No one guessed the roof of 504 Main Street, the home of our NYPL Branch, St. Francis Cabrini Church and the RI Youth Program.
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
NEW YORK CITY MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES
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For a painting with such a perfunctory name, “Municipal and Woolworth Buildings, Lower Manhattan,” by Lionel S. Reiss, gives us a stunning look at a two-tiered city.
THE ANNEX GALLERIES
Lionel Samson Reiss was born in Jaroslau, Austria on January 29, 1894. His family emigrated to America, arriving on June 20, 1900 at which point his middle name was changed to Samuel. Reiss grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As immigrants to the United States, Reiss’ parents joined the ranks of other Eastern European Jews who were fleeing their native countries at the start of the 20th century. He married Frances Grossel on December 4, 1935.
Reiss became known for his portraits of Jewish people and landmarks in Jewish history, which he made during his trip to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East in the early 1920s. Being American and Jewish himself, Reiss became fascinated with Jewish life in the Old World. In 1919 Reiss temporarily left the United States to travel to the aforementioned regions, and recorded the everyday life that he encountered in the ghettos. Self taught as an artist this trip resulted in exhibitions in major American cities.
At the dawn of the Holocaust in 1938, Reiss, who had long returned to the United States, published his book My Models Were Jews, in which he illustratively argued that there is no such thing as a “Jewish ethnicity”, but the Jewish people are rather a cultural group, whereby there is significant diversity within Jewish communities and between different communities in different geographical regions. Reiss was therefore presenting an argument against what he considered to be a common misconception that existed about the Jews. Later works included a 1954 book, New Lights and Old Shadows, which dealt with “the new lights” of a reborn Israel and the “old shadows” of an almost eradicated European Jewish culture. In his last book, A World of Twilight, published in 1972, with text by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Reiss presented a portrait of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.
Reiss worked as a commercial artist for newspapers, publishers, and a motion picture company. in the early 1920s he became an art director for Paramount Studios and is credited with being the creator of the Leo the Lion logo of Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer Studios.
Lionel Samson Reiss died on April 16, 1988 in New York.
“BEAUTY AND THE BEAST” CHRYSLER BUILDING AND ITS NEW NEIGHBOR ONE VANDERBILT ANDY SPARBERG, JAY JACOBSON HARA REISER, GLORIA HERMAN, ALEXIS VILLAFANE, NINA LUBLIN ALL GOT IT!!
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Been thinking about hotels – with the new Graduate Hotel here, and because I’m looking at hotels for a planned trip to Venice, Trieste and Ravenna next month.
When I taught at Pace downtown, I thought the Astor Hotel, which had been located nearby on Broadway, was the first New York hotel. Turns out that I was wrong. The story is more interesting than that. So let’s talk about hotels and New York.
First of all, commercial hotels seem to have been an American invention. Granted, all sorts of inns and taverns had existed around the world for centuries. But these were typically small affairs, attached to (or in) the owner’s home. The large, commercial hotel was something quite different and quite soon, a significant business in many cities.
Why here? No single answer. It’s said that when George Washington traveled as President, he refused to stay in people’s homes – as English and French Kings had always done, roving from great estate to great estate – but stayed instead in inns. The inns were so grubby and dirty and mean that Americans were embarrassed and came up with a new idea, a modern, clean hotel! Others say that a rising American entrepreneurial class needed better places to stay on their travels, that business and political leaders needed meeting places, and that wealthy families sought out sites for weddings and parties. The new hotel idea met all of these needs.
The first hotel in New York and in the US? The City Hotel, which opened in 1794 on Broadway near Trinity Church, was the first American structure purpose built as a hotel. Designed by John McComb Jr., a leading New York architect, it was huge, with 73 rooms, mostly for overnight guests. It included a ballroom, public parlors, a bar, stores, offices, and the country’s largest circulating library. Taller than almost all New York churches, and at $200,000, it was the city’s costliest building, except for the newly built New York Stock Exchange headquarters Wall Street. The City Hotel soon became a center of social activities and, until the early 1840s, it was the city’s principal site for prestigious social functions and concerts.
One of the most famous of these was the magnificent dinner for Charles Dickens in February 1842. More than 200 of New York elite attended. The New York Sun reported the “unalloyed good feeling and hilarity” that marked the evening. An unusual feature of this man-only world was the presence of a group of ladies, including Dickens’ wife, in a room adjoining the banquet hall. They edged their way into the ballroom to listen to the speechmaking.
City Hotel demonstrated that American innovators would change the direction of the hospitality business; soon Americans were known for the largest and finest hotels in the world. The idea spread quickly and by the early 1800s, the best hotels had as many as seven floors and over 200 rooms, and cost more than a half a million dollars.
The new hotels helped create a new urban culture and new images of women. In his review of Sandoval-Strausz’s Hotel: An American History, Edward Short writes, “By the early nineteenth century, hotels had already become what they continue to be in the twenty-first: meeting places for politicians and businessmen, reception spaces for the newly wed, retail outlets for shoppers, getaways for tourists, hideaways for adulterers. In the nineteenth century, enterprising prostitutes threatened the reputations of even the best hotels; books of hotel etiquette warned unwary guests against them. ‘Have little to say to a woman who is traveling alone without a companion,’ advised one, ‘and whose face is painted, who wears a profusion of long curls about her neck, who has a meretricious expression of eye, and who is overdressed.’ By the same token, respectable women were urged to behave accordingly. ‘Any bold action or boisterous deportment in a hotel will expose a lady to the most severe censure of the refined around her, and may render her liable to misconstruction, and impertinence.’
The Astor House (not Hotel) wasn’t New York’s first hotel, but it was the City’s first luxury hotel. Located at Broadway and Vesey, and opening in 1836 as the Park Hotel, it soon became the best known hotel in the US. Isaiah Rogers was the architect. In 1829, he had designed the country’s first luxury hotel, the Tremont House, in Boston. Astor House was five stories with 309 rooms and servant’s rooms on the sixth floor. It had gaslights – the gas was produced in the hotel’s own plant and bathing and toilet facilities on each floor, with the water pumped up by steam engines.
House, circa 1905. The former City Hall Post Office and Courthouse, on the right, was located at what is now the lower end of City Hall Park. The building was torn down in 1939. Photo: Library of Congress
The Astor House was built by John Jacob Astor, the United States’ first multi-millionaire. Astor had a voracious appetite for land, but not much taste for development. His motto—”Buy and hold. Let others improve”—meant that Astor left few personalized buildings behind when he died, despite owning massive parcels of land throughout the city. One exception to his “Buy and hold” policy: Astor owned a brick townhouse on Broadway between Vesey and Barclay Streets, at the time New York’s most fashionable residential district. In the 1830s, he began buying up his neighbors’ mansions with the intention of building a huge hotel on the site. Associates warned that the site would not work: “It can never be a success. It is altogether too far uptown.”
