becoming covered over. Then, because the nearby Brooklyn Bridge Stop was more convenient, fewer and fewer passengers were using the elegant station. In 1945 the NYC Board of Transportation shut down the City Hall Station, demolishing the ornamental kiosks and sealing the entrances under concrete slabs. The tiled arches and brass chandeliers were thrust into tomb-like darkness and the station was essentially forgotten. However, Lexington Ave. Local (#6 today) trains continued to use the station’s loop tracks to change direction at Brooklyn Bridge, and do so to this day, as noted in the last sentence.
Any hope that the City Hall stop would be resurrected was smashed when modern train cars, the R17s, introduced on the IRT in 1954, had door positions that could not safely open on the sharp curve of the platform. The wide gaps created between the platform and cars would be unsafe and logistically unreasonable to attempt to correct.
Explanations: The Transit Authority was not created until 1953. The older model cars had doors at the extreme car ends, whereas the R17 cars were the same length, 51 feet, but had a different door arrangement that created dangerous gaps on curved platforms.
In 1995 plans were made to rehabilitate the stop as an annex to the Transit Museum. Over $1 million was granted by the federal government and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to restore the space and, for awhile, was opened for tours. However, in 1998 after terrorist bombings around the globe, Mayor Rudolph Guiliani shut down the space again in concern over the accessibility to the area under City Hall.
Today tours are again conducted, although sporadically. While some of the skylights have suffered severe damage, some are surprisingly intact. There is some water damage and the once elegant chandeliers are covered in decades of gray dust. Yet the grandeur of Mayor McClellan’s showpiece is still evident over a century after its opening.
You can ride thru the station on the #6 train as it turns to start its uptown run. Though the station is not open you can get a glance of it from the train.
Save the Date A Tale of Two Waterworks
Talk by Jeffrey Kroessler presented as part of NYC H20’s Ridgewood Reservoir for the 21st Century
Tuesday, Mar 2, 2021 6:00pm–7:15pm
In conjunction with the current Community Partnership Exhibition Ridgewood Reservoir for the 21st Century situated around the historic Watershed Model at the Queens Museum,
We are pleased to host A Tale of Two Waterworks, talk by Jeffrey Kroessler presented by NYC H20. The presentation will be followed by Q&A with attendees.
This event will take place on Zoom. To join please see queensmuseum.org
The history of the water systems of New York City and the once independent City of Brooklyn is not only a story of engineering triumph, but a story about the public spirit. Clean water was essential for economic prosperity, health, sanitation, and municipal growth. When New York reached into Westchester and the Catskills for water sources, and when the City of Brooklyn tapped the Long Island aquifer, what were the environmental, economic and political factors in play? A Tale of Two Waterworks will explore the history of the two water systems, how and why they were built, how they determined the city’s future, and the story behind their unification.
Jeffrey A. Kroessler is the Interim Chief Librarian of the Lloyd Sealy Library, John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is the author of New York, Year by Year, The Greater New York Sports Chronology, and the forthcoming Sunnyside Gardens: Planning and Preservation in a Historic Garden Suburb.
Image Credits: (black and white image) Drawing with aerial view of the two rectangular-shaped reservoir basins built in NYC in 1842, prior to the construction of Central Park, showing the larger oval-shaped reservoir which would replace them in1858. (color image) Lithograph,1859, showing the original two Ridgewood Reservoir basins in the City of Brooklyn, completed by 1858.
BODLEIAN LIBRARY, OXFORD ARLENE BESSENOFF, HARA REISER & 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 Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
Sources: A DAYTONIAN IN MANHATTAN NY DAILY NEWS PHOTO JUDITH BERDY
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Yesterday, I stumbled on a CSPAN-3 history program on Alexander von Humboldt. I was immediately fascinated by the story of this explorer, artist, scientist, adventurer and diplomat.
I suggest you watch the two videos about the exhibit at the SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM. The videos are presented by Senior Curator Eleanor Jones Harvey https://www.c-span.org/video/?507040-1/alexander-von-humboldt-united-states-exhibit-part-1 https://www.c-span.org/video/?507040-2/alexander-von-humboldt-united-states-exhibit-part-2
There is also a great 4 minute video for kids explaining who Humboldt was. (Suitable for adults too)
As soon as the Smithsonian re-opens, let’s go!
Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture
Friedrich Georg Weitsch, Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), 1806, oil on canvas, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany / Klaus Goeken / Art Resource, NY.
292nd Edition
FEBRUARY 20-21, 2021
FROM THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM
Renowned Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt was one of the most influential figures of the nineteenth century. He lived for 90 years, published more than 36 books, traveled across four continents, and wrote well over 25,000 letters to an international network of colleagues and admirers. In 1804, after traveling four years in South America and Mexico, Humboldt spent exactly six weeks in the United States. In these six weeks, Humboldt—through a series of lively exchanges of ideas about the arts, science, politics, and exploration with influential figures such as President Thomas Jefferson and artist Charles Willson Peale—shaped American perceptions of nature and the way American cultural identity became grounded in our relationship with the environment.
Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture places American art squarely in the center of a conversation about Humboldt’s lasting influence on the way we think about our relationship to the natural world. Humboldt’s quest to understand the universe—his concern for climate change, his taxonomic curiosity centered on New World species of flora and fauna, and his belief that the arts were as important as the sciences for conveying the resultant sense of wonder in the interlocking aspects of our planet—make this a project evocative of how art illuminates some of the issues central to our relationship with nature and our stewardship of this planet.
This exhibition will be the first to examine Humboldt’s impact on five spheres of American cultural development: the visual arts, sciences, literature, politics, and exploration, between 1804 and 1903. It centers on the fine arts as a lens through which to understand how deeply intertwined Humboldt’s ideas were with America’s emerging identity. The exhibition includes more than 100 paintings, sculptures, maps, and artifacts as well as a video introduction to Humboldt and his connections to the Smithsonian through an array of current projects and initiatives.
In 1805 Humboldt and Bonpland published this plant geography map, which Humboldt called his Naturgemälde or “picture of nature.” It combines illusionistic watercolor with a cutaway diagram labeled with the plants he and Bonpland observed in South America, shown at the altitudes where they found them. This map affirmed his belief that the distribution of plants around the globe could be correlated based on altitude and the rock underneath. By amassing and comparing this kind of data, Humboldt refined his theory that everything on the planet was interrelated. His idea of the unity of nature —that plants, animals, and climate are related in ecosystems—is widely accepted today, but was a radical concept when Humboldt first began writing about it.
Artworks by Albert Bierstadt, Karl Bodmer, George Catlin, Frederic Church, Eastman Johnson, Samuel F.B. Morse, Charles Willson Peale, John Rogers, William James Stillman, and John Quincy Adams Ward, among others, will be on display. The installation features a digital exploration of Frederic Church’s famous landscape, Heart of the Andes (1859), enabling visitors to engage with the painting’s details in new ways. The wealth of detail is a painterly extrapolation of Humboldt’s plant geography map. The mountain at the center of the work, Chimborazo, was referred to as “Humboldt’s Mountain.” The narrated, 2.5D animated projection enables visitors to appreciate the connections between Church’s painting and Humboldt’s ideas.
