THOMAS JEFFERSON CENTER FOR HISTORIC PLANTS TWINLEAF JOURNAL ARCHIVES
Encounters with America’s Premier Nursery and Botanic Garden The Prince Nursery of New York City
The year was 1791, and Thomas Jefferson, then Secretary of State under George Washington, was embroiled in various political and personal matters. His ideological vision for America, in conflict with the governmental system espoused by Alexander Hamilton, was causing political relationships to crumble and his already strained friendship with John Adams to deteriorate further.
Consequently, Jefferson’s month-long “botanizing excursion” through New England with James Madison in June was the subject of much speculation that summer. Hamilton and other political adversaries were convinced that this lengthy vacation of two Republican Virginians through Federalist strongholds in the North had secret, ulterior motives. It would seem likely that, as Jefferson historian Merrill Peterson surmised, while the two future presidents “bounced along in leisurely fashion, their conversation must have turned occasionally to politics.” Yet, apparently the trip was innocent of intrigue and intended exclusively for, in Madison’s words, “health recreation and curiosity.”
This goal was successfully achieved, for both Jefferson’s “periodical” migraines and Madison’s “bilious attacks” vanished in the nearly four weeks they spent walking over historic battlefields, studying botanical curiosities, wildlife and insects (including “musketoes” and the Hessian fly), recording observations on climate, the seasons and the appearance of birds, and even boating and fishing in Lake George and Lake Champlain.
Their journey did, nevertheless, incorporate elements of a working vacation, for Jefferson was seeking ways to advance the new nation through alternative domestic industries. He believed his most recent idea—the addition “to the products of the U. S. of three such articles as oil, sugar, and upland rice”—would lessen America’s reliance on foreign trade, improve the lot of farmers, and ultimately result in the abolition of slavery itself. At that time a Quaker activist and philanthropist Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, himself an ardent opponent of slavery, was seeking ways to convince political leaders and slave owners to create a sugar maple industry in America, convinced it would “lessen or destroy the consumption of West Indian sugar, and thus indirectly to destroy negro slavery.”
Jefferson took up the cause of Benjamin Rush, becoming a conscientious consumer of maple sugar much in the way that modern environmental activists boycott plantation grown coffee today. In a letter to a friend in England, Jefferson expressed the political and humanitarian benefits of commercial independence when he wrote, “What a blessing to substitute a sugar which requires only the labour of children, for that which it is said renders the slavery of the blacks necessary.”
The Princes of New York In their quest for the sugar maple, Jefferson and Madison made a noteworthy visit to the Prince Family Nursery in Flushing on the north shore of Long Island, New York. Established on eight acres of land in the 1730s by Robert Prince—within a community chiefly of French Huguenot settlers—it became America’s first commercial nursery and remained a thriving family business through four generations, until just after the Civil War. Initially called the “Old American Nursery,” it soon became the largest supplier of fruit trees and grapes in the New World, producing most of the grafted apple, pear, and cherry trees that could be found in early northeastern orchards.
Robert’s son William Prince, the nursery’s second proprietor and the one who was in charge at the time of Jefferson’s visit, was the first to propagate the native pecan commercially. In 1771, the nursery’s first broadside advertised 33 different plum trees, 42 pear trees, 24 apple trees and 12 varieties of nectarines. Their offerings expanded and diversified by 1774, when they listed in the New York Mercury, “Carolina Magnolia flower trees, the most beautiful trees that grow in America, and 50 large Catalpa flower trees” along with other flowering trees and shrubs.
The Prince Nursery was among the first to introduce Lombardy poplars and, in 1798, they advertised ten thousand trees. The nursery continued its focus on fruits and, according to U. P. Hedrick, “the first planned attempt to improve fruit on a large scale began in the Prince Nursery” with their work on plum seedlings. Although the American Revolutionary War had led to a seven-year occupation of Long Island by the British, the by-then successful and well-known nursery suffered little, for it was guarded by British General Lord Howe and his troops, who were interested in protecting the property for its contents.
Following the war, an excellent demand for American shrubs ensued, as the former enemy soldiers shipped plants home to their gardens in England and Germany. When William, in his advanced years, divided the operation between his two sons, Benjamin and William, the second William Prince purchased additional acreage nearby and, in 1793, began “The Linnaean Botanic Garden and Nursery.” Named for Carolus Linnaeus, the renowned Swedish botanist and naturalist who a mere half-century earlier had devised the system of plant classification called binomial nomenclature, William Prince’s Linnaean Botanic Garden served to educate the public as well as encourage potential customers by displaying the richness and diversity of the world’s botanical treasures.
As the Prince family nursery passed from father to son, each generation shared a common, underlying goal: to propagate and make available every known plant of merit, including North American species, not so much for profit as from a deep-rooted love of botany and the discipline of horticulture itself. This scientific approach toward the natural world was an attitude in keeping with the essential philosophical tenets also embraced by Jefferson and many of his contemporaries. William Prince became an active member of the newly created New York Horticultural Society. Through this prestigious organization he was in fellowship with Dr. David Hosack, who established the Elgin Botanic Garden in 1801, the city’s original botanical garden, which now lies directly beneath the present Rockefeller Center.
Prince nurseries supplied Dr. Hosack with many of the trees for his 700-acre estate on the Hudson River, Hyde Park. William’s son, William Robert Prince was the fourth and final generation to oversee the family enterprise. William Robert operated the nursery more as a botanical garden and, as a young man, he accompanied professor John Torrey, of Columbia University, and Thomas Nuttall, of Harvard, on botanical forays and plant collecting expeditions throughout the entire length of the Atlantic States. He would later publish two important books on fruits, A Treatise on the Vine and A Pomological Manual, which became standard references for decades. Likewise, the Prince catalogs from1815 through 1850 became common resources for horticulturists of all sorts.
His now rare manuscript, Manual of Roses, published in 1846, two years after Robert Buist’s seminal volume The Rose Manual, firmly established him as a premier authority on roses of the 19th century. But, his unwavering zeal to import white mulberry trees and promote the silkworm industry nearly bankrupted the family business. Although the nursery operations ended after William Robert Prince’s death in 1869, many unusual trees and shrubs flourished on the property and throughout Flushing well into the 20th century. In her book, Old Time Gardens Newly Set Forth, published in 1901, Alice Morse Earle describes the “oldest Chinese magnolias” and the “finest Cedar of Lebanon in the United States” still standing in the forlorn and forgotten garden at the Prince homestead.
Exploring the Nursery in Flushing Two years prior to Jefferson’s and Madison’s journey to Flushing, two other notable American statesmen paid a visit to the Prince Nursery. In October 1789, when the seat of American government was in New York City, George Washington, accompanied by vice president John Adams, “set off from New York, about nine o’clock in my barge, to visit Mr. Prince’s fruit gardens and shrubberies at Flushing.” Although his assessment would improve upon later visits, President Washington was unimpressed with what he saw during his first, noting “these gardens, except in the number of young fruit trees, did not answer my expectations. e shrubs were trifling and the flowers not numerous.” Jefferson, on the other hand, certainly saw much that interested him. He began that summer day by making the following entry in his Memorandum Book: “June 15, 1791. Hamstead. breakfd. –went to Prince’s at Flushing.”
While at the home of William Prince, Jefferson left a note requesting “all you have” of sugar maples and bush cranberries (Viburnum trilobum) as well as three balsam poplars, six Venetian “sumachs” (Cotinus obovatus), and twelve “Bursé” (Beurré Gris) pears. Later that year Jefferson would receive sixty sugar maple trees, Prince’s entire stock, which were subsequently planted “in a grove” below the Second Roundabout on the northeast slope of Monticello mountain. This became Jefferson’s experiment in sugar production at Monticello. Eventually, it was found that the central Virginia climate was not ideally suited for adequate sap flow in the spring, and Jefferson’s well-intended project proved unsuccessful.
While a national commercial sugar industry never took hold, Jefferson continued to advocate the sugar maple on a household level by stating there was no reason why every farmer “should not have a sugar orchard, as well as an apple orchard.” But, William Prince’s 1791 shipment of plants—which arrived at Monticello in early December, nearly a month after Prince’s November 8 invoice—was substantially larger than the original limited request Jefferson made in June.
Jefferson had taken a copy of Prince’s catalog and obviously had studied it thoroughly, for the following month, when in Philadelphia, he wrote an enormous addendum to his original short list, explaining “To [my original order] I must now desire you to add the following; the names of which I take from your catalogue.” Jefferson expanded his fruit order to include Brignole plums, apricots, Red and Yellow Roman nectarines, Green Nutmeg peaches, Yellow October and Lemon Clingstone peaches, and Spitzenburg apples, as well as Madeira walnuts (Juglans regia) and filberts. The fruits, according to the planting instructions Jefferson prepared at the time he placed the order, were to be planted “in the vacant places” of his South orchard, while the Madeira walnuts were to be “among the trees on the S.W. slope…towards the grove,” and the filberts were for the “room of the square of figs.” He enhanced his selection of native and ornamental trees and shrubs with an eclectic collection, intended primarily for planting either in the various clumps of trees on the slopes of the mountain or for the “vacancies of the 4 clumps at the corners of the house.” These included three types of conifers: “Hemlock spruce” (Tsuga canadensis), “large silver” (Abies alba), and “balm of Gilead” or balsam fir (Abies balsamina), as well as balsam poplars, “Carolina kidney bean trees with purple flowers” (native wisteria, Wisteria frutescens), “Balsam of Peru” (Myroxylon balsaminum), Rhododendrons, and cuttings of yellow, or golden willows. The “monthly honeysuckles” (possibly the native Lonicera sempervirens) were for the base of weeping willows.
And finally, quite significantly, Jefferson went through Prince’s entire inventory of roses and specified three each of all ten varieties the nursery had to offer that year. In fact, this extensive assortment of rose varieties has proved to be the richest and most comprehensive documentation of Jefferson roses presently known. These thirty shrubs were to be planted around the clumps of lilacs at the East Front of the house. The quantity and diversity of trees and shrubs Jefferson purchased from Prince in 1791 vividly exemplified the evolution and complexity of his long-ranging aspirations for Monticello. Jefferson’s subsequent associations with the Prince Nursery were few and indirect.
A notable connection occurred years after the Jefferson inspired Lewis and Clark Expedition, when the Prince nurseries played a leading role in making commercially available one of the expedition’s most ornamental species, the Oregon grapeholly (Mahonia aquifolium). According to Stephen Spongberg in A Reunion of Trees, the demand for this novel shrub was staggering. “By 1825, when the plant had become widely known up and down the Atlantic seaboard, the Prince Nursery firm…listed plants in their catalogue at twenty-five dollars each, in today’s currency doubtless equivalent to several hundreds of dollars!”
A final occasion connecting Jefferson with Prince was in a more intellectual way, as part of a poignant tribute made during Jefferson’s later years. In 1823 Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill, Jefferson’s former lieutenant in Congress and fellow enthusiast for newly discovered inventions and natural productions, sent Jefferson an unusual invitation. Mitchill proposed that, as honorary members of the Linnaean Society of Paris, the two should simultaneously observe the May 24th birthday of Carolus Linnaeus, the man who united “all nations under one language in natural history.” Mitchill planned to celebrate at Prince’s garden in Flushing, New York, and promised to think of Jefferson on the occasion, knowing that he would “not disapprove of an attempt to render science popular and attractive.” Although not known for certain, it is likely that Prince family members were among those gathered to raise a toast to Linnaeus. Jefferson assured Mitchill that he likewise would be with them in spirit from his Bedford, Virginia retreat Poplar Forest, where he planned to invite “some amateurs in natural science in [the] neighborhood to fraternize on the same day with their brethren of New York by corresponding libations to the great apostle of Nature.” Unbeknownst to Jefferson, this commemoration would be on the final day of his final stay at Poplar Forest. Peggy Cornett, former Director Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants. The author is extremely grateful to Lucia Stanton, Monticello’s former Shannon Senior Research Historian for her research on Benjamin Rush and on botanical anniversaries.
Parsons Nurseries
In 1868, Samuel Parsons opened Parsons Nurseries, one of the earliest commercial gardens, near what is now Fresh Meadows Lane. With help of a team of collectors, Parsons Nurseries found exotic trees and shrubs to import into the United States, and its advertisements filled gardening magazines with depictions of these exotic plants.[28][29] During the late 1880s,
Parsons Nurseries was importing 10,000 Japanese maples into the United States each year with help from Swiss immigrant John R. Trumpy. Parsons Nurseries also was the first to introduce the California privet in the United States from Japan.[ Kissena Lake was initially used as a mill pond. Parsons later used Kissena Lake for ice cutting, where surface ice from lakes and rivers is collected and stored in ice houses and use or sale as a cooling method before mechanical refrigeration was available. However, as recently as the 1900s, both Kissena Lake and Gutman’s Swamp served as a habitat for wood duck.Just east of the lake was a water pumping station. It was used first by the College Point Water Works, then by the Citizens Water Supply Company of Newtown, and finally as a city-owned pumping station Samuel Parsons’s children, Samuel Bowne Parsons and Robert Bowne Parsons, later took over running the nursery, and by 1898, Samuel Bowne Parsons’s son George H. Parsons, had taken over as superintendent of Parsons Nurseries.Later that year, George was found in the lavatory by his father; he had died of heart failure. Parsons Nurseries closed in 1901.
