In a city built of glass, brick and stone, wooden houses are hard to spot in Manhattan these days. That said, some wooden houses have survived throughout the years from the 18th and 19th centuries. These houses were built back when the city was mainly farmland. When the city became industrialized, these wooden houses were deemed hazardous and new construction in wood was outlawed in 1866 on the island of Manhattan with the “fire limit” law of 1866. Thus, the few that remain in New York City today are extremely rare. Here are the ten of the most remarkable, charming wooden homes ordered from oldest to youngest that you can still spot in Manhattan:
Dyckman Farmhouse (~1785)
The only remaining Dutch Colonial style farmhouse in Manhattan is the Dyckman Farmhouse. The farmhouse was built around 1785 and originally stood on a 250-acre farm. Now, the farmhouse stands in a small park in the Inwood neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, and the farmhouse serves as a museum that tells the tales of the farmhouses’ residents and rural living.
In the 1660s, Jan Dyckman established a farm near the northern tip of Manhattan that was destroyed during the Revolutionary War. As a result, William Dyckman (Jan’s grandson) replanted the land and built the Dyckman Farmhouse around 1784. Three generations of the Dyckman family lived in this small home, but in 1868 the character of the neighborhood changed from rural to urban and the farmhouse became dilapidated.
Alice Dyckman Dean and Fannie Fredericka Dyckman Welch—the daughters of the last Dyckman to grow up in the house—saved the house from total disrepair in 1915. These women worked to restore the house by furnishing the interiors and landscaping the property. They preserved the historical farmhouse as a museum to showcase New York’s Dutch heritage. This past weekend, Untapped Cities Insiders were treated to a tour of the inside of the house.
The Dyckman Farmhouse is located at 4881 Broadway, New York, NY, 10034.
Bridge Cafe (1792)
Completed in 1792, Bridge Cafe is the oldest surviving tavern and one of the oldest buildings in Manhattan. The building has contained in the past a porter house, a beer-serving grocer, and a brothel on an upper floor.
Located near the marina at 279 Water Street in the South Street Seaport area of Manhattan, the establishment attracted pirates and sailors who often hung out in the brothel drinking beer and whiskey. Besides serving great drinks, Bridge Cafe has gourmet food. In the 19thcentury, the building was described as a grocery, a porterhouse, or a liquor establishment and is one of New York City’s oldest historic taverns. But, beware if you visit this vintage bar, it may be haunted!
The Bridge Cafe is located at 279 Water Street, 11201.
Hamilton Grange (1802)
In 1802, Alexander Hamilton’s two-story home—named the Grange—was built. “The Grange” takes its name from Hamilton’s grandfather’s estate located in Ayrshire, Scotland. Hamilton commissioned McComb Jr. to build this 32-acre estate that sat on a hilltop, allowing for views of both the Hudson and Harlem Rivers. This historic house is built in the Federalist-style, as seen from its large windows and long piazzas on each side of the house.
The Hamilton house required 14.5 million dollars of renovation and has relocated two times. In 1889 the house moved to Convent Avenue at 141stStreet where is was used as a place to worship. In 1962 the house became a National Memorial and in 2008, the house was moved to the corner of the north end of St. Nicholas Park. The current location of the estate was part of the original Grange acreage and today free admission and tours of the estate are offered. You can go into the house portion of the Grange on tours through Untapped Cities Insiders as well.
The Hamilton Grange is located at 414 W 141st St, New York, NY 10031.
Charles Street Farmhouse (~1810)
This isolated, peaceful, and secretive farmhouse that has survived for over 200 years was originally located in the Upper East Side on York Avenue and 71stStreet. The farmhouse dates back to the 18th or early 19th century according to the Greenwich Village Historic District Designation Report, and some sources actually date the house back to 1810.
In 1868 Irish immigrants William Glass and his wife bought the house and used it for dairy and eventually they lived in it. They built a small brick house in house in front of the farmhouse which they used as a tea room and in the 1940s the brick building functioned as a restaurant: Healy’s Dining Room. Furthermore, in the 1940s-1950s the author Margaret Wise Brown rented the house. Brown is the author of the children’s book Mister Dog which shows an illustration of this house and she also the author of Goodnight Moon; thus, the house is sometimes referred to as the “Goodnight Moon House.”
The Glasses sold the farmhouse in 1965 to the Archdiocese of New York, but Sven Bernhard (Brown’s ex-fiancé) and his family went to court to save the farmhouse from being demolished to make room for a senior home. The Bernhard’s were successfully at saving the property but this came with the price of relocating the farmhouse because the senior home was being built regardless. Therefore, the farmhouse was moved to 121 Charles Street in Greenwich Village on March 5th 1967. In 1988 Suri Bieler and Eliot Brodsky purchased the farmhouse from the Bernhards.
The Charles Street Farmhouse is located at 121 Charles Street, 10014.
The Grove Street Home (1822)
In the market for a wooden house in Manhattan? Well you are in luck because a rare 200 year old wooden house at 17 Grove St. in West Village with classic clapboard siding is for sale for a soaring price of 12 million dollars.
The carpenter William Hyde built much of this three story home. The first two floors of the property were built in 1822 and the third floor was built in 1870. Additionally this home comes with a two story guest home with a separate address: 100 Bedford St. One of the unique features of this home is the trapdoor that could have functioned as a holding space of a tunnel to hide people escaping slavery as part of the Underground Railroad.
The Grove Street Home is located at 17 Grove Street, 10014.
Rose Hill House (~1837)
In 1747, John Watts bought the Rose Hill House as part of a land purchase, and he developed the property to include a main house, additional houses, outbuildings, orchards, and gardens. The estate took on the name Rose Hill Farm after the property Watts owned in Scotland.
Watts, however, was exiled from New York in 1811 because of his loyalty to England during the American Revolution. The main house on this lot was burned to make room for individual lots. In the 1900s the house served as a junk shop with apartments above it. In 1979 the house was converted to a three-story bedroom apartment.
Today, the original framing and roof are left intact and date the house back to the 1790s. Interestingly, the house is located at 203 East 29thStreet and appears to look as if it is floating in mid air amongst New York’s brick buildings!
412 East 85th St. Wooden Home (~1860)
Located in Upper Manhattan is a rare surviving three story Italianate style wooden house of the pastoral era in Yorkville. It has a raised brick basement, a three-bay façade clad in capboard siding, a porch with a tall stoop, floor-length parlor windows, and a bracketed cornice. This home was built around 1860 just before Manhattan’s “fire limit” law in 1866. This law was extended north to 86thStreet and consequently this house is one of the last wood houses in the Upper East Side. When built, this neighborhood was a wealthy rural area and became the home of many German immigrants during the late 19thcentury.