The exhibition also includes the original “Peale Mastodon” skeleton, on loan from the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, with ties to Humboldt, Peale and an emerging American national identity in the early nineteenth century. Its inclusion in the exhibition represents a homecoming for this important fossil that has been in Europe since 1847, and emphasizes that natural history and natural monuments bond Humboldt with the United States.
Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture is organized by Eleanor Jones Harvey, senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. A major catalogue, written by Eleanor Jones Harvey, accompanies the exhibition. The book shows how Humboldt inspired a network of like-minded individuals who would go on to embrace the spirit of exploration, decry slavery, advocate for the welfare of Native Americans and extol America’s wilderness as a signature component of the nation’s sense of self. Harvey traces how Humboldt’s ideas influenced the transcendentalists and the landscape painters of the Hudson River School, and laid the foundations for the Smithsonian, the Sierra Club, and the National Park Service
.The catalogue is co-published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Princeton University Press; it is available for purchase ($75) online.
In this late self-portrait, the elder Peale gestures to the femur of a mastodon. The discovery of the mastodon had been Peale’s inspiration to expand his museum and the complete skeleton was his prize attraction. The femur held special meaning: it was the index bone that allowed one to estimate the overall size of the animal. Like Humboldt’s barometer, it represented what Peale cherished most: the ability to use parts of nature to take the measure of the whole. Here it suggests the summation of Peale’s life as an artist, scientist, and museum founder. Peale had hoped that his museum might become a national institute; however, it would be James Smithson’s bequest that enabled the country to establish the kind of museum complex Peale envisioned.
After Eduard Hildebrandt, Humboldt in His Library, 1856, chromolithograph on paper, 18 5/8 x 26 5/8 in., Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Robert F. Norfleet Jr., Photo: Travis Fullerton, Courtesy Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
ABOUT THIS ARTWORK
In 1855, Smithsonian Regent and art collector William Wilson Corcoran traveled to Europe with former president Millard Fillmore. Carrying a letter on Smithsonian letterhead, they met Humboldt in Berlin, where the aging naturalist welcomed them, showing them around the city and arranging for a dinner with the Prussian king. Corcoran commissioned a marble bust of Humboldt; Fillmore returned with this color print showing Humboldt in his library, surrounded by his books, travel diaries, maps, specimens, and artworks. His rooms had come to resemble Peale’s museum. The globe is positioned to show the regions he visited in South and North America.
THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HOW THE SMITHSONIAN CAME TO BE!!!
James Smithson: Founder of the Smithsonian Institution
Engraving of James Smithson, by Heliotype Printing Co., c. 1881
James Smithson (c. 1765-1829), founding donor of the Smithsonian Institution, was born in 1765 in France with the name James Lewis Macie. The illegitimate son of Elizabeth Hungerford Keate Macie and Hugh Smithson, 1st Duke of Northumberland, he changed his name as well as his citizenship, becoming a naturalized British citizen around the age of ten. After his parents’ death, he became known as James Smithson rather than James Macie. On May 7, 1782, he enrolled in Pembroke College, Oxford, and graduated four years later. The natural sciences sparked his interest, and he established a solid reputation as a chemist and mineralogist, during the exciting period when chemistry was being developed as a new science in the late 1700s. Committed to discovering the basic elements, he worked diligently to collect mineral and ore samples from European countries. Excerpts from his notes show that his field excursions often forced him to brave the elements and do without the upper class comforts known to his parents. Smithson, although a wealthy man, was determined to make a name for himself among scientists. He kept accurate records of his experiments and collections, and his publications earned the respect of his peers. The Royal Society of London recognized his scientific abilities and accepted his membership on April 26, 1787, only a year after he graduated from college, an unusual honor for someone so young. The society became an outlet for publishing many of his papers, which covered a wide range of scientific topics, and also was a meeting place for Smithson and other scientists. James Smithson wrote a draft of his Last Will and Testament in 1826 in London, only three years before he died. He died on June 27, 1829, in Genoa, Italy, where he was buried in a British cemetery. The will left his estate to his nephew, Henry James Hungerford, and stated that if his nephew died without an heir, the money would go “to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge ….” After his nephew died without an heir, Smithson’s estate did come to the United States and a debate began about what this new institution would be.
First, Richard Rush, an attorney from Philadelphia, filed a lawsuit in London to get the Smithson estate for the United States. Rush brought Smithson’s personal effects to the United States in 1838, along with the money from his estate. Then Congressional debates continued until 1846 when legislation was passed creating the Smithsonian Institution. Unfortunately, a fire in the Smithsonian Institution Building or Castle in 1865 destroyed many of the Smithson letters, diaries, and other papers originally acquired by the Institution. As a result of the fire, the Smithsonian Institution Archives does not have very many of James Smithson’s original letters or other papers. Among those that the Smithsonian Institution Archives does have are a handwritten draft of Smithson’s Last Will and Testament, dated October 23, 1826, and his “Receipt Book” containing formulas for food, beverages, and everyday products.
COOPER UNION WHEN THE THIRD AVENUE ELEVATED TRAIN WAS NEXT TO THE SCHOOL.
M.FRANK, HARRIET LIEBER, HARA REISER & ANDY SPARBERG GOT THIS
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff Roosevelt Island Historical Society
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM C-SPAN3
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By 1860 New York City was floundering in a disconnected tangle of public agencies. Then on March 1 of that year The New York Times reported on the formation of the Department of Public Charities and Correction—a title with a seemingly incongruous authority.
The new Department would consolidate and oversee the workings of numerous institutions: The Colored Home, the Colored Orphan Asylum, the Lunatic Asylum, the Nursery Hospital, the Smallpox Hospital, the Work House, and the Penitentiary among them. Despite the dizzying collection of responsibilities, the bill specifically excluded from its supervision “the House of Refuge, Juvenile Delinquent Asylum, the House of Detention for Witnesses, and the County and Sheriff’s Jail.”