Genus Malus Species Malus domestica Hybrid parentage unknown Cultivar ‘Newtown Pippin’
Origin United States Newtown, New York
The Newtown Pippin, also known as Albemarle Pippin, is an American apple that originated in the late 17th or early 18th century and is still cultivated on a small scale.At one time, there were two very similar apple cultivars known as the ‘Yellow Newtown’ (‘Albermarle Pippin’) and ‘Green Newtown’
Newtown Pippin is typically light green, sometimes with a yellow tinge. It is often russeted around the stem. The flesh is yellow and crisp. The flavor is complex and somewhat tart, and requires storage to develop properly; some sources ascribe to it a piney aroma. Green and yellow varieties are sometimes distinguished but it is not clear that they are in fact distinct cultivars. It is one of the best keeping apples.
This variety originated as a chance seedling (a “pippin”) on the Gershom Moore estate in the village of Newtown (now called Elmhurst; the Moore property stood in the vicinity of what is now Broadway and 45th Avenue) in Queens, New York in the late 17th or early 18th century.[1] It was widely grown and praised in colonial America.
Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote from Paris that “they have no apples here to compare with our Newtown Pippin.” It was widely cultivated in the Piedmont region, brought there by Dr. Thomas Walker, who grew it on his estate, Castle Hill. U.S. presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both grew the Newtown in Virginia, where it acquired the alternate name “Albemarle Pippin” after Albemarle County, Virginia. It came to the fore in 1838 when Andrew Stevenson, the American minister to Great Britain, presented Queen Victoria with a gift basket of the apples from his wife’s Albemarle County orchard.
In response, the British Parliament lifted import duties on the variety, and it was an important export until duties were reimposed during World War II.
A partnership between the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, New York Restoration Project, Slow Food NYC, and Green Apple Cleaners is providing hundreds of Newtown Pippin saplings (and pollenizer saplings) to community gardens, schools, parks and other public spaces throughout the city.
Uses Originally grown as a dessert apple, it is now used commercially primarily for cider. In modern times, the Newtown Pippin has been eclipsed by the Granny Smith apple, which is more handsome and not as susceptible to russetting. It is still grown commercially in New York, where most of the harvest is used in Martinelli’s sparkling ciders.
The Newtown Pippin is still available in Virginia, New York, California, the Pacific Northwest, and a few other places in the East, including roadside stands and at farmer’s markets. It continues to attract attention as an heirloom variety, and was identified as one of the parents of the Ginger Gold variety. As of 2014 it has attracted attention for its potential to be used in hard ciders, and at least one single varietal is sold in its native New York.
EDITORIAL
In these days of staying home, I was ready to drive (which I cannot do) to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
Reading these fascinating stories of Jefferson and Madison’s road trip to Flushing, New York to purchase trees for their properties. Being good business people the Prince family published a catalogue as seen on the top of the article.
Northwest Queens has been noted for its orchards and agriculture. Read about our Newtown Pipping apples. If you visit Randall’s Island, some are planted there.
I think we will stay in Northwest Queens and go to an amusement park tomorrow! Happy Virtual Traveling!
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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
Credits: THOMAS JEFFERSON’S MONTICELLO WIKIPEDIA RIHS ARCHIVES JUDITH BERDY
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Through the 19th century Long Beach’s first inhabitants were the Algonquian-speaking Rockaway Indians, who sold the area to English colonists in 1643.
From that time, while the barrier island was used by baymen and farmers for fishing and harvesting salt hay, no one lived there year-round for more than two centuries. In 1837, the barque Mexico, carrying Irish immigrants to New York, ran ashore on New Year’s Day.[citation needed] In 1849, Congress established a lifesaving station.
Austin Corbin, a builder from Brooklyn, was the first to attempt to develop the island as a resort. He formed a partnership with the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) to finance the New York and Long Beach Railroad Co., which laid track from Lynbrook to Long Beach in 1880.
That same year, Corbin opened Long Beach Hotel, a row of 27 cottages along a 1,100-foot (340 m) strip of beach, which he claimed was the world’s largest hotel.In its first season, the railroad brought 300,000 visitors to Long Island. By the next spring, tracks had been laid the length of the island, but they were removed in 1894 after repeated washouts from winter storms. Long Beach Hotel Long Beach boardwalk,
In 1906, William Reynolds, a 39-year-old real estate developer and former State Senator, entered the picture. Reynolds had already developed four Brooklyn neighborhoods (Bedford–Stuyvesant, Borough Park, Bensonhurst, and South Brownsville), as well as Coney Island’s Dreamland, the world’s largest amusement park. Reynolds also owned a theater and produced plays. He gathered investors, and acquired the oceanfront from private owners and the rest of the island from the Town of Hempstead in 1907; he planned to build a boardwalk, homes, and hotels.
Reynolds had a herd of elephants marched in from Dreamland, ostensibly to help build the Long Beach Boardwalk; he had created an effective publicity stunt. Dredges created a channel 1,000 feet (300 m) wide on the north side of the island to provide access by large steamboats and sea planes to transport more visitors; the new waterway was named Reynolds Channel. To ensure that Long Beach lived up to his billing it “The Riviera of the East”, he required each building to be constructed in an “eclectic Mediterranean style”, with white stucco walls and red-clay tile roofs. He built a theater called Castles by the Sea, with the largest dance floor in the world, for dancers Vernon and Irene Castle.
After Reynolds’ corporation went bankrupt in 1918, the restrictions were lifted. The new town attracted wealthy businessmen and entertainers from New York and Hollywood. On July 29, 1907, a fire broke out at the Long Beach Hotel and burned it to the ground. Of the 800 guests, eight were injured by jumping from windows, and one woman died. The fire was blamed on defective electric wiring. A church, several cottages and the bathing pavilion were also destroyed. Trunks belonging to the guests, which had been piled on the sand to form “dressing rooms”, were looted by thieves. A dozen waiters and others were apprehended by the police, who recovered $20,000 worth of jewelry and other stolen property.
The community became an incorporated village in 1913 and a city in 1922 In 1923, the prohibition agents known simply as Izzy and Moe raided the Nassau Hotel and arrested three men for bootlegging. In 1930, five Long Beach Police officers were charged with offering a bribe to a United States Coast Guard officer to allow liquor to be landed. The police had another problem a year later in the summer of 1931, when a beachcomber found the body of a young woman named Starr Faithfull, who had drowned. She had left behind a suicide note, but others believed she had been murdered, and the circumstances of her death were never resolved.
Corruption became rampant in Long Beach by then; in 1922, the state Legislature designated Long Beach a city and William H. Reynolds was elected the first mayor. Soon afterward, Reynolds was indicted on charges of misappropriating funds. When he was found guilty, the clock in the tower at city hall was stopped in protest. When a judge released Reynolds from jail later that year on appeal, almost the entire population turned out to greet him, and the clock was turned back on. On November 15, 1939, Mayor Louis F. Edwards was fatally shot by a police officer in front of his home. Officer Alvin Dooley, a member of the police motorcycle squad and the mayor’s own security detail, killed Edwards after losing his bid for PBA president to a candidate the mayor supported. Jackson Boulevard was later renamed Edwards Boulevard in honor of the late mayor. After the murder, the city residents passed legislation to adopt a city manager system, which still exists to this day. The city manager is hired by and reports to the City Council.
In the 1940s, José Ferrer, Zero Mostel, Mae West, and other famous actors performed at local theaters. ] John Barrymore, Humphrey Bogart, Clara Bow, James Cagney, Cab Calloway, Jack Dempsey, Lillian Roth, Rudolph Valentino, and Florenz Ziegfeld lived in Long Beach for decades.[9]
THE SCANDALS AND CORRUPTION CONTINUE WITH SOME OF THE SAME CAST OF CHARACTERS FROM BROOKLYN!
A REQUIRED STOP ON THE WAY HOME FROM THE BEACH. HOT DOGS WITH A SIDE OF SAND
JONES BEACH STATE PARK
The park was created during Robert Moses’ administration as President of the Long Island State Park Commission as part of the development of parkways on Long Island. Moses’ first major public project, Jones Beach is free from housing developments and private clubs, and instead is open for the general public. Several homes on High Hill Beach were barged further down the island to West Gilgo Beach to make room for the park.
When Moses’ group first surveyed Jones Island, it was swampy and only two feet (0.61 m) above sea level; the island frequently became completely submerged during storms. To create the park, huge dredgers worked day and up to midnight to bring sand from the bay bottom, eventually bringing the island to 12 feet (3.7 m) above sea level. Another problem that followed was the wind the fine silver beach sand would blow horribly, making the workers miserable and making the use of the beach as a recreational facility unlikely.
Moses sent landscape architects to other stable Long Island beaches, who reported that a beach grass (Ammophila arenaria), whose roots grew sideways in search of water, held dunes in place, forming a barrier to the wind. In the summer of 1928, thousands of men worked on the beach planting the grass by hand.
Built in the 1920s, many of its buildings and facilities feature Art Deco architecture. In the center of a traffic circle that he planned as a terminus for the Wantagh State Parkway, Moses ordered the construction of an Italianate-style water tower to serve as a central feature of the park. Two large bathhouses are also prominent features within the park. After rejecting a number of submissions by architects for the bathhouses, Moses selected the designs of the young and relatively inexperienced Herbert Magoon. Moses also picked out building materials—Ohio Sandstone and Barbizon brick—two of the most expensive materials available.[
The park opened to the public on August 4, 1929, along with the causeway that provided automobile access from the mainland of Long Island. The causeway was the first section in what was to become the Wantagh State Parkway.
Unusually for the time, no carnival-style amusements were allowed in the park area. Moses has been criticized for intentionally specifying very low heights for the bridges over the Southern State Parkway so that buses would not be able to reach the beaches that way, thus making it harder for poor people without cars to enjoy them.
The impressive entry into the park
FLUSHING MEADOW CORONA PARK
What is now Flushing Meadow Corona Park was originally the site of the “Hill of Ashes,’ the municipal dump built on the swampy land in Corona, Queens. Ambitious and controlling builder Robert Moses masterminded the 1939-1940 World’s Fair on the site. It was a great success the first year. Television was previewed there and many of the pavilions were constructed of the miracle material asbestos.
In 1940, many European countries had pulled out as World War II broke out in their countries. The fair took on a honky-tonk atmosphere to lure the visitors.
In 1964, the second World’s Fair opened on the same site, now intersected by the Long Island Expressway and Grand Central Parkway, both Moses projects. The fair was close to my home so we loved visiting it and the GM Futurama, Belgium Waffles, The IBM Egg, where you rode up into a Selectric typewriter shaped egg. I think there was a “living” Abe Lincoln, Dino the Dinosaur and pavilions with exotic foods. Clairol Carousel had a magic mirror moving ride to show you what your hair would look like in other colors.
Our favorite pavilion was Pepsi with IT’S A SMALL WORLD playing in our head for days after.
As our feet ached, we rode the moving sidewalk past the Pieta, from the Vatican.
World’s Fairs have lost their lustre and now costs and the environment concerns outweigh building a site for us to imagine.
Let’s take a quick look back to history of only 56 years ago!
The Unisphere is still here adjacent to the Queens Museum and the National Tennis Center
The IBM “EGG” where you wondered at a Selectric Typewriter
The Cute Kids were typical of the 1960’s
A ticket was $2.00
IMAGE OF THE DAY
Can you identify this photo and location? Send your answer to JBIRD134@AOL.COM 212 688-4836
Yesterday’s Photo of the Day
Yesterday’s photo was the top of the landmark lighthouse at the northern tip of the island.The winner is Nancy Brown!
EDITORIAL
Trips to the beach, Nathan’s, a carnival, the World’s Fair, park, lake, or a relatives was how we spent our holiday weekends. Getting on a plane was not something you did in the 1950’s. Airplane travel was a big deal and expensive. We did drive to Oswego every summer and I counted many cows along the road.
Many families went to “The Mountains” whether thy be Irish. Jewish, Italian or other resorts. No matter what ethnicity, there was always too much food and lots of activities.
This year I will settle for the riverfront resort overlooking greenery and watching boats sail in the river.
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) Cover image by Christopher Payne
PART HOG, PART SHARK, ROBBER BARRON OF NEW HAMPSHIRE
Noted for his activities and politics, a truly interesting story.
WEDNESDAY
MAY 20, 2020
RIHS’s 56th Issue of
The ‘Part-Hog, Part-Shark’ Robber Baron of New Hampshire: Austin Corbin
as published by the New England Historical Society
In the history of New Hampshire, Austin Corbin stands out as probably the most loathsome blight the state ever produced. So perhaps it’s fitting that his Newport mansion sold in 2019 for a fraction of the asking price. Corbin built the estate around his childhood home, which he razed except for his old bedroom. The house measures 7,500 square feet with four bedrooms and six bathrooms, and the owners asked $3.75 million for it. In September 2019 it sold for $612,733.
Born on July 11, 1827, Austin Corbin made his mark on the world as a railroad man, plantation owner, resort operator and banker. His success came mostly in places outside New England, such as Arkansas, Iowa and New York. And he carefully cultivated the image of a prosperous businessman who summered at his New Hampshire mansion.
A MONUMENT TO GREED
The mansion was his birthplace, but he gradually tore it down over the years. In its place he erected a monument to his greed, complete with a private rail siding for his personal rail cars.
You can see it here as it was when the Wall Street Journal featured it as the House of the Day in 2012. Austin Corbin continued visiting New Hampshire his whole life, and died on his estate in 1896. He was much lamented by the press of the day, which regurgitated the pleasant fiction of the self-made business success.
Scratch the surface of Corbin, however, and you unearth a long and sordid history of corruption, swindling, bribery, thuggery and anti-Semitism. It’s hard to imagine that one man could possess all these traits and in such full measure — but he did.