But it wasn’t too far. Instead, it became a central component of the City’s social life. Guests included practically every prominent figure of the time, including Henry Clay, Jefferson Davis, and Daniel Webster, who, it was said, “would stay at no other hotel.” President-elect Lincoln, on his way to Washington for his first inauguration in 1861, stayed overnight and made an impromptu speech from the top of the entrance portico to a crowd of 40,000, according to Walt Whitman. Eighteen US presidents, from Andrew Jackson to Theodore Roosevelt, stayed at The Astor House, probably the most of any hotel in US history.
Competition followed. The St Nicholas Hotel on Broadway at Broome Street was built for a million dollars and offered the innovation of central heating that circulated warmed air through registers to every room. The Metropolitan Hotel opened in 1852 just north of it, at Prince Street, was equally luxurious. But the new hotel to put all others in the shade was the Fifth Avenue Hotel facing Madison Square.
The Fifth Avenue Hotel was built in 1856–59 by Amos Richards Eno at the cost of $2 million. Eno had made a fortune in dry goods and then real estate. As with the Astor House, critics claimed that the hotel was too far from the city center to be popular – the hotel was called “Eno’s Folly”. But like the Astor House, it became the social, cultural political hub of elite New York, and brought in a quarter of a million dollars a year in profits. The Fifth Avenue Hotel spurred development of additional hotels to the north and west.
The Fifth Avenue Hotel closed at midnight, April 4, 1908, and was demolished. It was reported that patrons of the hotel’s bar spent $7,000 (about $200,000 today!) in drinks during its last day of operation.
Fifth Avenue Hotel, Wikipedia
Well before that, by the early 1870s, the Astor House was viewed as old-fashioned and unappealing and was used mainly by businessmen. But it remained a seeming permanent fixture of New York. It was divided by feuding Astor cousins William Waldorf Astor and Vincent Astor—Vincent owning the southern half and William the northern. On May 3, 1913 signs were posted announcing that the hotel would close on Thursday, May 29. Vincent had sold his share of the property when impending subway excavations threatened its stability. He redeveloped the site as the Astor House Building in 1915-16, which remains today. The rest was demolished in 1926 and the site rebuilt as the Transportation Building.
But this would not be the Astor family’s last involvement with hotels!
PART OF THE PEPSI SIGN IN LONG ISLAND CITY GLORIA HERMAN, ALEXIS VILLAFAN, NNA LUBLIN, HARA REISER, LAURA HUSSY, JINN EWALD GOT IT!!
FROM A READER
I lived in Yorkville from 1976 to 1989 when Roosevelt Island (and my wife to be) lured me away. I call those my bachelor years. I loved the restaurants, the shopping (remember Gimbels?) and the many movie theaters on 86th Street. Carl Schurz Park, directly adjacent to Gracie Mansion, was a gem – remember the statue of Robin Hood, located in a little glen? 87th Street between York and First was my block association and I organized street volleyball during the warm months. The liquor store on the corner sponsored a softball team, the Sons of Off-Broadway (or the SOBs), which played in Central Park, at the Asphalt Green and on Roosevelt Island, which was my first taste of what would become my home and my obsession. Matt Katz
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
STEPHEN BLANK
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
Ellsworth Huntington, “The Water Barriers of New York City,” Geographical Review, Sept., 1916
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VICTORY ON BENCHES BETTER BENCHES REPLACE MONSTROSITIES
AFTER OUTCRIES FROM THE COMMUNITY, RIOC HAS REPLACED THE BENCHES IN SOUTHPOINT PARK EAST SIDE. WE CANNOT TELL YOU HOW MANY WILL BE REPLACED, BUT THIS IS A VICTORY FOR THE COMMUNITY. MOST WILL FACE INSIDE THE PARK AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE PEPSI SIGN.
FROM THE ARCHIVES
MONDAY, AUGUST 9, 2021
THE 437th EDITION
The Belvedere Castle
in
Central Park
Cynthia Brenwall
Belvedere Castle, ca. 2019. During a 15-month restoration by the Central Park Conservancy new glass windows and doors were added, the structures and terraces were repaired, a new drainage system was put into place, and a newly recreated wood tower was added at the castle’s northwest corner. Photograph courtesy Central Park Conservancy.
The collection of Parks Drawings at the Municipal Archives are often called the “jewel in the crown” within the holdings. It includes hundreds of exquisite plans and designs of parks throughout the city and in particular, Central Park. Originally created to illustrate the park designers’ intentions and to guide those who built the parks, many of these drawings are now considered works of art. Some are again being utilized as “working” drawings, providing essential information for on-going restoration projects in the parks. One of the most visible of the recent projects is the Belvedere Castle.
Study for the Belvedere Castle, 1870. Department of Parks Drawings Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.
Perched atop the high-rising Vista Rock in Central Park, Belvedere Castle has an interesting history. As early as 1859, park designers Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted had planned on placing an object of visual interest at “the highest and most remote part of the hill as seen from the terrace.” The men recognized that the location of the rocky outcrop, the second-highest point in the park after Summit Rock, would provide visitors with an overlook that showed off the scenic splendors of the north and south ends of the expanse including the Ramble and the original Croton Reservoir (now the Great Lawn).
Park visitors enjoying Belvedere Castle c. 1885. DeGregario Lantern Slide Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.
Designed in 1865 by Vaux and fellow architect Jacob Wrey Mould as a Victorian folly or “eye-catcher,” the miniature castle would not have been out of place in any European pleasure ground. Built at a three-quarter scale in a Norman-Romanesque style, it worked to create a nostalgia for another place and time, a popular theme in the grand European parks of the day. Belvedere was constructed out of the same gray Manhattan schist that formed Vista Rock. From the Terrace, Belvedere (Italian for “beautiful view”), is a picturesque, arresting nd distant visual focal point. It draws the viewer’s gaze up through the nearby Ramble, which was planted with dark foliage that made bold reflections on the surface of the Lake.
Shelter 1, Belvedere Castle, 1871. The small shelter was Jacob Wrey Mould’s replacement for the planned second stone tower. Department of Parks Drawings Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.
Section and elevations, Belvedere Castle, 1867. Department of Parks Drawings Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.
