NEW COMMEMORATIVE PLAQUES FOR BOTH TRAM STATIONS DONATED BY POMA
FREE TEES WERE GIVEN OUT BY POMA AND SUPPLIES ARE GONE.
RIHS 50th ANNIVERSARY TEES ARE AVAILABLE AT THE KIOSK FOR $20-
GET YOUR RIHS EXCLUSIVE TRAM 50 TEE SHIRT IN ADULT SIZES AT THE RIHS KIOSK $20-
REPLICAS OF ORIGINAL COINS AND PINS WERE DISTRIBUTED
ADDING SUGGESTIONS FOR USES FOR ORIGINAL TRAM CABINS
CREDITS
IRIS CHAN-RIOC
JUDITH BERDY
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
CELEBRATE THE TRAM’S 50TH BIRTHDAY THURSDAY, MAY 28TH TRAM PLAZA 3 P.M. ALL ARE WELCOME!!
SEE 1976 INVITATION BELOW
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JOIN US ON THURSDAY, MAY 28TH AT 3 P.M. TO CELEBRATE THE TRAM’S 50TH BIRTHDAY PARTY
The invitation with the date stamped in, just in case.
The Program for the Opening Ceremony
A Boarding Pass for Opening Day
I has watched Welfare Island for many years since I was a student working at the Goldwater Hospital in 1967. When I heard the Tram was opening, I walked over from my home at 65th Street on the evening of March 17th, 1967 and took my first ride that day.
FLOATING OVER SECOND AVENUE PAST THE KIOSK STILL ON SECOND AVENUE
ANNUAL RESCUE DRILLS
TAKE THE WINDOW OUT AND GET INTO THE RESCUE CABIN
WANT TO DO THIS CLIMB OUT THE WINDOW TO THE RESCUE CABIN?
ONLY ONCE THE RESCUE CABINS WERE USED IN APRIL OF 2006, WHEN THE CABINS WERE STUCK OVER THE RIVER. IT TOOK HOURS TO RESCUE ALL PASSEGERS SAFELY.,
EVERYONE HAD TO PARTICIPATE ON A SUNDAY MORNING
STAFF WAITING FOR THEIR TURN TO GET OUT THE FLOOR HATCH
DOWN YOU GO THRU THE FLOOR, WHEN THE CABIN WAS OVER LAND
2010 THE GREAT REBUILD FROM A SWISS TO FRENCH DESIGNED TRAM
DISMANTLING THE OLD HANGER ARMS
Input caption text here. Use the block’s Settings tab to change the caption position and set other styles.
RESUE CABINS TO THE DUMP AFER ONE USE.
PARKED AT THE BUS STOP, WAITING FOR 15 YEARS NOW TO FIND A NEW LIFE……
ONE TRIP ON GROUND LEVEL TO MOTORGATE
TRAM AT MOTORGATE STORAGE FOR 16 YEARS
THE NEW HANGER ARMS BEING INSTALLED DURING THE SUMMER OF 2010
ARMANDO CORDOVA, TRAM MANAGER CHECKING OUT NEW CABIN. ARMANDO OUR BEST FRIEND AND GREAT MANAGER IS RETIRED NOW AND SORELY MISSED… MY AMIGO!
CREDITS
ROOSEVELT ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY ARCHIVES JUDITH BERDY
PHOTO OF THE DAY
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
In September 1887, in broad daylight, a robbery took place at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met). The thieves got away with a pair of ancient bracelets described in a New-York Tribune crime report as “solid gold, about four inches in diameter, richly carved and studded with all manner of precious gems.”
The police did not recover the items, but Tiffany & Co. created fine replicas (the firm acted as “sole agents” for the reproduction of the Museum’s works of art). Originating in Cyprus, the bracelets were part of the Museum’s “Cesnola Collection,” the formation of which itself was a story of mass thievery.
Diplomats & Other Vandals
The disclosure of early civilizations was a nineteenth century adventure tale. Royals and politicians visited excavation sites in Italy, Greece, or Egypt; newspaper headlines announced the latest digs; and thousands flocked to visit exhibitions of artifacts from distant millennia.
These were the pioneer days of digging, the rush for ancient treasures, when excavators employed hundreds of workers in a frenzied search for hidden riches. Out of this mania, archaeology was born.
Over the decades, passion for the past deteriorated into concerted theft and vandalism, erasing rather than illuminating the past.
The spade was in the hands of greedy diggers. The legal issues surrounding the retention of looted property are fought out in courtrooms to this day.
In the early 1800s agents working on behalf of the diplomat Thomas Bruce, Lord Elgin, shipped the “Elgin Marbles” from the Parthenon in Athens to the British Museum in London.
Ironically, the French added a newly coined word “elginisme” to the vocabulary, referring to an act by which antiquities are torn out of their cultural and spatial context.
In comparison to the extent of Napoleon’s art sackings, British public opinion regarded Elgin’s “purchase” of the Marbles as an entirely honorable transaction.
As looting (euphemistically called “acts of seizure”) in occupied territories was acceptable under international norms at the time, museums stacked their exhibition rooms with displaced objects.
The appointment of “collectors” such as Henry Salt (1780-1827) or the notorious Turin-born tomb raider Bernadino Drovetti (1776-1852) to Consular posts in British and French services respectively, as well as state-sponsored expeditions to secure antiquities for national collections, led to the mass export of stolen art works to Europe’s major museums. Cultural imperialism was in full swing.
Museums were the creation of plunderers; chauvinists pushed the concept of a National Museum. Europe’s great powers asserted their claim to pre-eminence by amassing vast collections of colonial objects.
In 1818, the British Museum acquired the colossal bust of Ramses II from the Abu Simbel Temple, Upper Egypt. Not to be outdone, three years later the Louvre obtained the “Dendera Zodiac,” a bas-relief taken from a chapel dedicated to Osiris in a temple complex on the Nile.
An international mob of early archaeologists stripped Egypt of its treasures in an insane rivalry for possession between the British Museum and the Louvre.
When France signed the Treaty of Amiens in March 1802, one of the British conditions of surrender was the handing over of antiquities Napoleon had removed during his campaign in Egypt, including the “Rosetta Stone.”
Egyptology was a competitive encounter between France and Britain in which passionate feelings of national pride and imperial prestige were at stake. The United States would join the circus later.
The Met
During the summer of 1866, several prominent Americans living in Paris put on a Fourth of July festival to celebrate the nation’s ninetieth birthday.
In his speech, lawyer and attorney John Jay II (1817–1894) pointed out that New York was ready to compete with Europe’s great cities by creating its own museum. He called for the foundation of a National Gallery of Art. As President of New York’s exclusive Union League Club, he actively rallied civic leaders, artists, and philanthropists to the cause.
The Met was incorporated on April 13, 1870, opening to the public in the Dodworth Building at 681 Fifth Avenue. The first object the Museum received was a Roman marble sarcophagus dug up in Tarsus, modern day Turkey, in 1863. The treasure was donated by J. Abdo Debbas, the American vice-consul in the region.
Collection formation at the Met started with the abuse of diplomatic privilege to smuggle a work of art out of its country of origin. Legal immunities eased such illicit movement. The Museum gained its reputation as a repository of antiquities after the acquisition of the Cesnola Collection of Cypriot Art.