Shortly after moving in to the new headquarters the Commissioners met. The minutes reflect the unwieldy scope of responsibilities. Among the issues addressed were “That all Emigrants with Relapsing Fever be retained on Hart’s Island;” the problem of “boys not being at work at tailors shop” on Randall’s Island; the night watchman of Hart’s Island, L. Van Buskirk, was absent without leave and had not returned his pistol (his dismissal was ordered); an additional nurse was needed at the Lunatic Asylum; the Lunatic Asylum needed five new boilers; and a hospital was established “on the corner of Chambers and Centre streets, for the reception and medical treatment of persons Sun struck, or taken ill from excessive heat in the lower portion of the city.” The report from the Apothecary of Bellevue Hospital necessarily included the “consumption of liquors for April.” That month 81 gallons of whiskey, 66 gallons of port wine and 471 gallons of ale were consumed in the hospital. The report, sadly, did not disclose who drank the liquor, other than “5-1/4 galls. Whisky and 55 pints ale given to mechanics, etc., by order of the Commissioners.” The Department was in charge of the education of boys for the trades. To prepare young sailors, the School Ship Mercury, was operated under the Department’s charge. The boys did not necessarily choose a sea-faring vocation, however. The Department issued a report to Mayor A. Oakey Hall regarding the Mercury on September 12, 1871 explaining the selection of the crew. Some, it said, had been committed to the care of the Commissioners by the courts “for slight misdemeanors and vagrancy. Others, and in large numbers, had been committed by their parents as incorrigible, or because of evil associates, who were leading them to ruin.” The lawless boys, the Commissioners felt, “could not without a long probationship be recommended as apprentices, because of their wayward and reckless character, nor could they be discharged without the probability that they would again become vagrants, or fall into their former wicked associations.” So they were loaded onto the Mercury to learn to be a sailor.
Boys put on the Mercury could not expect to see New York again for, sometimes, a year. “The only effectual mode of instruction is the continuous handling of a ship at sea,” said the report, “and that the manifold duties of a thorough seaman can only be learned by actual service.” The report outlined the cruise that had begun on December 20, 1870. The boys took the ship to the Madeira Islands, then to the Canaries, then on to Sierra Leone. From there they sailed to Barbados before returning to New York.
In 1880 the Commissioners Report reflected the struggle the Department had in keeping up with the burgeoning population and the resultant medical and charity cases. The Pavilion for Insane was overcrowded and “we are obliged to place more than one patient in a room. This is to be regretted, from the fact that this class of patients when admitted, become very much excited and often violent; such cases it is necessary to place under mild restraint, which, under the circumstances, cannot be avoided.”
The report noted that a separate pavilion for alcoholics was needed. That year “the number of cases admitted suffering from alcoholism was 1,565, of which 45 died.”
Shortly after 1895 the Department left its 3rd Avenue headquarters. A separate Department of Corrections had been established, relieving the Department of an enormous work load. Around this time orphaned and abandoned children were put under the care of the Out-Door Poor. The Charity Organization Society of the City of New York approved of the move, but felt it did not fully address the problem.
“This was an improvement of course, on the former practice, since the children, while waiting, associated only with tramps, paupers and sick people, instead of with prostitutes and criminals but it was bad enough,” said the Society’s report in 1901.
To address the situation, the Bureau of Dependent Children was established by Commissioner Keller in January 1899. The Bureau took over the building at 3rd Avenue and 11th Street. The organization realized early on that one of its most crucial tasks would be weeding out parents who tried to use the Bureau as a convenient dumping ground for unwanted babies.
Such was the case in April 1900 when jeweler Wilbur F. Hammond walked in with a two-month old baby. The man told Superintendent Blair that he had gotten off the 23rd Street Ferry from Jersey City, walked about four feet and noticed the child lying against the wall. After he waited approximately 45 minutes and no one came to claim the child, he took it to the New York Foundling Hospital. The Hospital refused to accept the infant and sent Hammond to the Bureau. Now, sitting before a suspicious Superintendent Blair, he was asked if he wouldn’t like to adopt the child. No, he answered, “but he was willing to pay for his care,” reported The New York Times. Hammond’s story began unraveling when cabbie Thomas McDonald came forth saying that a man and a woman (she “veiled and well dressed), disembarked from the 23rd Street Ferry and asked to be taken to the Foundling Asylum. The man got out of the cab with a baby and the woman was driven to the elevated railway at 67th Street and 3rd Avenue. There was only one baby brought into the Foundling Hospital that day; a fact that pointed to Hammond as the man. Employees of the ferry terminal said Hammond’s story was “preposterous.” Instead of the lonely station he described, the terminal teemed with “several hundred people. Police became involved and Hammond faced a seven-year prison term for abandoning a child under six years of age. The careful scrutiny of every case resulted in similar discoveries. In 1908 10,519 children were brought to the Bureau. Of them only 3,269 were accepted. The city sold the building—now a half-century old—in 1917. Automobiles crowded New York City streets and parking, as now, was a problem. The old Department headquarters was unceremoniously converted to a garage and its mansard roof, controversial in 1868, was demolished. Throughout the 20th century the humiliation continued with glass brick replacing the window openings—no doubt with security in mind. Yet amazingly the building survived until 1989 when Loew’s Theater Management leased the corner property. Before long one of James Renwick’s surviving structures, already forgotten, was replaced by a cinema complex.
EDITORIAL I sit in my warm apartment looking out at the snow thinking of the dire situation in Texas. A state of stubborn individualists and government that did not heed the warnings. Texas wants to be a loner. Now they are alone, even ted Cruz left for Cancun. (He got a police escort to the airport). No matter how we criticize ConEd, they are prepared for winter and summer…………..with mutual aid from our good neighboring states.
Judith Berdy
COLD HANDS?
STOP INTO THE RISH VISITOR KIOSK FOR A GREAT PAIR OF REALLY WARM LINED GLOVES. $5- FOR KIDS, $10 FOR ADULTS KIOSK OPEN SATURDAY AND SUNDAY 12-5 P.M.
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
Sources
A DAYTONIAN IN NEW YORK
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Simone Leigh (born 1967) is an American artist from Chicago who works in New York City in the United States.She works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism. Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society.Leigh has often said that her work is focused on “Black female subjectivity,” with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history.[4]
The Art Newspaper.com
African AH.com
Early life and education
Leigh was born to Jamaican parents and received a BA in Art and minored in Philosophy from Earlham College in 1990.
Career
“I came to my artistic practice via the study of philosophy, cultural studies, and a strong interest in African and African American art, which has imbued my object and performance-based work with a concern for the ethnographic, especially the way it records and describes objects.”[7] The artist combines her training in American ceramics with an interest in African pottery, using African motifs which tend to have modernist characteristics. Though Leigh considers herself to be primarily a sculptor, she recently has been involved in social sculpture, or social practice work that engages the public directly.Her objects often employ materials and forms traditionally associated with African art, and her performance-influenced installations create spaces where historical precedent and self-determination co-mingle. She describes this combination representing “a collapsing of time.” Her work has been described as part of a generation’s reimagining of ceramics in a cross-disciplinary context.[9] She has given artist lectures in many institutions nationally and internationally, and has taught in the ceramics department of the Rhode Island School of Design .
In October 2020, Leigh was selected to represent the United States at the prestigious 2022 Venice Biennale.[14] She is the first black woman to do so.
Hammer Museum Los Angeles, California
Working across ceramics, sculpture, video, installation, and social practice, Simone Leigh examines the construction of black female subjectivity and economies of self-preservation and exchange. Her practice is largely research based and intersectional, and considers a range of sources, including ethnography, feminist discourse, folklore, and histories of political resistance.