The Parks Drawings include several original designs of the Belvedere Castle. The earliest plan, dating from 1867, shows two towers on the grounds. The buildings were open structures with no doors or windows, to be used as a venue “for gathering and shelter of a number of visitors in an informal picturesque way at this attractive point.” The foundations for both were dug in that year, but by 1870 only the main building, with its distinctive flag and clock tower, was underway. The Architect-in-Chief, Jacob Wrey Mould (Vaux and Olmsted resigned from the park in 1870 after the new Tweed regime led by Peter Sweeny took over) was determined to finance his recently designed sheepfold buildings rather than the Belvedere.The Board of Commissioners of the newly-formed Department of Public Parks agreed to replace the projected second stone building with a small wooden pavilion of Mould’s design. This saved an estimated $50,000 and was found to be “. . . quite satisfactory to the public.”
NEW YORK ARCHITECTURAL TERRA COTTA FACTORY, NOW LONG GONE SOUTH OF BRIDGE IN QUEENS. ED LITCHER GOT THE LOCATION
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)
MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
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They were not entirely popular. Ben Franklin, for one, felt that German immigrants threatened “American” culture: “they will soon so out number us, that all the advantages we have will not in My Opinion be able to preserve our language, and even our Government will become precarious.” Franklin didn’t want to bar them, just ensure they assimilated. “Yet I am not for refusing entirely to admit them into our Colonies: all that seems to be necessary is, to distribute them more equally, mix them with the English, establish English Schools where they are now too thick settled…”
Germans first came to North America in 1683 – a small group of Mennonites seeking religious freedom in William Penn’s colony. They founded “Deitschesteddel”, the first German settlement in the US. A century later, a third of Pennsylvania’s people had German roots – the “Pennsylvania Dutch”—referring to Deutsch (or German) or the dialect they used, Deitsch.
So, a little context. First, a word about “Germans”. Remember, there were no German nationals until 1870 when Prussia amalgamated many smaller German speaking states into the German Empire. (German speaking Austria and several other German speaking regions remained outside of the Empire, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.) The “German” community here was made up of groups from many German states. Even after 1870, Germans continued to see themselves as Prussians, Bavarians, Hanoverians and such. Here, immigrants still tended to settle in these groups. Most Germans in New York City were Catholic, but many were Lutherans and German Jewish immigrants were central in establishing the Reform movement here.
When I arrived, the area still had a German-Hungarian feel. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, it had been a middle-working class neighborhood, inhabited by many people of German and Hungarian descent. Wonderful German and Hungarian restaurants and shops still remained. But Yorkville was not the first “Little Germany” in New York. The first was what became the Lower East Side, around Tomkins Square.
By the early 1800s, the Upper East Side was full of farms and market gardens. It was connected to New York City by the Boston Post Road and from 1833 to 1837 by the New York and Harlem Railroad, one of the earliest railway systems in the United States. A village near the 86th Street station became the Yorkville neighborhood. UES was also the site of several gracious country residences far from the center of the city, one of the most famous which, Gracie Mansion, remains. The mansion was built in 1799 by a well-to-do stock trader named Archibald Gracie.
Where? Roughly from East 79th Street to East 96th Street, between Third Avenue and the East River. What became Yorkville was undeveloped in colonial times. In August 1776, George Washington placed many of his troops here, in defensive positions along the East River to protect a possible retreat from Long Island. Following their August 27 defeat in the Battle of Long Island, the Continentals organized a well-managed retreat which led to the successful Battle of Harlem Heights in September 1776.
The Upper East Side is just across the East River from our island. I lived there, in Yorkville, in the mid-1970s, on 2nd Ave at 82nd Street, just as the last vestiges of its past were fading. So let’s take a trip back in time to when Yorkville was in flower.
The greatest influx of Germans occurred between 1820 and 1914, when a total of 6 million arrived, their numbers increasing as the cost and hardship of trans-Atlantic travel declined. In 1860, over 120,000 German-born people lived in New York City, making it the world’s third-largest German-speaking city, after Berlin and Vienna. Unlike some other immigrants, Germans were usually educated and had marketable skills. More than half of the era’s bakers and cabinet makers were of German origin, and many worked in the construction business. Educated Germans were important players in the creation and growth of trade unions, and many Germans and their Vereine (German-American clubs) were also often politically active. William Steinway, whom I wrote about earlier, is a perfect example of a skilled, aggressive and successful German immigrant who was deeply involved in building the German community in New York City.
The famous Germania Bank building in Bowery has German roots. Wikimedia/Jim Henderson
Little Germany (or “Kleindeutschland”) centered on Tompkins Square in the 1850s, which the Germans called der Weisse Garten (‘the White Garden’). Eventually, Little Germany would include 400 city blocks on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It reached its peak in the 1870s and disappeared by the 1920s. Little Germany was the first major non-Anglophone ethnic enclave in New York. But it was a complex community: Prussians (about a third of the city’s German-born population), Hessians, Wurttembergers, Bavarians and others all concentrated in different neighborhoods.
Avenue B, the “German Broadway”, was the commercial artery. Each basement was a workshop, every first floor a store, and the partially roofed sidewalks were markets. Avenue A was the street for beer halls, oyster saloons and groceries. The Bowery was the western border (anything further west was totally foreign), but it was also the amusement district. There, all the artistic treats, from classical drama to puppet comedies, were available.
By the 1870s, Germans had begun to move to other parts of the city. They were replaced by first-generation immigrants from other backgrounds. So Kleindeutschland was already on the decline in 1904, when the local St. Mark’s Lutheran Church organized its 17th annual summer picnic. Historians say the General Slocum disaster “broke the spirit” of the local community. The Slocum disaster accentuated the movement out of Little Germany. Kleindeutschland evaporated – and new immigrants moved in. The Lower East Side became a centre of Jewish life, then later of Portorican and Dominican immigration – and more recently of gentrification.