AUSTIN CORBIN
Austin Corbin is largely forgotten in New Hampshire now, but one odd memorial to him remains: Corbin’s Park. You’d need to look a little bit to find it. Even if you did you couldn’t get in (because it’s fenced off and private). But it still exists, taking up 20,000-plus acres – roughly half the size of Lake Winnipesaukee. You’ll find it in Sullivan County near Claremont on the borders of Grantham, Croydon, Cornish and Plainfield. The park was odd even when it was conceived in 1888, and it’s odder still today. Once upon a time it was open to public visitors; it now remains silent for most of the year. It serves only as a local curiosity and private animal preserve for canned hunts. It’s made the news in the last 20 years only once — when a hunter mistook one of his companions for one of the park’s boars, shot at him (twice) and killed him.
Still, Austin Corbin and his park remain a subject of interest. Brian Meyette, a neighbor of the park, has created an authoritative and informative history of the park at his website. He writes on the site, and rarely does a day go by, even now, when someone doesn’t land on the site looking for information.
WIDELY DESPISED
And if you read about the robber barons who did so much to crash financial markets and corrupt governments in the 1800s, you’ll find Austin Corbin generally makes an appearance. In the photo above from the satirical magazine Puck from September 1882, Austin Corbin is depicted in a Louis XV-style party cavorting with other unscrupulous businessmen of his ilk, such as Jay Gould and Russell Sage. A host of senators, including Massachusetts’ George Hoar, are dressed as their courtesans. Corbin stands to the rear of the group with his back to us and a bag of money slung over his shoulder. Austin Corbin of Newport NH Though not as prominent as some of the wealthier robber barons, Austin Corbin was well-known and widely despised in his day.
And the story of that black hole of forest in the middle of New Hampshire and the man who created it provides some stunning parallels to the corruption we are surrounded by Austin today.
FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES
Austin Corbin’s business success is indisputable. He made a long career out of marrying his political connections with his business interests to his benefit and the to benefit of his investors. After learning law at Harvard Law School, he went to work with Ralph Metcalf, Newport’s politically connected lawyer and former New Hampshire secretary of state. Metcalf would later go on to serve two terms as New Hampshire governor.
In 1851, Austin Corbin struck out for the western frontier, which at the time was Iowa. He was armed with his and Metcalf’s connections and investor cash. Metcalf alone had loaned him $1,200. Arriving in Davenport, Iowa, he began working as a lawyer. However, he quickly jumped into the more lucrative real estate and banking trades. Here he got his first experience in the profitable business of selling mortgages to the flood of people relocating to the Midwest. Banking in mid-1800s was a state-by-state business, with banks each issuing their own currencies supported by their gold reserves and their own credit from lenders. The system was unstable, open to a host of threats such as banks overextending themselves and counterfeiting. The result was a system where anyone accepting currency had to question first if it was real and, if so, was it actually worth anything?
BANKING ON SUCCESS
Austin Corbin succeeded in this rough-and-tumble business. He ran one of the few banking concerns in Davenport that did not have to shut its doors during the 1857 financial panic. However, he was also intimately familiar with the weaknesses of state-by-state banking. At one point, he and his banking partner caused a minor panic in Davenport when they began refusing Illinois currency because of their suspicions about its soundness. Such decisions were difficult. Accept a weak currency and a bank could be out a lot of money. Refuse it and its customers would revolt.
When the Congress passed the National Banking and Currency Act of 1863, Austin Corbin and a group of associates received the first charter for the First National Bank of Davenport. It was the first national bank anywhere under the new rules, according to the bank’s published history. The national bank system and uniform currency were highly unpopular with established banks. They were accustomed to making money off their own currencies. But the politicians of the day desperately needed to stabilize the financial markets and gain a new source of revenue for the fast-accumulating Civil War debt. The national banks, operated by the Republican-friendly businessmen who won their charters, would provide a much-needed supply of customers for that debt. Austin Corbin, always politically plugged in, saw the opportunity. He and his colleagues in the First National Bank of Davenport wasted no time in sending off their application to Washington, D.C., seeking the charter. In addition to his political insights, Corbin also had another asset that may have helped clear the way for his banking venture. President Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase.
ANOTHER FRIEND
Chase, who wrote the National Banking and Currency Act and issued the charters, was also a fellow son of New Hampshire. Originally from Cornish, Chase had moved to Cincinnatti, Ohio, in the 1830s. The he won election as both senator and governor before Lincoln chose him as his treasury secretary. He was also Austin Corbin’s cousin. No strong record details the relationship between Corbin and Chase, who sought the presidency three times and failed at each attempt. On at least one occasion, however, Corbin repaid the kindness of his cousin. Chase’s daughter had married the governor of Rhode Island and the two had a turbulent and scandalous marriage with infidelity on both sides. On one well-documented occasion, Chase’s daughter was driven from their Rhode Island mansion. Corbin gave her shelter and, more importantly, stepped forward to defend her in the press. For two years Corbin acted as the Iowa bank’s president, and when he resigned in 1865 the bank’s assets had grown from $100,000 to more than $500,000. The national charter had been a goldmine for those banks that seized the opportunity. With their single, uniform currency they were wildly popular with the stability-seeking public. Local currencies, soon subject to discounts by anyone accepting them, gradually left circulation. The future for the national banks looked bright, but Austin Corbin decided his interests would be better served in New York. And so he took his now-considerable fortune to Manhattan where he could profit by connecting eastern capital with western farmers.
FRIEND TO THE FARMER
Corbin’s devious brain saw an opportunity in the rewritten banking act. Congress had restricted commercial banks from holding mortgages. While this protected the currency from being tied to institutions conducting profligate lending, it also created a business opportunity for Corbin. He worked with mortgage companies and a network of brokers to sell mortgages to farmers in the frontier states. The mortgages would be profitable enough, paying 7 to 10 percent. Austin Corbin,though, found a way to improve on that. His mortgage brokers also kept a portion of the loan as a fee. For instance, someone borrowing $1000 would pay the regular payments with 10 percent interest to Corbin’s mortgage company until the $1000 was repaid. In addition, the borrower would pay a fee to the broker of perhaps $200 from the loan itself. Austin Corbin
Austin Corbin of Newport, New Hampshire Corbin’s practices were illegal. He was sued and convicted of usury for the scam, but he succeeded in hoodwinking the farmers more often than he got caught. He became a millionaire in the process and earned his investors far more of a return. Still, to any ambitious, flimflam man of the era, mortgage scams amounted to small potatoes. The mortgage processing machinery that Wall Street used to destroy the economy in 2008 hadn’t been invented yet. In Corbin’s day, the real action was in railroads, and that’s where he focused his energy.
RAILROADS
Railroads in the late 1800s were booming. There was no quicker, nor more corrupt, way to make big money fast. States, counties and municipal governments would grant millions of acres to the roads to lure them in. Financing was readily available for the sexiest venture of the age. And the western frontiers had a tremendous appetite for moving freight and goods. In addition, the constant mergers and the possibilities for fraud and speculation were tailor made for the Wall Street hustlers. Some of America’s biggest fortunes were made, at least in part, off the railroads. Vanderbilt, Gould, Corning, Harriman and Fisk all profited mightily off the boom, and Austin Corbin intended to join the party. He is described as a reluctant participant in his first venture — bringing the Indiana, Bloomington, and Western Railroad out of receivership as its president. Corbin quickly saw how the industry worked.
The I.B.&W was born out of the financial mismanagement and corruption of the smaller lines brought together to form it. It connected Indianapolis with points in Illinois. After Austin Corbin shepherded the railroad from receivership in 1870, it racked up a remarkable $13 million in new debt. Then it collapsed into default again in July of 1874. Furious bondholders were left picking through the ashes of the company that now consisted of an inventory of decrepit equipment and little cash. The books were a tangle of self-dealing, and there was little to recover. It gave Austin Corbin a taste for what railroading could be, though, and he went on to own or control numerous railroads in his lifetime.
PHILADELPHIA AND READING
Compared to Frank Gowen, Austin Corbin was a saint. But that’s not saying much. Gowen assumed the presidency of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad in 1870, at the age of 33. The Reading had a profitable business in transporting anthracite coal from the Schuylkill County region of Pennsylvania to Philadelphia. There it could be loaded out to other destinations. Cowen believed that Reading could enhance its profit if it could also own the coal mine and the ships that carried it. The Reading’s charter, however, prevented it from engaging in mining. So one of Gowen’s first acts as president was to convince the Pennsylvania Legislature to create a special entity that would be formed to develop coal in the Schuylkill region. Its stock would be available for purchase. No sooner did the law pass than the Reading Railroad began buying the stock and pouring its money into the region’s mines. Eventually, the Reading would be the major coal operation in Schuylkill, operating as the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company. The coal miners’ lives were a bitter struggle. The pay was low and the work extremely dangerous. A quarter of the workers were children between 7 and 16. The Irish immigrant miners had formed the Molly Maguires, who used guerilla tactics against the mine owners.
MOLLY MAGUIRES
When Gowen took control of the Reading in 1870, it was at the heart of the Molly Maguires disputes that had rocked the region since 1833. Gowen decided to escalate. He reduced wages for his workers, guaranteeing a high level of violence in the region. He hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to infiltrate the group. The Pinkertons passed along information to vigilantes who murdered the Maguires and their families if the state couldn’t execute them legally. Throughout the period, the railroads and mines persistently sought to lower wages. All the while the railroad executives traveled the rails in luxurious private rail cars and vacationed abroad. The excess and inequality frequently caused strikes. No sooner would one strike end then the companies would cut wages and prompt another strike. One particularly long strike in 1877 included a massacre of railroad men in Reading. Throughout the chaos, the Reading held a virtual monopoly on anthracite coal. During this period it used dubious means to make money: It fixed prices with other mines, delayed and limited shipments from competitors that would not cooperate, and manipulated its stock both up and down. One of the company’s clever tricks was to charge exorbitant shipping fees to the mining company that it owned to carry its coal. The mining company would borrow the millions to pay the fees, and then the railroad would record the loan proceeds as revenue even though it would need to repay the loans. Gowen took the company into bankruptcy twice, and after 10 years he began losing his grasp on it. J.P. Morgan finally ousted him. In 1887, with the railroad in receivership, Morgan created a trust to run it with Austin Corbin as president. Corbin reorganized the line to much fanfare, but his tenure would not last long.
HIRING SCABS
Virtually his first act as president was to reignite old fights with the miners, and he managed to extend the fight to the more reserved railroad engineers. From December 1887 to April, 1888, the Reading was beset with strikes. Corbin managed to bring in strikebreakers. Congress hauled him to Washington to face charges that he provoked a strike by lying that he would raise wages. That let him push coal prices higher and hire scabs at lower wages. Congress exposed the Reading’s fiddling of its books and rigging of coal prices. The company subsequently took a beating in the press. Austin Corbin also infuriated the congressional committee members by offering to take them to Reading in a posh, private rail car. In that era, people viewed such blatant efforts at bribery as at least somewhat shameful. People who worked for a living viewed Austin Corbin with derision. The Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine, for example, published an article about the strike. In it, Austin Corbin was described as belonging to ‘that tribe of human monsters who prey upon poor men, who combine the natures of hog and shark, who, being influenced by greed, make war upon the weak, regardless of right.’ For Austin Corbin, however, criticism from his own kind caused greater problems. While Morgan had cleared out the competition for the Reading once, the remnants of the old management weren’t entirely silenced. The trust had control, but the stockholders were still eager to play games with the company.
CRITICS
Corbin’s critics constantly needled him. They accused him, for instance, of filling coal cars and putting them on sidings. That way he drove up coal prices by preventing competitors from using them to ship coal. And his critics damaged him seriously when they uncovered another example of his self-dealing. As the Reading struggled, it could not maintain lease payments to a New Jersey railroad over which it shipped coal. That resulted in a loss to the Reading and a gain to the New Jersey line. Using this information, Corbin heavily invested in the New Jersey rail line. This kind of manipulation was commonplace among railroad barons, but it resonated with investors who perceived management was more interested in personal profit than the operations of the company. Austin Corbin beat back his critics, and shareholders selected him to continue on as president. But in 1890 he did an about-face and resigned. It’s unclear why. Did he face new allegations? Had Morgan lost faith in him? Or had he simply realized the company was headed for disaster once again? Because in 1893 the Reading again defaulted. This time, it signaled the start of the nationwide depression of 1893, which brought years of hardship for the country. It would be impossible to catalog or reconstruct all of Corbin’s railroading schemes. However, in part two of this article we look at some of his other ventures.
Austin Corbin, New Hampshire Robber Baron – ‘We do not like the Jews…
In July of 1879, Austin Corbin put pen to paper to spell out his thoughts. As he was addressing a delicate matter, he didn’t want any confusion about where he stood: “We do not like the Jews as a class,” he wrote, beginning his formal attempts to prevent Jews from visiting his new hotel on Coney Island.
By this point, Corbin was the president of the Long Island Railroad and the Manhattan Beach Railway and Hotel. He got both positions, not surprisingly, through theft and corruption. Corbin first took interest in Long Island shortly after returning from the Midwest and establishing his New York banking firm, as we wrote about in the first installment of this series. A doctor advised that the sea air would be beneficial to his sickly child, and while visiting what is now Coney Island, he saw the opportunity to build an oceanfront resort at Manhattan Beach in Gravesend.
The town was poorly managed, but there were property claims to all the beach land – just not terribly well-defined claims. Corbin’s solution was to hire the town’s corrupt surveyor and have him begin acquiring parcels by hook or by crook. Some he bought, others he just needed to survey out of existence.