For 50 years, John Herbst and his family lived in this house and they ran a monument shop there. Despite having many owners, the house always maintained its character. Currently the owners Catherine and Alfredo De Vido restored the house to maintain its history and is actually considered a landmark.
Twin Wood Houses in Turtle Bay (1866)
Just before the New York City passed a law banning wood houses up to 86thStreet, two wooden frame houses at 312 and 314 East 53rdStreet were built in 1866. Two carpenters decided to build these twin clapboard houses in the French Empire style on the Old Eastern Post roadbed. They include mansard roods, bracketed cornices, and round-hooded dormer windows.
The twin wooden homes have survived in Manhattan via industrial change when factories, tenements, and slaughterhouses were being built and for this these sister homes are breathtaking to see.
Blackwell House
This simple well-proportioned house, built for James Blackwell between 1796 and 1804, is the sole surviving building on Roosevelt Island which dates from the period when the island was still privately held property. The Blackwell family owned and farmed the island from the late 17th century until 1828, when it was sold to the City of New York. Blackwell’s Island, as it was long known, had been inherited by Mary Manningham Blackwell from her stepfather, Captain John Manning.
Captain Manning was granted a “patent” on the island by the British Governor Nicolls in 1668, a fortunate circumstance, since five years later, after mismanaging his command of New York’s Fort James during a Dutch attack, he was tried by court martial and publicly disgraced. Manning moved to his island retreat and evidently found solace there. Reverend Charles Wolley, writing in 1701, tells us that he had often gone to Manning’s Island to visit the Captain, “whose entertainment was commonly a bowl of rum-punch.”
In Dutch times the island was known as Varckens Eylandt, which translates to Hog Island. It was purchased from two Indian chiefs by Governor Wouter van Twiller in 1637 and was already being farmed by 1639 under land grants from the Amsterdam Chamber of the West India Company. Jan Alteras, Francois Fyn, Jonas Bronck and Laurens Duyts all farmed the island during the mid 17th century. The last of these by 1658, defaulted on his lease. But Duyt’s misconduct was far worse in the respects- he was banished from the province for “selling his wife into immoral slavery and for gross immoralities committed by himself.” Hog Island was confiscated by the British in 1667. During the Revolutionary War the island was occupied by the British and in 1782, when peace negotiations were in progress, American prisoners of war were quartered there.
James and Jacob Blackwell, who had inherited the island from their father Jacob, found themselves in financial straits after the Revolutionary War and attempted to sell the property. In an advertisement of 1784 James was able to boast that his 107 acre island, “was about four miles from the city,” included among other amenities, “two small Dwelling Houses, a Barn, Bake, and Fowl House, a Cyder Mill, a large orchard, stone quarries and running springs.” A buyer could not be found, but by 1796 James Blackwell’s financial condition must have improved since it was about this time that the Blackwell House was built.
With the purchase of Blackwell’s Island by the City, its agricultural use gave way to institutional development, beginning in 1829 with the erection of the penitentiary. The Blackwell House became the residential quarters for various institutional administrators. In the late 19th century the warden of the island’s Almshouse lived here. The house was abandoned during the 20th century and by the late 1960’s was in an advanced state of decay, its only hope for survival being complete restoration. The New York State Urban Development Corporation, as part of its redevelopment program for the island, instituted a survey of existing structures.
On the basis of recommendations made by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, a survey by historian Loring McMillen in 1969, and a report prepared the same year by noted architectural historian Henry Russell Hitchcock, the Blackwell House was assessed worthy of preservation and restoration. The well known New York architect, Giorgio Cavaglieri, was commissioned to evaluate the buildings on the island and which were of special interest with a view to preserving them. In 1973, he carried out a complete and highly sympathetic restoration of Blackwell House.
This unpretentious clapboard farmhouse, built in the vernacular style of the late 18th century, now consists of a two-story main section and a one-story kitchen wing, constructed soon after the completion of the main building. A larger addition at the north, of later date, was razed during restoration and a root cellar entrance was constructed at the northeast corner of the main building. On the east, a spacious one story front porch has been restored and rests on the original stone foundations. A simple wood rail surrounds it, and the wood shingled roof rests elegantly on slim Ionic columns. This facade like that on the west, has two windows at each side of the simple central doorway, and five at the second story, all with six-over-six sash. A delicately scaled dentil course appears beneath the eaves of the gabled roof. Pairs of dormers project from this roof at the east and west. On the the west side, the doorway is sheltered by a simple pedimented portico, an addition in the Greek revival style.
The Blackwell House is one of the few farmhouses in New York dating from the years immediately after the Revolutionary War. Now utilized as a community center, it still rests on its original site, now a handsomely landscaped setting , which preserves much of the proper scale and relationship of the building to its surroundings.
Edited by Deborah Dorff ALL PHOTOS COPYRIGHT RIHS. 2020 (C) PHOTOS IN THIS ISSUE (C) JUDITH BERDY RIHS
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
Marinus Willet, Tammany Hall & The Treaty of New York
by James S. Kaplan
NEW YORK ALMANACK
Marinus Willet, Tammany Hall & The Treaty of New York
November 28, 2021 by James S. Kaplan
(Marinus Willett painted by Ralph Earl, oil on canvas, ca 1791 Metropolitan Museum of Art )
Every year in October the Lower Manhattan Historical Society holds its Saratoga/Yorktown celebration in Trinity Churchyard to celebrate the American victories at the Battles of Saratoga and Yorktown.
At that ceremony wreaths are lain on the graves of Revolutionary War figures associated with those battles — Horatio Gates, Alexander Hamilton and Marinus Willett.
Of these Revolutionary War heroes on whose grave a wreath is lain, Marinus Willett is the least well-known of the three. However, Willett is arguably of equal if not more importance to the history of the City of New York, as General Gates or perhaps even Alexander Hamilton.
Today Willett is better known for his relatively brief time at the Battle of Fort Stanwix (where the Marinus Willett Visitor Center greets you to the National Park Service facility) and his later defense of the Mohawk Valley during the Revolution. He was also an important politician and diplomat who played a critical role in the history of the nation and the City for almost fifty years after the Revolution.