Luigi Palma di Cesnola was born in July 1832 in Rivarolo Canavese, near Turin, then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. His family was of minor Piedmontese nobility and Luigi embarked upon a military career.
In 1848, he served (and suffered defeat) in the Sardinian army fighting against Austrian forces in the First Italian War of Independence (1848-1849); he then volunteered in the Crimean War (1853-1856) on the side of the British.
In 1858 he settled in New York, founded a training school for army officers, and married the daughter of the 1812 naval war hero Samuel Chester Reid.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, he joined the Fourth Cavalry Regiment of New York with the rank of Colonel. In 1863, leading a charge of his troops at the Battle of Aldie in Virginia he was wounded and captured. Following his distinguished service, Luigi received the Medal of Honor for gallantry.
For his military credentials and multilingual abilities (fluent in Italian, French, and English), President Abraham Lincoln appointed the United States Army veteran in 1865 as Consul at Larnaca, Cyprus, then under Ottoman occupation.
His duties were light and, with plenty of spare time, he joined in the hunt for ancient treasures which had become a diplomatic pastime on the island. He was one of several amateur “gentlemen” diggers who plundered and pillaged the island’s antiquities.
Although academic interest in the history of Cyprus as one of the oldest civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean was deepening, adventurers, tomb robbers, and dodgy dealers exploited Ottoman indolence towards its heritage.
Cesnola was not bothered about scholarly considerations, nor did he show much respect for the socio-historical context of the objects he accumulated. His operations were a commercial venture. The past was for sale. As there were no institutional rules of provenance ethics nor any norms on dealings with cultural heritage, he used his consular office to collect some 35,000 antiquarian items.
By 1870, the scale of his activities had alarmed the authorities. He was denied permission to remove his treasures from the island. Using diplomatic levers, he was able to bypass custom officers and ship 360 large cases to Alexandria. For a while, the collection’s destination remained uncertain.
Negotiations took place with Napoleon III, who wanted the collection for the Louvre; Russian officials discussed a transfer to the Hermitage Museum at St Petersburg. Soon afterward, Cesnola transported the collection to London where its exhibition aroused interest.
At that point (1872), the Met intervened and bought the collection. Cesnola himself supervised its installation. In 1877, after his duty as Consul in Cyprus had ended, he took a seat on the Museum’s board of trustees and served as its first Director from 1879 until his death in 1904.
When in March 1880, the Museum moved to its permanent site at Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street the collection of over 6,000 works occupied a prime location on the first floor. He pushed for the publication of (unreliable) catalogues, including the six-volume, richly illustrated Atlas of Cypriot Antiquities and oversaw the arrangement of his artifacts in dedicated galleries.
Its display was trumpeted as an asset to the city, outdoing similar collections in London or Paris.
Treasure of Curium
Discovered in 1875, Cesnola unearthed the Curium antiquities at the site of Kourion, an ancient Greek city-state on the southwestern Cypriot coast.
They were added to the Museum’s earlier collection and enhanced its reputation – for a while at least. In 1877, Luigi “documented” his excavations and procurements in Cyprus: Its Ancient Cities, Tombs, and Temples.
Controversy started soon after publication when experts began fact checking the story lines. The “Cesnola Scandal” exposed his corrupt morals, crude methods, and unauthorized removals. His geographical descriptions were unmasked as either wildly inaccurate or completely fictional.
Archaeologists accused him of forging provenances and fabricating dates and/or locations; newspapers called him a liar and a looter.
Theft was a family affair. Luigi’s younger brother Alessandro also served in the military, before emigrating to America in the 1860s where he claimed citizenship. In 1873, he was appointed honorary American vice-consul in Paphos, a position that allowed for his involvement in archaeological activities on the island.
Between 1876 and 1878, in partnership with his father-in-law, the London financier Edwin Lawrence, Alessandro excavated many artifacts (by whatever means), principally from around Salamis.
His attempts to flout the ban on private excavations instituted by the first British High Commissioner following Britain’s occupation of Cyprus in July 1878, resulted in his expulsion from the island and the confiscation of part of the collection. He disposed of the bulk of the material at various auctions in London between 1883 and 1892.
Luigi’s projects were overseen by a character named Beshbesh, a Turkish fixer who contracted local vandals to plunder sites without record or documentation. He also bought objects from local dealers, inventing excavation narratives to justify his expenditure.
The Consul himself rarely visited the digs; he simply retold the stories and published them as factual accounts. This explained the extraordinary mixture of periods in the Curium treasure. The collection was not properly classified until 1914 by Oxford professor John Myres (1869-1954).
A pompous character, Cesnola remained unmoved by the tsunami of criticism directed against him. He died in 1904 at his apartment in the elegant Seymour Hotel on West 45th Street.
With the controversy raging over the acquisition of antiquities, their fraudulent restorations and illegal export, the collection became an embarrassment to the museum.
The Cesnola Collection was quietly dissolved over the decades, except for the most authentic pieces. When the Met opened new galleries in 2000, a reduced number of six hundred pieces was on display at its Department of Greek and Roman Art.
Agents of Displacement
Western museums were displacement agents of classical art and sculpture, either through the physical removal of artifacts, or through the misrepresentation of their original appearance.
Objects were adapted to fit European aesthetic taste, presenting Greek and Roman sculptures as pure white. All traces of coloring were scrubbed off to enhance the “marmoreal gleam,” fostering a false association between whiteness and beauty.
It was the wealth of our heritage that allowed for “cultural terrorism” to occur. Abundance provokes carelessness. If ancient treasures had been scarce, the alertness to protect them would have been more acute.
Cesnola is a comprehensive collection of Cypriot art, highlighting a blend of Greek, Egyptian, and Near Eastern influences that were at play throughout antiquity, but key issues surrounding the acquisition history of items stay unresolved.
While Cypriot officials acknowledge the collection’s importance for international study, there have been (sporadic) calls for the repatriation of “plundered” works.
There seems to be a resigned acceptance that the Cesnola treasures, like the Elgin Marbles, were removed with consent of the Ottoman regime, making a legal challenge of ownership complicated. The charge of “colonial theft” would be difficult to prove.
The black market of antiquities is still rampant as the looting of archaeological sites in conflict-ridden regions like the Middle East and North Africa continues.
As of early 2026, ongoing conflicts and political instability in countries such as Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and recently Iran have resulted in the widespread pillaging of archaeological sites.
That situation has prompted attempts to exert international control over the illicit trade. The joint fight against the trafficking of cultural objects may encourage a trickier conversation on the status and presentation of museum collections.
To reduce ancient histories to a dreary display of exhibits removed from their original context and deprived of their spiritual essence, is meaningless. Rather than telling a coherent tale, museums impose a sense of lost history and forgotten cultural identities upon its visitors – mental fatigue rather than inspiration.
Restitution is the return of a cultural object to its rightful owner from which it was wrongfully taken. That is an obligation under the law and, therefore, a legally binding duty.
Repatriation is more complex. It implies the return of a significant object to its community of origin for historical, cultural, or spiritual reasons.
At present, this is a voluntary “ethical” choice, not an enforceable requirement. However sensitive and complicated proceedings might (and will) be, the discussion on repatriation must continue.
Apart from fostering restorative justice, the process will restore historical context by allowing communities of origin to reconnect with their heritage and rewrite Western-centric narratives. History itself will be the winner.