Through ceramics, Leigh references vernacular visual traditions from the Caribbean, the American South, and the African continent, as well as the black diasporic experience dating from the Middle Passage to the present. Vessels, cowrie shells, and busts are reoccurring forms, each making symbolic reference to the black body. Each object is heavily decorated, either with pin drops of glaze or clusters of flowers covering the head or face. The repetition of shapes allows Leigh to have a sustained, temporal engagement with the formal—and gendered—history of ceramics and the cultural histories each object represents. Architecture becomes another extension of the body for Leigh; often cages constructed of steel that become either the armature for another layer of cover, or are left bare. These womb-like structures allude to sub-Saharan grass huts and rural meeting places, often built by women.
Concealment and visibility are also central to Leigh’s work, pointing to historical instances where people, especially women of color, operated in secret in order to build communities and organize against oppression. Her recent projects, such as The Free People’s Medical Clinic (2014) and The Waiting Room (2016) locate social practice within institutions that are geared towards underserved communities. Inspired by the outreach work of the Black Panther Party focused on literacy, poverty, and hunger, and radical self-care initiatives rooted in non-traditional health practices, such as herbalism, meditation, acupuncture, and yoga, these free workshops empower visitors to take back the care of their bodies from agents of capitalism.
For her first solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles, Leigh presents a selection of recent ceramics and a site-specific installation, as well as a public program related to her ongoing research and work in public engagement.
LEIGH ON SITE AT STRATTON SCULPTURE STUDIOS, THE PHILADELPHIA FOUNDRY WHERE SHE IS PRODUCING NEW WORKS.
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)
WIKIPEDIA GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM HAMMER MUSEUM
REPORT FROM TEXAS
Deborah Dorff, our webmaster and the person who keeps our website updated lives in Austin, Texas. For four days she and her husband have had no electricity in their home. This afternoon she reports that their water service is out. Texas homes are not build for cold and their power grid has collapsed. The only shelter they can go to, you have to bring your own food and blankets. It sounds dire in Texas,
Read the interesting stories about the Texas “GO IT ALONE” power grid. It is an interesting story about the attitude “that we do not need other states”. In NY and all the other states we mutually cooperate when one state needs help there is a network, not in Texas.
Hoping Deborah and Kevin are soon warm and cozy soon.
The 1915 Marshall Orme Wilson, Jr. House – 11 East 64th Street
from A DAYTONIAN IN MANHATTAN
For many years I walked by this building on East 64th Street. It has been the scene of elopements, marital bliss, romances, intrigue and scandal in its over 115 year history. Enjoy the stories and the vast cast of characters!
Marshall Orme Wilson, Jr. was 17 years old when his parents moved into their sumptuous new mansion at No. 3 East 64th Street. There were few young men in New York who could compete with his social status. His mother was the former Caroline “Carrie” Schermerhorn Astor (daughter of William Backhouse and Caroline Schermerhorn Astor), and his father was banker and railroad mogul Marshall Orme Wilson. His aunt had married Ogden Goelet, his uncle was John Jacob Astor IV, and other aunts had the married names of Roosevelt, Drayton, and Haig.
Marshall Orme Wilson, Jr. original source unknown (photo)
Following his graduation from Harvard, Wilson went into the banking business. Then, in the summer of 1910, one of America’s most eligible bachelors was off the market. On June 10 The Washington Post reported “Society turned out in large numbers to attend the wedding of Miss Alice Borland to Marshall Orme Wilson, jr….The bride is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. J. Nelson Borland, and the granddaughter of George Griswold Haven. The bridegroom is the son of Mr. and Mrs. M. Orme Wilson, and the grandson of Mrs. Astor.”
Three years later Wilson purchased and demolished the former Charles Steele house at No. 11 East 64th Street, steps away from his parents’ home. He hired the architectural firm of Trowbridge & Livingston to design a modern replacement mansion on the site. On June 21, 1913 The Sun announced “The proposed dwelling, plans for which were filed yesterday…will be a five story fireproof structure, 29×80, with an extension, its façade being in limestone and brick. It will cost $75,000.” That amount would translate to about $2 million today.
Construction on the limestone-faced residence would take two years. The architects produced a sedate neo-French Classical style mansion that stressed sophistication over ornamentation. The understated entrance within the rusticated base was decorated with only a scrolled keystone. Three sets of graceful French doors at the second floor, or piano nobile, were fronted by stone balustrades and set within arches. Intermediate cornices separated the two-story mid-section from the first and fourth floors. The fifth floor took the form of a dormered mansard, set back behind a stone balustrade.
Millicent Rogers Salm
The house was, of course, used only during the winter social season. During the warmer months the couple made the rounds of fashionable “watering-holes.” On May 24, 1915, for instance, The New York Press announced, “Mr. and Mrs. Marshall Orme Wilson, Jr., will close their house, No. 11 East Sixty-fourth street, on Wednesday and go out to Bay Shore, L. I., where they have leased a place for the summer. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson will pass part of August in Newport.” The couple had barely arrived back home that year when they left again to spend Thanksgiving with Wilson’s sister and her family. On November 23 The New York Press reported, “Mr. and Mrs. Marshall Orme Wilson, Jr…left last evening for the Greenbrier, at White Sulphur Springs, where they will spend Thanksgiving with Mrs. Ogden Goelet.”
The mansion was shuttered in 1917 after the United States entered World War I. Marshall joined the army and was sent to Washington D.C. It would be a decisive moment in the lives of the Wilsons. With peace achieved in 1919, the couple returned briefly to East 64th Street. On April 6 the New York Herald reported that they “have returned from Washington and opened their house at No. 11 East Sixty-fourth street, which they closed two years ago.”
The Wilsons’ only child, Orme, was born in the mansion in August 1920. In announcing the birth The Evening Telegram noted, “Mr. Wilson has recently been appointed to a secretaryship at the United States Embassy at Brussels and will leave for Europe in two weeks.”
Marshall, Alice and the newborn sailed around September 15 and the following week the New York Herald reported that “Mr. and Mrs. G. N. Ormsby, who are at the Ritz-Carlton, have taken Mr. Wilson’s house at 11 East Sixty-fourth street for the winter.”
What initially was a one-season lease extended through the summer of 1923. George Newell Armsby was the chairman of Curtiss-Wright and sat on the boards of numerous corporations. His wife, the former Leonora Chestnut Wood, was the daughter of Colorado mining magnate Tingley Sylvanus Wood.
Armsby’s decision not to renew the lease on No. 11 no doubt had to do with worsening domestic problems. A few months later Leonora would claim abandonment. Her divorce, granted in San Francisco, earned her a $1 million settlement–more than 18 times that much in today’s money.
The 64th Street mansion was briefly leased to millionaire Moses Taylor, and then, following a remodeling in the spring of 1924, to Standard Oil executive Henry Huddleston Rogers and his wife, the former Mary Benjamin. Moving in with his parents was Henry H. Huddleston, Jr., but not his sister, Mary Millicent Abigail (who went by Millicent). She was currently “away.”