CONEY ISLAND
In the 1870s, Coney Island was a disreputable place, populated by muggers, gamblers and petty thieves. It had been turned into this mess by Boss Tweed, the corrupt political leader of New York’s Tammany Hall political machine. Though Tweed was exiled from power by 1877, the power of Tammany persisted, and one of its minor operators, John McKane, was the boss of Gravesend when Corbin took an interest. He almost certainly proceeded with McKane’s blessing. New Hampshire Anti-Semite Austin Corbin. Once Corbin had title to the Manhattan Beach properties, he constructed the Manhattan Beach Hotel, opening it in 1877. And it was grand: 108,000 square feet, 250 rooms, with a veranda 30-feet wide and 600-plus feet long. President Ulysses S. Grant helped cut the ribbon on the hotel at ceremonies on July 4, and over its 25-year life it would host musicians such as John Philip Sousa and Victor Herbert, along with wealthy and famous New Yorkers of the day.
Access to its grounds and beaches was tightly controlled. Corbin retained the Pinkerton guards, as he had in the Pennsylvania mines, to patrol the property and keep out those he considered undesirable from the less ritzy end of the beach. Visitors were subject to search and inspection before entering. The hotel was barely two years old when he tried to bar all Jewish patrons.
AUSTIN CORBIN, BIGOT
Anti-Semitism was hardly unheard of at that time, but it was not uncontroversial. The prior summer, hotel operator and judge Henry Hilton (no relation to the Hilton hotels of today) made headlines when he refused to admit a Jewish patron to his Saratoga Springs Grand Union Hotel. Corbin’s similar stance resulted in both he and Hilton being featured in a Puck cartoon, depicting them churlishly harassing a Jewish caricature.
For what it’s worth, Corbin’s bigotry was not confined to anti-Semitism. He made headlines again in the later years of his life for barring a Chinese passenger from being seated in the cabin on one of his ferries. While it doesn’t seem to have been a major element in his life, Corbin did take his point of view seriously, and he served as a founding member in the short-lived, but ominously named, American Society for the Suppression of the Jews. Controversy aside, the Manhattan Beach Hotel prospered and Corbin set his sights on establishing a second hotel on the ocean: The Oriental. He turned to Tammany gangster John McKane again for assistance. Despite ongoing scandals, the Tammany machine was difficult to topple. In part this was because it was embraced by both Democrats and Republicans who, much like today, were both controlled by the same interests.
Tammany thrived by demanding kickbacks for government contracts, licenses and favors, but would faithfully deliver on promises – taxpayers and the public be damned. Though Tammany started as a Democratic apparatus, it took money from anyone, regardless of affiliation. McKane, while successful in cleaning out the lesser criminals from Coney Island, was not successful in improving the overall image of the island. Under his control, it became known as ‘Sodom by the Sea.’ Home to three racetracks, it was a destination for pleasure-seekers of all sorts. Eventually McKane would be sentenced to prison for his corruption, but in the 1870s he was still the boss of Gravesend. McKane advised Corbin that he could acquire from the town the property on which to build his second hotel through a simple town meeting vote, which McKane could deliver for a price.
On the night of the town meeting, Corbin and McKane packed the town hall with his guards and employees, blockaded Corbin’s opponents from entering the building, and voted him the land to build the hotel on for $1,500, roughly one one-hundredth of what it was worth. The controversial land grab would be the subject of lawsuits and legislative investigations, but Corbin and his friends beat back every challenge and the Oriental opened its doors, as planned, in 1880. This time President Rutherford B. Hayes was guest of honor. Coney Island Oriental Hotel
PORT PLANS
The illegal tactics Corbin used in acquiring the land were part of the pattern of his life. In 1880, he gained control of the Long Island Railroad, bringing it out of bankruptcy. As its president for 16 years, he expanded it dramatically, with little regard for the property rights of those who stood in his way. The most notorious case involved the theft of lands owned by the Montaukett Indian Tribe by Arthur Benson, a friend and business partner of Corbin’s. Benson successfully strong-armed the Native Americans off their land at Montauk, and partnered with Corbin to build resorts, housing and a shipping terminal at the tip of Long Island. Corbin’s hope was that trans-Atlantic passengers would arrive at Montauk and use his railroad to reach New York, a full day faster than they could on a ship. The ill-conceived plans were flawed in many ways, most significantly by the fact that the proposed port at Montauk was too shallow to serve as the competition that Corbin envisioned for New York Harbor. Nevertheless, Corbin was on the verge of winning Congressional approval for a duty-free port at the time of his death. Had not repeated lawsuits by the Montauketts over the tactics used to get control of their land slowed the developments, Corbin’s plans might have moved further. Nevertheless, his port plans provide the punctuation mark at the end of his railroading career.
PLANTATION ECONOMICS
Perhaps one of the oddest business ventures Corbin undertook was operating an Arkansas plantation. How did a New Hampshire Yankee wind up running a southern plantation? No surprise, it was politics and land speculation that took Corbin down this road. In 1869, John C. Calhoun, grandson of the South Carolina senator of the same name, acquired Sunnyside Plantation in Chicot County, Ark., with Corbin’s backing. In the post-Civil War period, Calhoun had become convinced there was a lot of money to be made operating plantations using former slaves as a labor force. His business model worked once, and so he and his brother Patrick looked to replicate the success. Sunnyside, however, was never a great success. The Calhouns owed substantial debts to their backers. Their system of paying for labor through sharecropping and tenant-farmer relationships, as well as traditional wages, was effective enough. But there was nothing they could do about the vagaries of agriculture. Creditors expected payment, regardless of whether the crop was a good one or the market price for the crop was weak. BIson at Corbin Park from the 1908 Annual Report of the American Bison Society Bison at Corbin Park from the 1908 Annual Report of the American Bison Society After several reorganizations, the property finally reverted to Austin Corbin in 1886. The Calhouns concluded that the path to easy money lay not in the hard work of farming, but in New York, so they extracted what profits they could from their properties and set out for the city. At the start, the project was a bust for Austin Corbin. The African American populace that had been willing to work with Calhoun balked at working for skinflint Corbin. In addition, the farming economy was depressed. So for several years, the bulk of the plantation properties went unused. By the early 1890s, however, Austin Corbin found the cheap labor he wanted: Prison inmates. Arkansas’ legislature employed a system of leasing prisoners to farms, and later it agreed to a sharecropping arrangement with Corbin, further insulating him from the risks of farming. Why did Austin Corbin win such a favorable arrangement from the government? Railroads. With his usual grandiosity, Corbin established a tiny rail system to bring his cotton from the field to his gin. And he stationed his personal steamboat, the “Austin Corbin” on Lake Chicot, where it impressed the residents. Most importantly, he the charmed the Arkansans with his plans to build a railroad that would both serve the local needs and add a much needed east-west line to the state.
PRINCE RUSPOLI
But Austin Corbin had an even more profitable scheme in mind. He struck a bargain with the mayor of Rome, a socialite-loving gadabout known as Prince Ruspoli. For a fee Ruspoli would recruit struggling Italian peasants to come to America and send them overseas to the U.S., where Corbin would fleece them. He charged them inflated prices for everything from boat passage to the tools and equipment they would need to work the land assigned to them when they arrived. If they made it 20 years, they would own their plot. After some political tap dancing to get around the laws that made it illegal to bring foreign contract labor to the country, Corbin put his plan in motion in 1895. The plan did manage to establish some pockets of Italian-Americans in Arkansas, but did not accomplish one of his central goals – directing Italian immigration away from New York and toward the center of the country.
RETURNING TO NEW HAMPSHIRE
By now it will come as no surprise to learn how Austin Corbin accumulated his 20,000-acre park in New Hampshire. Corbin and Benson started his collection of exotic animals on land he acquired on Long Island. It was part zoo, part hunting preserve, part animal-breeding operation. By the late 1880s, however, Corbin decided he needed more room and began looking to his native New Hampshire for land. In 1889, his agents began acquiring struggling farms and assembling his acreage in the depressed region. The few who held out had their land blocked in on all sides, and Corbin persuaded the towns to stop maintaining their roads. They eventually sold. He then began stocking the park with a wide variety of deer, elk, bison, and wild boar. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of animals that Corbin imported were dead within a year because they were not suited to the climate and conditions. But some of the herd lived on, and the park was a popular stop for Corbin’s wealthy and famous friends who would visit for a day or two of shooting.
New Hampshire Robber Baron Austin Corbin Buying the Presidency By this point,Austin Corbin was still an energetic man. Toward the end of his career he suffered some setbacks. He lost control of the New England Railroad, and efforts to buy the New Hampshire Railroad were rebuffed. And on a broader scale he was widely reviled. The satirical magazine Puck in 1890 highlighted him again, this time among a pack of his wealthy colleagues bidding to buy the United States presidency and vice presidency. (Who would be in that picture today, Lloyd Blankfein? Jamie Dimon? Warren Buffett? George Soros? David and Charles Koch?) Nevertheless, Corbin was still pursuing his schemes well into the 1890s: his seaport, his plantation and his railroad expansions. He scoffed at the notion he might retire . . . right up until June 4, 1896.
On that day, while riding in a carriage on his expansive New Hampshire estate, he popped open an umbrella to create some shade from the sun and spooked his horses. They bolted and dumped him eight feet onto a rock wall that cracked open his head. The carriage driver died quickly. Corbin survived another six hours, as his family and physicians made their way to Newport, via private trains naturally, arriving in time to watch him expire.
AFTER AUSTIN
Austin Corbin’s death was a shock. At just 68, few expected to be rid of him anytime soon. The newspapers of the day recounted his business successes. Teddy Roosevelt in New Hampshire at Corbin Park in 1902 Teddy Roosevelt in New Hampshire at Corbin Park in 1902 His estate, however, was soon tangled in litigation. His wife’s one-time maid, Mathilda Nelson, sued the estate in October, 1896. Apparently Corbin’s mistress, she claimed he was a “frequent visitor” to her apartments and had promised to provide $50,000 for her. The estate lawyers claimed that Nelson was trying to blackmail them, and The Brooklyn Eagle chastised Nelson, who they described as a pretty blonde Swede, in an article headlined: An Affliction of Millionaires. “Women of a certain class seem to delight in notoriety of this kind. They will proclaim that they had irregular relations with rich men and make claims upon the property which was left.” The estate settled an unspecified amount on Nelson to resolve the matter. Four years later, Nelson committed suicide.
More significantly, the estate was also sued by Austin Corbin’s daughter, Anna Corbin Borrowe, who had been on the outs with the family because they didn’t approve of her marriage. In 1898, the estate executors made a filing showing that it was worth $1.6 million after settling Corbin’s debts – initially its value was placed at $4.9 million. Where had all the money gone, she wanted to know? So she sued her mother, brother and brother-in-law. Her charges were largely directed at her brother-in-law, Corbin Edgell. She claimed he had squandered more than $200,000 on the Sunnyside Plantation, that he had not properly managed the Corbin Park property in New Hampshire, and that he had sold off stock in the Long Island Railroad and other interests at a bargain price in an effort to further his own interests. She ultimately could not prove malfeasance, but the suit was costly. By the time the case was settled in 1904, the value of the estate had plummeted further to just $290,000 – at least that’s what the Corbins told the tax collectors.
NOT SO SUNNY
Sunnyside Plantation suffered badly after Corbin’s death. None of his children took interest in the property. Promised improvements to the irrigation system were never completed, and the Italian immigrant laborers were beset with malaria, as a result. Disillusioned by the unfair treatment and illness, many simply moved on. Within a few years, the plantation was a wreck. The planned railroad, of course, was never built until others developed it years later.
In 1906, the corporation that owned the Manhattan Beach Hotel stopped making payments on its $5 million mortgage. It was sold at auction for $3.5 million, and operated for several more years until the Legislature banned racing on Coney Island in 1910. The Manhattan Beach was unceremoniously torn down in 1911, its owners assuring that the Oriental was strong and would continue operating. The Oriental was then torn down in 1916. In 2007, residents of Corbin Avenue on Coney Island successfully petitioned to strike Austin Corbin’s name from the history of their street. In attempt to sweep away the stain of Corbin’s anti-Semitism, the city declared that it was renaming the street in honor of revolutionary war hero Margaret Corbin (no relation).
The Long Island Railroad will turn 180 years old next year. Since Corbin’s time at the helm, it returned once more to bankruptcy in 1949 before being taken over by the state in 1966. The Pennsylvania and Reading Railroad, which came to symbolize the speculative bubble that caused the 1893 financial panic, continued its up-and-down history until 1976, when the last of its rail assets, known then as the Reading Railroad, were sold to Conrail. It lives on as a space on Monopoly boards, and its shell corporation has been reborn as a movie theater chain. CORBIN PARK Corbin Park remains a non-profit wildlife preserve used for hunting by its members. In 1902, Teddy Roosevelt was one of its famous visitors. Other famous guests included presidents Grover Cleveland, Herbert Hoover, Woodrow Wilson, Yankee Joe DiMaggio (you know they weren’t Red Sox fans), and of course financiers, including Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt and J.P. Morgan. In 1908, the Corbin family furnished the park service with 300 buffaloes from the park to assist in repopulating the species in the western states.
The Corbin family retained control over the park until 1944, when it was transferred to a group that included Mortimer Proctor of the Vermont Proctor political dynasty. It is one of two Corbin Parks in the U.S. today. Spokane, Washington, also has a Corbin Park named for Daniel Chase Corbin, Austin’s brother. He was a railroad magnate in his own right on the West Coast, equally prosperous, though perhaps a bit less venal – he married his Swedish maid. Daniel’s Spokane home, the Corbin House, is also still around today. It very nearly wasn’t, however, since Corbin’s widow in 1921 plotted to burn it down in an insurance scam that went wrong. But that’s another Corbin story for another day.