Once located on the 66th to 68th floors of the Chrysler Building, The Cloud Club belonged to a group of mile-high power lunch spots in New York City, atop the city’s most distinctive skyscrapers. The New York Times calls The Cloud Club “the inspiration for many of the others.” It was initially designed for Texaco, which occupied 14 floors of the Chrysler Building, and used as a restaurant for executives. It opened with 300 members of New York City’s business elite and only men were allowed to enter for many decades.
From the New York Public Library The Cloud Club was designed by William van Alan, and had an eclectic mix of design, ranging from Futurist in the main dining room, Tudor for the lounge, and an Old English grill room. Perhaps because of its decor, or its original function, it never became hip and stylish like the Rainbow Room but it did have amenities like a barber shop, a humidor, lockers for members to store their own alcohol of choice, and a wood-paneled bar that was used to hide alcohol during Prohibition. There was a stock ticker for the high powered financiers who frequented the club.
The Cloud Club closed in the 1979. The New York Times reported in 2000 that there were “various attempts in the early 1980’s to fill the three floors with everything from a nightclub to a disco to a lunch club for bankers” but they all failed. As of 2000, the marble and bronze staircase was still in the space, however, and the club had been “ravaged by time, neglect, water and vandalism.”
The club was later gutted to accommodate both potential office and hospitality tenants but according to the New York Post, potential restaurant operators were scared off by the “impractical layout.” As of the early 2010s, several, if not all floors were empty, but in recent years, AMA Capital Partners, a merchant bank focused shipping and energy, moved into the former Cloud Club floors.
In 1931 when the Chrysler Building opened, it also had an observatory called the “Celestial” in the spire on the 71st floor. You could take in views of the city from all four sides for fifty cents. The star-themed observation deck closed down in 1945 and according to Moses Gates in his book Hidden Cities, it’s now occupied by a private firm. On a visit to the observatory in 2006, our Untapped New York Insider, Klaus-Peter Statz told us there were leftovers of a bar, with a bar, stools, and little tables, but not much else left
A mural of the Chrysler Building that was once in the observatory hallway, before entering the bar area. Photo by Klaus-Peter Statz
In fact, when Aby Rosen of RFR Holdings purchased the Chrysler Building in spring of 2019, he told the New York Post he was considering bringing back an observation deck. The Post reported that he was in discussion with Major Food Group and Stephen Starr about creating new restaurant spaces that “could rival the Cloud Club,” in hopes to revitalize the struggling ground floor.
One of the triangular windows inside the observatory. Photo by Klaus-Peter Statz.
Rosen got a great deal on the building, which is known to be a difficult business operation, paying $151 million to the Abu Dhabi Investment Fund, which had bought a 90% stake in the building for $800 million back in 2008. Tishman Speyer had bought the building in 1997 for $225 million but sold it’s finals takes in 2019. Reports from early 2026 indicate the company may be eyeing the building again, after it went up for sale in 2025.
Time will only tell if anything comes of the grand plans to bring back an observation deck. Rumblings of a new skydeck for the Chrysler Building surfaced in 2022, according to Curbed New York. The observation deck, which some estimate will cost up to $40 to enter, would allow access to the currently private building. Though there are no finalized construction plans for the Chrysler Building’s new observation deck, the Landmarks Preservation Commission approved its construction in 2020.
On a summer day in May 2018, Melanie Colter and I were invited to visit an office on the 65th floor of the Chrysler Building. Australian artist Marco Luccio had been using the space to paint views of the city. The space was rented by a maritime company and offered a great view of the infrastructure.
Marco Luccio’s paintings from the Chrysler
These triangular window have handles and open.
The beginning of LIC development from the window in 2018.
The big sister architectural masterpiece from the window
Melanie peeped ouf from an open window.
The support colums are clearly evident.
Imagine if this space with the windows, views and structure could be open to view.
The borough of Queens is the largest of New York City’s five boroughs. It holds more people than Chicago or Los Angeles. And thanks to immigration, it is today home to a population of extraordinary ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity. Queens is also the subject of a new book by Jeffrey Kroessler, Rural County, Urban Borough: A History of Queens, published by Rutgers University Press.
Kroessler, an expert on the history and preservation of Queens, was working on the final edits for Rural County, Urban Borough when he died in 2023. His wife, the architect Laura Heim, took up the work of moving the book through the publication process. She selected and placed the images in the book and wrote its Preface and Acknowledgements.
Rural County, Urban Borough is a history with a strong sense of place. Covering the the history of Queens from European settlement to the present, Kroessler charts centuries of change in the landscape. He shows how politics, industry, transportation, government and real estate interests all shaped the borough. Linking Queens to New York City and the wider world, Kroessler illuminates important elements of American metropolitan history.
CREDITS
New York Almanack
llustrations, from above: Tiffany reproduction of Cypriot bracelet from the Curium collection of the Met; Archibald Archer’s “The Temporary Elgin Room in 1819” with portraits of British Museum staff, a trustee and visitors. (British Museum); The Amathus sarcophagus from the Met Cesnola Collection; Luigi Palma di Cesnola, American consul in Cyprus and first director of the Met (Cultural Centre of the Popular Bank Group); Sculpture from the ‘Cesnola Collection’ on display at the Met (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, May 1880); and the ransacked Iraq National Museum in 2003, during the Iraq War (photo by Patrick Robert).
Untapped New York
Judith Berdy
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
The Lombardy city of Cremona is the birthplace of the violin. The name of Antonio Stradivari became a metaphor for perfection, and his presence sparked a cult of Cremonese violins.
Born in 1644, he continued a lengthy line of local luthiers who since the sixteenth century had produced fine instruments.
The town of Markneukirchen in Saxony’s Vogtland was the unofficial capital of a German and Czech cross-border region known as the “Musikwinkel” (music corner).
For its production of stringed instruments, the town enjoyed the reputation of a “German Cremona.” Immigrants from the region carried a rich tradition with them and, over time, would upgrade America’s musical landscape. Cremona calls for classical music; Markneukirchen stands for the modern age.
Music & Migrants
After the Thirty Years War, Bohemian Protestants from the Catholic town of Graslitz (Kraslice) fled their homes during the Counter Reformation and settled over the border. They brought the art of violin making with them.
In 1677, twelve refugee craftsmen came together and founded the Violin Makers’ Guild (Germany’s oldest continuous trade union). They codified standards of workmanship and turned the town into a hub of excellence. Over time, bow makers and string producers settled there as well.
At the same time, a start was made with guitar and zither production. Makers of woodwind instruments and French horns settled in the region at the turn of the eighteenth century. Almost the entire range of orchestral instruments became available in a single town.
Craftsmen worked from home, instructed apprentices, and sold their goods to wholesale dealers. With the march of industrialization, the manufacture of instruments largely kept its character as a cottage industry.
Rather than making entire instruments, artisans would concentrate on single parts such as fingerboards or tailpieces and supply them to an expert for completion. The region developed a range of specialisms.
The nineteenth century marked a peak in output. London’s 1851 World Exhibition put Markneukirchen on the export map. The American market took notice and there was a diplomatic effort to encourage trade relations.
In 1893, a Consular Agency was set up in the town, serving the instrument trade (until its closure in 1916) by easing the import processes for giant retailers like Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Ward.
Manufacture expanded rapidly. In 1913, the “Musikwinkel” produced forty percent of the world’s string instruments, totaling over 150,000 violins a year. Until the Second World War, it was one of the largest global centers of instrument making.
