Above: The Grand Republic steamship. As you can see from its paddlewheel, it was a twin to the General Slocum
East River Maritime Disasters
Stephen Blank
OK. By popular demand, one more – but only one more – East River ship story.
How about East River Maritime disasters? Turns out the East River has been a pretty dangerous place. Many serious shipping accidents have occurred in this short non-river (tidal estuary, to be precise). The most famous was the terrible General Slocum fire in 1904. Most of us have heard the name but don’t really know much about it. General Slocum was a triple-decker wooden side paddler that took folks on excursions around New York City. On Wednesday, June 15, 1904, the ship was chartered for $350 by St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church. The Church’s parish drew on German immigrants in the Lower East Side and East Village (then known as “Little Germany”). This was the trip’s 17th consecutive year, during a period when German settlers moved out of Little Germany for the Upper East and West Sides. Almost 1,400 passengers, mostly women and children (fewer than 150 were adult males) boarded General Slocum, which was to sail up the East River and then across the Long Island Sound to Locust Grove, a picnic site in Eatons Neck, Long Island.
But the steamboat caught fire and sank. In just 20 minutes, more than 1,000 people died. Prior to 9-11, the burning of the General Slocum had the highest death toll of any disaster in New York City history. It is the worst maritime disaster in the city’s history, and the second worst maritime disaster on United States waterways.
The excursion boat General Slocum lies beached off North Brother Island New York City’s East River, following a fire and resulting panic. The disaster cost the lives of 1,030 mostly German immigrants, June 15, 1904. (AP)
It was a preventable disaster. The crew was inexperienced and never conducted a fire drill. Some passengers jumped overboard but most of the ship’s lifejackets proved worthless because the cork then used for buoyancy, had turned to dust. Even worse, investigations discovered that Nonpareil Cork Works, supplier of cork for the life preservers, had placed 8 once iron bars inside the cork materials to meet minimum content requirements (6 pounds of “good cork” for each lifejacket) at the time. As the ship raced to shallow water the crew tried to fight the blaze, but the elderly fire hoses burst under the pressure. The Captain decided to continue his course rather than run the ship aground or stop at a nearby landing. By going into headwinds and failing to immediately ground the ship, he fanned the fire and promoted its spread from fore to aft. And he jumped ship as soon as he could. ‘
The Slocum disaster may have been the worst on the East River. But there were more.
The steamship caught fire just as it was in Hell Gate, the turbulent waters north of Blackwell’s (Roosevelt) Island, a particularly wicked part of the East River. Many tales have been told about the hundreds – even thousands – of ships sunk or damaged making this treacherous passage.
Indeed, histories repeat the same refrain: “Hundreds of ships have sunk into Hell Gate” “By the 1850s, one in fifty ships passing through the Hell Gate were either damaged or sunk—an annual average of 1,000 ships ran aground in the strait.” This is found again and again in the literature.
No less interesting than this Hell Gate horror story is the finding that while this liturgy is often repeated, evidence of these many maritime calamities never appears. (Where sources are indicated – rarely – they quote each other.) A thousand ships a year run aground just north of our island?? Why the north end of our island should have been littered in wreckage and bodies. The picture that these tales create was well captured by this dramatic painting of chaos in Hell Gate. (So many ships are waiting to run the gauntlet!) I suspect the reality of the numbers is as true as the reality of this image.
However, we know of one famous victim of Hell Gate, H.M.S. Hussar. She was a 28-gun, 6th-rate, Mermaid Class Frigate of the British Royal Navy with a crew of over one hundred. Built in 1763, the ship fought in sea battles off the coasts of Ireland and Portugal before being dispatched to New York in November 1780 to fight the colonists.
On 23 November 1780, against his pilot’s better judgment, Hussar’s captain decided to sail from the East River through the treacherous waters of Hell Gate between Randall’s Island and Astoria. Just before reaching Long Island Sound, Hussar was swept onto Pot Rock and began sinking. Pole was unable to run her aground and she sank in 96 feet of water.
What makes this loss of a relatively minor ship so interesting is that the British army’s payroll was to be moved to Gardiners Bay – aboard, of course, H.M.S. Hussar. The Brits owed a lot of back pay to its soldiers, and Hussar arrived in Manhattan with wages and 70 American prisoners of war. The exact amount is under dispute, but some say it might have been 960,000 British pounds in gold, worth roughly $576 million at the time. Various accounts of the tragedy emerged, but the British immediately denied that any payroll of gold guineas or sterling silver was consigned on the voyage. The survivors never mentioned a valuable cargo, nor was there any listed on the cargo manifest. The best bet is that the gold and silver was offloaded before the accident. The Brits denied the payroll delivery, but were suspect when they conducted extensive salvage efforts.
Occasional efforts are still made to find the treasure on the bottom of Hell Gate. A NY Times reporter in 2013 wrote, “The Hussar is the ship that got away. It has long been part of the lore of a South Bronx community that is among the poorest in the nation, promising untold riches for anyone with the imagination and courage to pluck it from the mud and trash of the East River. Its call has enthralled generations of residents and historians, and lured numerous fortune seekers.”
H.M.S. Hussar, National Maritime Museum
Two other East River maritime catastrophes are remembered today, probably because of the graphic images created at the time.
On October 7, 1833 steamship New England ploughed up the East River, destined for Hartford. Arriving off Essex at 3:00 am, the engine was stopped but both boilers exploded “with a noise like heavy cannon. The shock was dreadful; and the scene which followed … [w]as awful and heart-rending beyond description.”
New England burst its boilers off Essex, October 8, 1833, killing 13 people. Woodcut from Steamboat Disasters and Railroad Accidents in the United States by Warren Lazell, 1846
The ladies’ cabin suffered the worst: “Those who on first alarm, sprang from their berths, were more or less scalded. All who were on deck abaft the boilers, were either killed or wounded….Thirteen people perished, including five crewmen.
And mentioned in an earlier essay, Lexington was a paddlewheel steamboat servicing New York City and Providence. Commissioned by Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1835, it was considered one of the most luxurious steamers in operation. In 1837, the Lexington switched to the route between New York and Stonington, Connecticut, to connect with the newly built Old Colony railroad to Boston.
Hartford lithographers D. W. Kellogg & Co. published this view of the doomed Lexington sometime after Nathaniel Currier’s print was released. Survivors can be seen clinging to floating debris in the foreground. 2003.263.0
On the night of January 13, 1840, midway through the ship’s voyage through the Sound, a fire ignited bales of cotton that were stored (illegally) on deck. The fire went out of control and the order was given to abandon ship. The ships’ overcrowded lifeboats sank almost immediately, leaving the ship’s passengers and crew to drown in the freezing water. Rough water, poor visibility, the frigid cold and the wind made rescue attempts impossible. Of the 143 people on board the Lexington that night, only 4 survived.
These are the East River maritime disasters we remember. Over the years, there were many more incidents and even sinkings – if not hundreds or thousands. The East River was a turbulent and troubled and extraordinarily busy waterway. And as we see every day, it still is. Thanks for reading.
GLORIA HERMAN, ALEXIS VILLAFANE, AND LAURA HUSSEY 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 All image are copyrighted (c)
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Josephine Joy, Irish Cottage, ca. 1935-1938, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the Newark Museum, 1966.31.8
This quaint Irish cottage was probably inspired by romantic illustrations of Ireland that appeared in American travel brochures and books. The lady playing a harp, however, is based on the symbol of the Society of United Irishmen, an organization formed in 1791 to rebel against British control. Their badge combined a harp (Ireland’s national icon), with the motto: “It is new strung and shall be heard.”