One destination was Yorkville which had attracted some German immigration and which soon became a new Little Germany. 86th Street, often called Sauerkraut Boulevard, the German Broadway, or the German Boulevard, was the heart of Yorkville Germantown, home to many social clubs and singing societies. Businesses that lined the street included Maxi’s Brauhaus, the Lorelei dance hall, Cafe Wienecke and Kleine Konditorei and Cafe Geiger which were still there when I lived nearby. One of the most popular spots on 86th Street was the Yorkville Casino, a social center for the German community. It was erected in 1904 at 210 East 86th Street by the Musician’s Mutual Protective Union (the precursor to the American Federation of Musicians). One of its two main ballrooms, the Tuxedo, had more than 15,000 square feet of floor space and was one of the most popular nightclubs in the city. The casino then welcomed the Deutsches Theatre, which was the only movie theater in the city to show German-language films. By 1938, the German-language New Yorker Staats Zeitung newspaper was selling 80,000 copies a day.
boweryboyshistory.com
By the end of the nineteenth century, German industrialization and a growing job market made internal migration for German workers a preferable option to overseas emigration. The second wave of German immigration to the United States was over, but another would brew up in the 1930s and ‘40s, as refugees from Nazi Germany arrived in Yorkville. More refugees from communist regimes would arrive in the 1950s and 1960s. German Americans were caught up in the struggles of the time, and the neighborhood became the home base of Fritz Julius Kuhn’s German American Bund, the most notorious pro-Nazi group in 1930s United States as well as large numbers of anti-Nazi organizations.
Parade of German American Bund held on October 30, 1939, on 86th Street. Wikipedia
The F train makes it easy to get to Schallar & Weber and Old Heidelberg which are still favorite places, but there’s not much else left of Little Germany. Like the Lower East Side.
LOEW’S 179 STREET THEATRE ONE OF THE GLORIOUS WONDER THEATRES ANDY SPARBERG AND LAURA HUSSEY GOT IT RIGHT! ED LITCHER ADDED THIS:
The United Palace is a theater located at 4140 Broadway between West 175th and 176th Streets in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It functions both as a spiritual center, and a non-profit cultural and performing arts center, A full-block building, it is bounded on the east by Wadsworth Avenue.
Built in 1930 as Loew’s 175th Street Theatre, the venue was originally a movie palace designed by architect Thomas W. Lamb, who designed over 300 theatres in his career, including many others in New York City.[2] The theatre’s lavishly eclectic interior decor was supervised by Harold Rambusch, who also designed the interior of the Roxy Theatre and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.[3]
The theatre, which was the first in Washington Heights built specifically to show films,[2] although it also presented live vaudeville, was one of five deluxe “Wonder Theatres” built by Loew’s in the New York City area.[4][5][6][7] The theater operated continuously until it was closed by Loew’s in 1969. That same year it was purchased by the United Christian Evangelistic Association, headed by the television evangelist Rev. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II, better known as Reverend Ike. The theater became the headquarters of his United Church Science of Living Institute and was renamed the United Palace.[8]
The building was designated a New York City landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission on December 13, 2016.[9] The church attempted to have the designation overturned,[10] but later withdrew their objections.[11]
As of 2018, the church is called the United Palace of Spiritual Arts, and offers performing arts events through the United Palace of Cultural Arts. Its Spiritual Leader and CEO is Rev. Heather Shea.[12] The facility is available for rental to outside event producers and promoters, and is open to all people, genres of music, and any programming that will inspire the Spiritual Artists of the world.
FROM A READER: Andy Sparberg PS – I enjoyed the essay about the Paris Theatre. In 1969 I saw Romeo and Juliet there, with the girl I married in 1970. Brought back memories.
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
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FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE R.I.H.S. WE WELCOME ALL TO LEARN ABOUT THE SOCIETY.
Our next board meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, August 11th at 5 p.m. Please tell me if you want in-person or Zoom. All members and friends and those just curious are invited to attend. E-mail or text if you are interested in attending.
FROM THE ARCHIVES
435th EDITION
FRIDAY, AUGUST 6, 2021
NYC’S ICONIC
PARIS THEATER
WILL REOPEN ON
AUGUST 6
Opened in 1948, the Paris Theater is New York City’s longest-running arthouse cinema and the only single-screen movie theater in Manhattan. The 571-seat theater often showed art films and foreign films, and it became a destination for motion pictures by directors including Federico Fellini and Franco Zeffirelli. After remaining closed since the start of the pandemic, the Paris Theater is ready to reopen its doors on August 6.
Courtesy of The Brinsons.
The Paris Theater was opened by Pathé Cinema on September 13, 1948. Marlene Dietrich, the German actress who played Lola in “The Blue Angel,” cut the inaugural ribbon in front of the U.S. Ambassador to France. The building, located at 4 West 58th Street, was designed by Emery Roth & Sons, the architectural firm involved in large-scale projects like the Pan Am Building and the World Trade Center while under the leadership of Richard Roth.
Its first film was “Symphonie Pastorale” by the nearly-forgotten French director Jean Delannoy. In 1951, the theater drew criticism for its three-film series “Ways of Love”; the subject matter of Robert Rossellini’s “The Miracle” enraged the Catholic Church, and hundreds of protesters crowded around the theater for weeks with Cardinal Spellman at the helm from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The Paris Theater was ordered to stop showing the film, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the banning was a violation of free speech.
Courtesy of The Brinsons. Hit films like “A Man and A Woman,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Monsoon Wedding,” “Metropolitan,” “A Room With a View,” and “Belle de Jour” were introduced to the U.S. with a theatrical run at the Paris Theater. Many French films, as well as films in other languages, had their premieres and special showings at the theater.
In 1990, Pathé lost its lease, and Loews Theatres took over operations, renaming it the Fine Arts Theatre. In 1994, the theater was purchased by Sheldon Solow, a New York-based real-estate developer and owner, and it changed hands again in 2009 when City Cinemas became its operator.
Courtesy of The Brinsons.
Following renovations to give the theater a new light — including new carpeting, drapes, a red marquee and Paris logo, and installing an ADA compliant bathroom and stage lift — Netflix leased the Paris Theater to use it for Netflix-original movie debuts, special events and other screenings in 2019. Netflix looks to premiere engagements of new films, repertory screenings, filmmaker series, retrospectives, discussions programs, and an exclusive sneak-preview club. Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s Chief Content Officer, said in 2019 “After 71 years, the Paris Theatre has an enduring legacy, and remains the destination for a one-of-a kind movie-going experience. We are incredibly proud to preserve this historic New York institution so it can continue to be a cinematic home for film lovers.”
Courtesy of The Brinsons.
To celebrate its return, filmmaker Radha Blank is curating a program of repertory titles to screen alongside her directorial debut “The Forty-Year-Old Version,” which premiered at Sundance Film Festival. “I made ‘Forty-Year-Old Version’ in 35mm Black & White in the spirit of the many great films that informed my love of cinema,” said Blank. “I’m excited to show the film in 35mm as intended and alongside potent films by fearless filmmakers who inspired my development as a storyteller and expanded my vision of what’s possible in the landscape of cinema. That ‘Forty-Year-Old Version’ gets to screen alongside them at the Paris theater, a N.Y. beacon for cinema, makes it all the more special.”