While many of its violins were affordable, Markneukirchen also maintained the benchmarks for quality instruments, being home to prominent dynasties like Heberlein, Hamm, and Roth.
King of Guitars
Vogtland’s violin making was regulated by guilds. In the early 1800s, the guitar was a relatively recent instrument, and most producers were members of the Cabinet Makers’ Guild.
Violin makers claimed exclusive rights to the manufacture of stringed instruments and the guild exercised its privilege to prevent their rivals from producing guitars.
Christian Frederick (Friedrich) Martin was born on January 31, 1796, in Markneukirchen into a family of woodworkers. He learned his trade in Vienna as an apprentice to leading guitar maker Johann Georg Stauffer.
Returning to Saxony, Martin joined the Guild of Cabinet Makers and soon clashed with violin makers who tried to stop him from applying his trade. Unwilling to accept the locality’s confining rules, Martin moved to the city of New York.
In 1833 he opened a workshop at 196 Hudson Street in Manhattan’s Lower West Side, producing instruments modeled after those of his Viennese mentor. The original building at the corner of Hudson and Vestry Streets has not survived, but a bronze plaque commemorates the site where this immigrant built his first American guitars.
In 1839 he moved to Nazareth, Pennsylvania, where he set up a workshop at the corner of Main and North Streets. Once settled there, his guitars evolved in shape and quality, whilst his reputation grew.
By the late 1840s, he had abandoned the Stauffer characteristics and developed a style of his own. During the Civil War sales increased as Martin’s portable “parlor” guitar became a means of relaxation for the troops.
Martin’s main distributor was Charles A. Zoebisch & Sons, a firm also known for producing brass instruments. Its founder Carl August Zoebisch, born in 1824, was an immigrant from Saxony too, arriving in New York in January 1842.
Having started his business in Mott Street, he traded from 1866 onward at 46 Maiden Lane, Lower Manhattan. The link between the companies endured until 1898, when Martin took on its own distribution.
By the end of his working life (he was succeeded by his son in the family firm), clients hailed Martin as the undisputed king of the acoustic world. Despite its European roots, he had transformed the guitar into an iconic American instrument that gave shape and substance to the nation’s modern musical landscape.
Spanning all genres, from country, R & B, or folk to rock & roll, the legends of song have endorsed Martin’s guitars. Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Neil Young, Paul Simon, Eric Clapton, Ed Sheeran, and many other performers have strummed his creations.
The company stuck to its main mission throughout the decades: building acoustic guitars, never tempted to sell its soul to the electric market.
Mandolins, ukuleles, and electric guitars have featured in the company’s catalogues, but to connoisseurs the word “Martin” simply meant a classic flat-top acoustic guitar. America made music on Saxon-inspired instruments.
Civil War
During the 1850s Saxony’s instrument makers, primarily from Markneukirchen, emigrated to escape restrictive guild practices and political unrest, carrying their specialized skills to the United States.
Rudolph Wurlitzer was born on February 1, 1831, in nearby Schöneck where his father ran a family business of music distribution. The family had a long history of producing and selling (stringed) instruments, stretching back to the seventeenth century when Nicholas Wurlitzer began making lutes.
Little is known of Rudolph’s life (there is no biography). He joined the family firm after leaving school, but it is unclear why he made the decision to emigrate. Twenty-two-year-old Rudolph boarded a transatlantic liner in Bremen (the immediate reason to leave may have been a dispute with his father) and docked in Hoboken, New Jersey, in June 1853.
He arrived penniless and with no knowledge of English. Having started work in a New York City grocery shop, he quickly made his way up. He then moved to Cincinnati where he became part of the city’s large German-speaking immigrant community and set up his own company. Ambitious, energetic, intelligent, and frugal, he concentrated on what he knew best – the trade in musical instruments.
At the time, most instruments were expensive imports from Europe, and the business model involved a long supply chain and high transaction costs.
Rudolph’s connections gave him a competitive advantage as a was able to exclude the middlemen. He bought instruments directly from Saxon producers (and family members) and made them available for retail at relatively low prices.
The relationship was one of mutual advantage. Wurlitzer profited from his commercial networks in the “Musikwinkel,” while his home region benefited economically from his presence as a major American importer.
On September 19, 1868, Rudolph married Leonie Farny, an immigrant from Alsace, at Cincinnati’s Lutheran Church. Making their home on Franklin Street, the family kept a strong German identity and, at the same time, integrated fully into American society (he had been a naturalized citizen since October 1859).
His contracts with the army during the Civil War and the Spanish-American War were signs of mutual respect. Drums, trumpets, and bugles played by United States soldiers during the Civil War bore Wurlitzer’s name.
The Rudolph Wurlitzer Company went from strength to strength with America’s growing passion for music and entertainment. The company offered a wide selection of instruments in its 200 page-long catalogues, mostly focused on “conventional” instruments.
Towards the end of the century, the firm became increasingly aware of public interest in mechanical music devices. The leisure industry began making new demands.
Mighty Wurlitzer
The development of automatic instruments gathered pace. Barrel organs took over Manhattan’s streets and fairs; coin-operated pianos played ragtime in packed saloons. With the craze for silent movies came the introduction of “orchestrions,” mechanical organs that imitated the sounds of a complete orchestra.
Eugene de Kleist was born Eugene von Kleist in Düsseldorf in 1853 (of Prussian noble stock), but changed his name after spending time in London where he built barrel organs for merry-go-rounds.
Wurlitzer would become the sole distributor of his products, including the 1899 “Tonophone,” a commercially successful coin-operated piano played by a pinned cylinder. When De Kleist withdrew from business, Wurlitzer took over his factory.
In 1910, the company bought an insolvent enterprise owned by the eccentric Cheshire-born Robert Hope-Jones. A pioneer in applying electrical technology, he sold his patent for what would become the company’s greatest triumph, an organ that went down in the history of cinema as the “One Man Orchestra.”
Otherwise known as the “Mighty Wurlitzer,” the organ was equipped with trumpets, tubas, clarinets, oboes, chimes, xylophones, drums, and other sound effects.
With the advent of silent movies in the 1920s, it became an international success. The introduction of sound (“talkies”) spelled the end for silent film. Organs were replaced by speaker systems. The “Mighty Wurlitzer” went out of fashion.
The company (and the music industry in general) survived the Great Depression thanks to the jukebox. Its rise coincided with the end of Prohibition and then reopening of countless bars and clubs. “Put a nickel in it” was the slogan – and dance away.
Early jukeboxes used heavy and fragile shellac 78-rpm records. Rival companies competed to improve the mechanism, leading to the so-called “Battle of the Speeds.”
Introduced by RCA in March 1949, the invention of the 45-rpm vinyl record accelerated the spread of the jukebox. It improved sound quality, increased capacity (100 selections), and lowered production costs. The 45s became synonymous with the “single,” featuring a hit on the A-side and an added song on the B-side.
The root of the word “jukebox” goes back to the coastal plain and Sea Islands of South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida where “Gullah,” a creole of West African languages and English, was spoken by enslaved people brought to the region in the eighteenth century.
The word “jook” meant disorderly or rowdy. A “jook joint” was a dance hall, gaming room, and brothel, all rolled into one. Early boxes were known as “nickel-in-the-slot machines,” until around 1937 when Time magazine popularized the nickname jukebox.