Josephine Hiett Joy was born near Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, in 1869 and soon thereafter her family moved to Peoria, Illinois. After an early marriage that ended in divorce, she went to Chicago and subsequently married Frank Joy. She became interested in painting after they moved to San Diego. A prolific worker, she became a WPA artist in the late 1930s, which led to her first solo exhibition at the Galerie St. Etienne in New York City in 1943. Joy died in Peoria in 1948.
Josephine Joy was born Sally Hiett, but changed her name when she was sixteen years old. As a young woman, she lived in Chicago and Denver before settling in San Diego, California, with her husband. It was there that she began to paint, creating images of flowers and landscapes, and she particularly enjoyed sketching animals at the San Diego Zoo. During the Great Depression, Joy worked with the California Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which helped bring national attention to her work. In the spring of 1943, she held her first one-woman show at the Galerie St. Etienne in New York, which received considerable praise from critics.
Josephine Joy, Magnolia Blossoms, ca. 1935-1941, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from General Services Administration, 1971.447.44
Josephine Joy grew up on an Illinois farm, where she loved to sketch birds, trees, and flowers. Circumstances prevented her from following her artistic calling until 1927, after her children were grown and her husband had died. Joy lived in California then, and the WPA’s California Art Project afforded her the opportunity to work gainfully as an artist. In the 1930s, “non-academic” painters were increasingly celebrated alongside their professional peers. By the early 1940s, Joy was a nationally acclaimed painter whose work had been featured in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Josephine Joy, San Diego Mission, ca. 1935-1939, oil on fiberboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from General Services Administration, 1971.447.45
Josephine Joy’s paintings combine direct observation and imaginative design. This is especially evident in this painting of the Mission San Diego de Alcala, the first of California’s twenty-one missions. Founded in 1769, the building underwent renovations in 1931. Certain features of San Diego Mission are drawn from the renovation, while others appear much older. The newly built bell tower contrasts with the cracked and exposed brick and the aged building to the right. Joy painted San Diego Mission while working with the WPA’s Southern California Art Project in Los Angeles from 1936 to 1939.
“I love to paint in the open, sitting in some beautiful garden, hillside or remote place or in Balboa Park [in San Diego], where I had sketched many pictures … I paint from nature but occasionally I find myself designing.” The artist, quoted in Cat and a Ball on a Waterfall: 200 Years of California Folk Painting and Sculpture, 1986
Josephine Joy, Trysting at Evening, ca. 1935-1939, oil on fiberboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from General Services Administration, 1971.447.39
This painting may have been inspired by a sketch Josephine Joy made on one of her trips to the San Diego Zoo. The bench and railing in the image imply that this scene is a part of some man-made environment. The two peacocks in the foreground spread their trains to the fullest, displaying the bright colors of their plumage, and lift their chins in an attempt to attract a mate. The three birds perched on the railing and in the tree, however, ignore this elaborate show. In nature, the male peacocks are more brightly colored than female peahens, but here the artist shows them all to be more similarly colored.
Josephine Joy, Waterbirds Nesting, ca. 1935-1939, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from General Services Administration, 1971.447.42
Josephine Joy, Moufflon–Bobtailed Sheep, ca. 1935-1939, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from General Services Administration, 1971.447.40
Josephine Joy, Prisoner’s Plea, ca. 1935-1937, oil on fiberboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from General Services Administration, 1971.447.38
Josephine Joy, CCC Camp Balboa Park, ca. 1933-1937, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from General Services Administration, 1971.447.41
The Starrett–Lehigh Building at 601 West 26th Street, between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues and between 26th and 27th Streets in Chelsea, Manhattan, New York City, is a full-block freight terminal, warehouse and office building. It was built in 1930–31 as a joint venture of the Starrett Corporation and the Lehigh Valley Railroad on a lot where the railroad had its previous freight terminal, and was designed by the firm of (Russell G.) Cory & (Walter M.) Cory, with Yasuo Matsui the associate architect and the firm of Purdy & Henderson the consulting, structural engineers. When William A. Starrett died in 1932, the Lehigh Valley Railroad bought the building outright, but by 1933 it was a losing proposition, with a net loss that year of $300,000. The Starrett–Lehigh Building was named a New York City landmark in 1986,[1] and is part of the West Chelsea Historic District, designated in 2008
NINA LUBLIN, ROBIN LYNN, ARON EISENPREISS, ANDY SPARBERG, ED LITCHER (WHO SENT THE HISTORY),
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff Roosevelt Island Historical Society
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM
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New York City has seen its fair share of civil unrest. One of them, however unlikely, was caused by rocking chairs and took place in Madison Square Park.
The upscale Madison Square Park neighborhood, located in front of the posh Fifth Avenue Hotel, teamed with elegantly dressed and well heeled elites. One day in 1901, a businessmen named Oscar F. Spate saw an opportunity for procuring a buck. The idea was based both on the natural human desire to rest one’s tired body in a comfortable chair combined with the lack of an equal desire to share seating arrangements with lower-ranking members of society.
Mr. Spate arranged a deal with the city to place comfy rocking chairs in Central Park and Madison Square Park that would be made available for a modest fee of five cents per sitting body. This highly undemocratic concept was met with resentment and righteous indignation by those who happened to lack the proper means to afford the chairs but nevertheless desired to be seated just as much as the next person. In order to protect the chairs from un-paying public, Spate hired special attendants—a move which led to clashes between the hired hands and unruly citizens attempting to sit for free.
The problem was compounded by the heat wave of 1901—one of the longest the city had ever experienced—during whichthe temperature in Manhattan hit at least 99 degrees every day for over a week straight. Prior to air-conditioning, public parks were the only places where citizens could cool down and regain strength. Problematically, not only did parks not have enough public benches, but most of those benches in Madison Square Park were located in the open sun while the desirable shady spots were occupied by Spate’s paid chairs.
As an act of protest, some people actually went so far as paying for a chair, only to immediately break it down to pieces. One of the attendants, after attempting to remove a non-paying boy from a chair, had to run for his life to the safety of the Fifth Avenue Hotel when a mob of one-thousand men proceeded to chase the poor soul with the war-like cries of “Lynch him!”
The situation escalated two days later when the chair skirmishes erupted into a full-on rocking chair riot. It all started with one weary, overheated young man who refused to yield to the demand to either pay or vacate his comfortable, shady place of rest. His right to stay seated was vocally supported by a sizable, irritable, overheated crowd demanding equal sitting rights, free of charge. The struggle got physical as unruly members of the crowd started expropriating the chairs and threatening attendants. The police rushed over, but to no avail—the crowd was too large to handle. The uprising soon ended in the complete and utter success of the public: the Parks Commissioner canceled the five-year contract with Spate. A 10,000-person celebration ensued, with victory being sealed when the NY Supreme Court issued an injunction forbidding anyone to charge money for park seating.
In a final attempt to monetize his chairs, the relentless Spate sold some of them to Wanamaker’s Department Store under the label of “Historic Chairs.” The rest of the chairs were left in the parks with the humane and democratic sign, “FREE.”