Blank selected the following titles to screen in the first few days: John Cassavetes’s “Shadows” (35mm), Sidney Lumet’s “Dog Day Afternoon” (35mm), Andrea Arnold’s “Fish Tank” (35mm), Kathleen Collins’s “Losing Ground” (Digital) followed by a discussion with Kathleen Collins’ daughter, Nina Collins, Nick Castle’s “Tap” (35mm), Billy Wilder’s “ The Apartment” (4K Digital), Christopher Guest’s “Waiting for Guffman” (35mm), Hal Ashby’s “The Last Detail” (Digital), Robert Townsend’s “Hollywood Shuffle” (35mm) followed by a video conversation with Townsend.
Following the opening week engagement, the theater will play films that premiered at the Paris Theater over the years: Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman Bertrand Blier’s Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (Digital) Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (Digital) Louis Malle’s The Lovers (35mm) Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (35mm) (with Stillman in person) Albert & David Maysles’s Grey Gardens (Digital ) Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (35mm) Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie (35mm) Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry (35mm) Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding (35mm) and The Namesake (35mm) James Ivory’s Room With A View (Digital) Ira Deutchman’s Searching for Mr. Rugoff (with Ira Deutchman in person) Marcel Carne’s Children of Paradise (35mm) Todd Haynes’s Carol (35mm) Roger Vadim’s ….And God Created Woman (35mm) Pietro Germi’s Divorce Italian Style (35mm) Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (35mm) Jacques Becker’s Casque D’Or (35mm) Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (35mm) Orson Welles’s Othello (Digital) Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana (35mm) and Belle de Jour (35mm) Just Jaeckin’s Emmanuelle (DCP) James Ivory’s Maurice (Digital) and Howards End (Digital) Jean-Charles Tacchella’s Cousin Cousine (Digital) Alain Tanner’s La Salamandre (Digital) Terence Davies’s The House of Mirth (35mm) Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name (Digital) Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (35mm)
ANC CELBRATING WTH A WONDERFULY DECORATED SCAFFOLDING ED LITCHER AND ARLENE BESSENOFF GOT IT!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
UNTAPPED NEW YORK
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which specialized in the design of department stores, primarily in the early 20th century.
History The senior partner, Goldwin Starrett (1867–1918), brother of Colonel William A. Starrett, had worked for four years in the Chicago office of Daniel Burnham before founding the firm as Goldwin Starrett & Van Vleck along with Ernest Allen Van Vleck (1875–1956) in 1907. Starrett, a native of Lawrence, Kansas, had attended the University of Michigan, while Van Vleck was a Cornell School of Architecture graduate from Bell Creek, Nebraska. After William A. Starrett and Orrin Rice joined the partnership several years later, “Goldwin” was removed from the firm’s name.
Notable projects Included in their designs were the New York City flagship stores of Lord & Taylor, Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Abraham & Straus, and Alexander’s. The Lord & Taylor Building, located on Fifth Avenue between 38th and 39th Streets, was completed in 1914 as Starrett & van Vleck’s first major department store and is a New York City designated landmark.
The Lexington Avenue extension of Bloomingdales.
Garfinkel’s Department Store
Starrett & van Vleck was also responsible for the design of the designated New York City landmarks Everett Building (1908), American Stock Exchange Building (1921), 21 West Street (1929), and Downtown Athletic Club (1930).[4] Between 1937 and 1948, they designed the downtown flagship store of the J. N. Adam & Co. in Buffalo, New York, which is currently threatened with demolition.[5] It is located in the J.N. Adam-AM&A Historic District. Starrett & van Vleck, credits also include the flagship store of Washington, D.C.’s Garfinckel’s, and the Miller & Rhoads department store in Richmond, VA as well as the former Mosby Dry Goods Store in Richmond, VA, which is now undergoing restoration and renovation as a hotel. Garfinckel’s was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1995.
21 West Street A slender 31-story Art Deco landmark, was converted from offices to apartments in 1998.
The building complements the adjoining Downtown Athletic Club, designed by the same architects but built five years earlier. When built in 1931 (at the same time as the Empire State Building),
21 West Street was across the street from the waterfront. Upper-story tenants then had an unobstructed view of the Hudson. Battery Park City was built on landfill placed in 1980 from excavation for the World Trade Center.
The exposed corners of the building are cantilevered, allowing corner windows. The building was promoted as “An office building with glass corners.” The original red window frames have been replaced by a more neutral tan matching the brick surrounds.
Starrett & Van Vleck used different-colored bricks to create a “woven” texture and to accentuate the building’s vertical lines. The Washington Street facade has setbacks at the 10th and 16th floors; all three facades have setbacks above the 21st, 26th, 29th and 30th floors.
The Former Equitable Life Assurance Company is currently under threat due to the proposed Empire Station Complex. *This handsome building at 383-399 Seventh Avenue, next to the Hotel Pennsylvania, was built in 1922-23 as the headquarters of the Equitable Life Assurance Company Building which was formerly based at 120 Broadway.
The stone-clad building was designed by the firm Starrett & Van Vleck with showroom-like windows on the first two floors. According to the Environmental Impact Study report, “The former Equitable Life Assurance Company Building is significant under Criterion A for its association with commercial development around Penn Station. In addition, the building also meets Criterion C for its architectural design.
In an Environmental Review letter dated December 14, 2020, LPC determined that it also appears to be eligible for NYCL designation.” This building would only be affected by “Potential Adverse Construction-Related Impacts from Construction on Sites 3 and 7.”
Take a look at our steam plant, now de-commissioned and sitting vacant, designed by Starett and Van Vleck.
SHEPARD HALL AT CITY COLLEGE A WONDERFUL LANDMARKS WITH GARGOYLES GALORE!
HARA REISER GOT IT!!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
WIKIPEDIA
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Let’s talk about East River bridges. We all know something about the Brooklyn Bridge and I have written about our Queensboro Bridge. But perhaps we can bridge some information gaps about other East River crossings.
First, how many bridges cross the East River? Seven? No, eight. (Don’t forget Hell Gate Bridge.) Three older bridges south of us (the BMW – Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg), Oueensboro, and then north, towards Long Island Sound – Hell Gate and Robert F. Kennedy, Bronx Whitestone and Throgs Neck.
Second question. Which of these bridges was viewed as the ugliest? Manhattan, Williamsburg and Queensboro – but never Brooklyn – have all been awarded that dubious honor at one time or another. Williamsburg is still considered the “Ugly Duckling” of suspension bridges, but the dysfunctional problem child is Manhattan. And, our cantilever truss, Queensboro, has been termed ungainly and visually heavy. Henry Hornbostel, responsible for the ornamental decoration on the towers and portals, has been widely quoted as saying, upon seeing the completed bridge “My God, it’s a blacksmith’s shop!”