A novelty in the 1920s, the jukebox transformed into a post-war cultural icon. Omnipresent, the vogue was associated with an emerging youth culture. Located in diners, coffee bars, roadside cafés, soda fountains, and amusement arcades, these boxes provided a hub where teenagers could spend time together, dance, and socialize.
They allowed them to control their choice of music at their own chosen venues. Wurlitzer was the market leader, its name almost synonymous with the machine. Stylish and colorful designs added to their popularity both in America and Europe.
Wurlitzer’s vanguard role was enhanced by the participation of Paul Max Fuller (born in Corisca in 1897; and died in Buffalo in 1951), the most talented box designer of the era.
The company stopped producing jukeboxes in 1974; by that time, the firm had sold more than 750,000 of them. New electronic music devices caused the company’s decline. Japan took the lead instead.
C. F. Martin and Rudolph Wurlitzer were young immigrants who made a career in music, showing a commitment to traditional quality and artistry that was emblematic for their enterprises. The former provided uniquely American acoustics for over a century of contemporary music, while the latter supplied the soundscape of entertainment that shaped popular culture.
One stood for the creation of music, the other served its dissemination and consumption. Within their own realms, both men represented a Saxon creative versatility they brought to the United States, securing a niche of professional esteem for themselves in the nation’s diverse musical history.
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NEW YORK ALMANACK llustrations, from above: A modern European instrument shop; “A Typical Family of Violin-Makers Outside Their Cottage” in Markneukirchen, ca. 1900; C.F. Martin Sr and his wife Otilia from a scrapbook page (courtesy Martin Guitar Museum); C.F. Martin bronze plaque at the intersection of 196 Hudson Street and Vestry Street; Making Drums for the Spanish American War in the Wurlitzer Cincinnati Factory, 1898; Wurlitzer 4/26 orchestral organ, 1928 (LIU Paramount Theater, Brooklyn); Wurlitzer Stores and Factory 1916; Paul Max Fuller designed Wurlitzer jukebox model 850 “Peacock” design, 1941. Judith Berdy
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
The emergence of the bottling industry in New York State occurred due to the rise of the leisure economy and the fashion for the kind of mineral waters available at natural spas.
Prior to the availability of chlorinated water, inhabitants of many highly populated areas of the world avoided unmixed water from most sources for fear of contamination.
Due to growing populations, land management practices, and an inadequate theory of germs and disease, the quality of many water sources in Europe deteriorated over the course of the Middle Ages, necessitating the consumption of hopped beer and other alcoholic beverages or water mixed with a small amount of alcohol for hydration.
Although a select number of elite Europeans had visited balneotherapeutic spas at places like Bath and Vichy to “take the waters” since their development by the Romans, the majority of Europeans avoided the consumption of water, and the precaution followed European settlers to the American colonies.
During the eighteenth century, the emergence of the merchant class in Europe led to a sharp rise in the popularity of spas throughout the continent, and the social status conferred by the leisure activity soon spread to the American colonies.
In the 1760s and 1770s, the American elite began visiting spas in the Northeast, including those at Stafford Springs, Connecticut, and Bristol, Pennsylvania, to take advantage of the health and wellness effects of the mineral springs there.
Above all, the development of first Ballston Spa and then especially Saratoga Springs at the end of the eighteenth century solidified the association of mineral springs with the most fashionable circles.
As the nineteenth century progressed, the emergent middle class in the United States desired to visit spa towns in imitation of the members of elite society, but not all those aspiring visitors could afford the trip to the relatively remote resorts offering mineral water cures.
[Other mineral spring spa communities in New York included Sharon Springs and Lebanon Springs, and even small communities like Poestenkill, in the hills of Rensselaer County, which had a small bath house industry.]
Thus, in the early part of the century, enterprising merchants constructed bottling plants at places like Saratoga Springs to cater to those consumers unable to visit or looking to take the water home with them.
Bottled mineral water remained a fashionable commodity for the following century, and bottlers took advantage of access to the mineral springs scattered throughout the Northeast, borrowing bottling techniques used for alcoholic beverages and delivering the water to consumers.
The typical spring water bottling plant included access to a water source and a pump, an area for cleaning bottles, a bottling line including a stoppage mechanism (first corking and later crown capping), and a packing and storage area.
Many bottling operations delivered their products directly to consumers and thus required an area for wagons and draft animals and, later, for automobiles.
Bottlers also reused bottles, collected from consumers for the return of a deposit, and thus required adequate bottle storage until the adoption of disposable or recyclable packaging in the second half of the twentieth century.
Other Carbonated Beverages
As the fashion for mineral water and its association with medicine grew, so too did the market for other carbonated beverages.
The ability to artificially carbonate water in the middle of the eighteenth century, pioneered by William Brownrigg and developed by Joseph Priestly, made possible the invention and production of numerous sweetened and medicated beverages.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, entrepreneurs in Europe and the United States introduced many of the soft drinks now found in grocery aisles throughout the world, including ginger ale, root beer, cola, and citrus-flavored sodas.
Beginning around the middle of the century, druggists and chemists installed soda fountains in pharmacies to offer their own proprietary beverages mixed with drugs such as cocaine, morphine, and caffeine, and these became especially popular with ailing veterans of the American Civil War.
The introduction of pharmaceutical sodas furthered the association of carbonated beverages with wellness, a notion that peaked at the turn of the twentieth century.
Although the popularity of soft drinks has never waned since their introduction, theoretical and technological developments in the early twentieth century led to a decline in the demand for bottled mineral waters.
The progression of germ theory and the study of microbiology encouraged the introduction of liquid chlorine into municipal water supplies. Beginning in 1913, Philadelphia began chlorinating its drinking water, and other cities soon followed suit.
The City of Troy began chlorinating its water supply in 1925, ensuring the abundance of clean drinking water wherever its pipes supplied water. The wide availability of clean water reduced the demand for bottled water, which had previously protected against waterborne pathogens.
The availability of modern pharmaceuticals proved far more effective at treating disease and conditions previously remedied by the intake of mineral water, further dampening the demand for the once-fashionable bottled mineral waters.
While the status of and demand for bottled mineral waters fell during the early twentieth century, the concurrent rise of the Temperance Movement ensured that bottling plants remained commercially stable ventures.
Whether Americans opted to reduce their consumption of alcohol or were forced to do so by the passage of the Volstead Act of 1919, largely prohibiting the production and consumption of alcohol, they sought alternative beverages beyond tap water in the decades leading up to World War II.
Although the popularity of medicated soft drinks waned over the course of the twentieth century, the Temperance Movement and Prohibition fueled the demand for “temperance beverages” like ginger ale, sarsaparilla, root beer, and unflavored soda water.
While Prohibition forced the closure and consolidation of breweries in the United States, the surge in demand for bottled beverages encouraged the rise of independent bottling companies in cities and towns throughout the country.
By 1940, over 6,000 bottling plants operated in the United States, and the number peaked at around 6,660 the following decade.
After the conclusion of World War II, material innovation and corporate expansion led to a fundamental shift in the beverage industry in the United States. Larger bottling operations, benefiting from economies of scale and often from relationships with major brands, purchased smaller competitors and often folded into the growing national beverage corporations.
From a peak in 1950 at over 6,600, the number of independent bottling companies in the United States fell steadily over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, with only about 500 remaining in operation in 1999.