EDITORIAL
For over 50 issues we have focused on the positive stories about great people, places, events and the good stuff.
After reading in our past issue that Austin Corbin was an anti-Semite, I became curious. Manhattan Beach where he built two hotels and various business ventures is now a major Jewish community. I found this article in the Journal of the New England Historical Society,
He puts every scoundrel to shame with his activities.
It does not sound that New Hampshire is proud of their native son.
What and where is this object? Send your answer to jbird134@aol.com. Winner gets trinket fro RIHS Kiosk
TUESDAY’S PHOTO OF THE DAY
Bollards for ships by Octagon Park. The winner is Jean-Pierre Trebot
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MONDAY
MAY 18, 2020
RIHS’s 54th Issue of
Included in this Issue:
ISAMU NOGUCHI MUSEUM
SOCRATES SCULPTURE PARK
Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) was one of the twentieth century’s most important and critically acclaimed sculptors. Through a lifetime of artistic experimentation, he created sculptures, gardens, furniture and lighting designs, ceramics, architecture, and set designs. His work, at once subtle and bold, traditional and modern, set a new standard for the reintegration of the arts. Noguchi, an internationalist, traveled extensively throughout his life. (In his later years he maintained studios both in Japan and New York.)
He discovered the impact of large-scale public works in Mexico, earthy ceramics and tranquil gardens in Japan, subtle ink-brush techniques in China, and the purity of marble in Italy. He incorporated all of these impressions into his work, which utilized a wide range of materials, including stainless steel, marble, cast iron, balsa wood, bronze, sheet aluminum, basalt, granite, and water.
Born in Los Angeles, California, to an American mother and a Japanese father, Noguchi lived in Japan until the age of thirteen, when he moved to Indiana. While studying pre-medicine at Columbia University, he took evening sculpture classes on New York’s Lower East Side, mentoring with the sculptor Onorio Ruotolo. He soon left the university to become an academic sculptor. In 1926, Noguchi saw an exhibition in New York of the work of Constantin Brancusi that profoundly changed his artistic direction. With a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Noguchi went to Paris, and in 1927 worked in Brancusi’s studio. Inspired by the older artist’s forms and philosophy, Noguchi turned to modernism and abstraction, infusing his highly finished pieces with a lyrical and emotional expressiveness, and with an aura of mystery.
Returning to New York City as well as traveling extensively in Asia, Mexico, and Europe in the late 1920s through the 1930s, Noguchi survived on portrait sculpture and design commissions, proposed landscape works and playgrounds, and intersected and engaged in collaborations with a wide range of luminaries. Noguchi’s work was not well-known in the United States until 1940, when he completed a large-scale sculpture symbolizing the freedom of the press, which was commissioned in 1938 for the Associated Press Building in Rockefeller Center, New York City. This was the first of what would eventually become numerous celebrated public works worldwide, ranging from playgrounds to plazas, gardens to fountains, all reflecting his belief in the social significance of sculpture.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the backlash against Japanese Americans in the United States had a dramatic personal effect on Noguchi, motivating him to become a political activist. In 1942, he started Nisei Writers and Artists Mobilization for Democracy, a group dedicated to raising awareness of the patriotism of Japanese Americans; and voluntarily entered an internment camp in Arizona where he remained for seven months. Following his release, Noguchi set up a studio at 33 MacDougal Alley in Greenwich Village, New York City, where he returned to stone sculpture as well as prolific explorations of new materials and methods. His ideas and feelings are reflected in his works of that period, particularly the delicate slab sculptures included in the 1946 exhibition Fourteen Americans at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Noguchi did not belong to any particular movement, but collaborated with artists working in a range of disciplines and schools. He created stage sets as early as 1935 for Martha Graham, beginning a lifelong collaboration; as well as for Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, and George Balanchine and composer John Cage. In the 1960s, Noguchi began working with stone carver Masatoshi Izumi on the island of Shikoku, Japan; a collaboration that would also continue for the rest of his life. From 1961 to 1966, he worked on a playground design with the architect Louis Kahn.
Whenever given the opportunity to venture into the mass-production of his designs, Noguchi seized it. In 1937, he designed a Bakelite intercom for the Zenith Radio Corporation, and in 1947, his glass-topped table was produced by Herman Miller. This design—along with others such as his designs for Akari light sculptures which were initially developed in 1951 using traditional Japanese materials—are still being produced today.
In 1985, Noguchi opened The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum (now known as The Noguchi Museum), in Long Island City, New York. The Museum, established and designed by the artist, marked the culmination of his commitment to public spaces. Located in a 1920s industrial building across the street from where the artist had established a studio in 1960, it has a serene outdoor sculpture garden, and many galleries that display Noguchi’s work, along with photographs and models from his career. Noguchi’s first retrospective in the United States was in 1968, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. In 1986, he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. Noguchi received the Edward MacDowell Medal for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to the Arts in 1982; the Kyoto Prize in Arts in 1986; the National Medal of Arts in 1987; and the Order of the Sacred Treasure from the Japanese government in 1988. He died in New York City in 1988.
(c) RIHS
Garden design by Isamu Noguchi and Louis Kahn
Associated Press Building in Rockefeller Center
Lobby of 666 Fifth Avenue by Noguchi. Now threatened of being demolished.
The story of this unique park demonstrates how a community can organize to reclaim and create a positive public space. Situated at the confluence of the Harlem and East Rivers, the site has a picturesque view of “Hell Gate,” or “Hellegat” as originally named by the Dutch colonists. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, this narrow strait between Astoria and Wards Island was infamous for treacherous navigational conditions caused by powerful tides and dangerous rock outcroppings. The 1780 shipwreck of the British ship Hussar and numerous other marine tragedies which occurred in this channel necessitated an 1876 effort by the Army Corps of Engineers to blast away much of the dangerous ledge.
Unfortunately, in the years preceding 1985, the long-abandoned Marine Terminal had become desecrated with illegal dumping and graffiti, its panoramic vista inaccessible to citizens of Astoria and Long Island City. In 1985 a coalition of artists led by local sculptor Mark di Suvero came here with a vision for an outdoor sculpture laboratory dedicated to up-and-coming artists. That year, they began the arduous process of restoring the site, and named it Socrates Sculpture Park – both in honor of Socrates (469-399 B.C.), the great Greek philosopher, and also as a tribute to the people of Astoria, New York’s largest Greek community.
By 1990, when Socrates Sculpture Inc. was formed to raise funds, oversee the arts programming, and manage the daily operations of the park, di Suvero and others had restored this beautiful park and begun to develop its international reputation as a cultural institution. Socrates Sculpture Park offers tours to school groups and tourists, internships and apprenticeships to high school and college students, and employment to a number of area residents. Since 1993, the park has been under the jurisdiction of Parks. With assistance from Mayor Giuliani, Borough President Claire Shulman, and Council Member Walter L. McCaffrey, Socrates Sculpture Park has made many improvements. The enhanced facility provides numerous amenities to the community and expands opportunities for arts and recreation.
Socrates Sculpture Park has been unique since its inception: it serves multiple purposes, as a major arts destination, a catalyst for economic development in the neighborhood, and open space access to the waterfront. Begun as one person’s vision to transform a vacant lot, the park is home to a collaborative enterprise involving a diverse array of local residents, artists, and government agencies to create a valuable community resource as well as a vital cultural institution. Socrates Sculpture Park was officially assigned as Parkland on December 14, 1998.
NYC Parks (c)
Socrates Sculpture Park was founded in 1986 by visionary sculptor Mark di Suvero as a community engaged, accessible arts space dedicated to supporting artists in the production and presentation of public artworks.
Socrates is now a designated New York City public park and cultural anchor in Queens exhibiting topical contemporary public art that intimately engages our five-acre waterfront landscape and diverse audiences. The Park’s visual arts programming presents emerging, mid-career, and internationally renowned artists by offering an open platform for public art and encouraging unfettered ambition in scale and subject matter. Since the Park’s inception, the vast majority of artworks exhibited at the Park have been commissioned and built on-site in our outdoor artist studio space.
This gives our visitors the unique opportunity to witness the creative and often labor-intensive art-making process. The Park also remains open to the public during exhibition installation and de-installation. Socrates does not have a permanent collection and all artworks are temporarily on view. A searchable archive of every Socrates exhibition is available HERE and our archive of over 1,000 participating artists is available HERE. Additionally, you can browse our digital library of exhibition catalogs and publications HERE.
In recent years, the Park has presented four major visual arts initiatives annually: The Spring/Summer Exhibition; ‘The Socrates Annual’ fellowship & exhibition; The Folly/Function Design Competition in Partnership with The Architectural League of New York; & The Broadway Billboard Series. Admission to the Park and all of our exhibitions is always FREE.
Note: The park is open and the scheduling has changed due to circumstances.
MONDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
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YESTERDAY’S MYSTERY PHOTO OF THE DAY
These are columns that held the beams supporting the floors in the City Hospital, that was located on this site at what is now the northern end of Southpoint Park..
EDITORIAL
Ever since I have been visiting the Noguchi Museum I have loved the garden with its water table fountain flowing down the sides of the stone. I remember when you could smell the ink of the graphics plant that was located in the red brick building facing Vernon Blvd. The garden is the site of a gas station.
It reminds me of the lost history of Vernon Blvd including the last blacksmith in Queens.
On a personal note today: For the last few weekends some friends and I have had wonderful afternoons at the Cornell Tech campus. We were at Cornell Tech campus where we saw parents not minding their children. There was one child picking flowers and three kids climbing the trees. This is not the behavior we expect as guests on the Cornell campus.
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff All materials in this publication are copyrighted (c)
FUNDING BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDING
DISCRETIONARY FUNDING BY COUNCIL MEMBER BEN KALLOS THRU NYC DYCD
MAY 17, 1976 WAS THE OPENING DAY OF THE TRAM HAPPY 44TH BIRTHDAY!
Remember the long staircase?
At 6 a.m. on a Sunday twice a year the tram staff would gather for the mandatory evacuation drill. You could leave the cabin in a bucket thru a hatch in the floor. With a pulley and manual power everyone was lowered to the lawn.
The other way was more challenging was to hitch a rescue cage up on the cable and hoist it to the cabin. The window and window guards were removed and the passengers climbed into the cage. This was only used once in 2006 when the tram was stuck over the river for 11 hours. The second cabin was over First Avenue and the rescue was easier.
THE ORIGINAL TRAM FROM DOPPELMEYER, VON ROLL, SWITZERLAND 1976-2010
The rescue cage held only 4 persons.
Greg started at the Tram a year before it opened!
Minnie who has handled the staff and finances for the Tram for decades. For year she had to account for tokens and the MTA daily and handled all special requests.
In 2009 RIOC decided to replace the 35 year old system with a new French one from Leitner Poma of Grenoble, France. The tram was closed for 9 months. At the same time the RIHS visitor center was being restored and we spent a hot summer watching these two construction projects. The kiosk and the tram both reopened on the same date November 30th.
The old cabins have been dumped and abandoned unceremoniously by the Motorgate.
Down with the old tram and up with the new tram in less than one year.
Like a giant jigsaw puzzle, all the pieces fit and come together
Armando Cordova has been the Tram Master for decades!!!
To celebrate the Tram’s anniversary the RIHS held a tram model contest. The submissions were on display in the Rivercross storefront
You are invited to come to see the cherry blossoms next year!!! All will be welcome. Save the dates April 20 to May 1!
At the same time the tram was being rebuilt, the Visitor Center Kiosk got a complete historical restoration.
MYSTERY PHOTO OF THE DAY
Can you identify this?| Send e-mail to jbird134@aol.com Winner will get gift from RIHS Visitor Center
Yesterday’s Photo of the Day OCTAGON VIEW FROM THE LOBBY TO THE DOME
EDITORIAL
So many fond memories came back while writing today’s tram and kiosk stories. It seems like only yesterday when a new cabin was installed bringing us better service and much less swinging in the breeze rides.
Most of the tram staff is still here, though on furlough due to the pandemic, Will be glad to have every back soon.
The Tram is Roosevelt Island. I took my first ride the evening it opened on May 17,1976. I lived a few blocks away and took the 35 cent ride to the island and back. It has been a love affair ever since.
Funding Provided by: Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation Public Purpose Funds Council Member Ben Kallos City Council Discretionary Funds thru DYCD 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
Astoria Park Rainey Park Queensbridge Park Gantry Plaza State Park Hunters Point South Park
An example of Fredrick W. Beers’ map of the Long Island City, published in 1873
As NYC Parks and Recreation notes, the site of Astoria Park was once home to wealthy, “fashionable families” like the Barclays, Potters, Woolseys, and Hoyts, who established their country houses along the shore. For instance, the Barclay family, whose roots can be traced back to traders along the Baltic and Scandinavian coast, owned a mansion near Hell Gate, which was later torn down to make room for the construction of the bridge. NYC PARKS (C)
Image courtesy NYC Parks and Recreation Astoria Park is equipped with one of the most popular swimming facilities in the country, which also happens to be the largest swimming pool in New York City park’s pools. Planned by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, the outdoor pool is 54,450-square-feet and measures 330 feet in length. Harry Hopkins, the administrator of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which provided the labor to construct the pool, described it as “The finest in the world.” According to NYC Parks, it has been said that it was intended to be the “grandest” of the eleven pools Moses intended to install throughout the city in the summer of 1936 — possibly because it provided the best view of the Triborough Bridge, which was completed in the same year. NYC PARKS (C)
RAINEY PARK
Thomas Rainey (1824-1910), a resident of Ravenswood, Queens, spent 25 years of his life and most of his fortune advancing the construction of a bridge across the East River between Manhattan and Long Island City. The area that now accommodates Rainey Park was to be the Queens anchor for the “Blackwell Island Bridge,” a project backed by leading citizens of Long Island City after the American Civil War. In 1871, they incorporated the “New York and Queens County Bridge Company.” The bridge, planned with one ramp south to Brooklyn and another out to Long Island, was promoted as a catalyst for developing growth in Queens and as a railroad link to Long Island. To the community’s disadvantage, the effort fell apart during the financial Panic of 1873.