Her elopement to Austrian Count Ludwig von Salm-Hoogstraeten in January that year had enraged her parents (most notably her father). The count had a title, but no money, and was almost twice Millicent’s age. Rogers immediately cut off his daughter’s allowance.
Pregnant and without funds, Millicent was lured back to New York by her father–without the count. It was not the end, but merely the beginning of the long drama. On November 13, 1924 The New York Times reported that the count was considering a trip to America “for a reconciliation with his wife, if such a reconciliation is possible.” The article added, “It was said at the home of the mother of the Countess, Mrs. Henry H. Rogers, 11 East Sixty-fourth Street, that the count was not expected in New York.”
As the count steamed toward New York the following year, Millicent took her baby boy to Palm Beach. Her parents “did not care to comment on the Count’s arrival,” said The New York Times on December 3, 1925, and in Palm Beach Millicent told reporters, “I do not care to talk with the press.”
The count was back in New York the following year, the Daily News reporting on November 26, 1926, “The Austrian nobleman came back to stay. Or so he said.”
Upon arriving he almost immediately telephoned the Rogers house. The newspaper reported, “He wanted to see his golden-haired son, Peter, who is living with his mother. Salm asked that the child’s nurse be allowed to bring little Peter to his father’s presence. But Peter was having his Thanksgiving dinner in the Rogers’s nursery. Or something.”
In April 1927 Millicent filed for divorce in Paris, her father offering Count Salm a $300,000 settlement. Little Peter was left home with his grandfather while Mary accompanied her daughter to France. Already the press was suggesting that Millicent had a second husband in the wings, but she underplayed that, telling a reporter “My future plans are indefinite. I won’t say that I will never marry again, at least, I have no one in mind now.”
In fact, she married Argentinian aristocrat Arturo Peralta-Ramos on November 8 that year. This time her father approved, giving the couple a $500,000 trust fund (with the provision that the groom “lay no future claim” to the Rogers fortune, then estimated at about $40 million).
The wedding was “particularly quiet,” as described by The Knickerbocker Press, due Millicent’s grandfather, Dr. George Hilliard Benjamin, being gravely ill. An eminent electrical scientist, he died two days later, early on the morning of November 10. His funeral was held in the 64th Street mansion. In the meantime Millicent’s brother was living a much more low-profile existence. He attended preparatory schools in the U.S. before entering Oxford University in 1924. Upon his graduation he returned to begin his career as an electrical engineer.
On July 28, 1928 Dr. William R. Lincoln of Cleveland, Ohio, announced the engagement of his daughter, Virginia, to Henry. The New York Times reported “The engagement is one of the most important of the year and is of interest to society not only here and in Cleveland, but in Washington, D. C., and in Europe.”
A month earlier a dramatic fracas had broken out in the 64th Street mansion. On June 7 Henry Huddleston Rogers’s valet, William Mackay, opened a clothes closet to find a burglar hiding inside. Rogers kept a revolver in the bedroom (which was not loaded) and Mackay grabbed it, ordering Haywood Edwards “to precede him to the basement,” as reported by The Daily Star. They never made it that far before an out-and-out brawl broke out among the staff and the intruder.
“When they got downstairs, however, Edwards bolted. Harry Caslow, the chauffeur; Charles Roth, the second man, and a maid servant struggled to hold him. They were being bested in the scuffle but Patrolman Woods arrived in time to place the [burglar] under arrest.” Detectives believed him to be the “window-cleaning” burglar who had been entering the homes of the wealthy in the neighborhood. Justice came quickly and on July 16 Edwards was sentenced to 10 years in Sing Sing prison.
As had been the case with the Armsbys, domestic bliss in the Rogers household began to deteriorate. They left East 64th Street in 1928 before Mary filed for divorce in January 1929.
At the same time, Marshall Orme Wilson, Jr. was appointed Second Secretary of the American Embassy at Buenos Aires. On October 9, 1928 the New York Evening Post reported, “During his leave of absence they will be in their home at 11 East Sixty-fourth Street.”
In January 11, 1929 the Wilsons sold the mansion to art dealer George Wildenstein and his family. It was conveniently located to the Wildenstein Gallery at 19 east 64th Street, erected in 1931.
On June 3, 1946 the house was the scene of Miriam Wildenstein’s wedding to Gerard R. Pereire, son of Jacques Pereire of Paris. In reporting on the wedding, The New York Times mentioned that the bride’s father “an art critic, is owner of one of the leading galleries in this city, Paris, London and Buenos Aires. He is director of Gazette Des Beaux-Arts, editor and publisher of art magazines and books, and a Commander of the Legion of Honor.”
Daniel Wildenstein and his father George Wildenstein
Daniel Wildenstein inherited the mansion following his father’s death in 1963. His son, Alec N. married Jocelyn Périsset in 1978 and the couple moved into the third floor. Alec’s brother, Guy and his wife, Kristina, lived on the fourth floor and the children of both couples had rooms on the fifth floor.
With drama that surpassed that of Millicent Rogers Salm, Alec and Jocelyn each filed for divorce in June 1997–but both refused to leave the mansion. Things boiled over three months later. On September 4 The New York Times reported “A prominent New York City art dealer was arrested early yesterday on charges of menacing his wife with a handgun.” Jocelyn had charged him with waving a loaded 9-millimeter pistol at her. Although Wilderstein claimed he was defending himself from intruders, she succeeded at having an order of protection issued “that bars him from his home and orders him to stay away from his wife.”
As part of the couple’s divorce agreement in 1999 Jocelyn vacated the 64th Street house and Wildenstein moved back in. He sold the mansion in 2008 for a reported $42.4 million to Oleg Deripaska, the Soviet-born aluminum tycoon and major GOP donor.
On October 8, 2018 the New York Post reported that, following sanctions imposed against Deripaska by the Treasury Department in April, authorities had “frozen his Upper East Side mansion, occupied by the ex-wife of his business partner Roman Abramovich.” The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project added “Deripaska has lost billions after the US sanctioned him on alleged bribery, money laundering, murder and racketeering charges.”
The report said “This might be a problem for Abramovich’s ex-wife Dasha Zhukova, a Russian-American businesswoman, art collector, magazine editor, and philanthropist,” who was occupying No. 11 East 64th Street.
Dasha Zhukova had become close friends with her former across-the-street neighbor, Ivanka Trump. According to the New York Post, “While they were together, Zhukova and Abramovich travelled with Trump and Kusher to Russia, Croatia, Aspen and New York.”
Despite having had more than its fair share of drama, the Wilson mansion continues to exude its architectural serenity after 115 years.
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Tuesday, March 16 “Abandoned Queens” Author Richard Panchyk takes us on a journey through Queens’ past. Revealing haunting reminders of the way things used to be, he describes fascinating, abandoned places, including the chilling Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, the meandering remains of the country’s first modern highway, a defunct airport reclaimed by wilderness, an eerie old railroad line in Forest Hills, and a destroyed neighborhood in the Rockaways.