Probably his most historically important achievement was his successful efforts in 1790 to negotiated the Treaty of New York with 27 Muscogee Creek. This treaty, which was one of the few treaties negotiated in the city of New York, was one of the early diplomatic triumphs for the nascent American government, and in certain respects would have major implications for the city’s future.
Willet’s Early Life and Role During the Revolution
Willet was born in what today is the Borough of Queens in 1740 to a somewhat prominent old line family of landowners, which is sometime described as having seen better days. He became a cabinet maker by trade and as a young man growing up in New York he became a member of the Sons Of Liberty.
After hostilities broke out in Boston, an incident occurred on June 6, 1775 when a convoy of British soldiers led heavy arms to Boston to join the Battle of Bunker Hill. Willett came out of a local bar and jumped unarmed in front of the armed line of British soldiers. He protested that only light arms, not heavy arms, were authorized by the City’s ruling council to be brought up to Boston.
Other members of the Sons of Liberty soon gathered on Broad Street to stop the convoy and the British authorities (presumably fearing another Boston Massacre) backed down and returned the heavy arms to the armory. As a result of what he would later call “the Broad Street incident,” Willett became a local patriot who would serve in the Continental Army and later in the New York and Federal governments for the next fifty years. ***see Image 1 As active hostilities broke out, having served with the militia in the French and Indian War, Willett became an officer in New York’s militia. He was later assigned to Fort Stanwix near Rome, New York in 1777 as British troops under General John Burgoyne were driving down from Canada to split the colonies in two.
The British plan included sending troops under Barry St. Leger to take Fort Stanwix and attack the Revolutionaries from the west. St. Leger’s superior force of British regulars and Native allies besieged Fort Stanwix, and some 700 troops under the command of Peter Gansevoort.
Gansevoort sought and obtained reinforcements from Philip Schuyler near Albany and their arrival under Gen. Ebenezer Learned forced St. Leger to abandoned his attack from the west, helping to pave the way for victory at the Battles of Saratoga.
Willett took part in the Battle of Monmouth and would hold senior military positions in Upstate New York during the Revolution where he gained experience fighting Britain and her Indigenous allies, including during the punitive Sullivan-Clinton Campaign (1779) where he was second in command at the attack on the Onondaga in April, 1779. He would later express doubts about the wisdom of the United States policy of subduing Native People in bitter military actions.
Willett also presided over the trail of Walter Butler, a hated and feared Loyalist tried as a spy, found guilty and sentenced to death. On November 11, 1778 the son of John Butler (a wealthy Indian Agent associated with Sir William Johnson) had commanded the Loyalist and Seneca sack of Cherry Valley.
Willett commanded about 400 men, which he positioned at Saratoga, Ballston, German Flatts, Canajoharie, Fort Hunter, Catskill, Johnstown, and Schoharie. He led the militia in an ambush Loyalists and Indian allies at Sharon Springs and again at the Battle of Johnstown. Afterward, he led his troops to in pursuit of the Loyalists, during which Walter Butler was killed.
In 1781, from his headquarters at Fort Plain he wrote of his militia that “I don’t think I shall give a very wild account if I say, that one third have been killed, or carried captive by the enemy; one third removed to the interior places of the country; and one third deserted to the enemy.”
He was later assigned to take Fort Ontario, but withdrew when his movements were discovered. He was also assigned to build roads and improve access to Oneida Lake.
The Treaty of New York
After the war, Willett returned to the city of New York where he quickly became one of the leaders of the newly established post-Revolution government. In 1784 he was appointed Sheriff of the city, in which capacity he was in charge of restoring order and police functions, and also redistributing forfeited Loyalist lands. (In 1787, he took part in suppressing Shays’ Rebellion).
The City’s policy of redistributing land belonging to Loyalists soon met considerable opposition from former Tories, represented by lawyers such as Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. They claimed that the Treaty of Paris which had ended the war guaranteed that the rights of Loyalists to their pre-war property, thus nullifying New York’s laws that called for the forfeiture of all land belonging to those who had sided with the British. Ultimately the U.S. Constitution would uphold these Tories’ claims in its clause that stated the “No State shall impair the Obligation of Contract.”
It was for this reason that Willett would become a staunch Anti-federalist and ally of George Clinton who unsuccessfully opposed the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. When the Federalist, led by Alexander Hamilton, his father-in-law Philip Schuyler, and John Jay, became ascendant in New York City politics, Willett lost some of his political power. He joined with the Tammany Society, originally a patriotic civic association which became the center of the Anti-Federalist opposition in the City’s politics.
The Tammany Society was primarily a group of disaffected Revolutionary War veterans who sometimes dressed in Native American outfits and held July 4th celebrations. They were opposed to the increasingly aristocratic Federalists who they viewed as betraying the ideals of the Revolution. The Tammany Society was said to be named after Chief Tammany of the Delaware, who supposedly had signed the peace treaty in 1683 with William Penn that established the City of Philadelphia. Chief Tammany (Tamanend) who was said to have believed in democratic ideals and peaceful and cooperative relations between Native People and Europeans.
After the formation of the Federal Government in 1789, New York City was briefly the nation’s capital (which as part of the deal forming the Constitution was later moved to Philadelphia and Washington DC). At the time, the federal government (then headquartered in what today is Fraunces Tavern) had a number of significant problems, not the least of which was its relationship with the Muscogee Creek, who had controlled most of what is today South Tennessee, Alabama, Western Georgia, and parts of Northern Florida.
Although all territory east of the Mississippi had been ceded over to the United States in the Treaty of Paris, the very powerful Muscogee had allied with the British. After conflicts with white settlers on their territory, Georgia officials insisted that the federal government send troops to protect white settlers and remove the Muscogee. George Washington and his Secretary of War Henry Knox believed the federal government did not have the capability of doing this and from their point of view a better solution would be to reach an accommodation.
After a delegation in 1789 led by General Benjamin Lincoln failed to achieve this goal, Washington and Knox reached across the aisle to Marinus Willett. Even though Willett was a stanch Anti-Federalist, he had a reputation for having dealt with Native People at the end of the Revolutionary War, and Washington reportedly thought highly of his service during the War.
Willett, who was about 50 at the time, accepted the assignment and gathered an experienced guide to undertake the mission to the Creek. He met with Alexander McGivillray (1750 – 1793, also known as Hoboi-Hili-Miko), son of a Muscogee mother and a Scottish father, an influential and controversial Muscogee Creek leader.