As for Oscar F. Spate—the chair riot apparently wasn’t the most colorful episode of his life. Prior to the “chair” saga, he divorced his wife on the grounds that she turned out to be a man and later ended up in jail for some of his shady “business deals.” What a shame it was for him to find out, while incarcerated, that after his mother’s death he had inherited more than a million.
OLD METROPOLITAN OPERA HUSE AT 39 STREET NO ONE GUESSED THE OLD MET!!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff Sources
PortableNYC – New York history, architecture and secrets
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The Cornell Graduate Hotel has opened. Who would have believed we would have a glam university campus, conference center and hotel? An impossible dream! Many dreams have been bruited about over the years on what this 147 acre bit of land in the East River might become. I wrote about several earlier, but today I’ll dig more deeply into one of the most important plans for the Island, the Johnson Burgee Master Plan.
First of all, what and when.
In 1966 Mayor Lindsay announced the city’s intention to develop Welfare Island. He also announced the creation of The Welfare Island Planning and Development Committee—a group of influential and interested New Yorkers, including Ralph Bunche, Mrs. Vincent Astor, the architect Philip Johnson and various city officials. The committee’s plan, financed by money it raised itself, was incorporated into the General Development Plan produced by Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s newly formed New York State Urban Development Corporation (UDC), the agency responsible for building subsidized low-and moderate income housing throughout New York State, headed by Ed Logue. In 1969, the UDC issued a report reviewing the options for Welfare Island – and then the city told the UDC to carry out the committee’s recommendations to create a new community on the island. The UDC tasked Philip Johnson and his partner John Burgee with developing a master plan. Their plan was unveiled in October 1969, in a Met Museum exhibition “The Island Nobody Knows”.
Who?
Philip Johnson (1906–2005) was a key figure in modern architecture. Influenced by Mies van der Rohe, Johnson became a proselytizer for the new architecture and was a key figure behind the landmark 1932 MOMA show “The International Style: Architecture Since 1922”. In 1930, he founded MOMA’s Department of Architecture and Design and later, as a trustee, was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and the first Pritzker Architecture Prize. John Burgee (1933-) is an American architect noted for his contributions to Postmodern architecture. Burgee and Johnson established Johnson/Burgee in Manhattan in 1968, with Burgee as CEO. Burgee eased Johnson out of the firm in 1991, and it subsequently went bankrupt.
Their Master Plan
There would be no private cars. One main street would wind through the sections of the new island community. Two distinct “towns” would be separated by parkland: Northtown, a dense zone of horseshoe shaped apartment buildings, 4 to 12 stories tall, with numerous views of the water; next an area of park around the Blackwell farmhouse; and finally Southtown, with a town center of shops, offices, hotel and arcade extending across the island from a harbor to the subway stop. With the two towns both clustered tightly, a third of the island could be open space. The island’s remarkable buildings were to be preserved as “important landmarks”. The master plan underlined protecting the island’s grand vistas. A network of waterfront promenades and paths would serve pedestrians and cyclists. It laid out impressive ideas for “docks and harbors for water buses and taxis of the sort that have long and efficiently served Venice… and two glass-tower elevators for pedestrian access from the 59th St Bridge.”
Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s master plan for Roosevelt Island. From The Island that Nobody Knows, New York State Urban Development Corporation, 1969.
The roughly 5,000 units of housing for some 20,000 people would be well spread among the poor, the old, the moderate and middle incomed, and the well‐to‐do, with schools, library, daycare and community centers, churches and sports facilities of many kinds. There was to be accommodation for patients well enough to live outside of hospital and for hospital staff. The response was largely positive. To some, the plan seemed “to project a believable and appealing image of medium density urbanism, comparable to that of prewar Forest Hills or Kew Gardens…”
The masterplan was approved in October 1969 and the UDC immediately leapt into action, hiring architects for the housing, garage, commercial facilities, infrastructure, and parks.
The first phase of construction commenced in the summer of 1971 with 2,138 units of housing for 5,000 residents in four apartment buildings, along with streets, sewers and commercial space and a parking garage with a firehouse, post office, full-sized supermarket and retail. Rivercross Apartments and Island House, designed by John Johansen with Ashok Bhavnani were completed in 1975. Sert, Jackson & Associates designed Eastwood and Westview Apartments, completed a year after Rivercross and Island House.
With much reduced federal financing for housing under President Nixon, building plans had to be revised. Most significantly, the towers grew taller, and courtyards were cut off from the East River. Johnson’s master plan sought to maintain a human scale, with buildings not more than 10 stories. But the UDC analysis found buildings would have to reach up to 22 stories to meet the required density. Sert and Johansen’s buildings were able to retain Johnson’s human scale by gradually stepping the 22 story east-west sections back from the river, preserving the water views and capping the longer north-south portions that followed Main Street to seven stories. But Main Street seemed more of a canyon between higher buildings with few vistas of the water. Ada Louise Huxtable who had praised the original design now said that the “plan’s most felicitous features, the side views through to the water from the central north-south main street were lost, with the street turned into an almost solid wall of the highest buildings.”
John Johansen later wrote: “The urban plan by Philip Johnson proposed an angled central street with buildings as fingers reaching and stepping down toward both banks of the river. As his proposal did not deal with a realistic density, it was not literally a master plan, and the team’s studies resulted in building heights not 10 stories, as he intended, but 18 stories. Johnson was insulted and said, ‘That is no longer my Island.’”
Buildings were not only higher, but materials changed as well. Johansen continued, “At first we were encouraged to be highly innovative in our design and use of building technology. Later, as the corporation became fearful of construction costs and anticipated market resistance to anything other than conventional housing, we were advised to modify our designs. Rossant and Giurgola refused and they were fired. Sert and I somehow held course and, as good friends, coordinated our separate designs rather well. Later, with Adam Yarmolinski as director, we were advised that, for security reasons, courtyards of the upper income apartments must be barricaded against the potentially threatening lower income people across the street. As this contradicted Ed Logue’s central idea of an open neighborhood, I resigned as architect until this directive was finally withdrawn.”
Still, the impressions were not bad. In 1974, in the midst of construction, Anthony Bailey of the NYTimes, wrote “What the Johnson‐Burgee concept did was combine many of the desired elements—housing, parks, historic buildings—in a plan that honored the exhilarating island site, while letting itself be shaped by what was there: the river, the narrowness of the island, the Queensboro Bridge winging across it and the constraints of the two hospitals, which were too recent and too expensive to replace elsewhere.” And Johnson himself seemed OK with what was working out. Bailey quotes him, “I think they’re all doing very well. Force of events, money and the actual conditions have caused them to make changes in my master plan, but they’re following it as well as they can. Ed Logue’s got fine architects working on the job, and Logue’s a genius. He’s the only person who could get this done.”
So? Many years later.
Certainly – my view – what we got is not what the Johnson Burgee Master Plan depicted. Most important, Main Street became a deep canyon with very limited views of the water. The water front described in the Master Plan never materialized. But perhaps the essence of the Master Plan was preserved.