Tuesday, April 20 “Mansions and Munificence: the Gilded Age on Fifth Avenue” Guide, lecturer, author and teacher of art and architecture, Emma Guest-Consales leads a virtual tour of the great mansions of Fifth Avenue. Starting with the ex-home of Henry Clay Frick that now houses the Frick Collection, all the way up to the former home of Andrew Carnegie, now the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, she takes us through some of the most extravagant urban palaces the city has ever seen.
Tuesday, May 18 “Saving America’s Cities” Author and Harvard History Professor Lizabeth Cohen Provides an eye-opening look at her award-winning book’s subtitle: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age. Tracing Logue’s career from the development of Roosevelt Island in the ‘70s, to the redevelopment of New Haven in the ‘50s, Boston in the’60s and the South Bronx from 1978–85, she focuses on Logue’s vision to revitalize post-war cities, the rise of the Urban Development Corporation.
WEDNESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
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BURJ AL-ARAB HOTEL, DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES CLARA BELLA 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 Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
A DAYTONIAN IN MANHATTAN
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TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2021
The
288th Edition
From Our Archives
SKYSCRAPERS
STEPHEN BLANK
WORLD BUILDING
Skyscrapers
Stephen Blank “Skyscraper” had many meanings in the late 19th century, from top hats to the top-most sails on the great sailing ships. But by the 1880s, skyscraper referred specifically to tall buildings – and a decade later, to buildings 10 or more stories high.
Speaking of tall, until 1890, the highest edifice in NYC was Trinity Church at the top of Wall Street, constructed in 1846. Its spire rose 281 feet, making it not only the tallest building in NYC but also the tallest building in the United States. Folks, we are told, were able to climb to the top for dramatic views of the city, rivers and port. Trinity continued to dominate the New York City skyline until 1890, when the New York World Building topped out at 309 feet.
Speaking of views, I have heard that people were able to climb to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge towers – another early skyscraper, completed 1883 – to watch the great sailing ships pass below. Could this be true?
The first skyscrapers? There are many stories.
First, height or construction? But height, of course, depended on construction. Masonry (load bearing) walls would have to be very thick to support a building more than a few stories high. There would be no interior space on the lower floors. That’s why skyscrapers are identified with internal steel construction. (Note, this is not entirely true – the Monadnock Building in Chicago, one of the great early modern buildings there, had masonry walls.) The changing quality and price of steel in 1880s is behind all of this.
The key to taller buildings was steel frame-curtain wall construction – that is, the walls are hung like curtains from the steel frame. There were earlier steel frame constructed buildings in NYC. The Tower Building at 50 Broadway (by Cass Gilbert, 1889) was possibly the first steel-frame building in the City, though it reached only to 108 feet.
THE TOWER BUILDING
If steel frame-curtain wall construction is the key to skyscrapers, can we look back to NYC’s cast iron front buildings as the early progenitors of the skyscrapers? The curtain wall construction permitted much more window area.
Steel frame construction wasn’t the only requirement for creating tall buildings. Elevators were also key. Through animal and steam driven lifts were used before, the first commercial passenger elevators were introduced by Otis in the Equitable Life Building in 1870 (considered by some to be the first skyscraper). Telephones, ventilation and – my favorite – plumbing were also necessary innovations. Taller buildings required a much greater understanding of stronger, deeper foundation construction and wind bracing. All of this had to come together to make the new skyscrapers possible.
What was the function of these new structures? Vertical space substituted for increasingly expensive horizontal space. Some of the new skyscrapers were prestige buildings – like Singer or Woolworth or the New York Times building – designed to show off the new powers in the economy. Another was purpose built office buildings. But all really served the same need – to provide office space for swarms of new businesses. This need responded to the emerging separation of functions in business. Underline the legal and financial changes that enabled builders to meet large up-front costs and rent to many tenants. The new prestige buildings housed many tenants, often smaller businesses. For companies with a large cash flow, building named, famous buildings and renting office space was good use for their money. Each new building lured tenants from older buildings, a churning which continued at least through the construction of the World Trade Towers.
Speaking of money, most of the new tall buildings provided commercial space on the ground floor. These shops were useful for tenants and also brought more rental income into the building. The one building that did not do this was the grand Telephone (AT&T) Building on Broadway, just south of St Paul’s. In the good old days when one could actually enter and look around, you’d see a magnificent, largely empty Egyptian style lobby with NO shops. The company was delighted to show you it didn’t need the income.
TELEPHONE BUILDING LOBBY
Chicago or New York? That’s hard to answer. Experts say that modern skyscraper construction began in NYC with the completion of the World Building (also known as the Pulitzer Building with the great gold dome, across Park Row from City Hall Park) in 1890. Burnham and Root’s 148 foot Rand McNally Building in Chicago, 1889, is said to have been the first all-steel framed skyscraper The Home Insurance Building in Chicago, completed in 1885, was a 10-story building widely recognized as the first to use steel skeleton frame construction with reinforced concrete.
But regardless of who was first, styles were quite different. In contrast to New York’s typical “wedding cake” style, one floor piled on another, the Chicago Schools’ buildings seemed lighter, with more glass walls and a greater sense of verticality. Of course, building in Chicago was easier because so much of the city had been destroyed in the fire of 1871 and that the downtown area had been completely redesigned, eliminating the narrow, difficult passages of downtown NYC.
CHICAGO STYLE, RELIANCE BUILDING
For sure, once New Yorkers figured out how to do it, the race for height went very rapidly. By 1900, fifteen skyscrapers in New York City exceeded 250 feet in height. Upward, from the World Building at 309 feet in 1890, to the Manhattan Life Insurance Building (348 feet, 1894), the Park Row Building (391 feet, 1899), the Singer Building (612 feet, 1908), the Metropolitan Life Tower (700 feet, 1909) and finally, the Woolworth Building (792 feet, 1913), New York skyscrapers soared higher and higher.
And soon created dark canyons on narrow New York streets. The Equitable Building at 120 Broadway was the last straw. It rose precipitately 38 stories (555 feet) from the sidewalk, and covered most of a block. This contributed to the adoption of the first modern building and zoning restrictions on vertical structures in Manhattan, the 1916 Zoning Resolution, which demanded set-backs at certain heights to ensure better access to light and air and gave NYC its iconic skyscraper image.
The decoration on many of these early New York skyscrapers was either a delight for the eyes or, in the view of the Chicago School, definitely old school. But the standard three-part model, lower level, middle and upper level, gave plenty of space for decoration. To see this clearly, look at Cass Gilbert’s first NYC building, the Broadway-Chambers Building, an 18-story office tower at 277 Broadway, completed in 1900. The tri-part design is clear and the decoration at the top is glorious – if you like that sort of thing.