Yet wonderful. Long ago, in 1916, Ellsworth Huntington, a well-known Yale geographer, gushed over our bridges and the City that built them: “With the exception of the bridge over the Firth of Forth in Scotland, New York has the four longest bridges in the world, their length varying from 6,000 to 7,500 feet… The New York bridges, too, have some of the longest spans in the world. Among suspension bridges, the Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Williamsburg Bridges…are unrivaled. The Hell Gate Bridge…is the largest arch bridge in existence… It is an astonishing fact that of the world’s seven largest bridges five should be in the midst of the world’s largest city.”
Also astonishing – how quickly they were built. Brooklyn, completed 1883; Williamsburg, 1903; Queensboro, March 1909; Manhattan, December 1909; and Hell Gate, 1916. These were among the largest and most complex – and most expensive – engineering jobs ever undertaken. Remember, too, that at this moment the City was raising the new sky scrapers, creating many of our great Beaux Arts edifices, and building the subways. In the 1890’s, much of the city was being wired for electricity. And New York’s population was increasing from just under 2 million in 1880 to almost 5 million in 1910.
We don’t know much about who actually worked on the bridges. Except, not Mohawks, who worked on many sky scrapers only from the 1920s. Many workers must have been immigrants whose number in the city increased from about half a million in 1880 to 2 million in 1910. (Soon, at the peak of immigration, some 40% of the City’s population would be immigrants.)
I learned preparing an earlier essay (“Thomas Rainey: A Man and a Bridge”) that discussions about a bridge crossing the East River over Blackwell’s Island had been on- and off-going since the 1850s, and were quite serious in the 1880s, but to no avail. So, of course, Brooklyn was first, and was the longest suspension bridge in the world.
Williamsburgers, too, pushed for a connector to Manhattan, even before Brooklyn opened. Why Williamsburg? Williamsburg stood apart from the rest of Brooklyn. Indeed, between 1852 and 1855, Williamsburg (or Williamsburgh, its original spelling) was its own city, comprised of the modern neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint. In 1855 it was absorbed — along with the Town of Bushwalk — into the expanding city of Brooklyn and these new additions, more industrial and immigrant in nature, were referred to as the Eastern District.
But, as with the Queensboro idea, bottom up pressure, even from the business community, was insufficient. A new organization, the East River Bridge Company, was able to get a charter from New York State to build two bridges to form a loop transit line connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan. But the project proceeded slowly. Others then pushed ahead for a bridge that would be owned by the two cities, ultimately purchasing the Company’s rights for $200,000. And the loop design was dropped. As usual, New York politics intervened and successive NYC mayors fired and hired commissioners and engineers in the bridge project.
What began as a design similar to Brooklyn worked out to be something much different, with all-steel towers that never won the hearts and minds of New Yorkers, and seems to lack the charm and grace of Brooklyn.
On the Manhattan side, planners used the project to clear away a notorious districts – Corlears Hook, where shipbuilding had been concentrated and now a well-known red light district. (The ladies there were known as “hookers”, a much better story than the conventional one about Civil War General Joseph Hooker.)
The Bridge opened up space in less populated Brooklyn for those, many Jews, who inhabited the very crowded Lower East Side. Thus the bridge was even called the “Jews Highway” as those of Eastern European and Russian Jewish heritage transplanted to Williamsburg.
Williamsburg Bridge. Wikipedia
But perhaps the most intriguing part of the story is the makeover proposed by Donald Trump in the 1980s. Williamsburg would be redone a “spectacular landmark”.
The fact is that Williamsburg was in bad shape. In May 1987, a six-foot beam fell from the bridge into the East River; in April 1988, the bridge was abruptly closed for two weeks after corrosion was found that presented a “5 percent chance there would have been a failure” of the bridge.
Der Scutt Architect
Trump’s plan included covering it with bronze reflecting panels and adding a two-story restaurant on one of the towers.
By 1898, electric trolleys, an El train and pedestrian lanes were crossing the Brooklyn, leaving only one lane in each direction for all other traffic. It is said that a traffic jam in 1898 was so bad the weight on the bridge caused it drop 12 feet, and engineers were afraid that if traffic was not reduced, it would fall. It was obvious that another bridge was needed from downtown Manhattan to the busy Fulton Ferry area.
In 1901, planning began for the new bridge, called Bridge No.3. Seth Low, reform mayor elected to counter Tammany influence and graft, hired Gustav Lindenthal, a respected bridge engineer and architect to design what would be the Manhattan Bridge. Lindenthal had grand plans for an enormous bridge with 14 lanes of track, as well as towers large enough to hold auditoriums.
In accordance with the City Beautiful Movement, plans included large public plazas leading to the bridge from both sides, very grand Baroque style with a gleaming triumphal arch and colonnade on the Manhattan side and sedate but impressive portal with statues on the Brooklyn side. The Manhattan entrance, inspired by Paris’ Porte St. Denis arch and Bernini’s Colonnade at St. Peter’s in Rome, had a colored mosaic walkway within a large plaza leading to the bridge.
But before plans could be implemented, Low’s term ended and the Tammany machine installed George McClellen as mayor. McClellen appointed a political hack named George Best as Chief Engineer, who was not an engineer or even an architect, who immediately fired Lindenthal, and hired a Leon S. Moisseiff to complete the bridge.
Moisieff’s design envisioned a lighter and shallower stiffening truss. The bridge is braced in only two directions, allowing the towers to flex, reducing bending moments and requiring smaller foundations under the tower. He also put the subway and streetcar tracks on the outer edges of the roadway, instead of in the middle, as in the both of the other East River bridges. This stressed the bridge, so when trains were coming from both directions, it sway and twist – a problem that worsened with longer trains. And, as one bridge historian writes, “Because it was a Tammany Hall project, a whole lot of money had to be spread around, and the bridge, which was supposed to cost under $20 million ended up at $31 million by the time it was finished. Initially, that is. In reality, the bridge would become a massive black hole sucking money into its maw well into the 21st century.”
Image: Wikipedia
The bridge was constructed in record time, mostly so that McClellan could claim it under his administration, and it had a show opening, on December 31, 1909, the last day of his term. Since the road wasn’t finished, they laid temporary planks across the deck to enable vehicles to cross. The pedestrian walkway wasn’t finished until 1910, and the first trains crossed in 1912. The Beaux Arts entryways to the bridge weren’t completed until 1916.