Looking in context, one critic (David Turturo) writes that “the re-imagination of Roosevelt Island, at the time, manifested an awakening of activist-architect-urbanists. New York’s new island town became a symbol of the nascent urban design (UD) movement, led by Sert himself. He established the first UD program at Harvard while GSD dean there in 1960…So Roosevelt Island was the perfect test site. In a city shaken by the civil rights movement, white flight, and an unpopular war, the site’s master planners Johnson and Burgee reached outside the box to build real change. They reconciled diverse concrete structures with historic landmarks to help create a real, vibrantly modern place. The result was striking and collaborative: refined, interwoven, and cumulative—a cross-disciplinary exemplar of urban design.”
And the island itself – notwithstanding the “what might have beens” – was viewed as a remarkable achievement. Robin Herman, in the Times, writes, “Just three and a minutes from Bloomingdale’s by way of the Tinker Toy colored tram, it is yet a world apart from the heat and bustle of Dry Dock country…” Of course, not everyone loved being a world apart.
This was a bit longer than usual. I’m sorry, and thanks for sticking it out.
The former USS Growler first opened at the Intrepid Museum in 1989 and is the only American guided missile submarine open to the public. Growler offers museum visitors a firsthand look at life aboard a submarine and a close-up inspection of the once “top-secret” missile command center.
ED LITCHER AND MITCH HAMMER GOT IT RIGHT
P.S. FIORELLO LA GUARDIA WIVES:
La Guardia married twice. His first wife was Thea Almerigotti, an Istrian immigrant, whom he married on March 8, 1919.
In 1929, La Guardia remarried to Marie Fisher (1895–1984) who had been his secretary while in Congress. They adopted two children.
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)
Chapter 8 Roosevelt Island, in Robert Stern, Thomas Mellins, David Fishman, New York 1960 (Monacelli Press, 1995)
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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On June 19, 1865, enslaved African-Americans in Galveston, Texas, were told they were free. A century and a half later, people in cities and towns across the U.S. continue to celebrate the occasion.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Derrick Bryson Taylor June 16, 2021 This story was first published in 2020. It was updated in June 2021.
Juneteenth, an annual holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States, has been celebrated by African-Americans since the late 1800s. But in recent years, and particularly following nationwide protests over police brutality and the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and other Black Americans, there is a renewed interest in the day that celebrates freedom. The celebration continues to resonate in new ways, given the sweeping changes and widespread protests across the U.S. over the last year and following a guilty verdict in the killing of Mr. Floyd. Here’s a brief guide to what you should know about Juneteenth.
What is Juneteenth?
On June 19, 1865, about two months after the Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Va., Gordon Granger, a Union general, arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform enslaved African-Americans of their freedom and that the Civil War had ended. General Granger’s announcement put into effect the Emancipation Proclamation, which had been issued more than two and a half years earlier on Jan. 1, 1863, by President Abraham Lincoln.
The holiday received its name by combining June and 19. The day is also sometimes called “Juneteenth Independence Day,” “Freedom Day” or “Emancipation Day.”
How is it celebrated?
The original celebration became an annual one, and it grew in popularity over the years with the addition of descendants, according to Juneteenth.com, which tracks celebrations. The day was celebrated by praying and bringing families together. In some celebrations on this day, men and women who had been enslaved, and their descendants, made an annual pilgrimage back to Galveston.
Celebrations reached new heights in 1872 when a group of African-American ministers and businessmen in Houston purchased 10 acres of land and created Emancipation Park. The space was intended to hold the city’s annual Juneteenth celebration.
Today, while some celebrations take place among families in backyards where food is an integral element, some cities, like Atlanta and Washington, hold larger events, like parades and festivals with residents, local businesses and more.
While celebrations in 2020 were largely subdued by the coronavirus pandemic, some cities this year are pressing forward with plans.
Galveston has remained a busy site for Juneteenth events over the years, said Douglas Matthews, who has helped coordinate them for more than two decades.
In 2021, the city will dedicate a 5,000 square-foot mural, entitled “Absolute Equality,” on the spot where General Granger informed enslaved African-Americans of their freedom. The city will also mark the holiday with a parade and picnic. Events and activities in Atlanta this year have been scaled back, but organizers have made plans for a parade and music festival at Centennial Olympic Park. Similar events are scheduled in Annapolis, Md.; Chicago; Detroit and Los Angeles.
THE FAMOUS HANGING CHAD COUNT IN FLORIDA IN THE 2000 ELECTION JAY JACOBSON, ARLENE BESSENOFF, ALEXIS VILLEFANE, NINA LUBLIN ALL TO IT RIGHT
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff Roosevelt Island Historical Society
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The
392nd Edition
A STATUE OF LIBERTY
REPLICA IS COMING
FROM PARIS TO THE U.S.
from UNTAPPED NEW YORK
One of our favorite fun facts is that there are replicas of the Statue of Liberty in both New York City and in Paris. We’ve just gotten word that one of the replicas in Paris is making its way over to New York City for July 4th to be inaugurated on Ellis Island! It will then travel to Washington D.C. to be on display at the French Ambassador’s Residence for Bastille Day. The effort to bring “Lady Liberty’s Little Sister” to visit the U.S. is part of a 135th anniversary celebration of the Statue of Liberty crossing the Atlantic Ocean (in pieces) and is a partnership effort between the Embassy of France in the U.S., the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (Cnam) and the CMA CGM Group, a shipping logistics company.
The original plaster sculpture, which sculptor Auguste Bartholdi made in his Paris studio, was bequeathed to the Musée des Arts et Métiers (Museum of Arts and Crafts) in the Marais district of Paris by his widow in 1907. In 2005, the French art dealer, Guillaume Duhamel, rediscovered the sculpture while accompanying his son’s elementary school class on a visit there. He convinced the museum to let him create 12 casts from the plaster original (the maximum allowed under French law) using the lost-wax method and the museum would get to keep the first cast. It’s been on display at the museum for the last decade.
The statue was taken down from the museum on June 7, 2021 and put into a plexiglass case custom-designed for the voyage. It will then be taken to the port city of Le Havre, where it will board the CMA CGM TOSCA on June 20th headed for New York in a branded shipping container.
According to a press release from the Embassy of France in the U.S., the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (Cnam) and the CMA CGM Group, “The arrival of the new Lady Liberty will celebrate the most central value of the French-American partnership: freedom. The technological, artistic, and logistical challenges that had to be overcome to bring this new statue to America tell a modern tale of successful international cooperation.”
In celebration, the French Embassy will be hosting a contest on Instagram (@franceintheus) for participants to win LEGO® Architecture Statue of Liberty, a France-Amerique magazine subscription, an Albertine Books membership and more. Starting June 20th, the voyage of Statue of Liberty’s “Little Sister” can be viewed live on the CMA CGM website.
The statue is scheduled to arrive in New York by July 1st, when a ceremony will take place on Ellis Island to inaugurate the statue. It will be on display on the island until July 5th after which it will be transported to Washington D.C.. by CEVA Logistics.
You can also see this statue with your tickets to our tour of the abandoned hospitals of Ellis Island, with tickets still available for the July 3 and 4:
DUE TO THE FACT THAT I AM WORKING CRAZY HOURS I CANNOT LIST THE WINNERS DAILY!! AFTER THE ELECTION THE WINNERS WILL BE POSTED
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)
Sources UNTAPPED NEW YORK (C)
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Last week we featured two stories on Civil War Union soldiers, Underwood and Clark who died at the Smallpox Hospital days after being mustered into the army. They never saw a battlefield and died of Smallpox weeks after joining up. Today, our story is about Col. Ellsworth who removed a flag from a building in Alexandria, Virginia. He was shot for his effort and his assailant was bayoneted by a fellow soldier.