Meanwhile, the increasing prevalence of advertising campaigns for nationally distributed beverages drew market share away from their local counterparts, forcing local beverage producers out of business. Innovations in packaging accelerated this process.
Drawing lessons from the beer industry, bottlers abandoned the predominant model of local bottle delivery, pickup, and reuse in favor of the one-trip bottling paradigm, in which steel or aluminum cans and later plastic bottles were distributed to supermarkets and sold without expectation of return.
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Illustrations, from above: Four men operate a mineral water bottling plant run by the New York State Conservation Commission in the New York State Reservation (now Saratoga Spa State Park) in Saratoga Springs, November 1918 (NYS Archives); Water Cure therapies or “Hydropathic applications” according to R.T. Claridge’s Hydropathy, 1842; High Rock Spring, Saratoga Springs, postcard ca. 1875; soda fountain counter at Clarkson and Mitchell Drugstore, Springfield, Illinois, ca 1905 (Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library) and 1894 ad for an ornate fountain; a standard bottling plant of the Coca-Cola Company in 1932; and the former 1885 Whalen Bottling Works in Troy, ca. 2025, recently nominated to the State and National Historic Registers.
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SAVE THE DATE SPECIAL DEMONSTRATION AND HOLIDAY CELEBRATION THURSDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2025 5 TO 9 P.M. BLACKWELL HOUSE WATCH FOR DETAILS
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Photos and text by Guglielmo Mattioli for NYC Urbanism. Cover image: Michael Young
It is one of the most embellished midtown skyscrapers. The crowning crest of the 1930s General Electric Building (originally the RCA Victor Building) is a triumph of metal lightning bolts, art deco ornamentation and terracotta work that masterfully concludes what is already one of the most eclectic and electric skyscrapers in the Manhattan skyline.
The building was designed in 1931 by two brothers, Cross & Cross, who also designed FiDi’s 20 Exchange Place, another art-deco gem that opened the same year. Along with Raymond Hood (link) and JER Carpenter (link), the two brothers attended the school of Beaux-Art in Paris, absorbed the Art Decoratif lesson and masterfully deployed it throughout the tower, mixing it with gothic revival elements. The result is a neo-gothic tower in its vertical development featuring buttresses and piers, and art-deco ornamentation.
From the ground up, the tower is scattered with symbolism, recalling radio waves, energy, and electricity. Cross & Cross used the ornamentation apparatus to reflect their client’s mission, using architecture as a vessel for prestige and corporate visibility.
The original commissioner was the Radio Victor Corporation of America (RCA), a subsidiary of General Electric, that sold radio devices and electronics and pioneered radio and television transmissions. It was RCA that created NBC, the National Broadcasting Company. When RCA decided to separate from General Electric, part of the agreement was to cede the new tower then under construction, to GE. The metal, round clock on Lexington and 51st reflects the new ownership and displays the GE logo, surmounted by two metal hands holding a lightning bolt or what could be a symbolic representation of electricity generated by the two hands.
Note: Queensboro Bridge in background with original spires
One element that sets Cross & Cross’s design aside is the use of mysterious anthropomorphic figures, reminiscent of what one could find on a byzantine style building, like the church next door. At 570 Lexington, they incorporated dozens of herm figures on the building’s facade; guardians some holding lightning bolts, or spreading their wings to mark a corner or a setback.
But it’s at the very top that the duo fully released their imagination. Four gigantic electric deities on each side of the building, look down on the city below—their faces framed by lightning bolts forged in metal. Connecting the four is an elaborate circular crown, a masterpiece of tracery that looks like a piece of cloth lace made of terracotta. Spikes and pinnacles add to the drama. At night, backlights project the supernatural crown into the sky.
Despite being one of the least visible parts of a tall building, architects, especially in the 1930s, focused their attention on it. The level of details and design stratagem deployed for sections that most will ever see is quite revealing of how designers saw their buildings, not just mere envelopes hosting various functions, but wholesome artistic creations in which every part has its own dignity and expression. The top of a building, therefore, becomes the most crucial component, deserving of the highest attention; ultimately it’s where the work of an architect meets the sky.
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
The American Fine Arts Society building, home to the Art Students League, is a landmarked gem at 215 West 57th Street, its front doors swinging open at frequent and regular intervals, offering a glimpse of the teeming creative life that still hums inside. From its founding in 1875, the Art Students League has sought to explore and express ideas outside the artistic norms of the time, particularly the concepts emerging from the avant-garde movements in Paris and Munich.
Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe, Robert Rauschenberg, and Robert Smithson are just a few of the notable artists who were once students at the Arts Students League. The 1966 Landmarks Designation Report describes the society’s illustrious heritage glowingly: “The roster of former League students, members, and instructors…reads like a Who’s Who in American Art. The School has had a tremendous influence on art in this country. The membership lists are studded with names of the famous, representing every idiom of the arts.”
Today, over 5000 students a year take a wide range of affordable art classes at the League under the direction of world-class artists and teachers. We recently took a tour to learn more about the organization’s history and the secrets of its building on 57th Street.
Courtesy of the Art Students League
The Art Students League’s home at 215 W. 57th Street was designed by prolific architect Henry J. Hardenbergh, known in New York City for designing the Dakota Apartments, the first Waldorf hotel, the Plaza Hotel, and more. A landmarked historic district on the Upper East Side, the Hardenbergh/Rhinelander Historic District, bears his name and is one of the smallest historic districts in Manhattan.
The French Renaissance-inspired building combines an ornamented façade with a balanced (and nearly symmetrical) architectural design. It was built at a cost of $400,000, which would be equivalent to around $9 million in 2017 dollars, when adjusted for inflation. An article in the New Outlook contends that within the new building, “it may be pretty safely predicted the artistic spirit of New York will henceforth find its chief theatre.”
On the first floor of the Art Students League building is a tiny but well-stocked art supply store, a true hidden gem known primarily just to students and art insiders. There is no sign on the outside of the building to denote its existence. But despite its small footprint, the store is wildly successful. According to Ken Park, the former Director of Communications and Institutional Fundraising, “Art supply reps tell us that the League’s Art Supply Store sells more products per square foot than any other store they know. We carry more than a thousand kinds and colors of professional grade paint.”
There are several skeletons scattered through the Arts Students League building, available for observation and drawing. But a very special one is on the second floor, the skeleton of Mafalda Brasile Hicks, a former student of the League who died in March 2010. Before her death, Hicks expressed a desire to serve as a model for future classes and her family donated her skeleton to the Art Students League, the first-ever type of bequest to the school.
Hicks herself had a fascinating history – she was born in Newark, New Jersey and was a talented singer since she was a child, performing on live radio. She studied visual art at Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts and served in the Marine Corps during World War II, based in North Carolina where, according to an article in the Art Students League’s in-house magazine, she applied her talents “drawing maps and developing visual training aids. She also sang with the big band orchestras, entertaining military troops.” She took classes at the Arts Students League after the war
Half floors are one of our favorite things in old buildings – the Metropolitan Museum has some curious ones, and the Art Students League building has two half floors – Floor 2 ½, which hosts the library, and Floor 4 ½, which serves as storage. You can access the 2 ½ floor library through the stairwell or view it through an elevated window from the exhibition gallery.