Willett informed McGivillray that he had come as the special representative of George Washington and that they should understand that the American government wanted peace and not war. He reportedly said that contrary to what they may have heard, the Americans were a peaceful people. Unlike the British who had in effect sold the Muscogee out in the Treaty of Paris, they could trust them to live with the Muscogee in peace for the mutual benefit of both groups.
Willett invited McGivillray to visit the American capital in New York to see how the people lived and perhaps meet with Washington. This proved persuasive and shortly thereafter a delegation of 27 Muscogee Creek traveled to New York. They reportedly received a warm reception in cities such as Baltimore and Philadelphia. In New York City, the Tammany Society members were allegedly out in force to greet them in their best Native attire, and there were a number of dinners and receptions in which the Society members assured them of their great interest and respect for their customs and traditions.
As skepticism and hostility began to fade a treaty was negotiated by Willett and his Tammany Society compatriots that secured rights to the ancestral lands of the “Upper, Middle and Lower Creek and Seminole composing the Creek nation of Indians,” but also allowed white settlers to enter and live in their territory.
The Muscogee Creek men also ceded a large area of their hunting grounds to the Oconee River, and agreed to surrender runaway slaves to Federal authorities (McGillivray had a plantation with as many as 60 enslaved people). The United States granted the Creek the right to deal with non-Indian trespassers, but were required to turn over non-Indians who committed crimes on Muscogee lands to white authorities. Secretly, McGillivray was rewarded with a commission as a Brigadier General in the U.S. Army, including an annual salary of $1,500, and he was allowed to import goods through the port of Pensacola, then still ruled by the Spanish, without paying American import duties. He also received $100,000 as compensation lands that had been seized from his father.
This treaty, known as the Treaty of New York, was a significant triumph for the new United States – Washington and Knox were delighted.
Legend has it that at a final meeting of the Muscogee leaders and Tammany Society, McGillivray raised his glass and said:
“I see you gentlemen call yourselves the Tammany Society. I assume you know it was Chief Tammany of the Delawares who in 1683 signed the peace treaty with William Penn that formed the basis for the Pennsylvania colony and the City of Philadelphia. Chief Tammany firmly believed in peace between native Americans and white men and that if Native Americans and white men could work together in peace and respect their cities could be among the most important and wealthy in the world. It was for this reason that the City of Philadelphia became the most important city in the Colonies, more so than other colonies in which there were wars between our peoples. Although perhaps these principles have not always been followed, it was Chief Tammany’s dream that one day there would be a City in which the government and people would more closely adhere to his vision and that such a City would one day be the largest, wealthiest and most important and powerful in the world.”
With raised glasses they toasted to Chief Tammany’s dream.
Of course the Treaty of New York was broken some years later by the State of Georgia and ultimately the Muscogee Creek were driven from their land along the trail of tears by Andrew Jackson’s enforcement of the Indian Removal Act.
In New York City, the Tammany Society however grew in political influence and importance. In the elections of 1800 led by celebrity candidates such as General Horatio Gates and Governor George Clinton (with political strategist Aaron Burr), they defeated the Federalists led by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and Phillip Schuyler, and supported the election of President Thomas Jefferson, forming the modern Democratic Party in the city. Marinus Willett would decline George Washington’s request for a commission to lead the American Army against the Native People in Ohio, preferring to stay in New York City as Sheriff. It’s said he opposed the use military force to drive Native Americans from their land in the Ohio valley.
In 1807 Willett was elected Mayor of the city of New York. In 1814 at the age of 74 in a stirring speech from the steps of New York’s newly constructed City Hall he would rally the New York militias against a prospective British invasion. He died in 1831 at the age of 91. His funeral at Trinity Church included an estimated 10,000 mourners, one of the largest in the city’s history.
The Tammany Society and the Democratic Party would be a major force in New York politics for the next 160 years. It was sometimes stained with corruption, but its bedrock insistence on upholding Chief Tammany’s vision (real or imagined) of democratic ideals and supporting the immigrant poor and the full participation of all ethnic groups in New York politics would frequently lead it to electoral victory.
Illustrations, from above: Marinus Willett painted by Ralph Earl, oil on canvas, ca. 1791 (courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art); “Cantonment of His Majesty’s forces in N. America… dated at New York 29th March 1766” (Library of Congress); “The Treaty of Penn with the Indians” by Benjamin West, depicting Penn negotiating with Tamanend; and the Willett Memorial in Albany’s Washington Park (placed 1907, relocated 2006).
Image 1 Fort Stamwix
Treaty of Penn with the Indians
Eastern state map
Plaque in Albany’s Washington Park
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We wrote about LaGuardia a while ago. Time for catch up on JFK. JFK is the busiest international air passenger gateway into North America (the three busiest international passenger gateways are Dubai International, Amsterdam Schiphol and London Heathrow), the 20th-busiest airport in the world, and the sixth-busiest airport in the United States, handling over 62.5 million passengers in 2019. More than 90 airlines operate from the airport, with nonstop or direct flights to destinations in six continents.
Beginnings – On the golf course
JFK sits on an old recreation spot for residents of Long Island, particularly for the wealthy, known as Idlewild. In November 1929, 300 acres of Jamaica Bay meadow land was assembled for the developer Nathan D. Shapiro, who owned the Idlewild Beach Company. He planned a colony of year-round houses overlooking the bay with two golf courses behind them which he expect to finish by early July 1930.
As war intensified in 1941, Mayor La Guardia said that New York was not adequately equipped with airfields either for the war or after the war. La Guardia said the federal government was “very anxious” to get on with construction at a third airport facility, after the newly opened La Guardia and Floyd Bennett Field which had been taken over by the Navy, and that Idlewild looked like “the most favorable both as to location and layout.” By the end of the year, title to the property had been conveyed to the city, the City Council had allocated $750,000 for payment to the 200 or so property owners on the land who had been notified to leave. “The work of clearing the property,” said the presiding justice in the case, “will be done by Park Commissioner [Robert] Moses. He will be in there with shovels and excavators, and you know he does things fast. You will have from two to four weeks to move.”
The airport opened with its first flight on July 1, 1948. The Port Authority canceled foreign airlines’ permits to use LaGuardia, forcing them to move to Idlewild during the next couple of years.