The metal coffin reached Jersey City by train at half past three o’clock on May 31, 1861. It was loaded into a hearse and onto a ferry, and when it arrived in Manhattan it was brought to a parlor inside Astor House—at the time New York’s most luxurious hotel, on Broadway between Vesey and Barclay Streets.
For several hours there, the coffin lay under a large draped American flag. Family, friends, and National Guardsmen mourned the man, whose “pallid features,” as the The Sun described them the next day, could be seen through a piece of oval glass. “Few would have recognized in the ghastly features the gallant commander once so full of life and intelligent,” the newspaper wrote.
At 10 pm, the coffin went back in the hearse for the short trip to City Hall, where flags stood at half-mast and black and white crepe hung over the entrance. “Here an immense crowd had assembled on the steps and in front of the building, awaiting the funeral cortege,” wrote The Sun. Politicians, such as mayor Fernando Wood, paid their respects. Soon the public was allowed to enter, and over the next few hours 10,000 New Yorkers passed by the coffin that contained Col. Elmer E. Ellsworth, 24, the first Union officer to be killed in the Civil War.
“Remember Ellsworth” was a popular rallying cry among Union supporters during the War Between the States. Today, Col. Ellsworth, who commanded a funeral cortege similar to that of Abraham Lincoln’s four years later, has largely been forgotten. Who was he, and why did the death of this young lawyer from upstate command such an elaborate farewell in New York City?
Part of it had to do with his status as a dashing young law clerk and National Guard Cadet who took a job in the Springfield, Illinois office of future President Lincoln. “The young clerk and Lincoln became friends, and when the president-elect moved to Washington in 1861, Ellsworth accompanied him,” stated Smithsonian magazine.
Ellsworth also had a deep interest in military science. When President Lincoln put out the call for Union troops after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861 launched the Civil War, he responded by “raising of the 11th New York Volunteer Infantry, which he dressed in distinctive Zouave-style uniforms, fashioned after those worn by French colonial troops,” according to the NPS.
The 11th New York Volunteers were also known as the First Fire Zouaves, since many members of this unit—with their distinctive flashy uniforms and billowy pants—were recruited from New York’s volunteer fire departments. In May 1861, Ellsworth returned to Washington with his Fire Zouaves. On May 24, the unit went to Alexandria, Virginia to remove a large Confederate flag that had been flying from the roof of a hotel called Marshall House, which could be seen from the White House roof 10 miles away. The next day, “Ellsworth succeeded in removing the flag, but as he descended the stairs from the building’s roof, the hotel’s owner, James W. Jackson, shot and killed Ellsworth with a single shotgun blast to the chest,” wrote the NPS.”
Jackson, a “zealous defender of slavery,” Smithsonian magazine stated, was then shot to death by one of the fire zouaves, Cpl. Francis Brownell.
The death of Col. Ellsworth so shook President Lincoln, he reportedly said, according to a PBS.org article on Ellsworth, ““My boy! My boy! Was it necessary this sacrifice should be made?” Before Col. Ellsworth’s body came New York’s City Hall, Lincoln had it laid in state at the White House.
Col. Ellsworth became something of a folk hero, his image and actions reproduced in lithographs and sheet music. His story stuck in New York City’s memory through the first half of the 20th century. In 1936, an Ellsworth memorial was dedicated in Greenwich Village: It’s the flagpole at Christopher Park, the triangle across from Sheridan Square. (Above, a marker on the flag pole.)
Photograph of Marshall House, Alexandria, VA. The view of Alexandria shows that the town was rather built up. The Marshall House is on the corner surrounded by many other buildings, such as the Dry Good Store, the Bookstore, and the “Great Western Clothing House”. There are a couple women standing outside the shops, which are surrounded by sidewalk.
A massive, iconic Confederate flag, torn down by a Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, a soldier born in Saratoga County and widely remembered as the first Union officer killed in the Civil War, was on display at the New York State Museum.
Ellsworth is buried at Hudson View Cemetery Mechanicville, Saratoga County, New York, USA
THOM HEYER, ED LITCHER, ALEXIS VILLEFAE, LAURA HUSSEY, SUSAN RODETIS, JAY JACOBSON ALL GOT IT RIGHT
Thank you for the wonderful article on Wanda Gag. I loved Millions of Cats since I was a child & first heard it read on Capt. Kangaroo!
I guess that dates me now, doesn’t it? ;^)
I knew nothing about her or her other black & white prints. They’re so beautiful & uniquely her own style. Thanks again for a great article! Have a great weekend– Thom
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
First image: Billy Hathom/Wikipedia photo of a portrait; second image: whitehousehistory.org; third image: Currier & Ives lithograph/Wikipedia; fourth image: Musicology for Everyone; fifth image: Corbis via Smithsonian magazine; sixth image: The Historical Marker Database]
ephemeralnewyork | May 31, 2021 at 3:12 am | Tags: Elmer E. Ellsworth in New York City, Elmer Ellsworth Abe Lincoln, Elmer Ellsworth Civil War NYC, Elmer Ellsworth FIre Zouaves, Elmer Ellsworth Flag Pole NYC, Elmer Ellsworth Funeral City Hall NYC, First Union Soldier Die Civil War | Categories: Disasters and crimes, Lower Manhattan, War memorials, West Village | URL: https://wp.me/pec9m-8Rj
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Kapiʻolani (December 31, 1834 – June 24, 1899) was the queen of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi as the consort of Mōʻī (king) Kalākaua, who reigned[3] from 1874 to 1891[4] until Mōʻī’s death when she became known as the Dowager Queen Kapiʻolani. Deeply interested in the health and welfare of Native Hawaiians, Kapiʻolani established the Kapiʻolani Home for Girls, for the education of the daughters of residents of the Kalaupapa Leprosy Settlement, and the Kapiʻolani Maternity Home, where Hawaiian mothers and newborns could receive care.
Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee celebration In April 1887, Kalākaua sent a delegation to attend the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria in London. It included Kapiʻolani, Princess Liliʻuokalani and Liliʻuokalani’s husband John Owen Dominis, as well as Court Chamberlain Colonel Curtis P. Iʻaukea acting as the king’s official envoy of the King and Colonel James Harbottle Boyd acting as aide-de-camp to the Queen.
The party landed in San Francisco and traveled across the United States visiting Washington, D.C., Boston and New York City, where they boarded a ship for the United Kingdom.
While in the American capital, they were received by President Grover Cleveland and his wife Frances.
In London, Kapiʻolani and Liliʻuokalani were granted an audience with Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace. She greeted both Hawaiian royals with affection and recalled Kalākaua’s visit in 1881. They attended the special Jubilee service at Westminster Abbey and were seated with other foreign royal guests, and with members of the Royal Household.[58] Kapiʻolani wore a peacock feathered dress design by her Special Equerry James Washington Lonoikauoalii McGuire.
Shortly after the Jubilee celebrations, they learned of political unrest in Hawaii. Under the threat of death, Kalākaua was forced to sign the Bayonet Constitution which limited the power of the monarch and increased the influence of Euro-American interests in the government. The royal party canceled their tour of Europe and returned to Hawaii.