On June 2nd, 1875, the Arts Students League was founded by a group of students and instructor Lemeul Wilmarth, who were dissatisfied with the traditional teaching at the National Academy of Design. The all-volunteer organization rented a single 20×30-foot room in the mansard roof of 108 Fifth Avenue, a four-floor building at the corner of 16th Street, to hold life drawing classes modeled on the practices of a Parisian atelier with natural light flowing in from the skylights above.
The students paid a tuition of $5 a month, but also volunteered to do organizational and maintenance tasks. A Board of Control was founded to govern the new organization. Within two years, the curriculum was expanded to include portraiture, sketch classes, composition classes, as well as lectures on anatomy and perspective. The Arts Students League would move to 38 West 14th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues in 1882, to 143-147 East 23rd Street in 1887, and finally to its current home at 215 W 57th Street in 1892. Many of the studios today still have large windows to allow in light, such as the clay studio above.
The American Fine Arts Society was incorporated in 1889, an initiative of Howard Russell Butler, a Princeton and Columbia Law School graduate. Butler had a vision to construct a building that would combine New York City’s new art societies and offer space for publicly accessible exhibition galleries. Butler raised funds for the building by creating a stock corporation, and in the process met Andrew Carnegie who hired him, while allowing him to spend part of each work day to paint.
The Arts Students League is one of three constituent organizations that founded the American Fine Arts Society, which also included The Architectural League of New York and the Society of American Artists. The 57th Street building soon became the locus point for art in New York City, and the Landmarks Designation Report contends that “practically all major fine arts exhibitions were held in the American Fine Arts Society’s galleries until 1941.” The three organizations would share the 57th Street building until 1941 when the Society of American Artists merged with the National Academy of Design and moved to its own building.
Today, the Arts Students League offers 100 studio classes in drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, welding and assemblage. Most classes work with a live model, maintaining the atelier tradition—the impetus of the League’s founding – where a master artist works alongside students There’s a welding studio, woodworking studio, and bronze-making studio (although the bronze is poured off-site),
Affordability remains an important aspect of the school’s mission—with classes ranging from $120 to $400 a month. The classes are by subject, with students across a range of skill levels. In 1879, work-study scholarships were established for students who could not afford the tuition, and financial aid continues to be available today through not only work-study but also merit based scholarships and grants.
There are also travel workshops to international destinations, along with short workshops held in New York City on specific themes.
The Vanderbilt Galleries. Photo courtesy of the Arts Students League
In 1893, a large exhibition in the American Fine Arts Galleries included an impressive array of European art from private collections, including work by Rembrandt, Diego Velásquez, J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, and Thomas Gainsborough. George Washington Vanderbilt II, son of William Henry Vanderbilt who would build the Biltmore estate in Asheville, North Carolina, gifted the American Fine Arts Society $100,000 to build new galleries. The connecting column-free gallery, built on West 58th Street, is known as the Vanderbilt Gallery and was modeled on the Galeries Georges Petit in Paris, particularly the inclusion of a 26-foot skylight ceiling.
The ceiling of the former Vanderbilt Galleries today
A fire destroyed the galleries in the 1920s, but they were rebuilt. Since the end of World War II, the space has been used as a bifurcated studio space, converted to accommodate the sudden surge in students at the League supported by the G.I. Bill. The exhibition gallery today is located on the second floor of the building, in a light-filled room that was originally used as a dining hall and lecture hall. Fun fact: an original oak and pink marble mantel sits in a storage area behind one of the exhibition walls.
The ceiling of the former Vanderbilt Galleries today
A fire destroyed the galleries in the 1920s, but they were rebuilt. Since the end of World War II, the space has been used as a bifurcated studio space, converted to accommodate the sudden surge in students at the League supported by the G.I. Bill. The exhibition gallery today is located on the second floor of the building, in a light-filled room that was originally used as a dining hall and lecture hall. Fun fact: an original oak and pink marble mantel sits in a storage area behind one of the exhibition walls.
The Central Park Tower, a supertall high-rise developed by Extell, is the second tallest building in the United States (after 1 World Trade Center) and the tallest residential skyscraper in the country, at a height of 1,550 feet. The ground floor hosts Nordstrom’s New York City flagship store and about 12 floors above the Art Students League building, a cantilevered portion of the skyscraper hangs over the historic landmark, thanks to air rights purchased from the League.
The famous artists who were students at the Arts Students League include Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, Norman Rockwell, Alexander Calder, Georgia O’Keefe, cartoonist, Al Hirschfeld, Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Stella, John Marin, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Jacob Lawrence, and James Montgomery Flagg. Notable instructors have included Thomas Hart Benton, John Sloan, Max Weber, George Bellows, Daniel Chester French, William Merritt Chase, Thomas Eakins, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
Each fall, the lobby and second floor gallery of the Arts Students League are host to the annual Instructors’ Exhibition, a presentation of work by current instructors. The tradition, which launches the fall exhibition season each year, goes back to the 19th century.
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There’s a lot of white in this depiction of a blustery winter day in the New York City of 1911: white snow on the street, stoops, and light poles; white-gray skies filling with factory smoke (or smoke from ship smokestacks?) across a grayish river.
Then there’s the violent white brushstrokes of howling wind against the red brick buildings. The wind is painted so viscerally, you can almost feel the icy snow and biting cold (and sympathize with the woman shielding her face in her coat, holding on to her hat).
“City Snow Scene” is an early work of Stuart Davis, a Pennsylvania native born in 1892 who is much better known as a Modernist painter. As a 17-year-old launching a career in New York, he fell under the thrall of early 20th century Ashcan artists and their gritty depictions of urban life.
The painting was auctioned by in 2012 by Christie’s, which had this to say about it: “Through bravura brushwork and a simplified muted palette, Davis succeeds in rendering a dreary winter’s day in lower Manhattan.”
“With a generous application of whites, Davis works up the surfaces to portray the texture of the snow which is juxtaposed with the more carefully applied reds he employs to develop the architecture in the background,” per Christie’s website.
“Broad, heavily applied strokes of black are the only device Davis employs to represent the pedestrians with the exception of a few simple touches of orange that delineate the faces of the primary figures in the foreground.”
It’s how a New York City winter used to be—and is once again in winter 2025.
DYLAN BROWN SPOTTED ROSIE ENJOYING A STROLL IN THE SNOW
PHOTO OF THE DAY
The caption actually states that we’re on East 79th Street between Avenues A and B—a reminder that both avenues originally extended all the way through the Upper East Side. Avenue A is York, and Avenue B is East End Avenue, which starts at 79th Street.
What’s this little boy doing on the rock-strewn ground of a stoneworks business beside the East River—close enough to what was then called Blackwell’s Island that the octagon tower of the lunatic asylum is within view? The caption says he’s drinking water from a spring.
An actual spring on the north side of East 79th Street? It’s hard to believe, but in fact Manhattan used to have plenty of springs. Some remain buried underground, only appearing during building construction, per this New York Times article. Today, you can still find springs in Central Park.
It should be noted that the photographer, James Reuel Smith, made a name for himself at the turn of the last century taking photos of springs and wells in northern Manhattan and the Bronx, documenting these vanishing waterways and the people who still drank from them. A book of his photos was published posthumously in 1935.
Who is this boy, with his heavy cap and delicate lace-up boots? I’m guessing he’s part of a family that moved uptown to the new tenement rows of Yorkville, where working-class and poor parents, mostly immigrants, toiled in factories, breweries, and on the waterfront.