In 1961, Robert Moses wanted to demolish the Manhattan entrance to the bridge in his plans for a Lower Manhattan Expressway that would connect the Manhattan Bridge and the Holland Tunnel. He got the permission of the New York City Arts Commission to do so, but the roadway was never built. The furor over this decision was a factor in the creation of the Landmarks Preservation Commission a few years later.
Most of the park leading to the bridge was reclaimed by the building of Confucius Plaza in the 1960’s. As Christopher Gray says in a “Cityscape” article in the NY Times in 1996, “Today the plaza of the Manhattan Bridge evokes not the City Beautiful but the sack of Rome.”
Bridges, love them or hate them, we can’t live without them.
THE WONDERFUL BROOKLYN BRIDGE PARK THAT GENTLY FLOWS TO THE RIVERFRONT. A CONTRAST TO OUR SOUTHPOINT WHERE THE RIVER IS MANY FEET BELOW.
NINA LUBLIN, ED LITCHER, OLYA TURCHIN, HARA REISER, ALEXIS VILLAFANE ALL GOT IT RIGHT!!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
Ellsworth Huntington, “The Water Barriers of New York City,” Geographical Review, Sept., 1916
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STOP THE PRESSES… EVEN MORE BIZARRE RIVERSIDE FURNITURE IN THE NEW SOUTHPOINT PARK!
THESE MONSTROSITIES ARE BEING PLACED ON THE EAST SIDE OF THE NEW SOUTHPOINT PARK. WHAT WAS RIOC THINKING? OR NOT THINKING. MOST OF THE BENCHES FACE THE PARK, NOT THE RIVER VIEW!
WE CANNOT EVEN IMAGINE WHAT THIS OBJECT IS SUPPOSED TO BE.
AFTER WORKING SO HARD (WITH LOTS OF COMMUNITY INPUT) A WONDERFUL FDR HOPE MEMORIAL MATERIALIZED.
RIOC WAS LEFT ON THEIR OWN TO MESS UP SOUTHPOINT PARK. THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN EVERYONE WAS SUPPOSEDLY “WORKING FROM HOME.” AN PANDEMIC OF BAD DESIGN.
FROM THE ARCHIVES
MONDAY, AUGUST 2, 2021
THE 431st EDITION
A Bizarre
August Tradition
Along Old
New York City’s
Waterfronts
FROM EPHEMERAL NEW YORK
Boys at Rutger’s Slip
The lazy dog days of summer along the waterfronts of late 19th century New York could could also be dangerous, thanks in part to a strange old tradition called “launching day.”
“Splinter Beach” George Bellows 1908
In 1908 On either August 1 or the first Friday in August (sources differ on exactly when it was held and how long it lasted), boys (and some men) along the city’s rivers would pick up another boy or man and launch them into the water. “Yesterday was what the boys along the water front call ‘Launching Day,'” wrote the New York World on August 3, 1897. “They throw each other into the river, clothes and all, saying, ‘Now swim and give yourself a bath.'”
The origins of launching day aren’t clear, but one Brooklyn newspaper stated in 1902 that it “has been a summer event ever since Robert Fulton launched the first steamboat into the Hudson in 1807.”
Launching Day was apparently held in Brooklyn as well. “Tomorrow will also be a fine day for the little boys along the river front who will observe ‘Launching Day,'” reported the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on July 31, 1897, a Saturday. “This juvenile holiday will, in all probability, last for three days, as some little boys do not like to be thrown overboard in their Sunday togs.”
Evening World headline
“August 1 has been known about the waterfront for many years as ‘Launching Day,'” wrote the New-York Herald on August 2, 1900. “Anybody who ventures on a pier is in danger of being thrown into the water….John Kriete, 21 years old, an iceman of 312 East 84th Street, pushed a workman, George Krause, of the same address, overboard at East 100th Street yesterday and fell in afterward himself. Kriete was drowned.”
“In Brooklyn the drowned body of Thomas McGullen, the 10-year-old son of John McGullen of No. 70 Hicks Street, was taken from the water at Henry Street,” wrote the New-York Tribune on August 2, 1903. “He was pushed off the pier by his playmates, who were celebrating ‘launching.’ They thought he could swim.”
The action along an East River dock
Exactly when launching day died out I’m not sure. But by the 1930s, newspapers interviewed people who recalled the tradition.
In the Daily News in 1934, a police reporter wrote: “I’ve known how to swim for 30 years because I was one of the West Side kids who used the Hudson River. We don’t have it now but then we had an annual ‘Launching Day’….Everybody near the water got thrown in, clothes and all. You had to swim or else.”
[Top photo: George Bain Collection/LOC; second image: George Bellows; Third photo: New-York Historical Society; Fourth image: New York Evening World; Fifth image: NYPL]
ED LITCHER, THOM HEYER, NINA LUBLIN, LAURA HUSSEY, ARON EISENPREISS, GLORIA HERMAN, HARA REISER ALL ARE RIGHT.
FROM WIKIPEDIA: The Elephantine Colossus (also known as the Colossal Elephant or the Elephant Colossus, or by its function as the Elephant Hotel) was a tourist attraction located on Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York City. It was built in the shape of an elephant, an example of novelty architecture. The seven story structure designed by James V. Lafferty stood above Surf Avenue and West 12th Street from 1885 until 1896, when it burnt down in a fire. During its lifespan, the thirty-one room building acted as a concert hall and amusement bazaar. It was the second of three elephant buildings built by Lafferty, preceded by the extant Lucy the Elephant near Atlantic City and followed by The Light of Asia in Cape May.
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)
EPHEMERAL NEW YORK
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FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE R.I.H.S. WE WELCOME ALL TO LEARN ABOUT THE SOCIETY.
Our next board meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, August 11th at 5 p.m. Please tell me if you want in-person or Zoom. All members and friends and those just curious are invited to attend. E-mail or text if you are interested in attending.
FRIDAY, JULY 30, 2021
The
429th Edition
The Age of Glamorous
Steamboats
on the East River
STEPHEN BLANK
The Age of Glamorous Steamboats on the East River
Stephen Blank
In my last essay, I described how splendid steamboats plied the East River as well as the Hudson. The most dazzling of these were the steamboats of the Fall River Line. Fall River Line was a combination steamboat and railroad connection between New York City and Boston that operated between 1847 and 1937. (Note, I have drawn heavily in this piece from two super articles on the Fall River Line by Michael Grace.)