NOTES FROM THE ROYAL DIARY ON THE VISIT TO BLACKWELL’ S ISLAND
On Wednesday, May 18, 1887, Queen Kapi’olani visited Blackwell’s Island, today’s Roosevelt Island in New York’s East River. The queen’s suite consisted of Mr. Allen, Mr. Carter, Mr. Iaukea, Mr. Boyd, Mr. McGuire, and Mr. & Mrs. Beckley. Among those accompanying the royal party were Mayor Hewitt and his wife, and the Charities and Corrections Commissioner Brennan and his wife. The total number of people on the tour that day was twenty-four. Princess Lili’uokalani wasn’t feeling well so she did not go.
It was a nice and sunny morning when the party boarded the ferry at East 26th Street. What struck McGuire when they first arrived was the beauty of the place. It was covered with grass, there were lots of trees, the roads were made of gravel, and it was kept very clean. Mayor Hewitt served as the queen’s escort during the tour of the island. Queen Kapi’olani inspected the charity hospital, the nurses’ home, the penitentiary, the workhouses for petty criminals, and the lunatic asylum. She was also shown, from a distance, the almshouses for the poor and where the prisoners quarried the stone for the buildings on the island.
When they visited the Charity Hospital: “She inspected several wards and looked so kind and motherly and interested that some of the women patients were almost tempted to swap baby stories with her. The Queen talked Hawaiian mother talk to the babies, who understood all that she said. The next place visited was the Nurses’ New Home, and here the Queen, as in the hospital, inspected everything and was greatly interested” (Pacific Commercial Advertiser, June 23, 1887).
McGuire described the Penitentiary as having dark granite walls two feet thick, and the building stood six stories tall. And he said the prisoners had short hair and wore striped blue and white pants. When they were taken through the cell corridors the queen “inspected the dark cell with considerable curiosity” especially the “delirium tremens” cell for chronic abusers of alcohol. Then Warden Pillsbury said he would show her “the prison’s big snake” which turned out to be “a band of convicts, shuffling along in lock-step” (Pacific Commercial Advertiser, June 23, 1887).
McGuire described the workhouses as places “where the street walkers & petty thieves are kept.” They saw about 100 women in a room using sewing machines making shirts for the prisoners. This was the Women’s Workhouse. They also saw cells where the men were put at night. This was the Men’s Workhouse.
Last to be visited was the Lunatic Asylum where the Amusement Hall was “profusely decorated…with national colors” and a semi-circle of chairs for the royal party was set up with “a more imposing chair” in the center for the queen (Pacific Commercial Advertiser, June 23, 1887). The patients made up the audience, and some were also the performers. The entertainment started with “Reveil de Lion” on the piano, followed by a woman singing and accompanying herself on the piano. McGuire describes the play as “a short but comical piece” and mentions that one of the actors was “a young lady dressed like a young man,” and explains that one of the actors “only the day before she was so bad that she tried to commit suicide.” Yet when he saw her on stage he couldn’t believe “that she was insane for she acted her part very well” (pg. 19). After the final song, the mayor escorted the queen out to the waiting carriages. The queen was “very affable, bowing right and left to the patients” (Pacific Commercial Advertiser, June 23, 1887).
TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE QUEEN’S VISIT AND THE OTHER CITIES SHE VISITED GO TO:
MITCH HAMMER, M. FRANK, LISA STERZYK AND ANDY SPARBERG 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)
WIKIPEDIA COLLETTE HIGGINS, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII
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Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue, UDC and the Creation of Roosevelt Island
by Robin Lynn
In the early 1980s, I invited Ed Logue to my home on Roosevelt Island. I knew of his role as the former president and chief executive of the NY State Urban Development Corporation (UDC), the agency that Governor Rockefeller formed in 1968 to build subsidized low- and moderate- income housing throughout New York State. I wanted to meet the mastermind behind the audacious plan that created our “new-town-in-town,” allowing me to live in the middle of the East River, raising my three children among appealing open spaces, with an unlikely form of mass transit—the tram—connecting us to 59th Street.
To my surprise, Logue accepted my luncheon call. “Residents never invite you back,“ he said to my husband Larry, and I had. Now, Lizabeth Cohen has published Saving America’s Cities , Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019). This fascinating book tracks Logue’s work, not just in developing Roosevelt Island in the 1970s (as head of UDC), but redeveloping New Haven in the 1950s, Boston in the 1960s, and the South Bronx from 1978–85. Cohen, the current Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies in the History Department at Harvard University, brings Logue’s backers and foes to life, while focusing on his vision to revitalize post-war cities. She spends considerable time documenting the rise and demise of the UDC, which had transformed Welfare Island into Roosevelt Island.
Cohen’s meticulously researched and accessible volume, which won the Bancroft Prize for history in 2020, delves into the complex world of city planning through the lens, as she states in her introduction, of “who’s in charge, who should have a say, who benefits, and who pays the bill.” Logue, Cohen writes, was enormously proud of his work on Roosevelt Island. He aimed to create what he called a “socially engineered community,” which embodied his goals for successful post-war urban living: a mixed-income, mixed-race, handicapped accessible community, with buildings designed by progressive architects working to build housing for all and using innovative building technology.
Logue couldn’t come over to the island often enough while it was being built. Cohen quotes a New York Times reporter’s description of him as, at least once a week, “plunging in his bear-like way around the site—old corduroys, green Shetland sweater, shirttail hanging out and no hard- hat covering his stack of grey hair; slow-speaking, fast-thinking, an interesting mixture of charm and combativeness.” Cohen helped put Logue’s comments to me—those that I remember, lo, these many years later—into context. But I wanted more. And although I could not invite Lizabeth Cohen over to schmooze about her book, I could contact her for the Roosevelt Island Historical Society.
Robin: Thank you for letting me email questions to you. For those who don’t know Edward J. Logue, could you please introduce our island’s planner and tell us why he is important.
Professor Cohen: Ed Logue may not be a familiar name to most people today. But in his own time, he was well known as a leader in the effort to revitalize American cities which were under severe threat from the explosion of suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s. And it was not just residents who were fleeing. So too were business headquarters, manufacturing plants, and retail stores, which meant that many jobs and urban attractions were relocating to more decentralized metropolitan areas.
In New Haven, Boston, and New York, Logue took advantage of federal funding for what was then called “urban renewal.” Many of the efforts undertaken to save cities ultimately proved terribly damaging to their survival: for example, when working-class neighborhoods were torn down to make way for new highways or housing that would retain and attract middle-class residents. I have no interest in whitewashing the worst abuses of urban renewal. But I argue in the book that we are mistaken if we assume that urban renewal meant the same thing everywhere from its establishment in 1949 until the mid-1970s, when the federal government under President Nixon withdrew funding for housing and cities. Instead, I suggest, someone like Logue made mistakes, but he also learned on the job. And over time, he experimented with new, less damaging strategies for saving cities, which he deeply valued and felt were in grave trouble. The UDC’s three New Towns, of which Roosevelt Island was one, were a way of doing things better.
Not all urban renewers were like Logue, of course. I show how, for example, his goals were much more progressive than Robert Moses’s. Roosevelt Island was so precious to Logue because it embodied his hope that city neighborhoods could be made more diverse in income, race, age, and accessibility, with affordable housing and good schools available to all who were living side-by-side. To his mind, financial support from the federal government was key to achieving this rather utopian goal of a more socially and economically integrated America.