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QUEENSBRIDGE PARK
This park is named for the nearby Queensboro Bridge, which is also known as the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge or 59th Street Bridge. The 1960s band Simon and Garfunkel made the bridge famous in their song “Feelin’ Groovy,” also called “The 59th Street Bridge Song.”
Dr. Thomas Rainey (1824-1910), a resident of Ravenswood, Queens, spent twenty-five years of his life and most of his fortune promoting the construction of a bridge across the East River connecting Manhattan and Long Island City. The area now occupied by Rainey Park (just to the north) was to be the Queens anchor for this structure, which was to be called Blackwell Island Bridge. The bridge, planned with one ramp south to Brooklyn and another out to Long Island, was promoted as a catalyst for developing growth in Queens and as a railroad link to Long Island. However, the effort fell apart during the financial Panic of 1873; most interest in the region was for another bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan, and the sparse population in Queens at the time raised further concerns of need and profitability.
On July 19, 1901, construction on the Queensboro Bridge officially began, but it was years before any notable progress was made. Renowned bridge engineer and City Bridge Commissioner Gustav Lindenthal (1850-1935) collaborated with architects Leffert L. Buck (1837-1909) and other designers and builders of the Williamsburg Bridge, to create the Queensboro Bridge. Significant construction did not get underway until 1906, after several delays, including a lengthy steel strike. The final link in the superstructure of the Queensboro Bridge was completed in March 1908. One year later, the bridge opened to traffic, at the cost of $20 million.
The original 1909 configuration of the bridge accommodated six lanes for motor vehicles, four pairs of trolley tracks, two elevated subway lines, and lanes for pedestrians and bicyclists. By the 1930s, this connection with Manhattan transformed Queens from a rural outpost into a borough with over two million by the 1950s. In 1957, the last trolley trains crossed the Queensboro Bridge, and the bridge was reconfigured to allow for ten lanes of vehicular traffic.
The City of New York acquired the land that is now Queensbridge Park in two sections in 1939. The nearby Queensbridge Houses gave jurisdiction of the land to the New York City Housing Authority, but it was understood that NYC Parks would maintain it. In 1975, some of the property was transformed into parking lots under the supervision of the Bureau of Property Management. The park is characterized by a variety of facilities, including baseball fields, a soccer-football combination field, basketball, volleyball and handball courts, a playground with see-saws, swings and jungle gyms, a comfort station, picnic areas, sitting areas, walkways, greenery, and trees.
In 2014, the seawall was reconstructed using rip-rap, or large rocks, which protect the shoreline by absorbing and deflecting waves while lessening the effects of erosion. The project also created a 6-foot wide waterfront promenade with benches, plantings, and a small wharf at its northern end. The promenade was named after long-time park advocate Elizabeth McQueen. NYC Parks announced in 2018 that the park’s old field house, which was built in 1941, will be demolished in order to build a new 1,500 square foot field house and comfort station. The new LEED-certified field house will include a community room, an office area for Parks staff, a public restroom, and storage space for the park’s maintenance equipment. It will be surrounded by an outdoor plaza area complete with seating, bicycle racks, and drinking fountains.
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GANTRY PLAZA STATE PARK
Gantry Plaza State Park is a 12-acre riverside oasis that boasts spectacular views of the midtown Manhattan skyline, including the Empire State Building and the United Nations. Enjoy a relaxing stroll along the park’s four piers or through the park’s manicured gardens and unique mist fountain. Along the way take a moment to admire the rugged beauty of the park’s centerpieces – restored gantries. These industrial monuments were once used to load and unload rail car floats and barges; today they are striking reminders of our waterfront’s past. With the city skyline as a backdrop and the gantries as a stage, the park’s plaza is a wonderful place to enjoy a spring or summer concert. Recreational facilities include basketball courts, playgrounds, handball courts, and a fishing pier with its own cleaning table. NYSPARKS (C)
HUNTERS POINT SOUTH PARK
This waterfront park was until recently an abandoned post-industrial area in Long Island City. Transformed into a space that offers fun and relaxation for everyone in the area, the new park includes a central green, playgrounds, adult fitness equipment adog run, a bikeway, a waterside promenade, picnic terraces a basketball court, a 30-foot-tall cantilevered platform for viewing the skyline and waterfront, and a 13,000 square foot pavilion that contains comfort stations, concessions, and an elevated cafe plaza. NYC PARKS (C)
IMAGE OF THE DAY
CAN YOU IDENTIFY THIS AND LOCATION? SEND TO JBIRD134@AOL.COM WINNER GETS AN ITEM FROM RIHS VISITOR CENTER KIOSK RIHS (C)
Thursday Mystery Photo No one identified the terra cotta panel on the side of the RIHS Visitor Center Kiosk.
EDITORIAL
The other day Bobbie Slonevsky and I were discussing the water fowl who nest and live around the island. She has written a great reference guide to our waterborne neighbors. We look at five parks in Queens that have blossomed in the last decade. Astoria Park, by the Triboro Bridge offers the largest municipal pool in the City. In the summer and especially around July 4th, there are free concerts and events in the park.
Just across from Octagon is Rainey Park. It is on a hillside overlooking the East River and has lovely blooms in the spring. It is just south of Costco.
Queensbridge Park has had many improvements in the last few years and now sports a new seawall and facilities building. Probably one of the most popular places for movie and television shoots.
Gantry Plaza State Park (designed by Weintraub and Di Domenico who designed Octagon Park) salutes the gantries where train cars were loaded onto barges to Manhattan, before train tunnels were completed. This is a NYS park that was the first park to be developed on the Brooklyn Queens waterfront.
The spectacular NYC Parks Department Hunters Point South Park runs south of Gantry Plaza to the Newtown Creek. Opened a few years ago, it is multi-leveled and a naturally occurring distancing spaced promenades.
You can easily walk from one park to another, though you have to venture onto Vernon Blvd at times. As you walk, you can look out on that long skinny island in the East River.
Roosevelt Island, a two-mile sliver of land in the East River nestled between the Upper East Side and Astoria, is home to a population of 12,000 on 147 acres of land. But the island’s small size belies its importance to the history of the city. In its different lives — the land was known as Welfare Island from 1921–1973, and Blackwell’s Island, Hog Island, and Minnehanonck before that — the island has been an influential site of innovations in architecture, medicine, infrastructure, and social service delivery. One such notable institution is the Goldwater Memorial Hospital, known as The Welfare Hospital for Chronic Disease when it first opened in 1939 (its sister hospital, the Bird S. Coler Hospital, opened on the north end of the island in 1952). The immense facility was designed to be a new model of medical care for those with chronic illness. The architect, Isadore Rosenfield, was as concerned with the careful design of a patient’s bedside lamp as he was with the circulation patterns of the thousands of people who would use the facility each day. Rosenfield wrote of the project for Modern Hospital in 1937 that his design was “the first tangible result of agitation, research and educational work over a period of years by…the committee on chronic illness of the Welfare Council in New York City,” and was best understood through an explanation of “the principles in accordance with which it was developed.”
Goldwater closed its doors on December 31, 2013, transferring its patients to other facilities around the city. Today, the buildings are in the midst of being torn down to make way for what the City hopes will be the next chapter in Roosevelt Island’s legacy of innovation: the forthcoming campus of Cornell NYC Tech. A two-million-square-foot applied sciences and engineering campus is planned for 12 acres on the southern half of the island, as part of an initiative launched by Mayor Bloomberg to make New York City a “global leader in technological innovation.”
Photographer and architect Charles Giraudet has been furiously documenting Goldwater Hospital in its last days, compiling an extraordinary 15,000 images so far during the brief window between its de-commissioning and its imminent demolition. Below, Giraudet shares a selection of his photographs (click on any of the photographs below to launch a slideshow with more images) and describes how this archival project has expanded to become, in his own words, “a study of the architect’s intention, of the life and activities in the building, and of light.”
The first stone of Welfare Hospital, subsequently renamed Coler-Goldwater, was laid on Roosevelt Island in 1937. Fiorello La Guardia was then mayor of New York and Dr. Sigismund Schultz Goldwater was Commissioner of the Department of Hospitals. Together they planned the development of Roosevelt Island as a haven for medical care and research with the creation of several major pieces of infrastructure, the flagship of which would be Welfare Hospital, dedicated to chronic diseases.
Dr. Goldwater hired a young architect to head the design team. Having emigrated from Russia as a young child and worked as a butcher’s assistant before he went to Harvard to get a degree in architecture, Isadore Rosenfield was to become the Chief Architect of the Department of Public Works. After the war, he would be in charge of New York City’s $100 million hospital program. He wrote several books and articles about hospital design. In a 1937 piece titled “The Fruit of Research“,[1] he describes the scientific process that informed the design decisions at Welfare Hospital. All major programming decisions — from the number of beds to the general layout of the buildings, the angled wings of the wards and the relative heights — were related to an unwavering patient-centric design approach. Going further, the bed itself, with its lighting and relationship to the other beds in the ward, were designed from the ground up to serve two purposes, seen as one: the well-being of the patient and the ability for the doctor to care for him or her.
Roosevelt Island provided Rosenfield with a perfect site. The old penitentiary at the south of the 59th Street Bridge would be demolished so the hospital could take its place. In this low-density setting, patients would benefit from the sun and air necessary to their recovery, while remaining close to their families, an aspect of care that Rosenfield deemed essential.
Away from the constraints of an urban setting, the hospital’s master plan could also yield to its program and develop organically. Four chevron-shaped ward buildings running east-west, connected by a three-story gallery running the length of the site; between the wards’ buildings, two pavilion buildings to receive the families; at the north end, a smaller building housing research laboratories; finally, a central building for admissions, administration, surgery, dorms for visiting doctors and nurses, therapies, and food preparation. All support and technical services were placed in the basement of the various buildings, and a tunnel — running the length of the island — would bring hot water and steam to the facility from a centralized plant that still functions today. Encompassing the width of the island edge to edge, the hospital resembles the superstructure of a ship, the bedrock of Roosevelt Island its hull.
I discovered Goldwater by accident a couple of decades ago, as a young architect from France interested in the nooks and crannies of New York. I was immediately drawn to its angled wings and running balconies reminiscent of the ocean liner architecture of early modernists. There aren’t so many buildings of that era in the country. I grew up near Paris, in a town where, in the 1930s, architects Lods and Beaudoin, associated with Jean Prouvé, built the Ecole du Plein-Air where kids with tuberculosis or other respiratory ailments could be schooled, and I was familiar with Alvar Aalto’s Paimio sanatorium. Goldwater seemed to echo these buildings. They spoke of an age where architecture could ambitiously address social needs for the public good.
Before penicillin, sunlight was part of the cure as much as any medication, so an almost obsessive attention was paid by Rosenfield to the path of light through his buildings. The buildings were placed so that they wouldn’t cast shadows on one another. The chevron shape yielded more hours of exposure and views of the river. Wards were designed to encourage the use of the outdoor space with every bedroom opening onto a wide balcony or terrace. Even the roofs of the main gallery were meant to be used as circulation and terraces by the patients during the sunny months. In fact, almost every single space in the facility receives natural daylight. Corridors set deep in the building are lined by glass partitions or doors with transoms. The dumbwaiter lobby in the laboratory building gets its light from a window set high above the sink of a bathroom that has its own six-foot-high window to the outside. There are countless examples and variations.
I entered the building during a very special and short phase of its life, between the day when patients and staff had been relocated and rooms had been emptied out of all things not attached to the walls or ceilings and the day the demolition crews would start to tear it down. For the first two weeks, I walked alone in the deserted hallways and basements with my cameras, pushing open doors to rooms that would invariably surprise me. The photo project evolved from a documentation of the “significant spaces” to an encyclopedic project, now totaling 15,000 images. This was due in part to the evolving time parameters of the project and in part to the impossibility of finding any space insignificant in a building so carefully tailored to its use. Ultimately, my photographs became a study of the architect’s intention, of the life and activities in the building, and of light.
Every time period has its light. It is the blank page onto which architect and designers write their projects. Yet, because we view it as part of nature, we have developed little vocabulary to discuss it. Its intensity, temperature, its use in architecture are measured or discussed, but we should consider it a part of culture that is reflected in all its aspects. When it comes to architecture, light is the very substance of space, a cultural trait par excellence. Anyone who walks around or lives in a building of a different era has the experience of a difference in the light’s quality. Movie directors use this to move us through time and space, as it speaks to us through our bodies before our consciousness can awaken to the trick. In a marvelous little book called In Praise of Shadows, Jun’ichiro Tanizaki talks about the influence of western aesthetics on a Japanese man. The western taste for light, brightness, clarity, brilliance, total transparency, and sheen is compared with the soothing, soul-feeding qualities of the deep shade, the murkiness of texture, the patina of time.