SINGER BUILDING
Bear in mind, dear reader, that while this was going on downtown, the City was building enormously, everywhere: Penn Station, 1910; NY Public Library on 5th Ave, 1911; Grand Central Station, 1913. Bridges: Williamsburg, 1903; Manhattan and Queensboro, both 1909. And the subways were being built, too. (And steam shovels really worked with steam! No automatic tools.) Don’t forget that this was the great era for shipping in the New York Port – with all of the traffic and tumult that caused. And it is worthwhile saying, none of this was throw-away. Builders felt they were constructing for the ages and were delighted to put their names on their works. Thanks for coming along with me.
Brick House is a 16-foot (4.9 m) tall bronze bust of a black woman by Simone Leigh, installed along New York City’s High Line in 2019 LAURA HUSSEY, VICKI FEINMEL, SUSAN RODESIS,GLORIA HERMAN, ALEXIS VELLEFANE, & V. HARWOOD 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
Judith Berdy STEPHEN BLANK WIKIPEDIA
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated PHOTOS BY JUDITH BERDY / RIHS (C) FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
Richmond Barthé (January 28, 1901 – March 5, 1989) was an African-American sculptor associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Barthé is best known for his portrayal of black subjects. The focus of his artistic work was portraying the diversity and spirituality of man. Barthé once said: “All my life I have been interested in trying to capture the spiritual quality I see and feel in people, and I feel that the human figure as God made it, is the best means of expressing this spirit in man.”
FROM WIKIPEDIA
RICHMOND BARTHE HARLEM RENAISSANCE-ERA FRIEZE AT KINGSBOROUGH HOUSES TO BE RESTORED
“Exodus and Dance” by Richmond Barthé depicts African-American figures engaged in collective dance. Photo by Michele H. Bogart
from Brooklyn Paper by Jessica Parks
A crumbling Harlem Renaissance-era sculpture at Crown Heights’ Kingsborough Houses is getting a much-needed facelift following decades of neglect. “The artwork is falling apart,” said Larry Weeks, Fulton Art Fair treasurer and neighbor of the Kingsborough Houses. “I would walk through there and I would see it and say this piece needs some tender loving care.”
Richmond Barthé — a gay, Black sculpturist prominent in the city’s art revival era — built the frieze, titled “Exodus and Dance,” on commission for an amphitheater that was never built at the Harlem River Houses, a mostly-Black housing complex at the time. Instead, the artwork traveled across the East River to the Kingsborough Houses, which had a mostly-white population, in 1941.
The sculpted-stone mural can now be seen at the New York City Housing Authority complex, although it exists in a state of disrepair — suffering from cracks due to rainwater and a bad patchwork job, according to one of the project’s advocates. “The work of cast stone was literally cracked and crumbling and you could put a finger through sections of it,” said Michelle Bogart, an author and art history professor.
“The immediate approaches to it are crumbling too… there was patching that had been done but very badly.” The restoration is a result of the combined effort of a number of people and organizations — which is said to have begun in 2018, when Bogart drew attention to the artwork’s dilapidated state on Twitter, and when the Weeksville Heritage Center and Fulton Art Fair began reaching out to their councilmember.
“So I was just simply trying to draw awareness to the work, so I started tagging [First Lady] Chirlane McCray and [Councilmember] Alicka Ampry-Samuels,” Bogart said. “And it was on that basis that some people saw it.” Their pleas eventually reached the right people, and moves were made to preserve Barthé’s largest work of art — in a project costing a whopping $1.8 million. “NYCHA continues to move forward with the in-house work on the Barthé frieze,” said a NYCHA spokeswoman. “In 2018, the Public Design Commission, NYCHA, and Speaker Corey Johnson’s staff met to discuss the conservation of this work, and The Speaker allocated $1.8 million for the work to be done.
BARTHE’S LIFE AND OTHER WORKS
Early life
James Richmond Barthé was born in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. His father’s name is Richmond Barthé and mother’s name is Marie Clementine Robateau. Barthé’s father died at age 22, when he was only a few months old, leaving his mother to raise him alone. She worked as a dressmaker and before Barthé began elementary school she remarried to William Franklin, with whom she eventually had five additional children.
Barthé showed a passion and skill for drawing from an early age. His mother was, in many ways, instrumental in his decision to pursue art as a vocation. Barthé once said: “When I was crawling on the floor, my mother gave me paper and pencil to play with. It kept me quiet while she did her errands. At six years old I started painting. A lady my mother sewed for gave me a set of watercolors. By that time, I could draw very well.”
Barthé continued making drawings throughout his childhood and adolescence, under the encouragement of his teachers. His fourth grade teacher, Inez Labat, from the Bay St. Louis Public School, influenced his aesthetic development by encouraging his artistic growth. When he was only twelve years old, Barthé exhibited his work at the Bay St. Louis Country Fair.
However, young Barthé was beset with health problems, and after an attack of typhoid fever at age 14, he withdrew from school.[6] Following this, he worked as a houseboy and handyman, but still spent his free time drawing. A wealthy family, the Ponds, who spent summers at Bay St. Louis, invited Barthé to work for them as a houseboy in New Orleans, Louisiana. Through his employment with the Ponds, Barthé broadened his cultural horizons and knowledge of art, and was introduced to Lyle Saxon, a local writer for the Times Picayune. Saxon was fighting against the racist system of school segregation, and tried unsuccessfully to get Barthé registered in an art school in New Orleans.
In 1924, Barthé donated his first oil painting to a local Catholic church to be auctioned at a fundraiser. Impressed by his talent, Reverend Harry F. Kane encouraged Barthé to pursue his artistic career and raised money for him to undertake studies in fine art. At age 23, with less than a high school education and no formal training in art, Barthé applied to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago, and was accepted by the latter.
Josephine Baker 1951
Chicago
During the next four years Barthé followed a curriculum structured for majors in painting. During this time he boarded with his aunt Rose and made a living working different jobs.[9] His work caught the attention of Dr. Charles Maceo Thompson, a patron of the arts and supporter of many talented young black artists. Barthé was a flattering portrait painter, and Dr. Thompson helped him to secure many lucrative commissions from the city’s affluent black citizens.
At the Art Institute of Chicago, Barthé’s formal artistic instruction in sculpture took place in anatomy class with professor of anatomy and German artist Charles Schroeder. Students practiced modeling in clay to gain a better understanding of the three-dimensional form. This experience proved to be, according to Barthé, a turning point in his career, shifting his attention away from painting and toward sculpture.[
Barthé had his debut as a professional sculptor at The Negro in Art Week exhibition in 1927 while still a student of painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. He also exhibited in the April 1928 annual exhibition of the Chicago Art League. The critical acclaim allowed Barthé to enjoy numerous important commissions such as the busts of Henry O. Tanner (1928) and Toussaint L’Ouverture (1928). Although he was still in his late 20s, within a short time he won recognition, primarily through his sculptures, for making significant contributions to modern African American art. By 1929, the essentials of his artistic education complete, Barthé decided to leave Chicago and head for New York City.