Name – Idlewild no matter what
No one could agree on what to call the airport. In 1941, a resolution had been put before the City Council to call it the Colin Kelly Airport after an Air Force captain of World War II, but nothing came of it. Two years later, Mayor LaGuardia declared it “Idlewild,” but the City Council said he couldn’t unilaterally name it and voted to call it the Major General Alexander E. Anderson Airport, after a World War I and II hero. Nonetheless, the airport was still called “Idlewild”. In March 1948, the City Council changed its official name to New York International Airport, Anderson Field, but the common name remained “Idlewild” until December 24, 1963 when it was renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport a month and two days after the assassination of President Kennedy.
Jets – Canada first Canada’s Avro Jetliner was the first jet airliner to land at Idlewild on April 16, 1950 on a well-publicized tour to New York City, to coincide with a Society of Automotive Engineers convention. Only in May 1957 did another jet fly in, a French Sud Aviation Caravelle prototype. US airlines began scheduling jets to Idlewild in 1958–59. (LaGuardia did not get jets until 1964.) Much of Newark’s traffic moved to Idlewild (which averaged 242 daily airline operations in 1952) when Newark closed in February 1952. L-1049 Constellations and DC-7s appeared between 1951 and 1953 and did not use LaGuardia for their first several years, bringing more traffic to Idlewild. By 1954, Idlewild had the highest volume of international air traffic of any airport globally.
Terminals – Many The Port of New York Authority originally planned a single 55-gate terminal, but the major airlines weren’t pleased, arguing that the terminal would be far too small for future traffic. A new plan would allow each major airline to be given space to develop its own terminal. This scheme made construction more practical, made terminals more navigable, and introduced incentives for airlines to compete with each other for the best design. The revised plan was approved by airlines in 1955; seven terminals were initially planned involving some of the biggest architectural names in the country.
The International Arrivals Building, designed by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, was the first new terminal at the airport, opening in December 1957.
American Airlines opened Terminal 8 in February 1960 designed by Kahn and Jacobs with a 317-foot stained-glass facade designed by Robert Sowers, then the largest stained-glass installation in the world.
Pan American World Airways opened the Worldport in 1960, designed by Tippetts-Abbett-McCarthy-Stratton that featured a large, elliptical roof suspended by 32 sets of radial posts and cables; the roof extended 114 feet (35 m) beyond the base of the terminal to cover the passenger loading area. It was one of the first airline terminals in the world to feature Jetways that connected to the terminal and that could be moved to provide an easy walkway for passengers from the terminal to a docked aircraft.
National Airlines’ Sundrome by I.M. Pei featured an all-glass facade and a clear-span interior achieved by glass mullions with glass walls suspended from them. Built in 1970, it was one of the first such designs in the U.S. I.M. Pei’s Terminal 6
Trans World Airlines opened the TWA Flight Center in 1962, designed by Eero Saarinen with a distinctive winged-bird shape.
Cargo – Much
Those of us who frequent JFK as passengers may be surprised that it is also a very important cargo port.
Indeed, when ranked by the value of shipments passing through it (as opposed to volume), JFK is the third or fourth ranking freight gateway in the United States (after the Port of Los Angeles, the Port of Long Beach and the Port of New York and New Jersey), and the number one international air freight gateway in the United States. In fact, while most of the nation’s airports, seaports and border crossings saw their trade plummet, particularly in April and May 2019, JFK’s trade did the opposite. For one month, April 2019, JFK was the nation’s leading port, ahead of perennial No. 1 Port of Los Angeles.
Why did it briefly occupy the top spot?
The reason was gold. With transatlantic passenger flights shut down because of the coronavirus spreading across the world and with rising uncertainty in the U.S. and global economies, the price of gold rose at the same time the need to have physical gold in New York, the world’s financial capital, ratcheted up to meet demand. In May 2019, gold was actually the top US import, ahead of oil, passenger vehicles, cell phones and computers. In 2019, $25.1 billion in gold was imported into JFK, 74% of the country total of $33.8 billion. More than $16 billion of the U.S. total, just under half, was in the months of April and May alone.
We travelers are pretty lucky. We can get to LGA and JFK without bridges or tunnels, and we can enjoy nonstops to most (or at least many) of the places we want to go. But remember what Elaine Benes said, “No one has ever beaten the Van Wyck!” Up in the air, senior birdmen.
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TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 30,2021
ISSUE #533
A HIDDEN RESTING PLACE
The 2nd Cemetery of
Congregation
Shearith Israel
72-76 West 11th Street
from: Daytonian in Manhattan
In 1654, fleeing intense religious prosecution in their homelands, 23 Spanish and Portuguese Jews arrived in New Amsterdam. It must have seemed that they had gone from one intolerable situation to another. The colony’s Director-General, Peter Stuyvesant, was openly anti-Semitic and the year the group arrived he wrote to the Dutch West India Company asking that “the deceitful race, — such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ, — be not allowed to further infect and trouble this new colony.” Stuyvesant was no doubt crestfallen when the Dutch West India Company allowed them to stay.
The 23 settlers would form the seed of Congregation Shearith Israel. In 1656 they requested permission to establish their own burying ground, rather than share New Amsterdam’s common graveyard. The location of the “little hook of land” granted to the Jews outside of the high wooden wall is unknown today.
In 1683, land was purchased for a new cemetery at what is today named St. James Place. It is known as the First Cemetery of the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue, or the Chatham Square Cemetery.
By 1804 that cemetery, too, was filled. A plot of land on Greenwich Lane (later Greenwich Avenue) was purchased from John Agnew on May 1. More than a century later, The Sun recalled that the “large burying ground stretched along the upper bank of Minetta Brook.” The cemetery, known as the Second Cemetery of Congregation Shearith Israel, opened in 1805, the first congregant interred being Wolfe Polack.
Ten years earlier, a yellow fever epidemic had broken out in Philadelphia. The disease spread swiftly and eventually 5,000 people, one-tenth of the population, would succumb. In July 1795, the first yellow fever death in New York City came. Within a single week in August twenty-one victims died. Around the time of the cemetery’s opening, panic was such that those who could afford to leave the city did so, moving to the fresh air of remote hamlets like Greenwich Village. The Jewish population was not immune to pernicious disease. The New York Times later reported, “Many interments were made here during 1822, when the number of deaths in the City from yellow fever was very large.”
The famous Commissioners Plan of 1811 laid out the streets and avenues, and placed West 11th Street through the Spanish-Portuguese Cemetery. The thoroughfare that had existed only on paper suddenly became real in 1830. On April 16, the Commissioners of Estimate and Assessment published their appraisal of “the loss and damage sustained by the owners” of the land and properties required for the opening of West 11th Street from Broadway to Greenwich Lane. The Evening Post reported that the opening “took portions of two cemeteries–one belonging to the Jews, and the other to the Presbyterian Church.”