Robin: Every morning as he shaved, Logue would look out his window onto Welfare Island, and that was how, he said to me, he became curious about the place. (From Cohen’s research I learned that his apartment was at 1 East End Avenue). With all the affordable housing projects he had under construction across the state (eventually, 115), and the pressure he was under to quickly complete them, why was he so intent on building an entire new town? What lessons did Logue learn from his work redeveloping New Haven in the 1950s, and Boston in the 1960s that determined his approach to developing Roosevelt Island?
Cohen: The New Town strategy arose out of Logue’s growing recognition that demolition-style urban renewal was not the answer. His earliest efforts in New Haven had suffered from this clearance approach. He sought alternatives in Boston. But the real breakthrough came in New York State. As he told colleagues in 1970, “We cannot…put all the emphasis on rebuilding, tearing down and rehabilitating in the inner city.”
So, instead, he sought available land where new housing could be constructed. “I don’t have to condemn it. I don’t have to relocate families. I don’t have to demolish any buildings,” he explained. He also broke with the modernist orthodoxy of separating functions, and sought to combine living, working, schooling, shopping, and recreating in one planned community.
Robin: I remember that Logue said he hired many different architects to develop Roosevelt Island so that no one firm could dominate his project. Logue, you make clear, liked to be in control. What were Logue’s criteria for selecting architects? Why was he a champion of modern architecture? Why did he equate “social engineering” with the modern movement in architecture?
Cohen: Logue wanted as much as possible to ensure that his projects avoided the cookie-cutter look—an alienating experience-of public housing. That goal included seeking alternatives to high-rise “tower-in-the-park” buildings. The UDC’s Marcus Garvey Park Village project in Brooklyn, for example, innovated what was called “low-rise, high density housing,” achieving the same number of units by designing the structures differently.
Interestingly, just when the UDC was collapsing in 1975, it was in the midst of sponsoring an architectural competition for a new, more promising prototype for high-rise-style subsidized housing on Roosevelt Island. In selecting architects, Logue wanted to attract a mixture of up-and-coming and established architects. He hoped to encourage them to make housing design more of a priority. But he was also wary of letting architects do too much of their own thing and, in that way, was a demanding client. He said, “If you leave architects alone, they will make a statement.” So he established mechanisms like the UDC’s famous “live-ins,” where architects and staff alike had to stay over in projects nearing completion to learn what worked and what didn’t.
Robin: When I moved to the island in 1980, I was only vaguely familiar with UDC and Logue’s social goals. I was more taken with the physical presence of Roosevelt Island’s river walks, open spaces, plazas, green areas, playgrounds and communal rooms, which provided a space for joint activities to take place and a community to form.
What is the role of open space in “social engineering?” Is there anything you can add about Logue’s attitude regarding how open space advances social engineering?
Cohen: That’s an interesting question. Logue liked sports and relished playing tennis and football, for example. So creating recreational facilities mattered to him in planning a community like Roosevelt Island. But even more importantly, he saw the river walks, open spaces, playgrounds, community centers, and the like as a way to advance the social mixing he advocated. Given that the buildings themselves were specified as market-rate or subsidized, there would be little social mixing there. And the most expensive units benefited from the spectacular skyline of Manhattan, while the others looked at industrial Queens. Those walkways and the mini-schools, he hoped, would be scattered throughout the many buildings (that ambition got scaled back) would be the public spaces he expected would bring people together. They would allow everyone to share the best views and a common social experience.
Robin: One of the goals of UDC was to build quickly, to fast-track construction. One of Logue’s goals for UDC was to find ways to use innovative building technology to make that happen. Can you point out innovative technological means used in constructing the island’s buildings?
Cohen: From the start, the UDC was committed to promoting innovation in building methods to make housing construction more efficient and affordable. Pre-assembly of building materials off-site cut down on the unit cost of objects, which also translated into savings in on-site labor expense. An example was the pre-assembled and presumed technologically-advanced electrical wiring panels developed by NASA.
Sometimes these efforts went awry, such as when UDC was convinced by Con Edison to install electrical heating with bulk metering on Roosevelt Island at a big savings per unit, only to find itself footing a huge bill when the energy crisis hit in 1973–74. But Logue was proud of other technological innovations on the island, such as the free electric minibuses that transported residents, the vacuum sanitation system that whisked trash under the streets to a central refuse disposal site for compacting, and, of course, the tramway. It became a necessity once it was clear that the subway would not be finished on time. And it soon became the icon of Roosevelt Island.
Robin: To build quickly, UDC was also allowed to use such tools as eminent domain to acquire land and to overrule local zoning and building codes. I’m not a big fan. I realize that my duplex apartment in Rivercross has no egress from its bottom floor where we sleep. I’m not sure I would have moved into that apartment if I had been savvy enough to realize this at the time. Why was he given permission to override local laws and was this his undoing when he tried to build affordable housing in Westchester?
Cohen: Logue understood that zoning and antiquated building codes were often used, particularly in suburbs, to keep out affordable housing. (And they still are today.) He had battled the problem in New Haven and Boston, but there he had no jurisdiction over areas outside of the city limits. Moreover, he felt strongly that the economic and social needs of underserved urban populations were not only the responsibility of cities. An entire metropolitan area, where many workers who profited from cities lived, needed to be involved.
When Logue was offered the statewide position heading the UDC, he thought he would finally have the authority to promote metropolitan-level solutions to housing, schooling, transportation access, and the like. So he pushed for the power to override local zoning and building codes if necessary. But when Logue proposed what he called a “Fair Share Housing Plan” to build 100 units of affordable housing in nine Westchester towns, he was met with violent opposition—ultimately leading to the demise of his UDC. It was a dramatic story that I tell in great detail in the book.
Robin: The island was never built out as Logue had planned. In 1975, a little less than half of the 5,000 proposed units were complete when UDC went bankrupt and construction stopped. What happened?
Cohen: The UDC had plans to keep building up Roosevelt Island. As I mentioned above, it had even sponsored an architectural competition to develop a new prototype for subsidized housing in 1974–75. But everything stopped when the UDC disastrously defaulted on notes and loans and Logue and many of his team were forced to resign. There were multiple reasons for the UDC’s default on $104.5 million in maturing short-term notes and $30 million in bank loans in February 1975. This collapse took place, of course, at a time when New York State and New York City were close to bankruptcy, so the UDC’s troubles must be put in that context as well. In fact, it was a very complicated convergence of factors, all of which are explained in Chapter 8 of my book.
Robin: Nevertheless, the truth is that none of us would be living here if Logue hadn’t conceived a plan that this “island that nobody knows”— as Welfare Island was called in 1969—could be a desirable housing haven for all. Yet there’s no place here that bears Ed Logue’s name. He should be remembered; your book fills a void, but what about recognizing him on Roosevelt Island?
Let’s ask the Roosevelt Island Historical Society readers how we can commemorate Edward J. Logue. Please send suggestions to Judy Berdy, President, Roosevelt Island Historical Society, at rooseveltislandhistory@gmail.com.
Editor’s note: Dr. Cohen’s book, Saving America’s Cities , Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019), is available on Amazon and barnesandnoble.com. You can hear Cohen speak on the topic on Tuesday, May 18 at 7:00 pm on Zoom. Watch for the registration link in your email as the date approaches.