What’s most interesting to me is that this combo line continued to operate – and to be a social high point – not only through the great rail era in the US but well into the time of air travel as well. It became a continuing element of high society. The Fall River Line also provides a window on the internecine struggles of the great robber barons of the Gilded Age.
Old Colony Railroad
Let’s begin with the landside, the Old Colony Railroad. The OC was a major railroad system which operated from 1845 to 1893. Its network ran from New York to Boston and southeastern Massachusetts. For many years, the OC also operated steamboat and ferry lines, including the Fall River Line. It grew by mergers and acquisitions until it was itself acquired by the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad in 1893. The acquisition was part of J. P. Morgan’s plan to monopolize New England transportation, including railroads and steamship lines, and build a network of electrified trolley lines to provide interurban transportation for all of southern New England. By 1912, Morgan’s railroad practically monopolized traffic from Boston to New York City.
Fall River Line The Fall River Line, known originally as the Bay State Steamboat Company, was launched in 1847, backed, among others, by members of the Borden family (remember Lizzie?). Sailing from New York, the Fall River boats steamed up the East River in the early evening; up to Hell Gate, then down the Long Island sound; calling at Newport in the middle of the night and in the morning landing at the Fall River dock. Boston was just a train ride away with connections north to Maine’s major cities and resorts.
Michael Grace writes “Of all the fleets that plied the Sound, there was never any quite like the Fall River Line. Songs were written about it. Nearly all the presidents and most of the great men and women of that long period traveled it—the famous boat train from Boston in the late afternoon, then off the cars and into the boat at the Fall River wharf, in time to dine in the line sea air while steaming down Narragansett Bay, past Newport, to head around treacherous Point Judith and thence westward through The Race into the Sound. A fine sleep and into New York in time for business in the morning: it was the recommended route.”
The Fall River Line’s first steamer was the Bay State, 300 feet long and forty wide, lit by oil lamps at night. Her cuisine attained considerable renown, at fifty cents for the grand table d’hôte dinner, served at long candlelit tables. These were no ferry boats, and they were modeled on the grand manner of the transatlantic trade. The line was so profitable that two new boats, the Empire State, and the Metropolis, could be bought out of profits in a few years. Soon, Wall Street men moved in to begin a series of major financial mergers and shufflings which lasted over many years.
Featured image Fall River Line night boats docked at Pier 14 in Manhattan, newyorksocialdiary.comFall River Steamer – Digital Commonwealth
One “Wall Street man” in particular is remembered, “Admiral” Jim Fisk (“If Vanderbilt’s a Commodore, I can be an Admiral!”) soon to be owner of everything from railroads to judges. Representing some Boston capitalists, he outsmarted Daniel Drew, a longtime rival of Vanderbilt, into selling out his rival steamboat interest, and this gave him power as the president of a great steamboat line.
After Fisk’s death, when his mistress’s other lover shot him on the stairs of the Grand Central Hotel, the line was restructured, becoming the Old Colony Steamboat Company, under railroad control. Later it was absorbed, along with the Old Colony Railroad, by Morgan’s New Haven in the 1890’s.
Competition was brisk, principally from the Stonington Line, which was called “Old Reliable,” only to run two of its best ships aground one after the other, and then to have two others, the sister ships Narragansett and Stonington, collide off Cornfield Point, near Saybrook, Connecticut, with a loss of 27 lives. Presently this line too was swallowed up in the Morgan mergers.
But the Fall River Line, with the largest and most magnificent and most perfectly equipped river going vessels in the world, remained preeminent. Its modern steam-electricity technology, brightened by music from top groups, and with grand meals in the elegant dining salon attracted the nation’s social leaders. The palatial steamboats Priscilla and Commonwealth were the greatest of the Fall River Line fleet. These ships, it was claimed, could carry as many passengers and as much freight as the great Atlantic liners, Lusitania and Mauretania, on about one-sixth the displacement. Their accommodations, it was said, were often superior to those on all but the most luxurious North Atlantic liners. With over 300 first class staterooms, plus 15 parlor bedroom suites, a crew of 250 needed to operate the Priscilla and Commonwealth.
Grace: “No steamship service under the American flag, not excluding the North Atlantic liners, was more beloved by the traveling public than the Fall River Line or more greatly mourned when it was no more. A naval architect wrote, ‘The passenger steamers of the Fall River Line are absolutely the finest ships in the world for passenger service on inland waters. We may well be proud of the Fall River Line boats as creations distinctly American along with the elegance and service found in the greatest European hotels.’”
Newport and Wickford Railroad and Steamboat Company
The Gilded Age wealthy traveled elsewhere as well, to less trafficked destinations where they built vast summer “cottages”, namely Newport and Conanicut Island and Narragansett. Getting there was not convenient. A group of well to do New Yorkers decided to make things easier. Cornelius Vanderbilt II and his brother Frederick, formed the Newport and Wickford Railroad and Steamboat Company with several other investors. Other members of the board included political figures like Senator George Peabody Wetmore and Congressman George Gordon King. They constructed and operated a rail line a mere three-and-a half miles long. The track ran from the mainline New York, Providence & Boston stop at Wickford Junction to the port of Wickford, where a company-owned steamboat could bring passengers across to Newport. The little steamboat was not grand, but its passengers were. The N&W began service in 1871, the start of the Gilded Age, and managed to provide combined rail and steamship service until 1925.
Travelers were soon arriving from as far away as Chicago and St. Louis. The private rail cars of the wealthy New Yorkers were backed onto the siding where the N&W’s sole locomotive patiently waited to haul them to Wickford Harbor. For those without a private Pullman parlor car, the mainline railroad added a “Newport Car” reserved for passengers also heading to the City by water.
The Sad End
But no dream lasts forever and our grand steamers were finally junked or sold. Why? The opening of the Cape Cod Cana created a faster and safer all water route. Cheaper New York-Boston rail service diminished demand. Most of all, the private automobile and an improving road network was the most important factor. As the Great Depression wore on, line after line disappeared until only the Fall River route remained of all the once far-flung New Haven Railroad steamboat network.
Last words from Michael Grace, “… a generation has grown up since the line stopped operating in 1937, a generation which never strolled the deep-carpeted saloon and decks, eyeing the drummers and men of property and occasional flashy women, and never awoke to peer through the porthole at Hell Gate Bridge and take a hearty breakfast while the ‘mammoth palace steamer’ steamed round the Battery and swung into her Hudson River berth.” Goodness, goodness, goodness. Don’t you wish you had had the opportunity to sail on the Fall River Line? (And those “flashy women”.)
SIEGEL COOPER DEPARTMENT STORE 18-19 STREETS ON SIXTH AVENUE
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)
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