The East Side Settlement House would be built on East 76th Street in 1903, offering activities and educational support for kids as well as their parents. But for now, an undeveloped stretch of land near the East River apparently made do as a play space, at least for this boy.
East 79th Street looks pretty rough in this photo. But within a decade or so, undeveloped areas like this would soon be cleaned up and turned into housing lots. What would become of this boy? With no way to know for sure, we’ll have to assume that he grew up and made his way.
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
A closer look at the art of Hisako Hibi and Matsusaburo Hibi
Hisako Hibi, Floating Clouds, 1944, oil on canvas, 19 1/16 × 23 × 1 1/2 in. (48.4 × 58.4 × 3.8 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the American Women’s History Initiative Acquisitions Pool, administered by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative, 2023.6.1
In 2023, SAAM acquired exemplary paintings by two groundbreaking figures of American art: Hisako Hibi and Matsusaburo Hibi.
Both were part of the vibrant and diverse art scene that thrived in San Francisco between the World Wars. Immigrants from Japan, they met in San Francisco in the late 1920s, when Hisako (née Shimizu) was studying oil painting at the California School of Fine Arts. Matsusaburo was already an established figure, having played a central role in organizing the East West Art Society, an association that brought together artists and art traditions from Europe and Asia. The couple married in 1930 and later moved to Hayward, California, where Matsusaburo opened a school for Japanese language and art. Even as they had two children, both continued to exhibit regularly, Hisako becoming one of only three Japanese American women to have work included in the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939-40.
However, little of the art Hisako and Matsusaburo Hibi created before World War II survives today. As with scores of other Japanese Americans, the events of the war sharply impacted the Hibis’ lives. In one of the worst civil rights violations in the history of the United States, the issuing of Executive Order 9066 in 1942, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, mandated the mass removal and incarceration of people of Japanese descent from the West Coast. Given about a week to prepare and told to bring only what they could carry, the Hibis had no choice but to leave their paintings behind. The Hibi family would spend more than three years in government detention, mostly at the Topaz Relocation Camp in the high desert of Utah. When the war ended, they moved to New York City. Matsusaburo died of cancer less than two years later, in 1947. By the time Hisako returned to California in 1954, their earlier artwork could not be found.
The Hibis’ story underscores the vulnerability of historic Asian American art. Although the Japanese were the first group of Asian immigrants to significantly participate in American modernism, their contributions have been largely invisible in scholarly and public conceptions of U.S. art and culture. Family members, a few committed collectors and art historians, and institutions dedicated to preserving Japanese American history and culture have been most responsible for protecting their work and bringing it to public attention. It remains now for large art museums such as SAAM to contribute to the recuperation and reintroduction of artists like Hisako and Matsusaburo Hibi to the history of American art—through acquisitions, exhibitions, and new scholarship.
Thanks to a crucial introduction provided by the scholar ShiPu Wang, I had the opportunity to meet Ibuki Hibi Lee, the daughter of Hisako and Matsusaburo Hibi, in 2022. In an apartment in San Francisco, I was astonished to see the number and variety of artworks cared for by Ibuki and her family members for decades. Four paintings, now in SAAM’s collection, stood out immediately, two of which were created while the Hibis were incarcerated at Topaz.
Matsusaburo George Hibi, Coyotes Came Out of the Desert, 1945, oil on canvas, 26 15/16 × 23 × 1 1/2 in. (68.4 × 58.4 × 3.8 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Catherine Walden Myer Fund, 2023.5
Matsusaburo’s Coyotes Came Out of the Desert (1945) depicts a group of animals roaming the camp barracks, seemingly in search of prey. The painting may relate to an actual event—the artist inscribed on its back: “It was a hard winter in Topaz the snow [lay] deep. Big [coyotes] came out of the desert right up to the camps and no one dared to go out of the doors.” But the work also masterfully conveys an atmosphere of dread and unease, emotions surely felt by the inmates as they lived under surveillance and grappled with the loss of their freedoms.
Hisako’s Floating Clouds(1944) is similarly both specific and universalized, grounded in observed reality yet transcendent in theme. While many of her camp paintings feature small figures in the landscape, here she omits the ground entirely, directing our gaze past the geometric rooftops of the barracks to the luminous clouds above. Hisako later inscribed on the back of the canvas: “‘Free, free’….I want to be free/ Free as that cloud I see up above Topaz.” Trapped in an oppressive environment and surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers, it is no wonder she turned to the sky for solace and mental escape. In its boundlessness, the sky suggests freedom as well as connection—it is shared by everyone on earth. The sky Hisako gazed at from Topaz was the same sky all Americans looked up to from across the vast United States.
Hisako Hibi, Peace, 1948, oil on canvas, 26 1/2 × 22 5/8 × 1 1/8 in. (67.3 × 57.5 × 2.9 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the American Women’s History Initiative Acquisitions Pool, administered by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative, 2023.6.2
After the death of her husband, Hisako supported her family working as a seamstress in a garment factory. Despite financial hardship, she continued to paint and grow as an artist, her work becoming more colorful and driven by her imagination. Some of her New York paintings reflect the artist’s anxiety and isolation at the time, depicting the city as a frightening, nightmarish landscape. Others, such as Peace (1948) are more hopeful statements. The painting shows a beatific angel facing down weapons of war, subject matter that reflects Hibi’s deeply held pacificism and ongoing engagement with art as a means of personal and spiritual consolation.
In 1953, after more than 30 years in the United States, Hisako Hibi finally gained American citizenship, thanks to the passing of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which made naturalized citizenship available to immigrants born in Asia. The following year, she returned to San Francisco, where she remained until her death in 1991. During the 1960s, her paintings became, in her words, “brighter and much freer” in expression. She experimented with materials and techniques, painting at times with twigs, pebbles and driftwood rather than using a brush. She also looked beyond European painting traditions, for the first time explicitly drawing on Asian aesthetics in her brushwork and compositions. Autumn (1970) is a stunning late work, an almost purely abstract composition whose magnetism hinges on Hibi’s delicate, gestural brushwork and canny activation of empty space. She renders the glory of fall foliage with intense color and touches of the brush that echo Asian calligraphy. Hibi exhibited actively during this period of her life, becoming an esteemed figure in Bay Area art communities. In 1985, the San Francisco Arts Commission granted Hibi an Award of Honor for her achievements.
Hisako Hibi, Autumn, 1970, oil on canvas, 39 1/8 × 32 1/4 × 1 1/2 in. (99.4 × 81.9 × 3.8 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the American Women’s History Initiative Acquisitions Pool, administered by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative, 2023.6.3
SAAM is grateful to acquire these rare works from the Hibi family. By entering the museum’s collection, Hisako and Matsusaburo Hibi’s paintings will be discovered by new generations of admirers—whether on display in SAAM’s galleries, on the museum’s website and social media, in open storage, or on loan to other institutions. The impact of such encounters is intangible yet significant. A work of art previously unknown to the general public holds the potential of a revelatory perspective. It offers a window into another human being’s experience and vision and does so across expanses of geography and time. Despite the racial injustice and personal loss they confronted during their lives, the Hibis created lasting works of art in which beauty mingles poignantly with pain, resilience and hope.
PHOTO OF THE DAY
My morning view on a clear cold day about 7 a.m., 30 minutes before the sun rises.
CREDITS
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM JUDITH BERDY
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