In the early 1900s, not every child who visited Coney Island was having a blast on the rides and in the ocean.
That’s because Coney was home to the Sea Breeze Hospital, an institution for poor children (and some of their moms) who had contracted tuberculosis in the tenement neighborhoods of the city.
Sea Breeze Hospital, Coney Island (Library of Congress) Tuberculosis is rare in New York now, and usually curable. But 100 years ago it was more common and deadly—and thought to be cured or at least eased by fresh, salty sea air.
Which is why Coney Island made the perfect place to build the hospital, equipped with its own school and partly funded by John D. Rockefeller. A New York Times article from 1905 reports:
“Yesterday afternoon at Sea Breeze the boys were playing at building terrible forts of sand, while their sisters sat in the sunshine to rock their ragged dolls to sleep. They were so healthy looking that no one would have dreamed they even had tuberculosis.”
THE ABANDONED TUBERCULOSIS HOSPITAL IN ROCKAWAY, QUEENS
FROM UNTAPPED NEW YORK
Looming over the beach in Rockaway, Queens adjacent to Jacob Riis Park is the abandoned Neponsit Beach Hospital also known as the Neponsit Children’s Hospital. The hospital once served as a tuberculosis sanatorium and operated from 1915 to 1955, and the main building was designed by the notable architectural firm McKim, Mead and White. Neponsit Beach Hospital mostly operated on children, but by World War II, the hospital began to treat military veterans until the hospital’s closure. The hospital was later converted into a Home for the Aged, a city-run nursing home that closed in 1998.
Around the start of the 1900s, the journalist Jacob Riis advocated for the creation of a children’s tuberculosis hospital in the Rockaways to take pressure off of the more prominent tuberculosis treatment centers in the city. Riis, a leader of the muckraking movement, chronicled the horrifying condition of New York’s tenements in his book How the Other Half Lives. After publishing his findings, Riis worked with the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor and New York City Mayor George B. McClellan, Jr. to create a hospital on the beach away from the hustle and bustle of the city.
“Riis soon became an influential spokesperson to lobby for the establishment of many of the city’s parks and playgrounds, providing a haven from the stagnant air and cramped lifestyle so commonly found within the city limits,” writes Opacity. The park and hospital began development starting in 1907, but efforts were suspended until 1909 due to the disastrous Panic of 1907, when the New York Stock Exchange fell nearly 50% from the previous year’s peak. Before being transferred to the city, the hospital was built by the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor with support by the Neponsit Realty Company and private sources.
In order to raise the $250,000 needed for the hospital’s construction, the Association distributed pictures of “Smiling Joe,” a boy suffering from spinal tuberculosis at the nearby Sea Breeze Hospital in Coney Island. The boy appeared in Association letters, newspapers, and magazines, and Theodore Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller paid visits to “Smiling Joe.” After seeing the boy, Rockefeller contributed $125,000 to the project.
“Joe, although he suffered with spinal trouble and had to lie strapped to an iron frame, had a most cheerful smile. The doctor took his picture and sent it broadcast throughout the country, with an account of the work. Money came in with every mail, from East and West, North and South,” wrote the New York Times.
The newly opened hospital replaced Sea Breeze Hospital, as almost fifty children were transferred to Neponsit Hospital followed by children from other city hospitals, tenements, and orphanages. The main building was designed by McKim, Mead & White in a “U” shape with a capacity of 122 patients. Facing the beach were porches and open-aired balconies facing the beach so that patients could momentarily escape their painful reality.
“They become sun worshipers these little ones, who have come a long way from dreary, harassed homes that could not provide them with the proper nutrition and care; from the deadening institutionalized atmosphere of orphan asylums, from charity wards and from crowded fire escape ‘sun parlors’ perched over harrow, foul streets. In their two-wheel carts and chairs, or on crutches, or just dragging one foot after the other, slowly but without fuss, they come to the big open piazzas fronting on the beach or down to the sand for sun baths,” describes a 1930 article from the Brooklyn Eagle.
For the next two decades, the hospital treated hundreds of young tuberculosis patients, giving them opportunities to bathe in the ocean and travel outside with supervision. In 1929, city hospitals commissioner Dr. William Schroeder, Jr. announced an expansion for the hospital that would double the hospital’s capacity. The hospital soon became a project of the New Deal agency WPA, or Works Progress Administration, which employed millions of job-seekers to carry out public works projects. The Board of Estimate appropriated $300,000 for the building’s expansion, and a power plant and a nurses’ residences were soon after completed in 1939 and 1941 respectively. Two sets of murals for the hospital were commissioned by the WPA in 1938, included a set of 11 circus-inspired murals by Louis Schanker and 23 panels depicting children playing games by Helen West Heller. The WPA also created gardens around the hospital and added a sea wall.
Louis Schanker at the presentation of his W.P.A. mural at the Neponsit Beach Children’s Hospital in Queens in 1939. Andrew Herman
For the next three decades, the nursing home cared for elderly patients, mostly with Alzheimer’s. Efforts to move HIV/AIDS patients to wings of the Neponsit Home for the Aged in the 1980s failed due to high risk of disease transmission.
Yet in 1998, the renamed Neponsit Health Care Center abruptly emptied the center of 282 elderly patients in the middle of the night. As a result of a Labor Day storm, the building suffered major damage to the point that city officials thought the building would collapse. As a result of this sudden move, two patients died. A report by the federal government concluded that the evacuation was unnecessary and that health officials not only endangered patients’ lives but also lied to them about a speedy return to Neponsit.
THE ROOSEVELT ISLAND CONNECTION
Under the direction of Mayor Giuliani ,busloads of Neponsit residents were delivered to many City Hospitals, unannounced with all their possessions in black garbage bags. Thirty souls appeared at Goldwater Hospital and it was later made their home. This disgusting act by Giuliani administration was fought and the dislocated Neposit residents won a lawsuit against the City of New York.
From Facebook:
October 28, 1999 – With the sudden closing, there were rumors that Giuliani wanted to sell the land to a political ally and friend, to turn the facility into an oceanfront hotel. The plan was tripped up because the deed to the land requires it to be used as a health care facility or a park. With the residents removed and the hotel plans thwarted, the City made plans to clear the property and turn it into park land. A Legal Aid attorney, however, got a court-ordered injunction in October 1999 which prevented the city from tearing down the buildings. (Source: http://www.rockawave.com/news/2014-03-07/Front_Page/Neponsit_Money_Pit.html) Justice David Goldstein ruled in favor of the New York City Council’s motion for summary judgement and declared that: (1) HHC’s surrender of the use and occupancy of the facility required the approval of the Council; (2) the Council has the right to determine the use of the facility (hospital, park or other public purpose); and (3) the Council has the right to contest the demolition of the facility by an unsafe building hearing. (Sources: http://rockawave.our-hometown.com/news/2000-09-16/Front_Page/Neponsit_Home0916.html?print=1; Text of judgement online: https://www.nycourts.gov/library/queens/decisions/council.htm)
Due to deed restrictions that allow only a hospital or public park, little redevelopment of the site has occurred. The Neponsit Adult Day Health Care relocated to nearby Rockaway Park in 2004, but the facility still remains abandoned despite numerous efforts to develop luxury homes on the property to the dismay of local residents. A security guard booth remains in operation, even in coronavirus times along the entrance on Rockaway Beach Boulevard.
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