What Tanizaki describes is the tactility of light, what our bodies are able to register of the texture of a surface without touching it, how a surface changes depending on how it’s lit — hard to soft, superficial to deep, slick to rutted — how our bodies would feel if immersed in that surface, and how that surface is merely a threshold to the surrounding space. Through our senses, light and touch are connected and always entertain a relationship, of affinity or dissonance, whether or not we’re aware of it. We touch what we see before we touch it and it may even be that some of us can’t see what we can’t touch[2]. In the darkness one can better feel the density of space, often experienced as claustrophobia in our day and age where luminosity is brought everywhere. We have lost the ability to move in darkness comfortably like we have lost the taste for feeding from silence.
Moving through the deserted hospital, enveloped in darkness, or basking in the sunlight drenching the day rooms in the evenings, I came to realize that a different sensibility and aesthetics from ours had informed the design, coming from a time of less disregard for the body’s comfort and functions. Goldwater is superbly built and entirely lined with green and honey-glazed bricks that deepen in tone with incandescent lighting. Its 2700 windows are made of bronze and work like they did on day one even after years of being screwed shut. Until renovations introduced a measure of vinyl and plastic, your hand would touch only wooden handrails and doors, brass knobs, marble windowsills. We have so distanced ourselves from the aesthetics of the ‘30s and the values that informed them that we often associate natural materials and their aging with grime. The gentleness with which light touches these surfaces and the sensation that remains can be so unsettling to the modern hand — the hand that expects the antiseptic and inorganic qualities of whiteness — that it’s easy to forget that the facility merely required a good cleaning on the outside, an operation that fell low on the priority list due to a chronic lack of funding for maintenance (the building is spotless inside).
Goldwater first served as a chronic diseases research facility. During World War II conscientious objectors volunteered to be used as guinea pigs for secret experiments on malaria and extreme cold. Tylenol was partially developed there. Eventually, the south side became a nursing home while the north side evolved into a respiratory care, hospital and rehab facility. In 1970 a new building opened at the south end, designed by William Lescaze, housing chapels for four religions, a library, a radio station, a gym, and a large sports arena and auditorium with a full sound and light stage. Research was abandoned and the laboratory building was used for nurses’ training and administration. Meals were no longer prepared from fresh ingredients and the operating rooms became doctors’ offices. Over the years, the facility had to adapt to changing safety requirements that condemned the balconies and limited the window openings to six inches,
along with other, often nonsensical, alterations. The forest was lost for the trees. These mandated changes forced hundreds of air conditioners onto the facades like so many pimples, closed access to the galleries’ roofs, choked the circulation. Parking lots replaced the landscaping on the east side. But because Goldwater was home to people living and working there around the clock who cared for it, it remained a vibrant place and retained its humanity and dignity even when it was stripped of its purpose and its occupants. There is much to be learned from the study of Goldwater. A number of its qualities are precisely what we are trying to re-instill in many contemporary buildings, including in our tech-centric – as opposed to patient-centric — hospitals where almost anyone will become dazed and confused after a short stay. Air, sunlight, natural materials, attention to circadian rhythms, access to the outdoors, generous space that adapts to a body’s movement rather than requiring that adaptation from the user can’t be considered replaceable by technological prosthetics without consequences for the people and activities for which the building is designed in the first place. Architecture should be about sheltering human activities, not processing them.
There is also something to be learned about the relationship between urban design and architecture: Rosenfield thought he was building a facility, but Goldwater was a de facto small city. At the core of his design were urban principles setting relationships between the buildings themselves and the site, expressing the relationship between the new community and New York as a whole. The hospital was part of a much larger project to build not just the infrastructure of New York, but also its community. The urban realm manifests a culture’s identity and values; it reflects its soul. Only too often nowadays does architecture try to manage what urbanism should, resulting in hyper-expressive buildings reflecting the fascination with the formal exploration unleashed by new CAD tools rather than an interest for the satisfaction of social needs. But Goldwater is also a lesson in what we can expect of an enlightened city administration whose vision is focused on the welfare of its constituents, and of architecture when it seeks modestly but ambitiously to embody these values. As the hospital enters its final hours, we can ponder the loss of yet another public health facility at a time of intense privatization of the sector and decreasing access to quality healthcare and eldercare for so many. We can use the example of Goldwater to reflect on the way healthcare is currently being delivered to New Yorkers and what has been lost since 1938, when Rosenfield conceived of the architectural experience as a path to well-being for all New Yorkers.
The author would like to acknowledge Judy Berdy, President of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society, who provided most of the historical background used in this article and generously shared her deep knowledge of Goldwater, its history and the people who lived and worked there; Andrew Mongiardo, Goldwater’s former Facility Director, who spent 37 years maintaining the building and came time and again to the hospital after work hours to graciously answer all my questions; and Andrew Winters, Director of Capital Projects and Planning for Cornell Tech, for granting me access to Goldwater.
[1]Isadore Rosenfield, The Fruit of Research [Welfare Hospital on Welfare Island, New York City], Modern Hospital, 1937 Mar., v. 48, p. 58-64.
[2]Oliver Sacks, To See and Not See in An Anthropologist on Mars (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995)..
To learn about Charles GIraudet’s other projects see charlesgiraudet.com. Please contact him if you have recollections of Goldwater.
IMAGE OF THE DAY
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YESTERDAY’S PHOTO IS THE TOP OF THE SMALLPOX WITH A VIEW WEST TO THE RIVER
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 Dottie Jeffries
Thanks to artist Ron Crawford for our 50th Edition Art (c)
WEDNESDAY
MAY 13, 2020
RIHS’s 50th Issue of
In honor or our 50th issue we have asked the members of our Board to contribute their thoughts to this issue.
We have a great Board of Directors at the RIHS. We asked them to contribute to this issue..
Arlene Bessenoff a long time member is the person who has been our secretary and grant writer extraordinaire.
Stephen Blank is a retired professor and with his late wife Lenore love the island and our history.As you can tell Stephen is a great movie fan.
Melanie Colter came to us as a Historic Preservation intern from Cornell (in Ithaca) and she has stayed on to write for us and give preservation perspectives into our projects.
Tanya Morrisett is here with her husband and family from Ithaca. Tanya has become an instant active member in our island and Cornell Tech community,
Thom Heyer has used his artistic talents on many projects on the island and is always ready to volunteer for a new project.
Matt Altwicker is an architect and we met when he developed an Affordable Housing exhibit at NYIT School of Architecture. When not scouting hidden sites on the island he practices at his studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Lisa Fernandez is the Director of the Carter Burden Senior Center here. When not running a very busy center, she is in the garden outside the center tending to the flowers and plants.
Lynne Shinozaki is the master caterer and coordinator of our Mae West fund raiser, we cannot wait to see what she is up to next.
Judy Connorton uses her organizational skills to help us research and gather information for our programs
Pat Schwartzberg, though not a Board Member, she keeps us on track financially.
Deborah Dorff arrived on the island the day the tram got stuck for many hours. She was not on the tram so she and her husband stayed for years. Now in Austin, Texas Deborah gets our website and all of these articles on line every day, and she is still talking to me!
ARLENE BESSENOFF
PANDEMIC WALK COLLAGE
Stephen Blank
Confined to home these days, our thoughts turn to films. And what could be more fascinating than movies about our Island? So I dug into my archives and found several pieces on Roosevelt Island in the Movies that were published in the Almanac a while ago. So, here from the Blank archives.
A lot of filming has taken place on Roosevelt Island. But few of the films shot here were actually about our island. The one film that is really about the island wasn’t filmed here. “Blackwell’s Island,” released by Warner Brothers in 1939, was filmed at their Burbank Studios. Aside from a few stock clips early in the production, no sign of any local work shows up. Indeed, the last scenes – a boat chase on the river – are shot against a totally wrong background. But the film, a quick (71 minute) B movie and a vehicle for a young John Garfield is well worth the time. It’s based roughly on the real-life raid by the New York police on the corrupt Blackwell’s Island penitentiary. The 1934 raid took the City’s notorious penitentiary back from mob bosses who had ruled the roost, exploiting their fellow prisoners with the tacit permission or active cooperation of its warden and deputy warden. The movie focuses on a crusading reporter, Garfield, who contrives to get himself convicted by slugging a D.A. He’s sent to the island and witnesses firsthand the corruption of one Bull Bransom, a protection racketeer who rules the New York City waterfront. Bransom is “taking a leave” on the island and soon sees the possibility of using his organizational skills there.
The film includes corrupt old cops and an honest young one – whose sister Garfield falls for – and the bang-up mid-night assault on the island. Blackwell’s Island was known mainly for its prison, and while the island wasn’t mentioned by name, everyone knew what was going on.
“No Man of Her Own” is a 1932 romantic comedy starring Clark Gable and Carol Lombard. Lombard had been in films longer than the slightly older Gable and she was better known, but neither had hit the big time yet. The plot is straight forward enough. Gable plays “Babe” Stewart, a card shark who hides out to avoid the cops. He meets a lonely but slightly wild librarian named Connie Randall. There follows a certain amount of pre-code, much enjoyable grappling. They marry on the flip of a coin and the grappling, now legit, continues. Problem: how does Babe keep new bride Connie from learning that he is still in the racket? He can’t. Connie discovers Babe hasn’t reformed and demands that he lay off the cards. Gable says he can’t, and tells Lombard he’s taking off for South America. But love makes men do strange things. In fact, Babe has turned himself in and copped a plea. He agrees to spend 90 days “across the river.” This is New York City and “across the river” is nothing other than our own island jail (as opposed to “up the river” which means Sing Sing).
What’s cool is that Lombard is wise to the action and gazes out of her hotel window at Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary. Granted, there’s never been a hotel with that view, but it’s still cool. This excellent Paramount film was directed by Wesley Ruggles and it launched him into several fairly well regarded comedies, including Mae West’s 1933 “I’m No Angel.” (Another Blackwell link: In 1927, Mae West served eight days in our prison on an obscenity charge for her play Sex.)
In two really important (my view) films, Roosevelt Island plays no leading role, but is the background for important action. Critics see “My Man Godfrey” as the definitive “screwball comedy.” In this 1936 film, a depression-downed “forgotten man,” William Powell, tangles with (his real-life ex-wife) Carol Lombard and a grand supporting cast in a story with very strong class overtones. Bill Powell is not a “bum,” but educated, sophisticated and down on his heels. Lombard’s wealthy family is— a typical plot line in these films—rich, crass and dumb. Lombard drags Powell in as a butler, but he has entrepreneurial ideas of his own. This is great fun and really good cinema: “My Man Godfrey” got Oscar nominations for writing, directing and all four acting awards (though not for Best Picture). Blackwell’s Island? Well, it’s there even if you don’t see it. In the opening credits, the background is the Queensboro Bridge and Blackwell’s Island. Why? Because the story line develops around Powell’s plan to open a night club on the shore of the East River, basically where Sutton Place is now.
The background to all of the scenes that deal with his plan is Blackwell’s Island. The film was shot in Universal Studios in California, so none of this is live. The scenes are filmed against a rear projection of the island. Look carefully and you will see that, in one scene, there’s a slip-up and the image is reversed, so that the old elevator (“upside-down”) building is suddenly on the south side of the bridge. Never named. But we know what we’re seeing.
And even more, of course, the romantic scene in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” (1979) when he and Diane Keaton sit on a bench in Sutton Place, looking at a softly focused Queensboro Bridge. The moment is framed by the background music of Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me”. We Islanders knew the film was an ode to New York City, but knew, too, our island was never so dreamy. The Queensboro Bridge itself played a major role several times on the big screen.
When the tram was held hostage in “Nighthawks” (1981) with Sylvester Stallone, we worried that this might give some idiot an idea. We were tickled when we saw that Billy Crystal’s character Mitch Robbins in “City Slickers” (1991) lived on the island and commuted to work on the tram like the rest of us. And who could forget when, in the 2002 “Spider-Man,” the Green Goblin threw Mary Jane Watson from the bridge, and Spider-Man had to decide between saving her or passengers on the Roosevelt Island tram. Always a good night at the Roosevelt Island flicks.
Stephen Blank May 11, 2020
MELANIE COLTER
Researching the Chapel of the Holy Spirit which has become a destination event space called The Sanctuary. I always wish I had more time to do RIHS work.
TANYA MORRISETT
Roosevelt Island from a newcomers perspective
Tanya Morrisett
Almost every single day, people ask me the following question, “So, I bet you’re upset that you moved to New York City from Ithaca last summer with all this virus business?” Almost every single day, I shake my head and give the same, short answer. “No.” Yes, I’m now living in the heart of the pandemic – one that has forever changed our world.
Sadly, it has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of New Yorkers. It would be safer to be living in Ithaca. And like so many, I spend almost all my time in a small apartment trying to find some type of normalcy. But, I would move here again if given the choice. I adore this city and I love Roosevelt Island. I’m not happy until I see the sunrise over LaGuardia in the morning and look down on the powerful steel bridge with its never-ending stream of cars going between Manhattan and Queens.
I love to watch the tram glide over the water carrying people back and forth across the East River. The ruins of the Smallpox Hospital are enchanting and the Chapel is peaceful. Most of all, I love the people. New Yorkers are incredibly friendly and the people who live on Roosevelt Island are even more lovely. It is a wonderful community of people. So, tomorrow, when I’m asked again, I’m going to give the same, short answer, “No,” and I’m going to smile. This beautiful, little island has welcomed me. I’m going to ride out this pandemic here in my new city on my little island. We’ll all get through this together.