Knowing that the cemetery was soon to be decimated, on June 2, 1829 Congregation Shearith Israel acquired land from Horatio Wilkes on West 21st Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues for a new burying ground. That cemetery was opened on August 17, 1829 and the first interment, that of Mrs. Judith Lopez, took place on November 6 that year. The last burial in the 11th Street cemetery was that of Israel Phillips, on January 6, 1833.
In the months and weeks before construction of West 11th Street began, many of the bodies in the 1805 cemetery were reinterred in the 21st Street grounds. But, according to The New York Times, others were simply crowded into the remaining little triangular plot. On May 18, 1879 the newspaper recalled, “A great many bodies that were dug up at the opening of the street were reburied in the south-west corner, which is now all that remains of the old burial-ground, and of which every foot is supposed to be occupied by humans remains.”
By the time of that article, the forgotten little cemetery was showing the first signs of neglect. In 1875 The Jewish Messenger noted, “The ground is covered with a sparse growth of grass, and there are a couple of trees. It is in fairly good condition, but by no means presents as nice and clean an appearance as the Oliver Street [Chatham Square] and Twenty-first Street burying grounds.” Interestingly, it was an Irish immigrant rather than the congregation itself, who rescued the neglected parcel. In 1882 the New York Chronicle explained:
All that remains of the second cemetery…is a parcel of ground in the shape of an obtuse triangle, on the south side of Eleventh street, near Sixth avenue. It contains about fifty square feet. In the centre is a pyramidal monument bearing the names of Joshua and Jacob Canter, and the date 1822. It is surrounded by a number of tombstones. The cause of the curious shape of this cemetery is that when Eleventh street was opened all but the southeast corner of the property was cut away. Since then it has been allowed to run to waste, until recently Mr. Callanan, the owner of adjoining property, built a fence around it and fixed up the grounds.
The Joshua Canter mentioned in the article, was a well known portrait and landscape painter and art teacher. He, like Jacob Canter, were most likely victims of the 1822 yellow fever epidemic.
Once sitting in a field, in 1925 the little cemetery was hemmed in by apartment buildings. photographer unknown, from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York
Another grave belongs to German-born Ephraim Hart (originally Hirz, he changed his surname when he arrived in Philadelphia around 1780). Having fought in the Revolution, he became an elector of Congregation Shearith Israel on April 2, 1787. One of New York City’s most successful merchants, he helped organize the Board of Stock-Brokers, today’s New York Stock Exchange. His gravestone reads: “Ephraim Hart / Pennsylvania / Pvt Capt. Henry Graham’s Co. / Rev War / July 16, 1824.”
As Mr. Callanan had done, the Congregation Shearith Israel has refocused interest in restoring the more than two-century-old cemetery. Its West 11th Street Project Committee, formed in 2013, hired architect-conservator firm Rachel Frankel Architecture, as part of the ongoing restoration/preservation effort.
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
Sources: EPHEMERAL NEW YORK
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Jones’s Wood was a block of farmland on the island of Manhattan overlooking the East River. The site was formerly occupied by the wealthy Schermerhorn and Jones families. Today, the site of Jones’s Wood is part of Lenox Hill, in the present-day Upper East Side of New York City.
New York has its very lovely public green spaces, playgrounds, and private parks.But some lucky residents have their own secret interior garden—a lush sanctuary of trees, flowers, and fountains hidden from the street between rows of brownstones and accessible only through the back doors of adjacent neighbors.
One of these magnificent gardens, Jones Wood Garden, lies between Lexington and Third Avenues and 65th and 66th Streets (above) on the same block as St. Vincent Ferrer Church.
The original Jones Wood was a 150-acre tract of high forested land that roughly spanned today’s 65th to 76th Streets from Third Avenue to the East River.
Named for a 19th century tavern owner and owned by prominent families, Jones Wood became a popular picnic and amusement spot. It was even in the running in the early 1850s to be the city’s first major public park. In the post–Civil War years after Central Park edged out Jones Wood, builders cut down the forests and put up blocks of brownstone residences in this Lenox Hill neighborhood, as thy did all over Manhattan. Demand for these private homes soured by the turn of the century, then picked up again after World War I. That’s when Jones Wood Garden got its start.
With well-to-do tenants in mind, developers purchased 12 brownstones (six on the north side of 65th Street, and six on the south side of 66th), then remodeled them by getting rid of their tall stoops and updating the amenities. They also designed a 100 by 108 feet sunken interior garden. “This will be paved with special paving brick and flagging, and will have a fountain with a pool,” explained a New York Times article from 1919. “Back of each house there will be a small and more intimate garden about 20 feet deep, upon which the dining room will open.” Shutters and trellises would be added to the back of each of these homes as well. Unless you live there or know someone who does, Jones Wood Garden is pretty much off-limits to most New Yorkers.
You can catch a glimpse of a few trees from the street, as I did below. But the garden sanctuary is very private, just as it was intended. Occasionally recent photos appear, particularly when one of the homes is up for sale. In 2015, the house at 160 East 66th Street hit the market for $12 million. Curbed has the photos, including one with the open dining room leading to the garden, as described in the 1919 Times piece. But to get a sense of the beauty and lushness of Jones Wood Garden, we have to rely on old images, such as these black and white photos from The Garden Magazine in 1922.
EDITORIAL
For over 30 year my parents lived in an apartment with a partial view of the Jones Wood garden. You could see the fountain in the center and the beauty of a communal area with no fences.
Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 in Montreal, Canada. Laura Hussey, Gloria Herman, M. Frank, Ed Litcher & Andy Sparberg got it!!
SOURCES Ephemeral New York
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 FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
Turns out that our old island has become a game changer in environmentally friendly architecture. Read on.
First, a bit more about Becker + Becker, the company that developed and built The Octagon. The firm’s website states: “Becker + Becker seeks projects that are social and environmental game-changers: restoring underutilized historic buildings and transforming urban sites to enrich and revitalize communities. We pride ourselves on finding creative interdisciplinary solutions to complex urban challenges through a fully integrated design and development process. We believe inspired design and sustainable development must result from a comprehensive understanding of how buildings should function, serve their users and impact the environment.” The key here is sustainability, and Becker + Becker’s rebuilt Octagon was awarded LEEDSilver for sustainability.