New York City
While many young artists found it very difficult to earn a living from their art during the Great Depression, the 1930s were Richmond Barthé’s most prolific years. The shift from the Art Institute of Chicago to New York City, where he moved following graduation, exposed Barthé to new experiences as he arrived in the city during the peak of the Harlem Renaissance. He established his studio in Harlem in 1930 after winning the Julius Rosenwald Fund fellowship at his first solo exhibition at the Women’s City Club in Chicago. However, in 1931, he moved his studio in Harlem to Greenwich Village. Barthé once said: “I live downtown because it is much more convenient for my contacts from whom it is possible for me to make a living.” He understood the importance of public relations and keeping abreast of collectors’ interests.
Barthé mingled with the bohemian circles of downtown Manhattan. Initially unable to afford live models, he sought and found inspiration from on-stage performers. Living downtown provided him the opportunity to socialize not only among collectors but also among artists, dance performers, and actors. His remarkable visual memory permitted him to work without models, producing numerous representations of the human body in movement. During this time, he completed works such as Black Narcissus (1929), The Blackberry Woman (1930), Drum Major (1928), The Breakaway (1929), busts of Alain Locke (1928), bust of A’leila Walker (1928), The Deviled Crab-Man (1929), Rose McClendon (1932), Féral Benga (1935), and Sir John Gielgud as Hamlet (1935).
In October 1933, a major body of Barthé’s work inaugurated the Caz Delbo Galleries at the Rockefeller Center in New York City. The same year, his works were exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933. In summer 1934, Barthé went on a tour to Paris with Reverend Edward F. Murphy, a friend of Reverend Kane from New Orleans, who exchanged his first class ticket for two third-class tickets to share with Barthé. This trip exposed Barthé to classical art, but also to performers such as Féral Benga and African American entertainer Josephine Baker, of whom he made portraits in 1935 and 1951, respectively.[
During the next two decades, he built his reputation as a sculptor. He was awarded several awards and has experienced success after success and was considered by writers and critics as one of the leading “moderns” of his time. Among his African-American friends were Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Jimmie Daniels, Countee Cullen, and Harold Jackman. Ralph Ellison was his first student.
Supporters who were white included Carl Van Vechten, Noel Sullivan, Charles Cullen, Lincoln Kirstein, Paul Cadmus, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., and Jared French.
In 1945, Barthé became a member of the National Sculpture Society.
Blackberry Woman, modeled by 1930, cast 1932, bronze, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2001.6
Later Life
Booker T. Washington, 1946, National Portrait Gallery
Eventually, the tense environment and violence of the city began to take its toll, and he decided to abandon his life of fame and move to Jamaica in the West Indies in 1947. His career flourished in Jamaica, and he remained there until the mid-1960s when ever-growing violence forced him to move again. For the next five years, he lived in Switzerland, Spain, and Italy, then settled in Pasadena, California in a rental apartment. In this apartment, Barthé worked on his memoirs, and most importantly, editioned many of his works with the financial assistance of actor James Garner until his death in 1989. Garner copyrighted Barthé’s artwork, hired a biographer to organize and document his work, and established the Richmond Barthe Trust.
Haitian works
Barthe’s Haitian works came in a time after his 1950 move to Ocho Rios, Jamaica, and were among his larger and more famous works. The huge 40-foot equestrian bronze of Jean Jacques Dessalines, (1952), was one of four heroic sculptures commissioned in 1948 by Haitian political leaders to mark independence celebrations. The Dessalines monument was part of a larger 1954 restoration of the Champs-du-Mars park in Port-au-Prince, Barthe’s 40-foot-high Toussaint L’Ouverture statue (1950), and stone monument was positioned nearer the National Palace, and was unveiled in 1950 with two other commissioned heroic sculptures (in the capital and in the north of the county) by Cuban sculptor Blanco Ramos. At the time, one African-American newspaper called the collection “the Greatest Negro Monuments on earth.” [ L’Overture was a subject Barthe returned to several times, having created a bust (1926) and painted portrait (1929) of the figure early in his career.[
Exhibitions
Barthé’s debut as a professional sculptor was at The Negro in Art Week exhibition in Chicago in 1927. His first solo exhibition was held at the Women’s City Club in Chicago in 1930, exhibiting a selection of 38 works of sculpture, painting, and works on paper.[23] In 1932, the Whitney Museum of American Art decided to purchase a bronze copy of the Blackberry Woman (1930) after exhibiting it at the opening exhibition of Contemporary American Artists in 1932. Barthé’s work was paired with drawings by Delacroix, Matisse, Laurencin, Daumier, and Forain at the Caz-Delbo Gallery in 1933 in New York City.[ In 1942, he had an exhibition of 20 works of art at the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago.] The retrospective which included works from private collections shown for the first time, Richmond Barthé: The Seeker was the inaugural exhibition of the African American Galleries at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi, curated by Margaret Rose Vendryes, PhD.
Barthé’s most recent retrospective, titled Richmond Barthé: His Life in Art, consisted of over 30 sculptures and photographs.[ The exhibition was organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions of Los Angeles, CA, in 2009. The exhibition venues included the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, the California African American Museum, the Dixon Gallery and Gardens,] and the NCCU Art Museum.
Save the Date A Tale of Two Waterworks
Talk by Jeffrey Kroessler presented as part of NYC H20’s Ridgewood Reservoir for the 21st Century
Tuesday, Mar 2, 2021 6:00pm–7:15pm In conjunction with the current Community Partnership Exhibition Ridgewood Reservoir for the 21st Century situated around the historic Watershed Model at the Queens Museum, We are pleased to host A Tale of Two Waterworks, talk by Jeffrey Kroessler presented by NYC H20. The presentation will be followed by Q&A with attendees. This event will take place on Zoom. To join please see queensmuseum.org The history of the water systems of New York City and the once independent City of Brooklyn is not only a story of engineering triumph, but a story about the public spirit. Clean water was essential for economic prosperity, health, sanitation, and municipal growth. When New York reached into Westchester and the Catskills for water sources, and when the City of Brooklyn tapped the Long Island aquifer, what were the environmental, economic and political factors in play? A Tale of Two Waterworks will explore the history of the two water systems, how and why they were built, how they determined the city’s future, and the story behind their unification.
Jeffrey A. Kroessler is the Interim Chief Librarian of the Lloyd Sealy Library, John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is the author of New York, Year by Year, The Greater New York Sports Chronology, and the forthcoming Sunnyside Gardens: Planning and Preservation in a Historic Garden Suburb.
Image Credits: (black and white image) Drawing with aerial view of the two rectangular-shaped reservoir basins built in NYC in 1842, prior to the construction of Central Park, showing the larger oval-shaped reservoir which would replace them in1858. (color image) Lithograph,1859, showing the original two Ridgewood Reservoir basins in the City of Brooklyn, completed by 1858.
Roman Aqueduct – Caesarea Maritima, Haifa, Israel ARLENE BESSENOFF 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 Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
Sources: WIKIPEDIA SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM BROOKLYN NEWS QUEENS MUSEUM JUDITH BERDY
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