THOM HEYER
I started an artistic endeavor on the subject of the singer Alberta Hunter & the entertainer Mae West a year ago. It was for FIGMENT when that Arts celebration came to the island last June. Both women were contemporaries in the entertainment industry & both had ties to Roosevelt Island, but never met. My premise was what if they HAD met. What might that moment have been like? Because of the current COVID-19 shut-down, FIGMENT is one of the many events that have had to be cancelled. Though I’m still working on the Alberta/Mae Project, I am happy to share this unfinished set of portraits–each is 8.5″ X 11″.
Thom’s version of Edward Hopper’s NIGHTHAWKS
MATT ALTWICKER
Secret Places
I have learned a lot about the Island in the last 49 days of Judy’s daily reports. We moved here in 2006 and my daughter Zechine was born here in 2008. Like all kids and parents, we think we have probably covered every inch of the island in that time.
Over the almost 12 years since Zechine’s birth there have been two places that we have always called our secret places. They have been called that because we have never seen anyone else there. I was reminded of the space and stairs under the Helix reading about the recent death of the architect of Motorgate and the adjacent helix, Michael McKinnell. It is a strange place where RIOC and DOT store various items as they wish, but where they always seem to leave a walking path free for us to leave the Promenade and go up to the intersection without meeting anyone, along the way finding all the mundane items of the everyday island – the lampposts, the Z bricks, the barriers, etc. In this photo an impromptu desk was set up. (Under the Helix, 2016)
The discussion of the Island’s landscape architects reminded me of the Island House playground. It is a playground design from another era, although it is itself not an original. Maybe it is the rusty metal, the fading paint, or the non-compliance with current playground safety, but over all the years, we have never encountered another child on the playground.
That has made it all the more attractive to visit in the late afternoon sun coming from the west. (Empty Playground, 2020) It is hard to believe that in places so public and so central to the island, one can find this kind of solitude, but maybe this is one of those mysterious qualities of the Island that one cannot fully grasp but one can simply enjoy.
LISA FERNANDEZ
LYNNE SHINOZAKI
JUDY CONNORTON PAT SCHWARTZBERG DEBORAH DORFF
Deborah our wonderful staff member
EDITORIAL
Neighbors, friends and strangers have been asking me why I have been publishing FROM THE ARCHIVE. Why not? I have little else to do and I will do anything not to do filing. Our kiosk is closed, the staff cannot work, there are no visitors. I can go to our office in the Octagon, but there are no persons on our floor and what fun is it to sit alone all day looking out at unused sports equipment. I could unload 30 boxes of RIHS records stored in the Octagon, but there is no one to assist.
I could complain, kvetch, decry the government, though I do express opinions to certain politicians. At this time of year I train election workers, work the primary election and early voting. This year I taught 3 classes and then all was canceled.
I have mastered the art of watching oil deliveries to the power plant. The tugs gently nudge the barges parallel to the pier where they will stay about 2 weeks, getting lighter every day. They will be replaced and the cycle start again. Queensbridge Park has a lovely new promenade and seawall. It is hardly used, even on lovely spring days. At night the 4 baseball diamonds are lit, though empty. See views from my window below.
The construction at Queens Plaza has stopped midstream. The 70+ story building sits there with orange construction tape on what will be the next 20 floors to be closed in. Citicorp, the monument and first building is now half obscured from my window. The cars speed over the Queensboro Bridge, no traffic jams now. Silvercup shines red every night.
I continue my work at Coler Community Advisory Board and Coler Auxiliary. We will be raising funds for our nursing home residents as soon as we can be allowed into the building again. The support of Coler has been excellent and we will continue with your assistance.
Judith Berdy212 688 4836
PHOTO OF THE DAY
IDENTIFY AND LOCATE THE PHOTO OF THE DAY E-MAIL YOUR SUBMISSION TO JBIRD134@AOL.COM FIRST CORRECT ANSWER GETS A BOOK FROM RIHS VISITOR KIOSK,
Regina Avner is the winner of yesterday’s photo contest. It is the old Breyer’s Ice Cream Plant on Queens Blvd. The logo leaf design sign is still on the roof.
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 Dottie Jeffries
Included in this Issue: MANHATTAN’S OTHER ISLAND A PROGRESS REPORT SUMMER 1974
(c) RIHS
This brochure was published in 1974 to promote the new community on Roosevelt Island. What do you recognize?
EDITORIAL
I received an e-mail this morning and was asked if we had any pictures of the island under construction. This brochure shows the apartment houses about 75% complete.
Speaking of complete, the safety shed outside 480 Main Street is coming down since 460 Main Street is almost complete. The lottery is open for the the “affordable” apartments in the new building.
WHAT WAS THE ORIGINAL PURPOSE OF THIS BUILDING? E-MAIL JBIRD134@AOL.COM First correct reply gets a book from the Visitor Center
Monday’s photos is from the ceiling of the RIHS visitor center kiosk. Same light fixture as in Grand Central Terminal.
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 Dottie Jeffries
DAN KILEY NICOLAS QUINNELL/QUINNELL ROTHSCHILD ZION BREEN
(c) RIHS
Called Blackwell Island beginning in the 18th century, this 147-acre, two-mile-long island in the East River was sold to the City of New York in 1828. It became home for the city’s poor, housed within quarantined hospitals, alms houses, a lunatic asylum and a penitentiary, warranting the name Welfare Island in 1921. By 1961 the island was desolate, and Victor Gruen proposed an urban renewal scheme to transform the neglected island into a residential enclave.
In 1969 the city established a 99-year lease with the New York State Urban Development Corporation (UDC), who adopted a master plan devised by Philip Johnson and John Burgee. The plan envisioned a new town model of two medium-density residential clusters – Northtown and Southtown – interspersed with public spaces, and also addressed infrastructure, transportation, retail areas, civic institutions, schools, and hospitals.
The Office of Dan Kiley and Zion & Breen were hired to study roads and open space in the pedestrian-focused scheme. The plan was completed within eight years, and included mid- and high-rise apartment and commercial blocks designed by well-known architects.
Parks were integral to the overall plan, with Blackwell Park designed by Kiley, the Promenades designed by Zion & Breen, and Lighthouse Park designed by Nicholas Quennell Associates. Several nineteenth-century landmarks were also restored and preserved. In 1973 the island was renamed for Franklin D. Roosevelt, during which time Louis Kahn was commissioned to design a memorial park honoring Roosevelt’s four freedoms speech, which was not completed until 2012. Today, the island is home to more than 14,000 residents.
ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY CAMPUS LANDSCAPING BY DAN KILEY
DAN KILEY BLACKWELL PARK RIVERCROSS LAWN
While in Europe, he visited Chateau de Villandry as well as the work of André Le Nôtre at Sceaux, Chantilly, Versailles, and Vaux-le-Vicomte, whose formality and geometric layout shaped his future Classical Modernist style. Following the war, Kiley found himself one of the only modern landscape architects in the postwar building boom. In California, his friend Garrett Eckbo, Thomas Church and others were developing and practicing the modernist style. Kiley re-established his practice in Franconia, New Hampshire, and later moved it to Charlotte, Vermont.
In 1947, in collaboration with Saarinen, Kiley entered and won the competition to design for the Gateway Arch National Park (then known as the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial), a high-profile job that launched his career as a landscape architect. Kiley’s first essentially modern landscape design was the Miller Garden in 1955, which is now owned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art and known as the Miller House and Garden. Among his other masterworks are the Fountain Place in Dallas, Texas; the NationsBank Plaza in Tampa, Florida; the United States Air Force Academy; the Oakland Museum; Independence Mall in Philadelphia; and the Dallas Museum of Art.
He completed more than 900 projects, which received countless awards. In 1997, he was presented with the National Medal of Arts. In his office, he hired and inspired designers such as Richard Haag, Peter Hornbeck, Peter Ker Walker, Peter Schaudt and Ian Tyndal. The unique geometric layout of allees, bosques, water, paths, orchards, and lawns characterize Dan Kiley’s design. To Kiley, regular geometry lay at the heart of his design. Like his predecessors, Le Corbusier and Le Nôtre,
Kiley believed that geometry was an inherent part of man. It was the structure man could use to gain comprehension and create stabilization of his surroundings. He also firmly believed that man was a part of nature, rather than being separate from it. Rather than copying and trying to imitate the curvilinear forms of nature he asserted mathematical order to the landscape. Kiley’s landscapes overstepped their boundaries rather than ending elements neatly on a suggested edge. He called this approach, slippage, or an extension beyond the implied boundary, creating ambiguous relationships in the landscape.
Dan Kiley was a landscape architect made famous by his hundreds of distinguished works of landscape design, and inspires many students and professionals in the field of landscape architecture.
PLAY AREA OUTSIDE FORMER PS 217
BLACKWELL PARK FACING QUEENS
SEATING AREA BETWEEN BASKETBALL COURTS
MEDITATION STEPS OVERLOOKING THE RIVER AND MANHATTAN
As I walked around Blackwell Park recently with a RIOC staff member, we looked at the deteriorated state of the park in back of Blackwell house. After over 45 years of use, abuse, neglect and patching up the park is in sorry shape. The steps leading down the hill thru an arcade of ginkgo trees is paved with bricks that are falling out of the ground. Not a good place to step down.
The red covered shade area between the basket ball courts are rotted out and the pergola makes a great place to climb.
As you approach the sidewalk outside of the north of Blackwell House, be careful the pavers are lifting and hazardous.
On the west side of Main Street the Rivecross lawn is full of dips and bumps. The entire lawn needs to be rebuilt.
The good news is the Meditation Steps are in great shape. After years of rebuilding them with junk pine, they were rebuilt about 5 years ago with Brazilian wood that does not rot. The steps are great, but the brick walls next to them are deteriorating as are the railings.
Maybe in the near future the Blackwell Parks will have a thoughtful rebuild and not another Band-Aid patch.
Re-imagining Dan Kiley’s work will be a challenge for whomever will take on the chore. Read the adjoining article and see how many of Kiley’s landmark design ideas you can find in out parks.
Mid-century design constantly gets lambasted. Go across the river to Rockefeller University campus and see how wonderful the mid-century Dan Kiley landscape looks!
QUINNELL ROTHSCHILD
LIGHTHOUSE PARK NORTHTOWN PARK/CAPOBIANCO FIELD
NICHOLAS QUINNELL
Born in London in 1935, Quennell earned his diploma in architecture from the Architectural Association in London in 1956 and then worked for architect Leonard Manasseh and for the housing division of the London County Council.
In 1961 Quennell arrived in New York City, but soon settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked for Josep Lluís Sert (of Sert, Jackson & Gourley). One year later Quennell joined the San Francisco firm of Lawrence Halprin & Associates and was assigned to work on Ghirardelli Square almost immediately. While at the firm, he flirted with the idea of being an artist and returned to New York City in 1967,
living in the storied Chelsea Hotel. To support his artistic ambitions, Quennell took a job with Vollmer Associates and then earned his M.L.A. from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 1969. He then established his own landscape architecture practice before teaming with Peter Rothschild to found Quennell Rothschild Associates in 1979 (renamed Quennell Rothschild & Partners in 1998).
LIGHTHOUSE PARK PRIOR TO RESTORATION IN 1977
AERIAL VIEW OF LIGHTHOUSE PARK
CAPOBIANCO FIELD
ZION BREEN PROMENADES
As classmates at Harvard University, Robert Zion and Harold Breen were introduced to modern design by Lester Collins, Walter Gropius, Joseph Hudnut and Norman Newton. In 1957, the pair formed a partnership in New York. Their firm, which would relocate to Imlaystown, New Jersey in 1973, would endure for over forty years, first as Zion and Breen Associates, then as Zion Breen Richardson Associates (since 2001) with the addition of Donald Richardson, who first joined the firm in 1962, as a principal.
The firm designed projects for museums, universities, corporations, cities, towns, developers and individual clients, but is most well known for its public parks which have become landmarks of civic design. In 1967, Zion’s commission for the first “vest-pocket” park, Paley Park in New York earned the firm early recognition. They collaborated with top architects of the time working with Philip Johnson on the design for New York’s Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden. The firm would continue their work for MoMA, directing the garden’s renovation for the museum’s 50th anniversary celebration in 1989, and in 2005 working on a major expansion of the property.
From 1967 to 1982, the firm also served as landscape architects to Yale University and from 1976 to 1983 as campus landscape architects to Princeton University, while completing numerous master plans for other universities throughout the country. The firm’s significant commissions included the Philip Morris Corporate Offices and Tech Center in Richmond, Virginia, as well as the company’s 2,000-acre manufacturing plant in Concord, North Carolina; a master plan for Liberty State Park in New Jersey; the grounds of the Statue of Liberty in New York; the Bamboo Garden in the IBM World Headquarters atrium; and the Cincinnati Riverfront Park.
The firm has been honored with over 50 national and regional awards for design excellence. Zion and Richardson were inducted into the National Academy of Arts in New York in 1972 and 2006 respectively and all three partners, Zion, Breen and Richardson were made Fellows of the American Society of Landscape Architects.
Mystery Photo of the Day for Monday
Can you identify this and the location. E-Mail Jbird134@aol.com Winner will receive a book from the kiosk.
WEEKEND MYSTERY PHOTO
Did you guess this location? It is the entrance to the Queensbridge apartment houses. Just across Vernon Blvd. With over 3000 units, built in 1939 it has been called the largest public housing development in the U.S.
EDITORIAL
Maybe many of us will appreciate our green spaces,more than ever this year since we are all spending lot of time walking the island.
Today I visited the kiosk for it’s weekly check. Outside I found life in full bloom and about to burst forth.
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 Dottie Jeffries