Bruce Becker, CEO, Becker + Becker, Credit John Muggenborg for The New York Times
LEED (“Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design”) is a green building rating program sponsored by the US Green Building Council, a non-profit coalition of building industry leaders. It is designed to encourage and reward sustainable design across several metrics—sustainable site choice, energy savings, water efficiency, reduction of CO2 emissions, and indoor environmental quality, among others—all while improving company profitability and employee well-being. LEED Silver is very good but below Gold and Platinum levels.
Why is this important? Buildings are huge consumers of fossil fuel – 40% of the total fossil fuel energy in the US and EU – and significant contributors of greenhouse gases. Diminishing building created GHGs would be a significant step toward dealing with climate change. B+B is viewed as a leader in pushing for more sustainable buildings.
I’ve learned several new terms. The total energy annually used by a Zero Energy Building is equal to the amount of renewable energy created on the site using technology such as heat pumps, high efficiency windows and insulation, and solar panels. The central requirement for Zero Energy status is that 100% of the project’s energy needs must be supplied by on-site renewable energy on a net annual basis, without the use of on-site combustion.
Passive house is a voluntary standard for energy efficiency in a building, which reduces the building’s ecological footprint. These are ultra-low energy buildings that require little energy for space heating or cooling. Passive design is not an attachment or supplement to architectural design, but a design process that integrates with architectural design.
This search for sustainability in buildings has given rise to an important debate between “energy harvesting” and “energy conservation”, that is, between generating point of use renewable energy and diminishing overall energy use. Most zero energy buildings use a combination of these strategies. Since the 1980s, passive solar building design (using direct and indirect sunlight for space heating, solar water heating systems based on the thermosiphon, use of thermal mass and phase-change materials for slowing indoor air temperature swings, solar cookers, the solar chimney for enhancing natural ventilation, and earth sheltering) and passive house have reduced heating energy consumption by 70% to 90% in many locations, without active energy harvesting. Such passive solar designs can be more cost-effective than adding expensive photovoltaic panels on the roof of a conventional inefficient building.
Becker + Becker’s buildings seek to meet net-zero energy standards. A recent project involves converting an office building into what could be the most energy-efficient hotel in the country. This $50 million project aims to revive the long-vacant Armstrong Rubber Company headquarters, a distinctive concrete box in New Haven designed by the Modernist architect Marcel Breuer in the late 1960s, as a 165-room boutique hotel to be called the Hotel Marcel.
The former headquarters of Armstrong Rubber in New Haven, Conn., is undergoing renovations to become a hotel that meets net-zero energy standards. Credit John Muggenborg for The New York Times In 2019, Becker + Becker bought this local landmark and registered Historic Place for $1.2 million to realize their vision of a net-zero hotel — believed to be the first of its kind in the US. Bruce Beeker says that he recognized the structure’s compact shape as a naturally efficient envelope — the ratio of surface area to interior space is low, a plus for minimizing heat gain in the summer or heat loss in the winter. “It’s hard to make buildings that meander efficient…But with a highly efficient envelope and building systems, we’ll be able to use about 80 percent less energy than a typical hotel building.” “You have to reuse, recycle and reinvent existing buildings to be truly sustainable,” Becker says. “The culture we have of tearing down and building new is really inefficient, and particularly when you have a building like (this one) which has such a great structure and that’s built to last for another century, not to repurpose it would have been a real shame.”
Solar canopies over the parking lot and rooftop solar panels are to supply all of the building’s electricity, and high-efficiency air-source heat pumps will be used for heating and cooling. Other efficiency measures will include triple-glazed windows, high-efficiency insulation, an all-electric heat pump HVAC system, and heat and energy recovery systems. These methods should help the hotel meet passive house standards, a set of design principles aimed at creating ultra-low-energy buildings. For Becker, building “green” just makes plain sense. “It seems like an obvious for a developer,” he says, emphasizing the importance of designing in energy efficiency from the beginning. “You have to live with the results of your design,” he emphasizes. “Most hotels are not built to operate with energy efficiency in mind.”
B+B has developed other high-efficiency projects, One is a Modernist office building in Hartford transformed into a 27-story apartment tower called 777 Main Street, powered like The Octagon with a fuel cell and a solar array and winning LEED Platinum.
Built in 1967, 777 Main Street is a prominent example of Mid-Century Modern architecture, designed by Welton Becket, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2014. The building is Connecticut’s first microgrid. Clean, combustion-free renewable energy to power and heat the building is created on-site from 336 Rooftop Solar panels and a 400 kilowatt fuel cell. These clean energy sources also power the 31 electric charging stations in the building’s garage, helping to bolster clean commuting.
360 State Street, another B+B project, revitalized a long-underutilized 1.5-acre site in a prime downtown location in New Haven. It is the largest private construction project ever built in New Haven and the greenest large-scale residential building in Connecticut and the largest apartment in Connecticut. The building received LEED Platinum, and includes the first fuel cell in an apartment building in the world. Energy efficiency is 60% more than energy code requirement. Smart metering with energy and water tracking webpage for each resident; electric-car charging stations; 1/2-acre green roof; recycled and local construction materials and finishes; low-emitting materials
Remember, B+B’s Octagon isn’t the only green break-through building on our Island. The House at Cornell Tech – the 26-story, 352-unit residential high rise that can house about 530 graduate students, faculty, and staff – is now considered the tallest Passive House in the world. Specifying a building envelope that would meet Passive House criteria and withstand very high wind loads was a challenge.
The House Courtesy Pavel Bendov
Critics have complained about the House’s bland design. Blake Middleton, the Handel Architects partner (and Cornell grad) who designed the House, says two reasons forced the streamlining: a budgetary imperative to make the building’s 352 rental units affordable for graduate students and a goal of building one of the most energy-efficient high-rises in the world. Both of those aims were met in the autumn of 2017, with a LEED Platinum certification bagged along the way too.
Reviews, blandness notwithstanding, acknowledge the story behind the wan exterior: Those walls are extraordinary in function. The Passive House Institute (PHI), based in Darmstadt, Germany, offers its certification only to structures that pass a stringent on-site “pressure test.” These buildings must be sealed airtight, with no leaky windows or building joints, to preserve indoor temperatures and hushed acoustics. Prefabricated, highly insulated panels (each one story tall) fitted with triple-paned windows were assembled in York, Pennsylvania, then hauled by barge to Roosevelt Island for build-out.
So committed were the building teams to this airtight-envelope concept (the general contractor on the project, Monadnock Construction, supported staff training in PHI standards) that when it came time to source a door for each floor’s heating/cooling condenser room, they purchased and installed actual walk-in-freezer doors: big thick white ones, complete with hand levers. So, big surprise, our Island, well known for its elderly buildings, is now at the very forefront of the most modern, green, sustainable architecture. Hooray for us.
SAKS FIFTH AVENUE HARA REISER, GLORIA HERMAN, THOM HEYER, ANDY SPARBERG, ED LITCHER AND CLARA BELLA GOT IT!
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Funding Provided by: Roosevelt Island Corporation Public Purpose Funds Council Member Ben Kallos City Council Discretionary Funds thru DYCD Text by Judith Berdy
Edited by Deborah Dorff ALL PHOTOS COPYRIGHT RIHS. 2020 (C) PHOTOS IN THIS ISSUE (C) JUDITH BERDY RIHS
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
JUDITH BERDY
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“Washington Market, New York, Thanksgiving Time” is the straightforward name of this hand colored wood engraving. Drawn by French artist Jules Tavernier, the richly detailed image ran in Harper’s Weekly in 1872.
Our Thanksgiving wishes to all, Share the day, weekend or time with your family and friends,. Eat well and be prepared to shop at the RIHS kiosk on Friday and the weekend.
A SPECIAL THANKSGIVING MEMORY
MIKE AND PAT SCHWARTBERG, THANKSGIVING 2011 MIKE PASSED AWAY ALMOST A YEAR AGO. HIS FUN LOVING SPIRIT AND COURAGE ARE FONDLY REMEMBERED
LAST THURSDAY’S PHOTO OF THE DAY
M. FRANK WAS THE ONLY PERSON WHO KNEW THE WISCONSIN CAPITOL.
WEDNESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
RIVERSIDE CHURCH NINA LUBLIN WAS THE EARLY BIRD WHO KNEW THE IMAGE. ALSO ARON EISENPREISS AND HARA REISER!
PENNIES FOR PRESERVATION
BRING YOUR PENNIES, NICKELS DIMES AND QUARTERS TO THE 531 DOORSTATION TO THE ATTENTION OF JUDY BERDY.
WE HAVE ALREADY COLLECTED $800+
THE PENNIES WILL BE SUPPORTING THE R.I.H.S. AND HELP RE-CIRCULATE COINS.
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
EPHEMERAL NEW YORK
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The Wild West-inspired apartment house designed for urban cliff dwellers
November 22, 2021
In Gilded Age New York, a new term popped up to mock a certain type of Manhattanite: cliff dweller.
“By about 1890 the growing number of residents in apartment houses were sardonically called cliff dwellers, after the image of the cliff-dwelling Native Americans in the Southwest,” wrote Irving Lewis Allen in his 1995 book, The City in Slang.
Inspired by the new slang term as well as Southwestern images and motifs, a new residential building opened its doors on Riverside Avenue and 96th Street in 1916: the aptly named Cliff Dwelling.
The 12-story Cliff Dwelling, situated on a flatiron-shaped plot only roughly eight feet deep on one side, opened as an apartment hotel high up over Riverside Park on posh Riverside Drive.
Unlike the restrained elegance that characterized similar new buildings on the Drive, the Cliff Dwelling had a playful, inventive facade unique in New York City.
Buffalo or cattle skulls, two-headed snakes, and mountain lions in terra cotta decorate the front of the building, along with images of corn, spears, and masks. Raised bricks form geometrical patterns and zigzags that mimic Aztec and Mayan design motifs.
The 12-story Cliff Dwelling, situated on a flatiron-shaped plot only roughly eight feet deep on one side, opened as an apartment hotel high up over Riverside Park on posh Riverside Drive.
Unlike the restrained elegance that characterized similar new buildings on the Drive, the Cliff Dwelling had a playful, inventive facade unique in New York City.
Buffalo or cattle skulls, two-headed snakes, and mountain lions in terra cotta decorate the front of the building, along with images of corn, spears, and masks. Raised bricks form geometrical patterns and zigzags that mimic Aztec and Mayan design motifs.
By 1932, the Cliff Dwelling was converted to apartments, according to Carter Horsely at cityrealty.com, with kitchens added to the already small rooms. Since 1979, the building—which lost its marquee at some point, visible in the above 1939 photo—has been a co-op.
I’ve never been inside the Cliff Dwelling, but I imagine there’s still a sense of living high above an urban canyon, with a view to the Hudson and perhaps the New Jersey Palisades.
One recent change, however, may make the Cliff Dwelling feel more like a typical squeezed-in city structure: In the early 2000s, a new residential building was built inches away from the Cliff Dwelling’s eastern facade.
At least the western facade still has those wonderful tongue-out faces at eye level.
[Third image: NYC Department of Records and Information Services]
ephemeralnewyork
Tags: 1916 Apartment Buildings NYC, Cliff Dwelling Apartment Building NYC, Cliff Dwelling Riverside Drive, Cliff Dwelling Upper West Side, Riverside Drive Apartment Buildings, Upper West Side Apartment Buildings
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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
DAN KILEY
Kiley was born in Roxbury, Boston, Massachusetts, where his father was a construction manager, grew up in West Roxbury, Boston, and in 1930 graduated from high school in Jamaica Plain. In 1932, he began a four-year apprenticeship with landscape architect Warren Manning, working without pay for the first year, then at 50 cents per hour, during which he learned the fundamentals of office practice and developed an interest in the role of plants in design, sparking his later creative and innovative use of plants in the landscape.
From 1936 to 1938, Kiley was a special student in the design program at Harvard University, while continuing work with Manning for 30 hours per week. Among his classmates and friends were Garrett Eckbo and James C. Rose, who also became influential landscape architects. After two years at Harvard, upon Manning’s death and the dissolution of his practice, Kiley left without graduating. He worked briefly for the National Park Service in Concord, New Hampshire, and later the United States Housing Authority, where he met architect Louis Kahn. On Kahn’s advice, Kiley left the Housing Authority in 1940 to become a licensed practitioner of architecture.
From 1943 to 1945, Kiley served in the U.S. Army as Captain in the Presentations Branch of the Office of Strategic Services, becoming its director after architect Eero Saarinen stepped down. At the end of World War II, Kiley designed the courtroom where the Nuremberg Trials were held.
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).
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
